Religions Confused Me When I Was Young. They Still Do and Now I’m 68.

World religions profess unity so why are they used, both historically and presently, to divide and conquer?

I had a series of spiritual experiences from the age of 6, onward. They all involved immersions into light. I didn’t know what was happening to me when I was a kid, but I did know I felt exhilarated and restored each time this phenomena occurred.

These rarefied, yet steady episodes, stoked my curiosity about hidden realms. The main energy operators we can’t see, but most definitely feel. They also oriented my life through a spiritual lens.

There wasn’t a mystery school in my nuclear home town, Richland, Washington. Quite the opposite in fact. I was surrounded by engineers and scientists manufacturing plutonium for atomic bombs. More of a hell on earth than a spiritual refuge.

My mother and father believed God could be found in nature, but they also thought their 11 children should be educated in the basic principles of at least one religion.

They sent us to the Protestant church at the end of our block because it was the closest. Their attendance was limited to major holidays but we kids were expected to go most Sundays until we were teens. People thought we were Catholic due to the size of our family. An assumption I was constantly correcting.

I started to realize I was not religious. Spiritual, yes, religious, no.

My first dilemma with the dogma and rules in religion showed up while attending Sunday school. The minister’s wife came into our classroom one day carrying a piggy bank in the shape of a cow. She rattled the coins it contained and informed our curious, seven year old group, that cows liked to chew green cud, not metal. We should feed it cud in the future.

I turned to my friend after she left and asked her if this woman thought we were dumb. Did she think we were unable to realize she wanted more money [dollar bills=green cud] for the minister’s missions? This was my first unpleasant clue to the intertwining of wealth and religion. Not what I was looking for.

Children can be under estimated in their knowledge of holiness.

I ended up making my own decisions about service on Sunday. I sat in the very back pew until I could hear the trays of doughnuts arriving for post service, social hour. After waiting a few minutes, I would slip out the back door and into the kitchen, grab one, sometimes two and head for the trees outside. Greasy, glazed, still warm spudnuts propelled me into a state of worship I never accessed inside the church.

In fact, the only benediction I received in church was a safe haven to stash the clothes I wanted to wear to school. The rolled up bundle fit perfectly behind the pulpit in the always open prayer chapel. It was an ideal hiding and changing place for the short skirts and tight dresses my mother nixed as appropriate clothing. One morning my girlfriend and I entered the chapel and to our surprise, found a group praying in a circle of chairs.

Oh no! What to do? I rapidly summoned up a dose of courage and re-opened the door with a flashing smile. “Sorry to interrupt, but I think I left my bible in here” I blurted out as I marched up to the pulpit, retrieving my clothes without blinking. I’d be damned if I wore that hideous, down to my knees, skirt, mother insisted on to school. I wasn’t a nun, I was a teenager. The group stared at me, totally perplexed. What was this apparition, a sign from God? I wished them a great day as I sprinted back out the door.

After that incident, I decided to attend other churches in our small town of 35,000. I was hoping to unearth further meaning of a divine I had already encountered. There were slim pickings in terms of variety. I was temporarily fascinated by The Assembly of God folks. Their tendency to speak in tongues and sometimes roll around in the aisles or faint in pews from the spoken Word was as transcendent as anything I had yet witnessed.

My quest intensified as the unseen world continued knocking on my door. I studied world religions in high school, senior year, English class. The one religion I resonated with at that time was Buddhism, until I read only males qualified for enlightenment. Female guidance was to pray long and hard for the next incarnation to be male.

My seven brothers were unable to demonstrate anything holier than the complete sentence they could form in a horrendously long belch or the farts they were constantly bragging could light a match. Were these signs of masculine awakening? Their behavior was not exactly conducive to craving a male embodiment.

The absent feminine principle grew into an increasingly dominant issue in my pursuit. I read and heard a lot about the Father, Son and Holy Ghost in addition to saints, mystics and other male religious figures. I rarely came across portrayals of women as representatives of the divine. Where was the Mother, daughter and Holy Spirit of the Feminine to be found? Mother Mary seemed isolated with her birth of an avatar, following Immaculate Conception.

