I have asked myself many times why I still care for the church when I have by my own definition become divorced from many of its dogmas, doctrines and beliefs. Now an octogenarian, I look back on my life and often ask myself if I could have lived it differently. People are envious. I lived a more than interesting and fulfilling life that took me all over the world. I have met the most amazing people and lived well. I had three totally separate careers, each of which I turned into a success. I was the estate manager of a castle in Co. Tipperary, Ireland. I travelled the world as a cruise director on some of the world’s most glamorous ships, including ten years on Cunard’s flagship, Queen Elizabeth 2. I was the horticultural interpreter and a garden designer for the 114-acre Springfield Botanical Garden in Missouri, USA, and I became the author of twelve published books. If I had become ordained as I had intended, I would have had none of those experiences.
I read theology at Cambridge. I became a rebel theologian. At a recent Cambridge dinner I met up with some of my contemporaries. One gentleman hearing of my life’s adventures, looked at me and said: “You know, when we were up at Cambridge a lot of us thought you would either end up the Archbishop of Canterbury or in prison.” It’s a fine line!
When I was a member of the General Synod of the Church of Ireland I had to be removed from the rostrum when I gave a contentious speech attacking many of ‘The Thirty-nine Articles of the Anglican Church’ as an out-of-date sixteenth-century document. About the same time, at a diocesan clergy meeting I was a guest speaker in the Diocese of Cashel and Emly, Waterford and Lismore and the Irish presswrote up my contribution with the heading, ‘Strong Stuff after Lunch’. Who did I think I was—Martin Luther? So, what took me on this ecclesiastical path of self-destruction?
I was not brought up in a particularly religious family. We rarely went to church, and for me, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, Sunday mornings meant eggs and bacon for breakfast! But out of the blue in 1953 I had a waking dream or vision that determined the course of my whole life. I was at a prestigious private boarding school on the Sussex coast where at 4:00 p.m. every day we had to line up in our ‘houses’ for roll call and to consume that third-of-a-pint of government-issue milk that was supposed to build us up after the strict rationing of World War II. Our big schoolroom looked out at Seaford Head—one of the chalk Sussex downs like its neighbouring ‘Seven Sisters’ that ended with white cliffs facing the English Channel. As I toyed with my rather unhygienic paper straw sucking up slightly soured milk, I looked out of the window and saw a great wooden cross rise up from the gorse and grass of Seaford Head. It was rough-hewn and there was no figure of the Christ on the cross. When the cross was upright, a voice boomed from it, metaphorically pointing at me like that famous cartoon of Lord Kitchener in World War I recruiting advertisements, saying not in a loud voice “Your country needs you!” but “God needs you!” It was apparent that nobody around me could see or hear this, but visually and audibly it was totally real for me and the vision has stayed with me throughout my life.
In my pre-teen and teenager years I interpreted this vision as my vocation to become ordained as a priest in the Church of England and set my sights on winning a place at Cambridge University to read theology. I achieved this goal in May 1962, but the following August when I presented myself at a Church Advisory Council for the Ministry conference, I was turned down as an unsuitable candidate for ordination. This was not for any moral or academic reason, but because, to quote the letter that I received, ‘the examiners felt that I came from too privileged and sheltered a background and that I should work in industry for a while before applying again.’ Ironically, this did not upset me as much as I would have expected. I had already won that place at Cambridge to read theology, and I took myself off on a GAP year as a private tutor in the family of a wealthy American artist where we spent the next nine months in Ireland. Fine art had been one of my A-levels, along with history and English literature, for my entry into Cambridge and had in part got me this job.
I still believed in my vocation, but when I arrived at Cambridge and met fellow theologians who were reading theology and had been accepted by the Church Advisory Council for the Ministry, I sensed somehow that I was different. Most of them were on pass-degree courses, whereas I had been accepted to read the Theological Tripos for a masters degree, but there was no guarantee for me, compared with them, that this would lead to my ordination. I was reading theology as an academic qualification rather than as a path to the priesthood.
