Yesterday I caught a glimpse of an advertisement for a reality show entitled something like “The Trappers.” The short ad featured a bearded man who made the following statement: “God created me to be a trapper.” He had more to say, but this was the take-away for me.

This really set me to thinking. I came up with a whole list of things to ponder.

1. Is there a God who creates individuals to play certain roles in life?
2. If number 1 is true, what does God have against all the critters these trappers capture and kill?
3. Does this mean that every choice we make is directed by God?

When I was teaching in the Federal Prison, I met inmates who believed that it was God’s or Allah’s will that these individuals commit their various crimes and that they should go to prison for said crimes.

I totally rejected such thinking because there was no self-responsibility, no accounting for individual will, but I did listen to their logic, which went something like this: “If God/Allah is all-powerful, then He (The Divine Entity was very masculine in these encounters) controls everything. If it was not his will it could not have happened.”

There is some logic in that statement but I believe personal responsibility supersedes any type of divine intention. While I know there is a Unified Field in which we all move and have our being, I do not believe this Source ever interferes with our individual choices. So, in other words, I reject the idea that there is a power out there that created me or anyone else for a certain purpose. I believe this Power gives us the ability to become the best version of ourselves which we are capable of conceiving. I do not believe Mike the Mountain Man was created to kill animals for their furs, nor do I believe that Jeffrey Dahmer was created to eat his neighbors.

I know my beliefs are not popular. People find great comfort in their belief that God created them for a certain purpose. At least some do; others spend their entire lives attempting to uncover this divine calling, which for some never seems to appear.

I believe we all have free will. I am not sure this free will is manifest in human form or if it is decided by our soul, most of which resides in Source, but I believe we can make the choice, today, to pack our bags and move to Cancun, start a jet ski business, and drink Pina Coladas if we decide that is what we want to do. I think I could walk into a bank tomorrow with a note that demanded their money and probably find myself in prison fairly quickly. The point is this: It is not God’s will for my life that I try to learn to write well, it is mine. I choose not to rob banks simply because I choose to reject such a lifestyle, it has nothing to do with God or with God’s will for my life.

While I recognize the possibility, maybe even the probability, that I am wrong about the nature of man’s relationship with the Field which permeates all that Is, I simply cannot imagine a God that creates one man to kill another man, such as the “God created me to be a soldier” individual. Nor can I conceive of Love creating a human for the purpose of killing rabbits because their fur is in demand. It just all seems too contradictory to be a real possibility.

I understand people’s need for belief that the divine not only accepts their actions but was, in fact, the cause of such choices, but I do not believe it is a possibility. Any time we seek to assign attributes to God, we are creating the Divine in our own image, so it is completely logical that we would create a God who created us to be killers. Whatever helps you make it through the night, right?

As a quick disclaimer, I am not suggesting that it is wrong to kill animals, humans, or to rob banks. It is not anything that appeals to me, in any way, but the God I have created, in my mind, would never judge such actions. I would like to say that I, too, do not judge a shooter who would go into a school and kill innocent kids and teachers, but unfortunately I am not quite that evolved. It is my goal, to love as the God of my dreams Loves, but my first reaction is disbelief, followed my anger, and finally, followed by pain-filled sorrow, when such an event occurs.

Everything we are is God. If we really believe it is God’s will for us to trap beavers to make $ 60.00 for their pelt, then it is so. It’s no worse than praying that God is on our side on the battlefield or in the football game. We use our idea of the Divine to justify all sorts of actions. Why not? Clearly God created me to be a cynic, right?

I think we need to take responsibility for our actions and not place the burden for our actions on an idea of some God which we have created in our own image. If we do not have free will, there is no logical reason for our existence here. If there is a Divine Entity pulling all our strings, we are nothing but puppets in some silly dance that we will never understand. If I want to go out and kill people who don’t look like me, people who worship in a different way from me, I hope I would have the courage to claim responsibility for my actions and not say that it was because God created me to be a soldier. But then what do I know, perhaps God created me to question everything.

The only freedom we can ever find is through taking 100% responsibility for our lives. There is no joy to be found in blaming our lives, our choices, on some mythical God, out there somewhere. We are what we are because of the choices we make and have made, not because some creator decided that this is who and what we should be. I think our parents, teachers, peers, and relationships had more to do with forming and shaping us than the Unified Field did. We are and have always been free to choose the direction of our lives. It is no wiser to say that “God created me for this” than it is to say that “The Devil Made Me Do It.”

To be free, we must claim and own our freedom. Any other choice abandons and disregards Truth.

I have tried my best to write this week and I have nothing but a bunch of words to show for my effort. My writing has been vague, meandering, circuitous, and virtually painful to read and attempt to edit. Sometimes my writing is like that. Rather than force something on-to the page, which does not reflect the ideas I am trying to convey, I have decided to share someone else’s thoughts.

