“Here is my servant, whom I uphold …

He will not fail or be discouraged

until he has brought Kindness to the earth …

I have taken him by the hand and guided him.”

~ Isaiah 42:1-6

I guess now would be as good a time as any to talk about the role “God” played in this Pilgrimage.

Let’s be clear about one thing right up front:  I have absolutely no idea what “God” is.  Frankly, I’m not even sure that “God” even exists (an uncertainty which is the source of all truly powerful acts of Faith, by the way – but more on that later) … This admission is complicated by the fact that every human being on the planet, regardless of his or her religious affiliation, has a truly unique understanding of this concept.  So when I say “God” in these writings, about the only thing that is certain is that I am not talking about the same entity or force that you associate with that word.

So, in order to make your reading more Meaning-full, I will attempt to explain at least a portion of my own understanding of “God”.

As a preface, I think I have met two “Gods”.  Or, more accurately stated, I have experienced the one Force I know as “God” in two forms – as an internal Guide, and as an external Flow or all-encompassing Presence (better terms to describe it elude me at the moment).  I found the former of these forms long before the Pilgrimage, and the latter primarily while on the Pilgrimage itself.

The story of my rediscovering God as Presence will come later, and yet the tale of rediscovering “God” as an internal Guide comes right now …

I have been looking for “the Divine” for a number of years, actually.  Being a skeptic by nature (I was a devout member of the atheist religion for over a decade), I couldn’t rightly tell anyone (especially not myself) that I was actually “looking for God”, but that is in effect what I was doing.

And the good news is – I found Him!*

But what exactly did I find?

For a number of years prior to this Pilgrimage I had been experimenting with the limits (or lack thereof) of human awareness – what some folks nowadays call “Interconnection”.  I was doing so scientifically, expounding upon some of the basic premises of Carl Jung’s work and testing them in my own life – using myself as my primary “guinea pig”, so to speak.

My hypothesis was centered on the premise that the human brain, while consciously aware of only one bit of information in any given moment (try it – it’s almost impossible to simultaneously focus on two different stimuli), is actually supra-consciously Aware of over 2000 other bits of information in the same moment.  For example, as I sit here in this room typing away, I am focused upon either the keyboard or my thoughts as I type these words.  And yet, while I am typing, I am also Aware on a much deeper level of my own heartbeat, my own emotional state of being, the temperature in the room, the sounds of a neighbor’s child playing next door, the emotional state of being of the cat for whom I am caring (he is actually caring more for me, but who’s keeping score?), the fit of the clothes on my body, whether or not I am hungry, the weather outside, the lyrics of the music to which I am listening, how many birds are flying about the backyard, the color of the walls here in this room, and on & on & on … In every second I am Aware of all of these things, even though I am only consciously aware of one of them.

What makes this exceptionally useful is that each of these bits of information has intrinsic meaning for each of us – a meaning that has been stored in our cellular memories since conception.  I call these meanings “archetypes”.  In essence, every entity, every color, every number, and every sound I perceive has meaning for me on a level far beyond what I have learned about them during my lifetime.  To make matters even more interesting, I discovered that I could download my own personalized definitions for certain archetypes into my supra-consciousness.  Essentially, I found that I could program my own archetypal data-base into my brain, and then “speak” with it at will thereafter.

I did so by researching the behavior patterns and intrinsic meanings of hundreds of commonly seen animals, birds, plants & trees.  I compiled all these meanings into an “archetypal dictionary”, also including the intrinsic meanings of numbers, colors, common sounds, minerals and the cardinal directions.  Then I simply went into the woods and began “talking to God” – posing a series of questions while paying close attention to where I first glanced after asking them.  And the compilation of the  meanings of the archetypes that I witnessed provided me invariably with extremely specific answers to my questions — so specific, in fact, that it quickly became an unnerving experience; as though I was actually communicating with an external source of information – as though I really was chatting with God.

Maybe I was and maybe I wasn’t.

