Issues of Power

I recently listened to a book by Gary Zukav called, Spiritual Partnership: The Journey to Authentic Power. It was published in 2010, but it hadn’t crossed my radar until now, probably because I rarely read “New Age” books anymore—they all seem pale in comparison to the completeness and level of love I find in Divine Truth. But this one was recommended by someone who seeks to know God in his heart and clearly gets the importance of owning one’s emotions and allowing them to be felt rather than avoided. So, I followed his suggestion and downloaded the book.

I was happy to see that this rather main-stream book gives much needed attention to the importance of confronting our unloving attempts to gain power from others, and suggests, instead, to feel the pain of powerlessness within. Gary shines a light on the fact that throughout human history, where satisfaction of the five senses and survival have been paramount, this power-seeking addiction is always at a cost to others. He recommends that we begin the process of evolving into what he calls multi-sensory humans who seek authentic power, the kind of power that grows inside of us by confronting and feeling fully the unhealed parts of ourselves. Those of you familiar with Divine Truth will recognize this as the important process of healing the soul. Gary suggests we seek out Spiritual Partnerships where we can practice this process with others (friends as well as with our lover) who share the desire for this transition towards love.

For the general public, I feel his insights about power, growing in sensitivity (becoming a multi-sensory human), and spiritual partnerships are helpful, but I don’t really recommend his book; there are just too many new-age assumptions that I cannot agree with, and he does not even mention what Jesus and Mary state is the most efficient and loving way to heal: developing a relationship with God. I also felt that Gary’s book lacked the depth of understanding behind his observations and suggestions that Divine Truth so completely offers. I always want to know the “Why?” and “How?” of things. For those of us who have heard Divine Truth, Gary’s book is no comparison to the comprehensive understanding of healing and growing in love that God’s Way offers.

I am glad I listened to the book, though, because I did gain a very important gem: a glimpse of understanding that almost every unloving emotion within me and just about every unloving behavior I engage in, has to do with my attempt to avoid the emotions of powerlessness by attempting to gain and keep power from others and the world around me.

This realization spurred a deeper exploration and prayer around my unloving desires for power and control over others and my environment. Basically, I want the world to provide me with a feeling of safety and love. I don’t want to take responsibility for the fact that those emotions of feeling unsafe, unloved, uncared for, unvalued etc. are within me. As much as I try to get everyone and everything around me to fill these holes for me, it doesn’t work. I may attempt to insulate myself from the world or create a lifestyle that appears to be safe and loving, but as long as the emotions are within me, all that is a facade and it won’t last. I fight when God’s Laws bring me events to trigger those feelings, even when I have been informed that the laws and events are here to support me in releasing these emotions permanently.

And sure enough, God’s Laws have brought me one event after another—way out here in the far reaches of Arizona—to do just that. Apparently, there is no outback far enough away to shelter me from the emotions inside. For those of you have followed my blog, you have heard of some of these triggering events like losing all my drinking water out of my rain catchment tanks due to a leak, or the pump wires dropping down the well and forcing me to have to drill a costly new well. There have been lots of difficult events that I haven’t mentioned. Just a few weeks ago, a man and a woman trespassed on my property in the middle of the night and came right up to my house and peered into the window above my bed. The sheriff said they were looking for things to steal for drug money.

Obviously, these kinds of events bring up lots of emotions (that is the point, Jesus teaches), so I let myself feel, but it wasn’t until this recent exploration about power issues that a light came on. All these difficult events, all these emotions, are showing me how powerless I feel. I cannot stand the feeling that I am powerless to control things around me. I feel powerless to make people be loving, kind and respectful to me; powerless to stop the killing and eating of animals; powerless to control broken pipes; powerless to keep industry from fracking into our aquifers and destroying primary water sources for millions of people; powerless to keep people from invading my home; powerless to be useful in this world; powerless to protect my home from the elements and critters; powerless to control noisy barking dogs; powerless to fully release painful emotions; powerless to experience true happiness; powerless to attract my soulmate, powerlessness to feel value, love and acceptance for myself. I hate feeling powerless, and I have done many unloving things to avoid it.