At that time, in the early 1960s Cambridge was probably the most avant garde theological centre in the world, spawning the likes of Bishop John Robinson with his startling little treatise Honest to God and theology was exploring new horizons. The main premise of Honest to God was that Robinson saw God no longer as a supreme God in human form somewhere up there in a heavenly dimension overseeing his creation down here on Earth. God was not ‘up there’ separate from his creation, but ‘down here’ within his creation. Of course, such ideas were a natural progression in a post-Darwin world that had within forty years gone through the horror of two world wars, but the church had never really answered Darwin. If mankind was not ‘created in God’s image’ but evolved, why should God be that ‘old man in the sky’ or his son be given to us as human beings for our salvation, when mankind is simply an evolving part of an eternal universe and after two world wars could increasingly be seen as a species quite likely to destroy itself. I was, after all, brought up in the shadow of the Atomic bomb and nuclear proliferation. It was an exciting time to explore theology. I became a rebel, questioning in my mind nearly two thousand years of Christian doctrine and dogma.
In this frame of mind, at Cambridge I had another life-changing experience. In my first year, I was set an essay topic by my New Testament supervisor, the Reverend Geoffrey Styler on ‘Christology’ or the titles given to Jesus in the evolution of the early church from Son of God to Son of Man, and Messiah to Rabbi. I wrote a pretty good essay, or so I thought. I wrote what I was reading and being taught, even though in my heart I questioned much of it. I wanted to please my supervisor and to be seen worthy of ordination. Geoffrey Styler, however, wrote at the end of my essay in red ink: ‘This is not radical enough’. He gave me the green light – it was all right to question, in fact it was to be encouraged. This was the exciting world of theology in the 1960s. No stone was to be unturned.
In 1965, I took a long vacation as a kibbutznik in Israel experiencing orthodox Zionism, but also immersed myself in the Holy Land’s Christian origins. That same year, I also attended a course in Social work at Cambridge House in Camberwell, which moved me from my privileged background into a real desire to help the down-trodden. Should I ever become ordained, I seriously considered life as a prison chaplain.
After graduating from Cambridge in 1966, I returned to Ireland where I became the estate manager of Tullamaine Castle, the estate that my GAP-year family now owned. I then applied to the Church of Ireland for ordination and was accepted by their CACTM at a conference in Dublin. I was immediately licensed as a lay-reader and preacher by the Bishop of Cashel and Emly, Waterford and Lismore and became an active member of the church, leading in 1970 to my being asked to be one of the three group leaders for the Centenary conference in Belfast commemorating the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland in 1870. I was trained in the use of radio and television for the church, and was a contributor to the church’s periodical New Divinity and a member of the General Synod of the Church of Ireland. Despite my rather liberal theological views, I was respected and given much freedom, so much so that despite my humiliating experience at the General Synod, my bishop nominated me to take care of Cashel Cathedral throughout an inter-regnum period before the appointment of a new dean, although I was still not ordained.
I was the estate manager of Tullamaine Castle from 1967-1977. These were also the years of the ‘Troubles’ in Ireland and my naïve understanding of Irish social mores between Catholics and Protestants led to my making, through blessed ignorance, considerable inroads into ecumenism in the rural life of Co. Tipperary, particularly while I was ‘acting dean’ of Cashel Cathedral.
In 1977 when my employers sold Tullamaine Castle, partly because of the ‘Troubles’, I went to the United States where I had regularly been visiting with them for eleven years and I had an indefinite tourist visa. A few years later, on a visit to Ireland I was flattered when one of my old parishioners said to me, “Mr Longley, we will always remember you for your extraordinary sermons.”
In the United States I continued to pursue the possibility of ordination. I was accepted by the Bishop of Georgia and made a postulant for Holy Orders, but this time I was beaten by the difficulties that I encountered with US immigration. It would have become the Episcopal Church’s responsibility to argue my immigration case, but they were not willing to take that on. After three years my bishop withdrew my postulancy saying, “Come back to us when you have solved your immigration problems.” It took fourteen years to solve. Eventually, in 1991, I was extremely lucky to win my immigration status by obtaining my ‘Green Card’ in President Reagan’s lottery!
Meanwhile, I had on the advice of the social directress at the resort in Georgia where I was living, embarked on that second career as a cruise director. She had pointed out to me that she didn’t think that I would have a problem working on ships as there were no American cruise ships, all ocean-going cruise lines sailing under foreign flag registration. Thus, as long as I worked at sea and on my tourist visa I did not stay in the United States for more than six months at a time, the problem was temporarily solved. If I had to stay in the USA for more than six months there would have been something seriously wrong with my job at sea.
