Last week a Field reader reached out to me. He is questioning his faith and in particular the version of God he was taught in the church he grew up in.
I get it. I think many of us reading do. We have questions that can’t be easily answered so I felt inspired to write a piece for anyone reading that has either left a church, synagogue or a denomination that no longer feels aligned with their hearts.
But there may still a deep yearning to better understand God.
Can we do this outside of religion?
Maybe. Maybe not. I have no idea.
But books have been such a gift to me on the spiritual path. Not just the ones that hit the top charts, we all know about those.
The other ones. The harder to read ones that really just have so much to offer us, but they are the ones that seem to find us when we need them the most, that speak to us from exactly where we are.
Even the WAY they come to us is often a mystery.
Like the time I heard one of the last interviews with Dr. Wayne Dyer before his death who was speaking about a book called Vasistha’s yoga and what profound revelations were in it and how it provided a means to eliminate psychological conditioning and to attain liberation as many of the 5,000 year old yogic texts seem to do. I ordered it and was astonished at how thick and intimidating it was and it’s contents blew my mind.
It was totally aligned with modern physics but it was written centuries ago. I was heading to India, but I wasn’t finished it and I felt compelled to pack it in my carry on. The most amazing thing unfolded in the next two weeks …I found myself at the foot of the Himalayas and a friend brought us to a random small damp dark cave about 25km’s from Rishikesh the birthplace of yoga in the middle of nowhere and we went in to explore it and pay our respects. We were told this is the cave that gave birth to this famous text… mouth drop. It was Vasistha’s cave. Just a couple of weeks earlier I heard about it and here I was. Goosebumps.
The picture above is one of a few bulging bookshelves in our basement.
When I look at it it reminds me that we’re all in this life together.
“Understanding is a kind of ecstasy”
Carl Sagan
To me it feels like I have about 350 friends on these shelves all with something interesting to share and teach me about our true nature. All of them filled with things I had never thought of or that resonate so deeply that I would never have acknowledged consciously until someone else pointed it out to me.
Gabrielle Marcelle once wrote about how when we have a problem, we stand over it in a detached linear rational way, but when we begin to look at that same happening as a mystery we become so intwined with it, it’s as though we’re IN it. We can’t stand away from it, or it’s lost.
This is what wrestling with faith in a higher power of our own understanding feels like to me. There are so many ways to go about it and yet if we get to literal or rational or certain something is lost.
If you zoom into the photo at the top of this post you’ll see mostly non-fiction and you’ll notice that most of them stem from a life-long desire to better understand our human nature, each other and the world.
Is this a desire we all share?
I’m not sure, maybe it’s just me, but I believe we do in our care and concern for one another and the earth.
Today let’s try something a bit different.
I have written a short heart-felt blessing for all of us that are on this path to help us get some personal clarity within our own belief system or religion and I’ll drop a short list of books at the end that I’ve personally found helpful. They may not be for you.
I just want to warn you. These are 10 more obscure kind of books or series that are not and will never be on the top or popular charts (we all already know about those great reads), these are some you may not have ever heard of, but have helped me significantly.
To be clear, I’m not recommending you read them. Just the opposite. Listen to what speaks to you the way books seem to do.
Some of these are lifelong texts to wrestle and learn with.
Some of these books or authors have helped me shift my worldview and faith to something bigger, more inclusive, and more expansive than if I just read texts from one particular thought system.
We hunger for truth and we may not ever know exactly what that is, but we also know that God is a concept that none of us can adequately describe.
We’re intelligent beings and of course we suspect that not everything we’ve been taught and told in any church or believe system is true, including our atheistic tendencies, but we all want the Truth.
In my personal experience, reserving judgement and reading a diversity of books we can sometimes get a better overview. It can help put the puzzle together in helpful non-fundamental ways or give our own faith and religion new life. Our egos don’t like to be wrong and they often can be if we are simply seeing things from one singular perspective.