More and more though, I have been letting myself feel the powerlessness and the emotions connected with it like anger, terror, hopelessness and grief. It is sickening. It hurts. It is the most uncomfortable feeling I think I have ever felt. As much as I don’t want to go there, I can tell that these emotions are important to feel. I sense the tremendous loving support around me assisting in whatever way they can to help me stay connected to those feelings when I do muster the courage to dive in. When I stop after a while, I feel expanded and lighter. And recently, a tangible feeling of greater love for others and myself has been starting to grow. This gives me the hope I need to keep going.

There is much information in Divine Truth about how those emotions get in our souls. In case you are not familiar with the process, I will do my best to summarize with respect to issues with power: When we arrive on this earth plane, we get bombarded with emotions from our environment (primarily our parents), a number of which are strong intentions to control us. And when we are born, it is normal practice for parents to carry out these intentions and systematically disempower children. Parents adhere to the long human history of controlling, manipulating, belittling, lying to and even violently forcing children to behave certain ways and not feel their emotions, justifying that this is good for children and will keep them safe.  Really it is all about the parents avoiding their own emotions—powerlessness being a big one—that they don’t want to feel. Children learn to function under these conditions, but the emotions of having their personal power constantly violated has dire consequences. Those emotions get buried in the body and soul, only to attract illnesses and events which cause great difficulty throughout our lives.

For my whole life, I have done what I could to avoid feeling powerless. I engaged the very same angry, controlling, manipulative attitudes and actions that I hated so much as a child in my own attempt to gain some kind of power in my life. I had become very desensitized to the evil of it. Yet, even since I was told I was doing this, I have struggled to stop this addiction. I still want to control and feel power over others, or better yet, I want it done for me. I want God to do it. I want all those cruel, destructive, uncaring people in the world to be punished and forced into alignment with love, so I can feel safer and happier.

I had a “talk” with God about these unloving attitudes I have around power. (I put “talk” in quotes, because when I really want to understand God’s Truth about something, I have to feel so deeply, that I am just a balling mess of emotion while the loving being on the other end (God? My guides? I am not really sure) is attempting to get God’s Truth past my resistance. This time, I did gain some insight into a number of my errors in perspective about love, learning, the purpose of earth, and priorities—all contributing to my errors around power. I recall Jesus mentioning many of these things, but now his words are gaining substance as I feel them more deeply.

Firstly, I have issue with learning. Many people talk about earth being a school where love is the curriculum. I too have often referred to it as Earth School. The trouble is that we have distorted views, not only about love itself, but also about learning. We grow up in a model of learning where we are forced, judged, ridiculed, singled out, manipulated, and even punished. This is exactly the model I have attempted to recreate in my interactions with others trying to get them to be loving. God, it is being pointed out to me, does not teach this way. Jesus has stated that people will not learn to love in their hearts if they are pushed into it. Love must be a choice arising from our own motivations. This is one of the Truths I struggle with.

Another of my errors has to do with my beliefs about the purpose of earth itself: Whereas I believe the purpose of our earth experience is for us to come to understand love, it was shown to me that this wasn’t quite right; it is to give us the opportunity to learn about love. God has given Her infantile children the opportunity to experience many gifts that show us how generous and loving our Creator is. We are given earth, a beautiful, abundant, self-maintaining playground full of loving examples to learn from. This earth is a safe place to experience the gift of free will, explore desires and choices, get to know the strengths and qualities of our individual soul and—only if we so desire—to choose love or perhaps even a relationship with our Creator. All of this has to do with opportunity and choice. 

Earth a safe place? I had to be reminded that earth is, indeed, a safe place—for our souls, that is. We obviously experience tremendous pain and suffering here, but such circumstances are only brought about by unloving human choices to show us that we are way out of alignment with love—both individually and collectively. We humans have to be very resistant to God’s Truth about things, resistant to the innumerable subtler hints that have attempted to guide us, before we could sink to the appalling level of pain and suffering that we have on this planet. But regardless of the destruction found here, Jesus and Mary teach us that our spirit bodies and souls are safe and will live on to experience many wonderful things as we eventually come to understand love.