The experience of travelling the whole world during those years only broadened my theological outlook. I encountered the tenets of Buddhism, the Hindu faith, Jainism, the world of Confucius in China and the Shinto thought processes of Japan. In the Americas, I encountered meso-American and native American beliefs.
As cruise director, I was also responsible for the religious life of the ship which appealed to my universal and ecumenical and inter-faith outlook. When we carried chaplains on the World Cruises, I also gained extensive inter-faith knowledge as the chaplains were employed in my department.
Those years, however, were also years of great theological change as science and religion merged in their search for new horizons in our joint understanding of who we might be in new definitions of divinity. First Darwin, then Einstein and in the post-war world the development of atomic studies and quantum physics, popularised by such academics as Stephen Hawking and Carl Sagan, took us into new realms of discovery about our place in the universe. Carl Sagan’s book The Dragons of Eden about the development of our stream of consciousness from the reptilian brain to our human brain left an enormous impression on me. In 1986 Carl Sagan was on board the Royal Viking Star as one of my lecturers — on board lecturers came under the direction of the cruise director. Sagan was with us to comment on our sightings of Halley’s Comet then visible from the South Pacific Ocean. Sadly, I was disappointed when I actually met the great man. I found him very arrogant despite his fascinating contribution to modern thought on our universe. At this time, there were also a plethora of New Age alternatives bombarding us, often without the backing of true science. It was a challenging and exciting time for the theologian.
Archaeology also played its part from the Dead Sea Scrolls in the late 1940s to the full discovery of the Nag Hammadi texts of Egypt in the early 1950s all giving us challenges to the post-Constantine formatting of Christianity in the third and fourth centuries.
By the 1980s, the work on the Nag Hammadi texts had become popularised into English translations. Many of these second-century texts were gospels that pre-Constantine had circulated in various factions of the early church, but had been deemed heretical and uncanonical at the Councils of the third century. They included the gospels of ‘Thomas,’ ‘Philip’ and a ‘Gospel of Mary Magdalene’ all of a gnostic theological bent that was carried in the Coptic church. There were also the ‘Infancy’ manuscripts that fleshed out the basic infancy descriptions found in the canonical gospels of ‘St Matthew’ and ‘St Luke’. As it was highly probable that Jesus spent the earliest part of his life in Egypt it is not surprising that these documents were part of a Coptic collection. Along with them, we have The Secret Book of James, possibly the half-brother of Jesus – a text that provides a Gnostic perspective on the teachings of James the Just – and The Apocalypse of Peter, a text that describes visions and prophecies attributed to the apostle Peter. These texts offer insights into early Christian history and Gnosticism, including perspectives on creation, cosmology, and the nature of salvation. The library also includes texts like the ‘Reality of the Rulers,’ ‘On the Origin of the World,’ and ‘The Sophia of Jesus Christ,’ which delve into various Gnostic cosmologies and theological concepts.
The Nag Hammadi texts offer a different perspective on early Christian teachings than the canonical Gospels, exploring themes of dualism, gnosis or spiritual knowledge, and the nature of the divine. The Nag Hammadi Library is an invaluable resource for religious scholars, providing primary source material for understanding the history and theology of the first three centuries of early Christianity. The discovery of these texts has shed light on the diversity and development of early Christian thought, particularly the emergence of Gnostic movements.
By the late 1980s, my career as a cruise director was really going well and led in 1988 to my being headhunted from Royal Viking Line to become the cruise director of the most prestigious passenger ship then afloat – Cunard’s flagship Queen Elizabeth 2. Still at this point not having my Green Card immigration status in the United States, I began to think that ordination was not what God had called me to all those years ago. I was not yet quite sure how to work out my vocation, but I began to write.
Naturally, because the Nag Hammadi texts challenged long-held doctrines and dogmas of the post-Constantine church, New Age amateurs and populist writers devoured the English translations. Mary Magdalene became a hot topic. I myself became drawn to this along with Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice when they created their musical Jesus Christ Superstar, and in 1986 I started to write a massive fictitious novel myself on the plausible relationship of Mary Magdalene and Jesus. I titled it ‘Joshua and Maria,’ using Jesus’ Aramaic name. It was almost published in 1991 by Simon and Schuster, who only did not take it on because they had just signed up Father Joseph Girzone for his series of ‘Joshua’ books – modern parables of the life of Jesus with his family in a twentieth-century re-incarnation. I then expanded ‘Joshua and Maria’ into a trilogy, where the central characters were Mary Magdalene and a fictitious Roman named Linus Flavian. I saw this Flavian Trilogy now as an alternative acknowledgement of my vocational vision as it seemed more and more obvious that it was no longer in the plan for me to become ordained as a Christian priest.
