The Other Side of Self-Reliance

Reasons not to believe in God: I really can’t think of any reasons to not believe in God as I have exploded my thinking of the concept to include things I can believe in. I could go on and on as to why I should not/will not believe in Him (capitalized masculine pronoun used purposefully) as He has been described by most every human who has sought to describe Him. But I’ve said that enough already.

Reasons to believe in God: Well, number one, I’m told that I have to if I am to recover from compulsion disease, or at least to come to an understanding of a higher power that works for me. Another reason is somewhat difficult to explain but I can attempt by saying that my self awareness, my acknowledgement of my “beingness” somehow leads be to believe that I came from something of a similar attributes that is to say because I have consciousness I feel like I came from consciousness even if it is a broader and more developed form of all that I am. Kind of like a drop of ocean water comes from a vast ocean but has similar properties as the whole from which it comes. Another metaphor I’ve heard is that apple trees don’t produce oranges and therefore my consciousness comes from consciousness. The third and final reason (and I am willing to concede that this comes from the fact that I was raised to believe in God) is that my intuition tells me that God is real– even if I am not very clear or may never be about what the exact nature of that God is. It may be my poet’s soul or my belief that I have a soul or am a soul that leads me to this as well. I can’t really imagine an artist who doesn’t believe in some sort of God or higher power or at least in the collective beingness of the Universe or perhaps Multiverses–all Reality perhaps can serve as the Higher Power. In the end and to simplify: when in the quietness of my own mind I whisper the question, “Are you there?” The definitive and immediate answer is, “Yes, I’m here.”

“Just as the body without the spirit is dead, so faith without works is dead.” James 2:26. See, there, the idea of a separate spirit– something that is “me” that is beyond my body. The problem with this is that having studied some neuroscience I know that thinking happens because of the actions occurring in the organ, the brain. This does not however necessarily preclude the idea that these actions may be occurring at the behest of or because of the existence of “the soul.” I think that I have heard some philosophies that make some delineation between the spirit and the soul– maybe one being consciousness and the other being meta-consciousness. My inclination is to not scoff at this because there does seem to be layers of consciousness within the totally of all that is “me,” definitely a part of me that seems to possess more ancestral wisdom and a part of my consciousness that is ego-driven or perhaps the ego itself.

“Faith alone can avail us nothing” seems to indicate that the missing element when there is faith alone is action. I must get into action.

Most Psychologists and psychiatrists agree that any sort of unhealthy dependence is just that, unhealthy. The precept that dependence on God is a healthy dependence and that it is the opposite of self-reliance is popular among those in the recovery community no matter what the addiction or compulsion they’re recovering from. The connection between the abuse of alcohol and compulsive underearning seems to be rooted in self-reliance. With alcohol, even though I was looking to a substance outside of myself to fix what I felt was wrong with me, it was still me at the helm. My history of underearning has been another example of me trying to run things but obviously with ruinous results because I am almost 50 years old and I am living in my teenage bedroom when I really want to be living in New York, LA or both. My way has not worked.

See y’all tomorrow.