I want to know how we can all live happy fulfilled lives, respect and care for one another and the earth better and get along and I love that there are thousands of ways for us to see this so that there really is no ONE “right” way but that like flowers the diversity makes life even more beautiful.
Deconstructing our faith and asking questions is a very healthy thing. Judaism does this brilliantly. Our Christian household seems a little less open, there is a lot of fear and suspicion wrestling with outside source of inspiration, but most of us can see now that it’s a healthy thing to do. I personally think that the version of God that we made in our own image and in fear really needs to be tossed but you get to decide that for yourself. . I’m referring to the judgemental or jealous male white God wagging his finger at us. The one we made up in fear that threatens an incidiary hell and eternal damnation for disbelief. That version of God has traumatized millions of us. The problem is, we no longer even know who we are praying to so many of us have even understandably stopped asking questions and praying all together.
There is so much anger, loss, doubt it’s no wonder so many people feel lost. It can be lonely and in some cases can cause the loss of the only loving community we’ve ever known. There seems to be a cold excommunication that happens in many religions if we for our own good reasons can’t tow the line. The loss of long time friendships from leaving church and sometimes family can feel devastating.
Today’s piece is not a critique of any particular religion, it’s about clarity and personal power. It’s about being open minded and willing to ask for answers to our hardest to ask questions to be led to the answers by a higher power of our own understanding.
To experience our own true nature and to help us integrate our personality self with our higher self. Our personality and ego may not be able to or even want to grasp it, but it can align to it in a level of agreements or comprehension so we can find peace and the promise of freedom when we find the truth for ourselves.
I may have done this already with Fundamentalism, but my intention is not to ever tell others what to believe or feel, but today is about asking for guidance to reclaim this manifest world beyond the fear and corruption. Beyond our own man made decree of separation that we have chosen to learn through.
To be guided back to oneness and coherence with all of life.
This is more about an agreement, an alignment and an accord or union with what created us all. We know deep down that it’s not just the priests, rabbis, ministers, shamans, medicine men or scientists that have access to something that we do not.
We’re told universally in all sacred scriptures and physics in one way or another that this is our birthright. The Divine essence in us claiming ALL things into manifestation. The quantum field, Christ consciousness or Buddha nature dwells dormant inside each and every one of us.
Today let’s bless our evolving faith and the undefinable primary organizing principle behind this incredible experience of life. May this blessing today soften the edges of the tension we feel and help lift us from fear to return to the love that can reconnect us more powerfully to one another and the earth..
Dear Mother, Father, God, Creator, Quantum field of potential and possibility,
Thank you for the gift of life. Please bless our doubts, our suspicions and our not knowing anymore.
We have been carried to a shadowland of self-deceit and we would like our faith to be brought to the light of understanding. We’re not even sure which spiritual scriptures or if what we have been told is true, they’ve been changed so many times in the last 2,000 years we suspect they are just a shell of their former glory. So many spiritual teachings have been destroyed, others buried and all of this turmoil behind the scenes in our churches and communities has left us feeling confused.
Please allow us to see past the lies.
We want to learn about your Kingdom and the gift of our Being.
Some of us are beginning to suspect that our lives are not about domination and power or any belief system. It’s not about aspiring to accumulate wealth on earth or of just having our own needs met, but knowing our own true nature and realizing yours. To be custodians of the earth and one another.
Some deeper part of us also knows that we were not put on earth to feel guilt or shame and to worship you through the many versions and translations of our heavily edited man-made spiritual rule books. One that keeps us under control and is used to justify our judging and harming one another and to keep us looking down at our feet.
Please guide us today to look up with true humility.
Awaken us to the systems we have put in place and the identities we’ve assumed.
Help us deconstruct what is not true.
Help us remove our masks and allow the truth of our full expression to be made manifest in us. Connect us to the love and light of our true nature.
Guide us to the teachers, friends and experiences to help us discover this wellspring of justice and compassion for all at our depths.
Remind us of our wholeness and help us dislodge all of the poisonous arrows of pain and suffering we have accrued in our separation from you.