Re-incarnation and the progression of souls was something that I, too, started taking more seriously when I met my future wife, Bettine Clemen. She was heavily involved in a re-incarnational New Age faith called Eckankar. We were actually married in Eckankar in 1993, although I remained nominally a Christian. At that time the Eckist’s were crazy about a novel written by the almost recluse, Florence Calhoun. It was titled, I Remember Union and was a re-incarnational recollection of the relationship of Jesus and Mary Magdalene. It was with great surprise that when I read this novel I discovered that Florence Calhoun had also created a significant Roman character named Linus, who was present at the cross at the time of Jesus’ crucifixion and later became the first leader of the Christians in Rome. In this New Age period in my life I found this to be an extraordinary coincidence. But at the same time another New Age novel had also become a best seller – The Celestine Prophecy.
The Celestine Prophecy: An Adventure is a 1993 novel by James Redfield that discusses various psychological and spiritual ideas rooted in multiple ancient Eastern traditions and New Age spirituality. The main character undertakes a journey to find and understand a series of nine spiritual insights in an ancient manuscript in Peru. The book is a first-person narrative of the narrator’s spiritual awakening as he goes through a transitional period of his life. One of its premises is that there are no coincidences, everything being revealed through a re-incarnational flow.
Little by little, and partly through the absurdities of some of the Whole Life Conferences that we attended, Bettine and I drifted away from Eckankar. For my part, I saw myself as a serious theologian and was not beholden to New Age conclusions. But I was still drawn to the theological content of the Nag Hammadi texts as a challenge to flagging Christianity.
The texts were being studied along with the canonical scriptures by a worldwide group of scholars, serious theologians that called themselves ‘The Jesus Seminar’ all scholars of the Historical Jesus Movement. Through my writing, I came in touch with the editor of their periodical ‘The Fourth R’ – New Zealander, Dr James Veitch, in 1996, Professor in Religious Studies at Victoria University in Wellington along with fellow New Zealander Lloyd Geering, who both helped me launch my first spiritual novel Two Thousand Years Later in New Zealand. After Simon and Schuster regrettably had to decline publishing ‘Joshua and Maria’, my New York literary agent had suggested that I try writing a shorter novel, perhaps set at sea on a cruise ship, and that he might try and get that published first, paving the way for the publication of The Flavian Trilogy later. The new novel was a love story set on a world cruise, but I linked it to the trilogy by incorporating a re-incarnational theme. All the characters on this journey around the world gradually become aware that they also knew each other in the First Century AD and were in fact the principal characters from my Flavian Trilogy. Being the cruise director of the most famous passenger ship in the world, I had a platform. After this book that I titled ‘Two Thousand Years Later’ was published I was interviewed about it on various TV and radio stations around the world. I was able to sell some 6,000 copies which was pretty good for a debut novel. Jim Veitch heard me interviewed in Wellington and got in touch with me, so I sent him a copy. He wrote me a review:
Your book is superb! I agree with almost all your first century scenarios – only with Judas Iscariot I disagree. I don’t think he ever existed, and have put out the case some years ago (before Bishop Spong!) It was one of the conclusions I reached when I translated the New Testament in contemporary English and put the writings in chronological order – I don’t think Barrabas existed either, etc.
I was now accepted in academic circles. When interviewed about ‘Two Thousand Years Later’ I now played down re-incarnation, saying that I used this re-incarnational theme as a means for having a twentieth-century theological discussion about first-century thoughts and events.
Ironically, when it came to getting The Flavian Trilogy published, I approached Bishop Spong – among many academic books also the author of Why Christianity must change or die, which I devoured, and asked him if he might review Two Thousand Years Later. Sadly he refused, saying he did not review novels.
As both Bishop Spong and Jim Veitch were members of the ‘Jesus Seminar’, I became an associate member myself and attended several of their conferences in America where I encountered such great names as Robert W. Funk, Marcus Borg, Karen Armstrong, Dominic Croissan, Don Cupitt, Elaine Pagels, David Galston and Brandon Scott.
