With unfolding form

Graceful movement transforms

The heart of a dancer

We are Consciousness

That is witnessing itself

Creating our life

Awaken your passion

By becoming the lover

To know the Beloved

Experience life

By celebrating yourself

In the eyes of another

If we take the Bible as having historical value, then we see at a certain point in its history when the patriarchs entered the picture that the belief in a pantheon of gods gave way to the one god Yahweh…it was then that a giant step was taken in mans progress of understanding the oneness of the cosmos. Prior to this time peoples understanding of the cosmos was composed of a pantheon of created gods who were constantly warring with one another and with people, creating factions and shattering the unity of the whole. Then the concept of one god emerged who had no beginning, and no piers…the creation of the heavens and earth were solely attributed to him. Now, people could begin to think about God as one divine being – a united whole – instead of many divided fighting gods vying for power. With this new found god-unity the Hebrews could focus on a common purpose for mankind, that of serving one god who himself had no beginning and who was responsible for all that existed, the purpose of their lives and of governing the cosmos.

This understanding of the oneness of the cosmos came at a great cost…in perceiving the unity of one masculine god, the feminine goddess was stripped away leaving the whole impoverished and without balance. The cosmic dance of spirit/male and body/female was lost when goddess/matter was deemed fleshly and sinful, and god/spirit became masculine and holy. Little by little everything associated with the feminine was degraded and made impure, while the masculine was exalted and made holy.  The mother/goddess was no longer needed to bring forth life because the father/god could create life with his mere words, and the sensual qualities of the woman became something to be suppressed and hidden. With no goddess to balance the god, the whole became less then the half…for without the feminine, the anima in the male had no connection, or expression.

From the very beginnings of Judeo Christian history, everything and anything to do with the feminine/goddess, bit by bit began to be eroded away and destroyed. Starting with the story of Adam and Eve, it is clear to see where the loss the sacred feminine began. Woman was made as an after thought from the man, when Adam could not find a mate from amongst all the animals. Then it was the woman who enticed the man to eat of the forbidden fruit of wisdom (ironically when Solomon asked for wisdom from Yahweh he was given it in great abundance), thus bringing down the curse upon herself and all mankind. The seductive feminine body was deemed bad, because it enticed the male to leave the worship of his masculine god (that was missing the goddess), causing him to go running after the sexual pleasure found in the woman. Creation yearns for balance, male/female, spirit/body, earth/heaven…duality yearns for marriage to become one. When the part cannot become united with the whole one feels cut off and separate from their origins, thus causing imbalance and lack of growth. It is time to give balance and harmony to our Christian roots by acknowledging its impoverished condition, caused by its patriarchal imbalance due to being stripped of the sacred feminine.

The whole of the earth has suffered because of this male/female imbalance. The biblical idea of a male warrior god which was brought forth from the minds of Bronze Age men, written by their hands, implementing rules favoring male dominance, and the suppression of the feminine has indeed exacerbated the imbalance of male/female to a large degree. This imbalance has greatly tipped the scales toward the more aggressive masculine qualities being manifested culturally, without the tempering affects of the feminine qualities of nurturing and comforting. This is why when one looks back through patriarchal history, the abundance of wars and aggressive dominance color the landscape.

Only by incorporating the sacred feminine (the missing half) into our worldview can we ever hope to return to a balanced condition and raise the consciousness level of humanity. As it stands now Christianity is frozen in the 1^st century, because the Bible has locked the understanding of “God” to that which was received by the male apostles of the 1^st century and the prophets before. Without the freedom to go beyond a rigid perspective of “God” promoted by those who penned the Scriptures, Christians will be forever trapped in a cage made by those who at one point were enlightened for the time period in which they lived, but has since in many ways become archaic. Our minds need to be free to grow and expand with the wisdom that has been denied those locked in religious bondage; only with the restoration of the missing half of the sacred feminine can humanity become whole.

If one looks at the idea of “God” as being made up of the collective whole of all things, instead of as a “separately existing objective entity”, with each human life being one of the “Hands of God”, then it is much easier to imagine our bodies as a microcosm reflecting the larger macrocosm of the universe; an analogy can then be drawn to compare the two. With our mind and body working together in harmony, and our self determined actions coming from the desires of our minds (self-awareness) which we can carry out with our bodies, we can then look to the whole of the cosmos and see how it also works together in a balanced way.

