The I of God: From Chaos to Creation

Copyright © 2017 Judith Attfield.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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ISBN: 978-1-5043-9207-5 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5043-9209-9 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-5043-9208-2 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017918086

Balboa Press rev. date: 12/07/2017

TABLE OF CONTENTS

In the Beginning

What Is God?

We Are All God

Separating from Our Oneness with God

Being Human

Being a Human I of God

Letting Go and Being God

How to Be Creative

The Ground of All Existence

Absolute Faith

Grace and The Void

Home Free

DEDICATION

This book is dedicated to those who are suffering and wish to find peace.

This book is dedicated to those who want to find compassion, kindness and love in the world.

This book is dedicated to those who want to be a living, breathing, creative force in their lives.

This book is for those who are suffering and want to be a living, breathing, creative force in their lives.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I could not have written this book without the help of other people and I am grateful to them. To my husband, Ray Attfield, thank you for your support, encouragement, humungous hours of discussion and love. Without you, this book could not have been written. Thank you to my friends, Catherine Temple, Pauline Wolf and Suzan Badgley (the Geko Treker) for the years of philosophical discussion and your belief in me to write this book. Thank you to my sisters, Johanna Clark and Janice Kovacs, and to my daughter, Lillooet Wasilenkoff, for your love, encouragement and support. Thank you to Ryan Orbell from Hay House Publishing. Your patience and willingness to work with me gave me the courage to finish my book. Thank you to my copy editor, Trevor McMonagle, for your enthusiasm and care of my book. You helped me take my book to the next level. Without all of you, The I of God would not have been possible.

FOREWORD

When I began writing this book, I believed that God was the supreme creator and I was the supplicant trying to feel some sense of connection or spirituality to Him. As time went on and I continued to write, I began to understand that not only was there no God out there, God was not as I perceived it to be. That was very difficult for me to understand as I had always felt that if I could be good enough, or spiritually inclined, one day I would feel God. I had thought that if I were perfect enough God would reward me and I would be happy and prosperous forever.

In writing this book, I have become convinced that each of us can speak to god whenever we want to because we are god. We have always felt the force of our nature but have shied away from owning our part of it. From the beginning, we have created gods rather than accepting our responsibility for our creations.

My friend, Suzan, asked a monk, If everything is god, are mosquitoes god too? The monk replied: Of course mosquitoes are god. Suzan then asked: Since mosquitoes are god, is it okay that we kill them? The monk replied: If you love mosquitoes, you can get along with them and perhaps they wouldn’t bite you. She observed him for a while and noticed that while mosquitoes hovered around him, they didn’t land.

We are god and so is everything else. There is no separation between god and us. God is everything including mosquitoes and we can become aware of this.

Our ability to create beliefs and stories is part of our divinity. We have not been trained to be responsible creators and so we create gods outside of ourselves. This is why we yearn for the experience of oneness or enlightenment. We feel an integral part of us is missing.

We don’t need to follow a spiritual path, become a vegetarian, meditate, do yoga or chant mantras. Being god cannot be changed. It is who we are and when we believe it, we understand that we are not connected to god, we are the god connection.

If you find the term god offensive to your beliefs, please feel free to use any similar term such as universe, energy, all that is, luck or higher self. As we go along, you may find it simpler to just say god.

There is no such thing as enlightenment. There is only the lifting of illusion.

A good tomorrow-worry story is about having to live under a bridge, where the final worry may go like this, I will lie under the bridge alone and unloved and when I die nobody will care.

IN THE BEGINNING

E ver since man first looked up into the night sky, the mystery of life has permeated his being. To early tribes, life seemed precarious because death and tomorrow were unknown. They balanced their fears with religious rituals and ceremonies to help themselves, their friends and their relatives live life and move on to the next world.

The first known religious practice was with Paleolithic¹ man around fifty thousand years ago. Intentional graves containing food, tools, pottery and stone were discovered. To this day, we bury our dead with grave goods as part of our funeral rituals. Imagine how many generations of people it has been who use burials as a religious ceremony in order to help our loved ones into the next world.

Our ancient ancestors asked for guidance and divine intervention to help keep them safe in their daily lives. They believed that as long as they revered their gods and followed the rules, morning would come and they would still be alive.

Here is an example of an old prayer that we still use, asking god to help us survive the night.