We are ready to listen.
We are ready to wake up.
Please allow us to be carried by a wave of change and claim us on the high shore of this new realization of who and what we have always been.
Thank you for the free will to see this for ourselves. It seems we have made this mess of the world ourselves and our old beliefs and need for war are now being revealed for us to see them in our narrow mindedness and fear. The slow destruction of the earth revealed in the extreme weather is something none of us can deny.
We feel your love at the heart of us tugging us forward.
We realize that we’ve imposed identity on you through our own mythological structures and world religions and even in our silent rejection of those for our own ideas, some of us are further separated by living in denial of your existence. We can’t seem to see beyond the dense fog of our history and memories. We keep changing our concepts of you, but we suspect that not matter what we come up with that there is only ONE true Monad. One Field. We all share it and live and move and have our being in it.
We are beginning to realize that our religions and science have been limited and were intended not literally but as sign posts on the road to our deeper understanding you.
No matter what we call you or whether we even believe we know that it does’t change your nature or what is true, it only changes our own ever shifting perceptions.
Please show us a sign today and show us so that we have no doubt it comes from you. That it’s such a coincidence that we’ll know who and at we are praying to. So that we can know you. The one presence, the Monad, the one true consciousness that expresses as ALL.
The intelligence higher that any of us.
The primary organizing principal and unfathomable love in our midst. Help us reclaim a new realization of who and what you are through a direct experience so we can be known.
Show us how to comprehend ourselves in accord with your will, not ours.
Move us beyond our man-made theories, theologies and spiritual philosophies to true comprehension of what was, what is, and what will be in the eternal now.
Guide us with your grace to love and accept others and ourselves as we are and to embrace the humble mystery and uncertainty of life.
Guide us to re-imagine our faith to match your purity beyond the limits of our current levels of human understanding.
Lift us beyond the fears and illusions of this world. Above the corruption and broken institutionalized faith and fear-soaked fundamentalism we have created.
Help us expand our limited rational understanding of the science of you.
Bring us to the endless hope and peace that lay just beyond our human perceptions.
And so it is.
Peace to all.
N
A few favourite sources of inspiration…
This Daily Meditation from The Center for Action and Contemplation started by Father Richard Rohr (He is one of my favorite teachers) and this is the most incredible resource (especially if you have a Catholic background)
Some favourite books and authors a bit outside popular culture. There are traditional Christian authors or philosophers like Kant, C.S. Lewis or even contemporary Christian authors like Max Lucado that have shaped me… but these are the ones I would have been hiding under my bed, in no particular order:
This is the Bible with the gospels that were ordered to be destroyed but thank goodness they were hidden and buried because “The New New Testament” by retired professor Dr. Hal Taussig was really helpful to give me a better picture of Christianity. Reading the traditional scriptures alongside these newly discoverd texts—the Gospel of Luke with the Gospel of Mary, Paul’s letters with The Letter of Peter to Philip, The Revelation to John with The Secret Revelation to John—offers the exciting possibility of understanding both the new and the old better.
Stephen Mitchell’s Tao translation is my favourite. I find his footnotes behind the eighty-one brief chapters helpful. Lao-tzu's Tao Te Ching, or Book of the Way, provides advice that imparts balance and perspective, a serene and generous spirit, and teaches us how to work for the good with the effortless skill that comes from being in accord with the Tao—the basic principle of the universe. An honourable mention to the Bhagavad Gita as well but this little gem of a book is a must read in any lifetime.
This one as you know has been a game changer for me. I recently wrote an entire post on it and I plan to help anyone willing to give it a go with daily 9 min. videos to help you make it through work book in 2024 starting January 1st. One of the most beautiful and helpful (and frustrating to understand) books I’ve ever studied. It’s a highly intelligent universal spiritual teaching and non-religious psychological self-study program that uses Christian language.