But why isn’t God controlling and protecting things more on earth like I want Him to? The Laws of Love that guide us on earth seem to lack authority and be delayed in their effect. But the truth I am learning is that God’s Laws have perfect authority, are always present, immutable and immediate, whether they are experienced on earth or in the spirit world, and regardless of how we perceive them. As soon as a person has an intention that is either loving or unloving, the laws of compensation immediately affect that soul. On earth, we often don’t feel these gentle, loving nudges of guidance, because we are somewhat buffered by our dense physical bodies and—even more significantly—we creatively learn to detune from the emotions of our souls. We can dull our sensitivities by indulging all kinds of addictions, or we can choose to become fully emotional and sensitive beings and attune to the ever-present gentle guidance encouraging us towards love, towards God. It is up to us.

Why has God designed these dense physical bodies as the first step in our existence? Why not give us super-sensitive bodies so we can feel the loving guidance more clearly? Firstly, if we were any more sensitive, we would be writhing in greater pain than we already are—I know I would. I believe it is a loving provision that God made us somewhat buffered during our earth experience. And very importantly, the buffering offers us a greater experience of choice.  We have the unique opportunity to explore more subtle things like love, truth, faith, compassion and respect of free-will while in a body that is not overpowered by the laws that guide us. It becomes our choice to develop the sensitivity to investigate these things. This way, we get to experience desire, and the pursuit of love as our own idea, our own decision, instead of something imposed upon us. I think that is so cool! Have you ever had a teacher or parent who gave you the freedom to come to a certain conclusion on your own? It feels so empowering!

The next error I was shown was about my understanding of priorities with regard to the human soul. I can hear with my ears that the human soul is the most important thing to God, but, apparently, it is more than that; it’s like the human soul is the only truly important thing to God. The earth, in comparison, is a simply a gift to us that demonstrates God’s love and magnificence (and might just inspire us to want to know our Creator) and is just a first step in supporting the joy and loving development of human souls. Of course, God wants us to respect and appreciate this gift and respect and love each other, but even if we destroy the earth and our physical bodies while we are here, that too is something we will learn from. The emphasis again is on opportunities—for human souls to learn and discover the truth about God, ourselves and love, not about it necessarily occurring while we are on earth. Perhaps that is because from God’s perspective, the outcome—coming to know love—is guaranteed. It may take a long time, well beyond our earthly days, but we will learn.

When we transition to the spirit world, we lose the training wheels of our exaggerated freedom and buffered bodies. Our bodies in the spirit world are much more sensitive, so the authority and consequences of God’s Laws have greater impact upon us as we propel ourselves along our chosen path. If, in our earth life, we spent our time denying the gentle nudges towards love, we will likely have a rude awakening. But that is not a bad thing. It is all to encourage us towards love, and there is always help available when we desire it. Simply ingenious, I say.

Divine Truth is full of information about God’s perspective on love, and some day it may take root here on earth and grow to blossom in every earthly soul. Or perhaps such wonderment will be ever delayed until the more refined classrooms of the spirit world. Either way, our earth-life is serving its purpose. And there is absolutely nothing to fear—even if it appears that the world is dangerous and uncaring. I wish could get that. I wish I could drink a magic potion and be able to absorb all this into my soul. But alas, I will have to be patient. I have many errors to face and feel—both from what was done to me as well as from my own unloving desires for power and control—before I can truly receive and understand God’s heavenly perspective.

And what about Gary Zukav’s journey to authentic power? I think it is simply a journey of growing in love. The fear and threat-based attempts to gain power over others is not power at all from God’s perspective; it needs to be called what it really is: evil. And the emotional errors that cause that kind of behavior will only change as we learn to take responsibility for, feel and release the pain of powerlessness in our souls; and become loving beings. God wants to help us do this. God’s Laws and provisions have all the loving power and support they can possibly have to help us. It may take us a while, but when we sincerely desire to grow in love, we will succeed. Only then will we naturally experience what could be called authentic power that comes with a loving soul. I want to experience this authentic power. I want to experience being a truly loving soul. I want to experience a relationship with God. My history of trying to avoid powerlessness and force my idea of “love” (as if love can be forced, which it cannot) on others has not helped anything. It only hurts. My issues of power have led me in the wrong direction, but I am determined to find my way to God and to love.