Namaste

I had a massage session recently that turned out to be anything but massage. We sat talking about the intransient nature of God. The Being who requires no validation from Its creation to Be. It Is. The conversation took me back a few weeks ago when we (warily) looked at God as being Absolute Truth, or rather, Absolute Truth being God…depending on how you see it…based on snippets from Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism. These are conversations that last all day and remain inconclusive. Especially if we insist on seeing God as only good. All That Is is God, and we know that all that is is not only good, so why do we declare God as only good? Obviously we are limiting Him/It to our understanding.

During the massage session that never was, I was sharing about my Muslim client who I had written of some time ago. The one who was hallucinating. He was sharing with me that the Nurses had officially gang-up against him and he referred to them as ‘the clan’ if they were nearby and he wanted to say something to me about them. I listened and all sounded normal until he whispered that they are trying to put him in trouble. One of the Nurses (he did not know which one) had started bringing her child to work and leaving it in his bed at night. One night he rolled over and felt this thing in the bed and when he looked he was shocked to see the little child…about two years old…lying there. He said he could have rolled onto the child and suffocated it and then he would have been blamed for murder. He said the child was placed in his bed late at night. He has never seen when it was placed, but he suspects it is some time after 9pm when he would have gone to sleep, so that he awakes later to find it there. Sometimes the child cries and disturbs his rest.

I did not speak of it immediately, but I eventually got the opportunity to broach the topic with the matron after she was telling me that he was shouting almost all night one night and when they went to him, he insisted that he was not, while explaining that he was breathlessly running as he was being chased by a woman…whom no one else could see. He cannot walk, so how was he running? I asked if she has heard anything of a baby in his bed. Yes! The baby has been blamed for wetting his bed some nights. Okay. The conclusion is that it might be what is locally known as a douen hanging out in his company. No one else is seeing it, but he does. And here again, if God is more present than absent, more visible than invisible, if He/It is All That Is, is it not God spending the night with my dear Muslim friend? What a privilege! But that makes us all privileged when we think of God as the fly on our mango (don’t swat God!), or the butterfly on our living room wall, or God as the communion wafer we sacredly swallow, or as well as the rice in our pot, and there is God belting out obscenities through the voice of our abusive neighbour, as well as through our television in the form of a shouting preacher calling us to salvation. And wasn’t it God I saw rifling through the garbage in ragged clothing, even as He smiled and waved to me through the eyes and hands of a little girl whose mother was walking her to school?

So none of this is about God. It is about us. Our belief. It does not matter to God if we believe in Him or not, He continues to exist. But it matters to us what we believe, as it is based on our belief system that we select our experiences. And this is what it’s all about, experiencing. We have to learn to let go and just experience without labeling our experiences good for bad, failure or success, and the likes. But can we, in a realm of duality? Maybe not, unless we have knowledge that supersedes this realm. Do we? And like Jesus, many who walked this Earth have said the same thing: You believe in God? Believe also in me, for I am God. He has some audacity, don’t you think? Maybe not. He is issuing a reminder that God is All That Is. And hopefully, if you can believe in Jesus, you can believe in yourself…He looks just like you. What experiences has He had to make Him so sure of Himself? And what experiences do we need to have to make us sure of ourselves? Hmmm.

Looking at life in general, we see that the Absolute Truth (which we seek to individualize) is an/the Absolute Lie. They are not on different ends of the spectrum. They are one. It is the growing together of the wheat and the tares fed of the same soil. When we stop trying for separateness, and see the similarities and the oneness, then we understand that a lie or a truth is created when enough persons believe something. Thought creates everything. A banana cannot now be called an egg. The masses who already believe in the appearance and attributes of a banana maintain its structure in this manifest realm. So too, that which we believe of God and His opposite, good and bad, truth and lie, etc., have been created in our thought world and is continuously held in place by us and those before us, so that change is never something that we wrestle against physically, the fight it always in space, the mind, the spirit, whatever you want to call it. If you are a proficient time-traveler, you can consider going back and convincing some of the earlier creators to un-create some of what we experience now, but I rather think that if you do go back, the journey would provide such clarity for you that you will let things be. The wise do not interfere, not because they can’t, but because they know.

