Do You Believe in God?

An Open Question in these times of Trial and Tribulation

I’ve often said that you can become lost on any religious or spiritual path, and you can become found on any religious or spiritual path. I am not precisely Christian, although I was raised as one.

Picture me at about 11 years old in my Ohio Catechism class, raising my hand for the Brazilionth time to ask a stupid question.

 Mrs. Cherry, pregnant with like her 17^th child, no Monty Python jokes to be had there, called on me nervously. “Yes Genevieve?”

“So this guy Methusaleh lived to be like almost 1000 years old! There’s all kinds of people in this section that lived to be hundreds and hundreds of years old. How did they do that back then but we can’t do it now? Our science is supposed to be so much better.”

Mrs. Cherry looked on. “Well they might have interpreted the years differently. They might have counted a season as a year, for example.”

“So they didn’t know how to count the same?” I questioned. “So then how do we know that Jesus was 12 when he went to the temple and that he was 30 when that thing happened with John the Baptist? Couldn’t he have been like four?” Some of the other children began snickering.

“We don’t really understand how everything works in God’s purview.” Mrs. Cherry finished with.

I had to be the student that every Catholic teacher was scared of. My questions were endless. If Adam and Eve were the only people on Earth, wouldn’t that have meant that their sons and daughters had to make babies with each other, and isn’t marrying your brother or sister bad? Mrs. Cherry countered that there were other tribes. So then I asked well who were they? Why weren’t they considered created in the image of God? If a child in Africa grows up and never hears the word of Jesus and then he dies, does that mean he automatically goes to Hell?

“You are Schylock!” The German monk explained to me when I told him of my experience growing up Catholic. Perhaps we’ve reached peak Tower of Babel when a Buddhist monk in Thailand is likening me to a Jewish lawyer in a play written by Shakespeare in England. “You poke holes in everybody’s story. The story is supposed to be accepted without question.”

Indeed. The Day Tapes don’t go far enough back for me. If there ever was a grand plot to take over the world, I think it would have began with the modifying of key words and text and translations in holy scriptures thousands of years ago. The end result would be part inspired by God’s teaching and Divine Law and part used to instill a control mechanism on Earth. One side would be God’s wisdom and on the other side would be be the control grid. Some parts of the story need to be uplifting.

Most of this religious stuff needs to play out subconsciously for it to work well. Once it becomes conscious it requires a lot more diligent thought and nuance.

I’ve never been an Atheist, though my high school sweetheart claimed to be one. At best I had a time where I was agnostic, which I still think has some merits: it is at least admitting that you don’t know something. Over time I have evolved into a firm belief in God.

My biggest problem with Atheism is that it tends to be a knee jerk rejection of ostensibly Christian teachings. The God of the Bible can indeed be viewed as an abusive and arbitrary father, smiting here and there at will, and there are numerous criticisms of the less cited sections: advice about the keeping of slaves are presumably outdated to say the least. Beyond that though Atheism seemed to replace the God of old with the God of Science, Technology and Progress.

All religious scriptures have a hybrid of best practices to curry God’s favor and a list of forbidden things which are looked unfavorably upon if done. In some redemption can be achieved from past sins through building merit or through sincere repentance. In others, such as the Hindu caste system, well, better luck next life.

A Theory Regarding the Symbolism of Cupid

I found the work by an American Hypnotist to be both profound and timely to me:

“Reality is, on one level, a singular object—we could reasonably call this the “Absolute” level of reality. Every level “below” the Absolute level corresponds to a division in reality—notice, I didn’t say a division of reality, for reality remains singular. The division is not in reality itself, but rather in a self-multiplying array of potentials for self-representation.

Mind, energy, and purpose together comprise what Langan and Leibniz refer to as the monic substrate—aka the “ground state”—underpinning existence itself. This substrate never becomes more than One thing—it does, however, represent itself to itself in theoretically infinite ways (ultimately, for the purpose of gaining self-knowledge).

Just like how the heads and tails of a coin are not themselves two different objects, but rather two aspects of one object, so too can the seemingly-separate contents of existence be described as differentiated aspects of one object. That object is THE universal, living language—the monic substrate. There is nothing in existence that is not made out of it; though the things made out of it possess (as their inheritance from God) a certain degree of choice, corresponding to their “level” of cognition/awareness. There are necessary laws underpinning the stability of existence—these laws amount to the “users manual” for the universe proper, and, importantly, nothing can contradict said laws without “self erasing”.

(This is why it’s monumentally stupid to choose evil… but we’ll save that conversation for another time…)

At the “highest” level of reality, everything exists at once in a form that can be described as pure language. This is how the monic substrate sees itself (God is indeed alive and conscious, you see…). At the physical-sensory level of reality (the realm of the “many”, where you and I reside), we experience this living language as the very objects and events that inform our experience. There is, in fact, no separating the contents of existence from the living language that produces and perceives them.