Consider these words from Stephen Mitchell found in the preface of the book A Thousand Names For Joy: “There’s nothing mystical or lofty about the Master. He (or she) is simply someone who knows the difference between reality and his thoughts about reality. He may be a mechanic or a fifth grade teacher or the president of a bank or a homeless person on the streets. He is just like everyone else, except that he no longer believes that in this moment things should be different than they are. Therefore in all circumstances he remains at ease in the world, is efficient without the slightest effort, keeps his lightness of heart whatever happens, and, without intending to, acts with kindness toward himself and everyone else. He is who you are once you meet your mind with understanding.”

I have been trying to write, this week, about incidents from my life, which clearly show that I am no Master. At  least, at times (like this week and probably most days, if I am totally honest), I can lay claim to no such title or authority.

Now consider these words from Byron Katie from the same book:
     “You can’t express reality in words. You limit it that way. You squeeze it into nouns and verbs and adjectives, and the instant-by-instant flow is cut off. The tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao, because trying to tell it brings it into time. It’s stopped in time by the very attempt to name it. Once anything is named, it’s no longer eternal. “Eternal” means free, without limit, without a position in time or space, lived without obstacle.

     There is no name for what’s sitting in this chair right now. I am the experience of the eternal. Even with the thought “God,” it all stops and manifests in time, and as I create “God,” I have created “not–God.” You can substitute anything here–with the thought “tree,” I create “tree” and “not–tree”; the mechanism is the same. Before you name anything, the world has no things in it, no meaning. There’s nothing but peace in the wordless, questionless world. It’s the space where everything is already answered, in joyful silence.

     In this world before words, there is only the real–undivided, ungraspable, already present. Any apparently separate thing can’t be real, since the mind has created it with its names. When we understand this, the unreal becomes beautiful, because there is nothing that can threaten the real.”

So, perhaps it should not concern me that I cannot claim to be a Master. It is interesting to me that Stephen Mitchell, Byron Katie’s husband, in the preface to this wonderful book, would be intent on naming a person of certain qualities, a “Master,” and Byron Katie would, within a few pages point out the fallacy of naming anything.

I really think part of my struggles, this week, can be traced to my efforts at naming things which are inherently unnamable. I have struggled with every piece I have tried to create. Some weeks are like that. Next week I may pick up one of the writings and tweak it a little and find something worth sharing. On the other hand, I may discard one or all of them as unusable. Of course, there is the third option: I may file it away in a “needing work” file which is already bulging at the seams.

Here is what I know to be true: Everything happens, at least in my life, for a reason. Everything shows up as my teacher at exactly the moment I am open and willing enough to learn what the event has to teach me. I need to spend some time contemplating the importance I place on the validity of my thoughts. This is a theme which appeared in all of my writing efforts, this week. There is no accident that I chose to dive into Katie’s insightful book in the same week that I am struggling so in my writing. I will discover how these two are connected and extract what I need. It doesn’t always happen as quickly as I would like, but I am a Master at extracting what I need from my life’s lessons.

In the meantime I hope that you find something valuable in Stephen Mitchell’s and Byron Katie’s wisdom which I have shared today.

The single most important work we will ever do is to heal anything which keeps us from Loving as the Universe Loves. Life has shown me that we are absolutely Loved without any conditions, Loved beyond anything we can imagine we deserve. When we work to approach learning to Love that way, the process itself is very cathartic, very healing, even if we never actually reach that goal.

To that end, I would like to offer three tools for removing blockages to our demonstration of Love.

1) The first and most important tool to becoming the greatest expression of Love you are capable of becoming is forgiveness. We cannot be a full and complete expression of Love as long as there is any hurt we hold as “unforgivable.”

In Truth, there is no hurt so hideous that it is intrinsically unforgivable. There is only that which we refuse to forgive. When we discover the truth that we are not incapable of forgiving but merely unwilling to do so, we find ourselves poised for significant growth previously unimagined in our wounded state.

I used to teach at a Federal Correctional Institution as part of The Life Connections program. It was a curriculum based system which separated individuals by their professed faith traditions.

During my years of teaching here, I had the joy of listening to Azim Khamisa a man who lost his twenty year old son, a college student working part-time as pizza delivery boy, to a gang-banger’s initiation rite. Azim and the perpetrator’s grandfather had created The Forgiveness Project which travelled the world teaching young people and adults the importance of self-esteem and of forgiveness.

At one of Mr. Khamisa’s presentations an inmate asked a very profound question of Azim: “How do you know when you have forgiven someone?” to which Azim answered, “I know I have forgiven someone when they have safe passage through my mind.” In other words, when he could think of someone and find no resentment remained in his mind, he knew he had completely forgiven that person.