The only way the universe as a whole can rise to a higher level of consciousness is by self-aware creatures (humans) carrying out self-determined actions, thus we are in a sense the “Hands of God” working together to carryout the will of the whole collective universe of which we are a integral part. As human consciousness steadily rises to a higher and higher level we can pass on the knowledge that’s acquired at each step of the way causing the whole to continually expand in an ever increasing inward and outward spiral.

Every act of compassion and empathy that we bestow upon another life, whether it be human or animal adds to the ever expanding level of consciousness of the universe. We as humans have the ability to change the structure of the cosmos by using the power of our empathic minds connecting to the whole. Each human life that acts empathically is a hand, carrying out an action, which elevates the consciousness level of the whole.

In reading through the Bible I have often noticed the abundance of “other” gods it contains, a good case in point is Psalm 86:8 “Among the gods there is none like unto thee, O Lord; neither are there any works like unto thy works.” where King David explicitly mentions “other gods”. Most of these gods were imported from Sumer, Babylonia and Egypt which were the ancestral home of the Hebrews. With that in mind it appears the Hebrew’s were not monotheistic in the most literal sense because they did believe other gods existed…it was just that Yahweh won the battle for supreme god, and because he was an extremely jealous and wrathful god he did not want the Hebrews to worship any others in the council of gods. Here are a few more examples from the hundreds of times “other gods” is cited in Scripture.

Exo. 12:12 For I will pass through the land of Egypt this night, and will smite all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, both man and beast; and against all the gods of Egypt I will execute judgment: I am the LORD.

Exo. 18:11 Now I know that the LORD is greater than all gods: for in the thing wherein they dealt proudly he was above them.

Deut. 7:4 For they will turn away thy son from following me, that they may serve other gods: so will the anger of the LORD be kindled against you, and destroy thee suddenly.

Deut.10:17 For the LORD your God is God of gods, and Lord of lords, a great God, a mighty, and a terrible, which regardeth not persons, nor taketh reward:

The interesting point to note is that Yahweh outlasted all the other gods mentioned in the Old Testament. What was it that allowed Yahweh to outlast all the other gods? I propose that what allowed Yahweh to continue on into the New Testament was the transition from an anthropomorphic warrior god to a spiritual father god introduced by Jesus. Thus, Yahweh, chief amongst many gods, morphed from a wrathful god who meted out punishment and spoke from a pillar of smoke, and whose earthly abode was in the Holy of Holies, to a transcendent fatherly being residing full time in heaven and imparting his Holy Spirit to all who would ask.

Jesus had the foresight to know that if Yahweh did not change he would meet the fate of all the other mythological gods. It was a stroke of genius on his part to change god’s face at that crucial point in history, before the final blow that would come with the destruction of Jerusalem. After the fall of the Jewish temple, the warrior face of Yahweh began to fade in significance, being replaced by the more forgiving god of the Trinity, of whom Paul played a major role in shaping, molding and promoting. Without the dramatic facelift given to Yahweh by Jesus and then Paul there would be no “God” that Christians call “Father” today.

In all the animal kingdom there is no imbalance between male and female, except the male imposed imbalance of humans. If all of life had the same supposed male/female imbalances that men have proposed to be of “God” through books such as the Bible, and the female of the species were truly the weaker of the sexes, then that would create a disadvantage, thus women would have a lesser chance of survival, so before long the female of the human species would die out.

No greater harm has been done to women than the mythological story of Adam and Eve etched in the stone of history. From its inception, the seed of women’s inferiority to men is planted in the mind of the reader and spoken with the authority of “God”. In the story of the Garden of Eden, all the animals that were given to Adam to name were balanced, male and female; it is only in the human species that Yahweh chose to create first the male. Yahweh then proceeded to give to Adam all the animals of his creation to name…desperately hoping he would find a mate in order to create balance. When Adam had named every creature under Yahweh’s heaven he is left in a state of despair, no mate does he find to bring balance and wholeness to his life. Instead of Yahweh creating a mate for Adam in the same manner as with all his other creatures, he chose to create the woman out of a part of the man. This biblical invention of woman coming from man is in direct opposition to the normal mode of creation in nature which is always life being born of the female, thus in the second chapter of Genesis the imbalance begins to shift towards the male. If it only had stopped there the struggle of women would have been far less severe, but it didn’t…this was only the beginning of Yahweh’s misogynistic ways.