Regardless, this phenomenon also harmonized perfectly with my understanding of the workings of the human brain.  Essentially, by attending to the archetypal contents of these “first glance” scenes, I was bypassing both the primitive “reptile brain” (that emotionally reacts to all perceived stimuli in order to keep us “safe”) and the neo-cortex (that logically analyzes the same data in order to make more “reasonable” decisions).  Instead, by refusing to form any personal opinion about the data at all, I could directly access the mass of Meaning-full information available to me in my supra-conscious Awareness. And when I then dissected the various archetypal meanings present in the scenes upon which I glanced (e.g. two chickadees flying southeast past a nuthatch on a pine tree), the “answers” I received were astoundingly specific.

I have been gathering information in this manner for over ten years now, and it has yet to lead me astray.  I don’t invest too much energy in figuring out whether I am accessing my own deeper Awareness or actually contacting the external entity many know as “God”.

I simply know that this is a tool that functions for me, so I use it.

And the first time I used it this Pilgrimage was, of course, on this very first day.

I had been thinking quite a bit that morning about whether I was to speak with any Christians about my experiences of literally walking The Way of Jesus Christ for the past five years of my life (which for me required not worshiping Jesus as God, but rather radically emulating his lifestyle of “radical Love” for all – especially extending Kindness to my “enemies”).  I wasn’t sure if it was a good idea to do so, and I was frankly a bit nervous about the prospects of sharing this information with Christian “believers” – thinking that it might be upsetting for many of them to learn that, while they were indeed “headed to Heaven” after their death (according to the teachings of Paul in the New Testament), most of them were not actively following The Way of non-judgmental Caring that Jesus wished for us to enliven before we die.

So I’m pondering this dilemma quite intensely as I’m walking down the road, and sincerely wondering what I should do about it, when I feel almost compelled to glance over to my left — where I see “Mark VI” painted in huge white letters on the side of a train locomotive.  Well, that was enough of a prompt for me, so I pulled out my Bible and opened it to the 6^th chapter of Mark, where I found – lo & behold – quite a few verses related to Jesus being amazed at the unbelief of those to whom he spoke, as well as a description of how his disciples were to go forth to spread his Good News of unconditional Love; a description that very closely described how I was outfitted for my own Pilgrimage that day.  And as if that wasn’t enough, I looked to my right immediately thereafter to see a dead possum on the side of the road — the first of several dead possums that I witnessed that morning.  The archetype of the opossum tells me to avoid interactions with others that might prove uncomfortable (i.e. “play dead”) – and yet these possums were all dead themselves!  This “message” seemed to clearly tell me that I was to have the courage to say the uncomfortable thing that was begging to be said — that I was indeed to share The Way of Jesus Christ with any Christians I encountered along the way.

Now please note that I am not making the case that God was directly speaking to me here – that the train engine and those possums somehow materialized near me at that point in time to “tell me” what I needed to hear.  That might be the case, of course, but I personally don’t go there.  What I am offering for your consideration is the very real possibility that I was supra-consciously Aware of the presence of both of those archetypal clues, and that my supra-consciousness then had me glance in their direction in order to provide me with an answer to my question that was in alignment with my Mission.

I’m not so sure about that one either, frankly, but I have lived a very good life following such “advice” for the past decade, and I am a big believer in not fixing what isn’t broken … As such, I decided at that point, if I came across a Christian church of any denomination with cars in its parking lot while on this Pilgrimage, that I would enter and share what little I could about Jesus’ Way of Love with those inside.

As it turns out, I wouldn’t have very long to wait to do so …

*The “God” I know doesn’t actually have a gender, but for the sake of convention, as well as the flow of the prose, I will stick with the commonly accepted masculine pronouns when describing Him.  Please avoid taking offense at this … If necessary for you to enjoy the story, simply insert “she” or “it” at your leisure.

Filed under: Peace Pilgrimage #01: Adventures of a Numinous Nomad (2011) by Scaughdt