The constant stumbling block in my religious studies was around the concept of unity.

The majority of religions are based on a core belief in unity, either with fellow worshippers or directly to the Godhead. If that was true, why was religion used as a justification to divide and conquer disbelievers?

What about the countless women killed in the name of Christianity during the Inquisition and Crusades in Europe? Were all those herbalists, midwives and rumored sorceresses guilty of anything, other than being born female? They were healers, not witches. What kind of religion sanctifies murder as a viable solution to any conflict in faith?

I’m an explorer by nature and that includes the unseen realms and energies guiding us with sparks of intuition and gnosis. I took my quest for communion into the world at large and began traveling in third world countries with varying religious affiliations. By this time, in my early twenties, I had also entered into profound, divine connection, by sparingly and sacredly imbibing LSD, mescaline or mushrooms.

Without any doubt, I entered sacred domain under the influence of psychotropics. The experiences I went through left me in awe and appreciation of the wonder in our inner and outer worlds. I also knew these little hits of God and herbal allies were way- showers. It was up to the sober, everyday me to realize divinity. It was my job to integrate and translate what I learned from these inter dimensional teachings.

The light I encountered held no dogma, restriction or judgement about anyone’s beliefs. Light is a field of complete acceptance where any version of spirituality suffices. Intolerance behavior cannot survive in the light of truth and inclusion for all. The sun shines on all of us, not the chosen few.

When I read the news, I feel saddened by obvious religious distortions. These prejudices are more evident now as global communication steadily reveals new travesties and punishments. When the government in India decided to arbitrarily cut Muslim immigration into their country I felt sick at heart.

I had many meaningful moments with Muslim people traveling through countries where this faith was dominant. I journeyed without timetables or itineraries, slowly overland and really sank into each culture. In 1973, I had a memorable stay with a young Muslim woman in Kabul, Afghanistan.

Her husband was a physician in London and she wanted to practice her English. She took me into her home, fed me a savory dinner, applied henna to my hands and hair and offered me a bed. We laughed into the night as she washed out the henna, then oiled and wove my long hair into neat braids.

I spent six weeks in Israel, two of those weeks on a Kibbutz in the Galilee region. One cranky old guy yelled at me the first day I worked in the kitchen. He declared I didn’t know how to make a three minute egg. I ran into him again, stargazing on a bench late at night, when I couldn’t find sleep. We ended up having a two hour conversation about a God who couldn’t be named, which moved me to tears.

And yet, there were daily fist fights on the basketball courts between the Ashkenzim and Sephardic Jews. I asked this wise man, a holocaust survivor who had suffered deeply, how this internal animosity could occur in a country whose survival was in constant peril? Wasn’t uniting over common goals more imperative than demonstrations of division? Were the fights racially driven?

We drifted back to star gazing as he mulled over my questions until he finally placed his hand on top of mine. “It’s the unfortunate nature of the human beast to search for differences rather than similarities” was his response.

We all come to realizations of the sacred aspect of life in our own way.

An artist, for example, enters sacred space through the zone of creative flow where time isn’t relevant. Maybe you don’t have any religious beliefs and are atheist or agnostic, yet you find solace in the company of animals and receive healing from immersion in the natural world. Where’s the problem in that for me? None.

I’ve been treated with kindness from people of all faiths across the globe.

I feel no threat if your belief is different from mine or if you have none at all. Conversely, I’m intrigued and stimulated by differences in beliefs. I’m in this school of life to learn and it’s our differences that are challenging and encourage growth.

I live and let live in regard to spirit. My spiritual essence is the core guidance system in my life. Spirit remains a mystery and needs a flexible navigator. We are all private detectives in a search for personal meaning. We develop an individual signature, then eventually realize we’re working in a quantum field of one. We’re all in it together.

The challenges we’re encountering are daunting. Fires are burning, oceans are dying and sentient beings everywhere are feeling the unsettling effects of disunity.

For the sake of the light we embody, let’s unite in allowing one another the grace and freedom to realize our own deeper meanings in life.