While the tools for forgiveness are many and varied, the bottom line is that we must reach a point where we are able to think of that person and allow them to pass through our minds without any resentment or pain still attached to their image. The methods for accomplishing this are individual in nature, but I have always found that some degree of forgetfulness comes in handy as well as taking personal responsibility for the event. While I may have not played any part in the original injury, I have been the one who has clung to the memory of the incident. In this, I have complete responsibility. Wayne Dyer used to say that what happened yesterday was as ancient as the Peloponnesian War. In other words, let the past own the past and let your awareness be in the present. Hanging on to anything, any memory of the past only creates pain that need not be a part of our current day consciousness. Let it go and set both yourself and the alleged injurer free.

While I know that sometimes acts, which have injured us, seem so heinous that we feel completely justified in refusing to forgive, nonetheless, clinging to the hurt just allows pain to continue where peace could reside instead. Let it go, whatever it is. Allow the chains which bind you under the guise of these memories to fall away. Enjoy the new lightness, which accompanies such a release, to be your experience. Forgive today, tomorrow, and each day, until no trace, indeed no memory, of the hurt remains.

Not only will this free you of the heartache your anger has perpetuated, but it heals the whole world in the process. Even if you believe you are unable to do this for yourself, I would urge you to attempt it for the sake of all humanity. No greater work will you ever pursue.

2) The second most important work you can begin today follows the same line of reasoning. We must learn to Love ourselves just as we are so that we have an abundance of Love which overflows from our hearts to pass on to the world.

I believe that we cannot fully love another until we can fully love ourselves. Loving myself always begins with forgiving all the parts of me that I find hard or impossible to love.

Paul Ferrini, in his excellent book, The Twelve Steps of Forgiveness writes:  “Every one of us has condemned ourselves. And every one of us has tried to work out of our self-hatred by projecting the responsibility for our problems upon others.

But it just doesn’t work. Self-hatred remains self-hatred, even when other people become involved. Attacking others or defending against their attack does not lessen our deep-seated judgment of ourselves. Deep down inside every single one of us is a wounded child who needs to heal.

The process of forgiveness offers this child the opportunity to heal. It is a life-long process that continues as long as we continue to judge ourselves and others.”

Ferrini is spot-on, in my humble opinion. As we forgive ourselves we find ourselves to be worthy of our love. This fills our heart to overflowing and we, in turn, find it easy to share this love with the world.

3) The third step we must master if we are to become full expressions of Love, is to stop judging. We learn to judge others from our earliest days of infancy, in part for our survival and in part because most of our parents were not examples of highly evolved humans.

We watch the news and we shake our heads wondering how people could be so screwed up, but we do not understand that everything we see is contained within us. There is only ONE power and ONE presence in the Universe and we dwell within that Oneness as IT. When we see actions, we judge as evil, we demonstrate a lack of understanding of the Truth. This Truth is that we see evil because we have evil within us. If it did not reside within us, we could not see it. When we judge some things as good and others as bad we are creating more and more separation, more increments of right and wrong, truth and untruth, when in fact all such judgment is illusion. Everything simply IS. Any other definition is judgment and judgment always leads to suffering.

When we learn to stop resisting what we see, start to tune in to the beauty which surrounds us, and learn to fully love “what is” we set ourselves and our world free of the pain that judgment creates. Everything we believe is “wrong” or “evil” only demonstrates areas where we need healing, areas where we are withholding Love. Such judgment never speaks to what is; it always only points to what resides within our own consciousness.

Judging is an habitual behavior. Consequently, it is not easy to stop. The best we can do is to begin to notice where we judge and instead immediately cancel that line of thinking and replace it with love. Loving what is instead of judging it as erroneous or bad can become the new habit. In replacing the separation-creating-judgment with a loving-inclusive-choice we begin opening to the possibility of becoming more loving individuals.

All three steps which I suggest as necessary to learning to Love as Love Itself loves are so intertwined it is virtually impossible to pull them apart for separate analysis.

To become the greatest expression of Love I am capable of becoming I must learn to love and forgive myself completely. In so doing I have the possibility of loving and forgiving everyone else. When I am successful in accomplishing these, lifelong pursuits, perhaps I can learn to stop judging others so that I find I have nothing new to forgive.

Once I become a clean and open vessel of the LOVE which is the Universe Expressing as Me, I can transcend the pain and drama that the unexamined life has always offered. These three steps create a life that is unimagined by most of humanity yet remains possible to each and every one of us.

Having glimpsed moments of pure, unadulterated Loving Openness I promise you that the work spent becoming such a vessel of Love pays greater rewards than can be dreamed. It must be experienced to be believed.

*Note: I first published, pieces of this article, in 2006 on my Love Expressing Blog which no longer exists. I reworked it and published it on WikiNut recently, and tweaked it, just a little, to post here. Hopefully, I have improved it enough that it sounds like a brand new writing.