Steve Perrault

HIGHER POWER (chapter excerpt)

Return with me now to my small quiet office for another appointment with the Here and Now, with a smattering of There and Then: another client, another day in psychotherapeutic ways. It was another December in Chicago. Cold, but not snow.

My client’s toilet-bowl white teeth were as distracting as the halo surrounding his head from the light cast from the scene out the window behind him. When he closed his eyes, I looked over his shoulder at the attention-grabbing yellow-orange glow visible through my office window. An arresting conflagration of lights and forms, the nativity scene across the street brought to mind the Midway at the state fair in August—or a methodical bushfire. The difference was the temperature of the air and deficiency of sound. The combustion of colors and shapes currently in my line of sight was lordly silent in the cold air of the December night.
The display was an unbridled holiday flambé on the front lawn of an unpretentious, vacant-looking ranch style home. Given its visual clout, it got star billing on the street. It was a flaming, opulent frozen parade blending a religious opinion and a secular tradition. I found it chilling. It had gone up the day after Thanksgiving and would not come down till several weeks into January. All of December would be held hostage by its confused goals. Occasionally cars would slow as they passed to take a gander, undoubtedly creating impromptu discussions in heated autos.

The Christmas Midway was designed in concentric circles expanding like ripples from a stone dropped in still water. Frozen ripples. At the center was a nativity scene of life-size, fading, colored plastic figures illuminated from their interiors by lightbulbs. Mary and Joseph looked to be in need of a consultation for chronic fatigue syndrome. Around the nativity set was a circle of mini-lighted topiaries of reindeer with slowly bobbing heads, one in serious need of a chiropractor, another missing part of a leg. Around the deer was a circle of inner-illuminated, three-foot high, red-and-white striped plastic candy canes tied together with poinsettia-riddled plastic garlands. Standing guard around the canes was a circle of inner-illuminated four-foot high Babes in Toyland soldiers. Stationed in front of this no-holds-barred mix of the secular and religious was a life-size inflatable Santa Claus with a three-by-four foot plywood board leaning against him on the snowless ground. The board stated in black spray paint, “Baby Jesus missing. Please return.”

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INTRODUCTION

We arrive in life in mystery, and when we depart this life, we disappear into mystery. How we spend our time responding to life is not a mystery: it is our decision.

In every age, human beings choose to react to life by trying to solve it. The Great Questions are familiar to all: Why am I here? What is the meaning of my life? Where will I go after I die? Is there anywhere to go? Will I see those I love again after death?

We know these questions are unanswerable. This truth need not bring anxiety, but people encumbered by fears and longings about life and death understandably seek to lighten their load. Bookstores and Web sites are full of religious and secular materials discussing distinct points of view, but these compositions are simply endless pages of talk supporting particular unverifiable opinions. They are collections of thoughts. Extracts of ideas. Philosophies, ideologies, and theologies are not knowledge, no matter how desperately we need them to be.

In trying to understand life and death, we turn to things that are equally incomprehensible. Organized religious systems seek to answer the questions of life with symbols, rituals and formulated conceptions that make us feel we have some control over our existence, because life produces problems. The biggest problem is death. We fear what we do not understand. As philosopher Bertrand Russell remarked, “If there were no death, there would be no religion.”

The multiplicity of religions and contrary denominations within religions is in itself evidence that the answers to the Great Questions are unknowable; however, the primary interest of religion is to console—not to provide concrete answers. All religious faiths provide the same degree of personal consolation for the believer. The psychological and emotional equality of felt results of any given faith makes null and void all claims of particular religions to be the “one true faith.” Each and all give comfort. No one can deny what someone else is feeling.

Beliefs get in the way of learning about ourselves. Present-centered consciousness is the only available gateway to your soul—the essence of who you are. It requires no prerequisite beliefs or systemic religious contexts for entrance. To foster a mature spirituality is to understand the human condition without desires or fears. It is the capacity to be silent and at ease with the unknown. Contemplating mystery is a source of strength. Spiritual growth requires living with the questions that arise from the inscrutability of life. When we fully grasp this, all fears disappear and we begin to trust the ways of higher consciousness.

Most people know that spirituality and religion are not synonymous.

Spirituality is to religion as being is to wanting.

Merely being open to the idea of questioning your religious beliefs can result in an enlarged, expectant, and mature life, a life of your own—not one planted within the boundaries of answers provided by someone else. Conditioned, prescribed faith does not encourage questions. Religious beliefs are arguments of faith, thus the answers you will be given orbit only around advice for more religious faith.

Spirituality dwells in the realm of awareness and propels the mind into liberating consciousness. It was this freedom of realization that propelled religious thinkers throughout human history to reevaluate ossified religious institutions but often, regrettably, to start new religious institutions.

Religious knowledge is not divine knowledge; it is merely information about a religion. Venerated objects and concepts of particular religions, particular views, are just that—objects and concepts. There are many views available to us on Earth. If you hold one, it is most likely determined by your position on the planet. This is religious destiny by geography.

Religion is an historical expression of moods and motivations about ultimate concerns, historically problematic. Religion has not been a benefit to the collective welfare, or connectedness, of humanity through the millennia. It has not helped make the planet a safer and healthier place. The value of fundamentalist religion—of any brand—has always been, and will continue to be, the greatest threat to peace on the planet. Fixated minds are not liberated minds and therefore not tolerant minds. As the world has always witnessed, and as we are seeing today, individuals of uncompromising, absolutist religious beliefs with an irrational preoccupation with evil—who always feel under siege in the world—will always see enemies.

I believe an individual has a better chance of spiritual maturity by not holding any branded historical explanations or opinions on “Truth.” Spirituality must be grounded in the perceptions we glean from our own experiences in real time. If it is not, we will remain harnessed to the projected hopes and fears a particular faith has instilled within us.

Choosing not to identify with a particular faith makes you a soul-at-large. For souls-at-large, the spiritual performance of life is in a theatre without walls, on a stage without backdrops. The view is unobstructed, the path unencumbered.

If your religion isn’t helping you to know yourself, it isn’t helping you to know your God. If your religion’s vision of creation is the eventual destruction of creation and genocide of humankind, you do not believe in a God of love. If your religion isn’t interested in tackling global problems, it is contributing to them.

You don’t need an organized faith to believe in the higher consciousness we personify with the name God. You don’t need religious beliefs to know that morality, right behavior, and charity are the best design for life—yours and the life of the planet. Love is always the answer. It is as simple as that.

What matters is the intention in your heart, the awareness in your mind, and the silence of your soul.

The sensing heart lives in wonder. The conscious mind lives in questions. The receptive soul lives in silence.

Learn from the silence within yourself. Listen to the pause between the sounds of human utterances tainted with advertisements that seek to make you a duplication of others. Find the peace no combination of words can provide.

“We are constantly invited to be who we are.”

— Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

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