The basis of symbolic, ritual magic is the fact that physical proximity and descriptive/linguistic proximity are two different things. This is why things like voodoo and synchronicities exist. A great many branches of “occult” study are wholly concerned with the manipulation of symbols via ritual in order to manipulate events in the real world—when you recognize that reality is a living language, and that this language pre-exists the objects it creates, then all action-at-a-distance type phenomena become immanently explainable.

Though it wasn’t until Chris Langan published his Cognitive Theoretic Model of the Universe (CTMU) before a complete scientific description of this process had been made public, the fact remains that many “occult” traditions have, at the very least, observed and acknowledged that there exists a connection between mind, language, and real-world events. It’s no coincidence that this type of knowledge is routinely ridiculed by “respectable” academia and “science”—because THEY want to keep it for themselves, if you catch my drift…

The “elites” maintain a sort of power over the “masses” because the masses, in the aggregate, do not acknowledge the true place of consciousness in reality.

For the record, I do NOT recommend going nuts practicing ritual magic to become all powerful, or to fight the cabal, etc—the highest magic in existence comes from seeking earnestly to do right by God. (If you want to wear robes and a wizard’s hat while you serve God then, by all means, knock yourself out—but it’s not necessary.)

An indispensable part of serving God is to seek knowledge—for, contrary to what nihilists and materialists tell us, the universe is quite logical and meaningful. The universe would not exist if it were not intelligible; and it would not be intelligible if it didn’t possess intrinsic logic. The more you learn to apply logic to various facts and facets of existence, the more skill you will develop with language itself, and this corresponds to a very REAL increase in metaphysical influence.

Your mind isn’t “nowhere”—it exists in the sea of consciousness, ultimately as a unique, differentiated aspect of the monic substrate out of which existence itself is made. Your mind shares a common syntax with the entirety of existence—you wouldn’t exist were that not the case. (If that last sentence didn’t make sense, don’t sweat it. Read on…)

Few things matter as much as the quest for proper understanding; when we learn how to read the environment, as well as the symbols used by other human beings, the benefit to our lives is incalculable.”

I was reading this as I was waiting in a Phuket courthouse for a document that the court could not find for a month for my husband’s police clearance certificate. It’s felt like the last several weeks has been some type of slow motion disaster, at least regarding my husband’s visa to go to America and other things. Visas have been cancelled at the last possible minute, one cat was lost, one dog was poisoned and the two remaining got to learn an elaborate trick of “Stay” when we took them to the beach. They’re back at the bungalow now and currently the pressure to get off of the land has ramped down.

And suddenly I found myself leaning into the suck. Part of what has made me generally an optimist is my trust that God is in charge. Even when I experience setbacks I view it as a sign that there’s some better path that’s calling me.

The man who had sheepishly admitted that they couldn’t find the document on Friday finally found something. I sent it to the Bangkok police officer immediately. He called us immediately and talked to my husband in Thai language for what had to be 30 minutes.

“Write it down!” I admonished Ka as I found my pen and notebook. My husband has a terrible short term memory, which is more obvious if he’s been drinking, but is still there even when sober. I’ve read that this is a common problem for people who have had epileptic seizures. Legal offices, even if one has a fluent understanding of the language involved, are enormously tricky and complicated.

I saw it as a good sign that both the man in the records section and the Bangkok police officer seemed to remember us and the case well enough to be invested in it. Ka had to fill out a form requesting some document in Thai language. He needed me to write in my notebook for him to fill out his phone number (okay a lot of people don’t remember their phone number), the date (12/12/2566 - this one is always difficult for him) and then, oddly “How old I? How many years?”

I rolled my eyes. “You don’t know how old you?”

“I know birthday me.” He answered back.

In case you were wondering, I married my husband for the sex. I also think God has a wicked sense of humor.

Well into the afternoon we waited. Finally the man in the records section called Ka into the office. This time he gave us a paper with a case number and a date for pickup. “Number 22.” Ka said.

“I know.” I sighed. “I’m not going to be here.” Here’s hoping my husband can handle it on his own.

Christmas is calling me. But as I pondered the writing of an American Hypnotist I thought about how conscious thoughts shape reality. I was thinking about thinking, as it were. At Nai Yang beach last time I was thinking about writing An Open Letter to my Daughter Jasmine.

“I have three things I want to do at the Thai Consulate in Los Angeles.” I explained to my husband as we walked the five miles to the bus station. “My visa to stay Thailand is all messed up so I need a new one. Eliza’s Thailand passport is expired. I also want to ask about Jasmine again. In 2018 I was told that if we had the records on her birth AND she stayed in Thailand at least one year in total before she turns 18, she might be able to get Thai passport.” It’s worth a shot at any rate. I’m leaning into the suck of immigration centers, legal offices, courthouses, police stations, Embassies and Consulates. At least this time I’ll try to make a little vacation out of it. On the plus side my husband has not had any vaccines. I got the feeling that when they were all pushing us heavily in late October and November about how quick and easy everything was going to be from here on out if he just got the Covid jab that this was a sales push. Perhaps his future health is worth it.

Do you believe in God?

Artwork for the day: This is where I am in the painting of the mountain on the water where God spoke to me. It still needs a little work in the foreground, but I’m hoping to finish it up today:

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