Eckhart Tolle is the real deal. His wisdom and depth of personal experience make him someone that was instrumental in my own personal spiritual evolution. He really helped me transcend my ego-based state of consciousness which was essential to my personal happiness. He has also studied ACIM as helped bring the East and West together for me in new ways and gave me a new love and appreciation of Christianity. Ironically fundamental or evangelical Christians call him the Anti-Christ, but I doubt any of them have even read his work because I’ve experienced him as one of the best teachers of Jesus I’ve ever learned from. These two are MUST reads in your lifetime:
Dying To Be Me. In this truly inspirational memoir, Anita Moorjani relates how, after fighting cancer for almost four years, her body began shutting down—overwhelmed by the malignant cells spreading throughout her system as a stage 4 patient in a coma being read her last rights, the miraculours happened. As her organs failed, she entered into an extraordinary near-death experience where she realized her inherent worth . . . and the actual cause of her disease. Upon regaining consciousness, Anita found that her condition had improved so rapidly that she was released from the hospital within weeks—without a trace of cancer in her body! I took a course with her and it changed my understanding of illness and I was no longer afraid to die.
Eleven men embarked upon a journey in 1894 with one objective: ...to find the great spiritual teachers of the Far East and witness their uncommon abilities and they get much more than they bargained for… and so did I. Wayne Dyer recommended these right before his death and they affirmed many things I’d learned and experienced.
These channeled responses to questions along with ACIM the most intelligent other worldly texts. It took me many, many years to get going but I’m not sure I’ll be able to stop. I agree, they are a bit “out there” but align perfectly with so many ancient spritual texts and add a richness and depth I’ve never found in any other books. Don Elkins and Carla L. Rueckert worked together for 12 years to perfect the channeling process and receive philosophical inspiration and guidance from extraterrestrial sources. Yes, you read that right. ET. All that it has done for me is deepen my awareness and acceptance of myself and others. This book is the transcript from the recording of that conversation between the Questioner and “Ra”. Through questions & answers, the metaphysical blueprint of spiritual evolution is explored, from the microcosm to the macrocosm, from the particulars of life on this planet to the life of the cosmos, to the possibilities of healing, transformation, and self-realization for spiritual seekers and wanderers.
It seems like the channeled texts are winning today as the needle movers on change. I have no words for this series of books. Paul Selig’s work with “the Guides” and his channelled texts have changed my life and have given me a non-religious but still ecumenical spiritual philosophy that makes so much good sense. Listening to his deep voice on Audible early in the morning is surprising, but I feel lifted energetically afterwards. Literally. It’s like I find an energetic accord I never knew I had.
The German painter and author Joseph Anton Schneiderfranken, also known by his spiritual name Bô Yin Râ, is someone I first heard about through Eckhart Tolle’s lectures - he’s very unique and expressed his insights into the metaphysical structures of the eternal spiritual reality through art and writings. His spiritual teaching Hortus conclusus is compiled into a series of 32 books. They are short and have unique covers and after my awakening incident in 2020 I couldn’t stop devouring them - they seem a bit harder to read to me now, but I was caught off guard by how truthful they felt to me and described how I felt at the time.
10. This last category is just a handful of my favourite spiritual teachers, poets & authors with work that may interest you with a LOT of online or free you tube material:
John Philip Newel, John O’Donahue, Thich Nhat Hanh, Poet David Whyte, Mary Oliver, Allan Watts, C.S. Lewis, Thomas Merton, Thomas Berry, Viktor Frankl, Pema Chödrön, David Hawkins, Rupert Spira, Thomas Moore, Neville Goddard, Ramana Maharshi, Karen Armstrong, Richard Rohr, Abraham Hicks, Dalai Lama, Byron Katie, Joe Dispenza, David Suzuki & Pierre Teillard de Chardin. So many more, but these just came to my mind today.
I would LOVE, LOVE, LOVE to hear which books have crossed your path have been the most influencial and why? It could even be a children’s book or a fictional work.
Please share in the comments below…
With love,
Rev Nona