Uh-huh, what this has to do with massage? I don’t know. I was just writing, but I will try to bridge the gap. There was a time in history when a Medicine Man was not a Medical Practitioner, but a very spiritual person who spoke with and understood Nature, and Nature shared its secrets with him/her, and he/she was made wise regarding the use of various medicines…massage being one. Believing that our Creator knows how best to heal us, we always turned our eyes upward for help and respected those most in communication with the All That Is and accepted anything that they presented to us as being of and from God and was best for us, so that healing always took place even if a tablespoon of water was the remedy, because we believed. As the physical world of technology developed, our belief in our abilities to create tools to do things made a great difference. No point waiting on a God somewhere when we can do it right here and now. Without recognizing that we were creating an independence from God through our thoughts, we worked hard and accomplished what we have today, the tool of medicine by our standards, which often lacks the essence of the ‘God prescribed’ remedies of yester year. But, it’s ‘our’ work and it works. And so the Gods among ourselves have been declared, and we pay high fees for their knowledge and expertise, and we believe (most importantly) what they say to us…which keeps them in their position, and us in ours.

So what do we believe, and where does that leave us now as Massage Therapists seeing that many are coming to ‘believe’ once again that massage works? Hmmm. It is nice to be believed in, but we still have far to go with believing in ourselves…creating ourselves through our thoughts of ourselves. What did I say earlier? If enough individuals concentrate their energy and thought into something, they will create it. So you can understand the power of disunity. Disunity keeps creation in check. Disunity within ourselves inhibits our creativity. A clear physical example of disunity within reflects in the many autoimmune diseases. So let’s gather our thoughts. Let’s look at ourselves…a good hard look…and start creating the us we want to be the way a bodybuilder creates the body he desires. He does not go out and buy a new body, or wish for another lifetime, he works on the body he has and in a few months…years…you might not recognize him. Who we are is separate and apart from our qualifications, yet we let ourselves be defined by them. I am a Massage Therapist. I knew that even as I sat in an office doing the typical secular stuff. What my massage qualification has done is allow me access places and people where my massage skills needed to be exercised. The diploma is a ticket to get into certain doors, but when you get in you need to be yourself, and if a Massage Therapist is required and you don’t know yourself to be such, it will be awkward.

And of course there are those of us who have it all figured. We do not believe in predestination as we create our own present and future as we go along. And, because so many of us believe this, it is true. We created that truth. It is also true that ‘those who He foreknow, He also predestine’ so that nothing is thought, spoken, or done outside of His knowledge. It is a tail-catching affair. I try not to dwell on these things, they take you out and beyond then land you right back where you started…with the original question. So, here’s what…we do have a pattern of experiences that we came here to live. Some will be achieved and some will not be. This is not the definition of failure. If you feel you missed out on something, then you are welcome to come again. It is important to recognize that we are experiencing. The more we see life as an experience, the more joy we will find in it. So you did the massage course, but you are not practicing. And you think you have failed. Who have you failed? Certainly not me. Our journey together was most appreciated, so you need to look at someone else. Nothing is ever ‘wrong’ with not practicing something you studied unless you decide such. It is an experience. The person who is practicing is not ‘better’ than you, he/she is just having a different experience. The brain is not the be-all and end-all of your being, so don’t let it drain you with all its rationality.

As for my Muslim friend, he might very well be a pedophile who was an upstanding citizen during the day, then sneaked a child into his bed at night, so now they are sneaking in on their own. Maybe he is not as spiritual as he used to be so ‘demonic’ energies are occupying his space. Maybe he is on his way to Heaven and is adapting to the Scripture that suggests that ‘unless you become like one of these little ones, you cannot enter the Kingdom of Heaven’ so he is hanging out with a child to learn again how to be like one so that he could access that Kingdom. One way or the other, he is experiencing. Yesterday when I saw him he was sitting in his wheelchair and was excited to show me what his right arm can do (the one that used to be motionless on the bed). He lifted it and flexed and rotated it…slowly, but it was done independent of my help. I am glad for him, and the child in the bed too. The child lies on his right side, so now that the right arm moves, the child can get a goodnight hug.