Sometime after Eve’s birth from Adam, Yahweh decides to temp the naïve couple with a desire too enticing for Eve to withstand, given her “God-imbued” hunger for knowledge. That temptation was a food bearing tree more desirable than any other tree in the Garden…not only for food, but also wisdom. Yahweh forbade his perfect couple from partaking of the tree on fear of death, but he wasn’t totally honest with them, letting the childlike nature of Adam and Eve (who did not even know what death was) lead them into the waiting arms of the serpent. In this myth it is the serpent who speaks the truth to the inquisitive Eve by telling her that she will not die from eating the fruit, she will only have her eyes opened and become wise. Anyone who remembers back to their own childhood, or has had children knows their inquisitive nature…humans want to learn, so why does the Bible present this quality that is innate within us all as being the reason for sin? And to make things worst the punishment for this innate desire to acquire wisdom was expulsion from their garden home and curses that would be passed on to all of mankind.

Another glaring example of Yahweh’s misogynistic tendencies was the nature of Eve’s curse, where we see that the punishment far exceeds the so called crime. Comparing Eve’s crime of seeking to fulfill the desire that she was created with and her punishment of pain in childbirth and ruler-ship of the man past on to all future generations, to her son Cain’s crime of murder and his punishment of being marked, so no man would kill him a great disparity emerges with leniency being skewed towards the male. Also, the curse that Adam was given of “toiling the land by the sweat of his brow” was equally given to the women who also had to toil the land as much or more than the man. All in all there is an egregious disparity in the way Yahweh deals with women as opposed to men which continues throughout the pages of Scripture.

The Bible is a valuable book that holds many treasures concerning our history, but it must be read with a critical eye so that its wisdom can be seen as a useful tool instead of a cage keeping the mind trapped in primitive ways of thinking.

Kindness is my strength

Compassion leads me forward

Empathy sustains

Isn’t it time the Christian community moves past the biblical solution of dealing with evil by killing people, to a higher consciousness of love? The Bible isn’t the only religious book that teaches violence as a solution to the problem of wickedness in the world, but it is the book that is promoted by millions of people as being a guide to peace. When asked about the nature of Jesus, the first response of many Christians is to say that he was a man who espoused peace, with words such as “pray for your enemies” and “turn the other cheek”, but there is also a very violent side to many of his sayings found throughout the Gospels. The book of Revelation whose full title is The Revelation of Jesus Christ is filled with brutality and violence, which is the preferred method used by Christ to rid the world of evil. The pages of Revelation are saturated with one form of brutality after another, all done in the name of God to cleanse the world of evil and bring in peace on earth. A particularly ironic case in point happens in chapter 19 where it begins by introducing the marriage of Christ, calling all the saints to attend, and ending with the marriage supper where the flesh of all men is the food upon which the birds feast.

Rev. 19:7-9 Let us be glad and rejoice, and give honour to him: for the marriage of the Lamb is come, and his wife hath made herself ready. And to her was granted that she should be arrayed in fine linen, clean and white: for the fine linen is the righteousness of saints. And he saith unto me, Write, Blessed are they which are called unto the marriage supper of the Lamb. And he saith unto me, These are the true sayings of God.

Rev. 19:17-18 And I saw an angel standing in the sun; and he cried with a loud voice, saying to all the fowls that fly in the midst of heaven, Come and gather yourselves together unto the supper of the great God; That ye may eat the flesh of kings, and the flesh of captains, and the flesh of mighty men, and the flesh of horses, and of them that sit on them, and the flesh of all men, both free and bond, both small and great.

Why is it that many secular humanists in this modern day and age are seeking peaceful means to try and bring harmony to the world, whereas the Bible teaches people the only way to peace and harmony is by brutality? How can slaughtering all the “wicked” people on the planet achieve peace? Yet, this is what we find in the pages of the Bible supposedly inspired by an all loving God. The biblical solution to every problem concerning the “wickedness” of man is to kill them, starting with the Flood in Genesis and ending with the battle of Armageddon in Revelation. This is what many Christians are expecting and waiting for when they speak of Christ ushering in the new kingdom on earth where peace and harmony is suppose to reign.

It is time the Christian community opens their eyes to the brutality of the Bible and understands that the mindset of Bronze Age man saw only one way to achieve peace and that was through domination and violence by a warrior god. It’s time to go beyond the mindset of biblical brutality and seek new ways to achieve solutions to the evil we see around us in accordance with our higher level of knowledge. Looking to brutality as an answer to the problem of wickedness will never work…violence only begets more violence, even if it’s done in the name of God.