This and that.

It's the biblical context that I find distasteful. My early years were pretty religion free. It's always a good idea to look at the roots of words so that we're clear about their meaning. It strips away the crap that religions attach to them. Sinning is only missing the mark. Easily done. I'm always at it. Catholic Church (we call the congregation left-footers) tried converting me but failed miserably. To the extent that I couldn't even pronounce the word 'god'. Since then I've come across some lovely teachers who've helped clear the dross that the established church left me with. It's been suggested to me that anyone who goes to a divinity school to learn about god will quickly have any sense of spirituality stripped away from them.

I'm now comfortable with most of them, Buddhism, Taoism, Hinduism, Christianity, all come with a fresh insight into our human condition.

Have you read Benjamin Hoff's Tao of Pooh? Lovely little book, especially if you enjoyed Milne as a child.

It's been suggested to me that there are only a handful of spiritual books that lead us straight to the centre of our being who we are. The Tao Teh King, The Bhagavad Gita, John's Gospel, The Secret of the Golden Flower are god starters. Some marvellous symbolism to be explained in the Tarot Cards, and in the astrological signs.

And there's truth everywhere we look if we look with fresh open eyes. And I just love The Matrix. So much wisdom in a film that in many ways predicts the kind of synthetic gross-material-scientist world we're moving towards. It's the Age of Aquarius, and not the harmony and understanding that the lyrics in Hair predict. We're only just entering two thousand years of science (Aquarius is memory) if the boys with toys don't destroy it for us.

When you say you're not religious, what do you mean by religion? For me the 'lig' in re-ligion is a binder, it binds me back to the inner being who I am. Same as yoga, or yoker ... it's all in the words. As for belief, we all have some kind of belief. Even a nihilist believes in death.

Yes we are all one. God is shorthand for Absolute Sentient Power, as mentioned, In this power, from infinity we have sought a body, entered a spinning zone of this power and become soloed, ensouled. The waves on the ocean might look like little individuals, but without the ocean's water they couldn't exist.

So "In the beginning was the word" works on many levels. The 'B' is Hebrew for house, the 'gin' is the same as gyn, or eternal female, the Sophic sphere of the ancients. And the 'word' is a formative principle. It initiates an order into the potential of the orderless sphere. We couldn't even call past experiences to mind without the words with which to describe them. Words are the beginning of order, signified by the Greek Logos, the universe's logical structure.

And the best place for me to start has been a good etymological dictionary. The words we've been given from childhood have been loaded with emotional baggage, and I'm finding it empowering, very worthwhile to penetrate to the meaning of a word and make it my own instead of accepting the way it's been given to me.

There's so much more I could add, but we'll leave it there for now.

Love,
John
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