Now I lay me down to sleep,

I pray the Lord my soul to keep,

If I should die before I wake,

I pray the Lord my soul to take.²

This prayer is at least four hundred years old. Even then, the fear of death was prominent. Today we still feel powerless in the face of death and tomorrow.

Since early times, many philosophers, shamans, scholars and scientists have tried to answer the mystery of life and death including whether or not god exists. They asked, Why aren’t we satisfied with our lives? What is life anyway? What is god? Is it instinct? Is it a belief?

There have been many philosophies and religions created that have tried to answer these questions. Philosophers and theologians sought understanding about life so that we could feel safe and secure and live our lives in peace.

We are afraid that we will not be able to complete our lives or fulfill our dreams before destruction or death comes knocking at our doors. We don’t know how to reach our potential because we are steered toward employment and lifestyle choices that suit our society’s needs. We don’t understand how to think outside the box of rules of how to be human. Yet, the desire for self-fulfillment is one of our drives.

Freda was just such a person. She had had a full life. She raised her children. She worked at a nursing care job. She was married to a great guy. She retired to watch her grandchildren grow up and be successful in the world. At ninety-three when she was dying, she was furious that she hadn’t completed her life. She felt she had missed out, not paid attention to her yearning for fullness, for that connection with life and she had no idea what death was going to present to her.

Abraham Maslow³ was a psychologist from the 1970’s who developed a theory on our need to be fulfilled and to feel complete. He created a hierarchy of those needs and described them as a pyramid with our base needs on the bottom leading to the peak of self-development.

Maslow described our physiological needs as basic survival requirements. These are having enough food to eat, water to drink, clothing, shelter and procreation.

Yet, some homeless people choose to deny themselves some of these needs. They believe that their freedom from our social rules is more important than their survival. Buddhist monks beg for food on the streets. They believe it builds humility and creates merits in this lifetime. It appears that we can shape what our base needs are, from our beliefs.

Our safety needs relate to our sense of security. We feel better if we can plan for tomorrow by having enough money and perhaps some insurance. Living in a country safe from war can also help. PTSD or post-traumatic stress disorder can destroy that sense of safety. This can occur with rape, war, financial destruction, death of a close loved one or childhood abuse.

We don’t understand why we keep worrying when we tell ourselves not to. Perhaps that is a key to being ourselves. If we felt that we belong here, no matter what our situation, perhaps our lives would be different.

Our sense of community and a happy family life fulfill our need for love and belonging.

Without that sense of belonging to society, we can feel crippled, isolated, alone and/or suicidal.

Ostracism is used as a form of punishment to keep us in line with cultural values. We fear judgment and can lose belief in ourselves as being important in life.

Esteem, including self-esteem, is our next basic need for us to feel self-confident, capable and strong. Without esteem in our lives from both others and ourselves, we can feel inferior, self-doubting and helpless.

From the time we are born, we are told who we are by our family, friends, educators and governments. We are called immature, consumers, parishioners, and taxpayers. Somehow our personhood is not included.

After observing the behaviour of Mother Teresa, Eleanor Roosevelt and other self-made people, Maslow added a fifth level to his theory of needs, which he described as self-actualization. He said that to reach this level, one had to master all of the other needs first. In other words, we first have to feel safe, comfortable with ourselves and secure in our lives before we have the drive towards self-fulfillment. This is the desire to be all that we can be, whether it is the child that needs to be loved, the picture that needs to be painted, the book that needs to be written or the race that needs to be won. It is what our lives demand of us to feel fulfilled in the world.

If we accept this as a self-evident truth, why don’t we learn this in school? Imagine feeling safe, secure and free in this world, no matter what our skin colour is, our choice of religion is, or what our gender is. We would require confidence in ourselves and our world for us to feel safe and secure.

In 1971, Maslow added a need that he called self-transcendence. This need is the yearning towards togetherness or wholeness. It is the drive towards oneness which includes the divine.

It turns out that our human race feels a oneness in god. For the last ten thousand years of recorded history we have written about our gods and how they help us and guide us with moral principles. We have fashioned our gods after ourselves. For example, in our society today, Gaia is the loving mother, Yahweh is the disciplining father and Jesus is the beloved son. Just as in the days of the ancient Greeks and Romans, our present-day gods represent our characteristics.

According to Steven Levine, our need for self-transcendence is our homesickness for