The seminar was founded in 1985 when Robert W. Funk invited 30 worldwide New Testament scholars to join him in a new, collaborative inquiry about Jesus as a figure of history. The focus of the Jesus Seminar was on identifying evidence about what, in all probability, Jesus actually said and did without privileging any traditional religious claims about him. The invitation included a commitment to making the results of the inquiry available to the general public as a contribution to religious literacy.
Robert Funk believed scholars of religion have an ethical responsibility to report their findings to the public, openly and clearly. And he argued that there is a large lay constituency eager to join scholars in public conversation. The continued vibrancy of Westar has proven him right. Over the years, Westar has had a profound effect on the public awareness of scholarship in religion and has helped inaugurate a new kind of academic environment that is both collaborative and cumulative.
Since its founding, Westar has conducted a series of innovative seminars on the historical Jesus, the ‘Acts of the Apostles’, the apostle Paul, and other topics. Currently, Westar scholars are conducting seminars on the origins of the Christian tradition, God and the human future, and on the image of Christ as a liberating metaphor. Westar is not affiliated with any religious institution or denomination and does not advocate a particular theological point of view. It relies on collaborative scholarship that is open to the public, accessible, and rigorous. Its academic seminars engage leading scholars from accredited institutions worldwide. Seminars typically meet twice a year for spring and fall sessions. Westar scholars have travelled across North America and beyond to promote religious literacy.
I felt like I had found a home, both personally, and for my interpretation of that childhood vision.
Meanwhile, my wife Bettine had become involved in a spiritual path called Avatar. It was more of a self-help course to create the freedom to establish our own vision free of indoctrination. I struggled with the rules and regulations of Avatar and the rather Scientology-like methods they employed, but it did lead to a remarkable experience I had on an Avatar course in Colorado in 2000. Angry with the course, I took myself up a track to a glade strewn with boulders. We had spent many days just feeling into the energy of things, but I had had great difficulty accepting that there was any difference between things animate and inanimate, both simply being configurations of vibrating atoms and particles. On that mountain in Colorado I stood on one of the boulders and watched the vapour of the clouds in the sunlight noting that these clouds were actually only formed by light. Nothing really exists except through light. I stood on that boulder and shouted to the world, “I am free, I am me.” I had found my truth and I was ready to say “Shove it” to Avatar. On my return to the inn where we were based, I hastily wrote a poem.
In the joy of my freedom, I had observed that the clouds really had no form. They were expressions of impressionist light. One minute they caught the sun’s rays and had a billowing shape and the next they had vapourised into nothingness. They were only transparent gases given form by light. I then applied the same principles to the rocks and boulders whose shape was only determined by light; to trees in clumps, whose merging forms were again only created by light; to the very mountainside, which again was only defined by the contrast of light and shade. These were not new lessons for me as an artist. For just by squinting ones’ eyes in observation of the landscape one sees form in this way before transmitting the same to canvas. But now, I was philosophising on this exercise, wondering if form at all times is nothing but an illusion — our creation. Is this our power as co-creators with God?
That same afternoon Elleva Joy, my avatar master, suggested that I again prepare myself by identity feelings before going on to a more advanced part of the course. Excited by my morning discoveries, I decided to take the exercise one stage further and make the light itself the object of my intense observation.
There were two small fishponds close to the entrance into the Cottonwood Springs inn. The sun was reflected in one of the pools as a perfect pulsating orb. But, all of a sudden the orb was shattered as a fish broke the surface of the pond. It became divided into a host of dancing balls of light. Then a breeze scattered those balls of light on the surface of the water and the orb became unrecognisable in form. And yet this change of form was only visible to me. It was purely my interpretation and my joint creation with the wind and the fish.
Next, I observed the reflection of sunlight on the chrome frame of a car’s windscreen. The reflection would pulsate and change according to my stance, and yet at the same time it was invisible to others. Was it really there? Did these powerful rods of light have real form? But, they had energy. They had life.
The surface of the sulphurous pools next caught my attention. At first, they were flat surfaces of grey light, but when the wind stirred their water, creating ripples, they became ablaze with sparks of light—reflections of the reflected sun, but in their own way creating a new and different definition of the sulphurous pools.
In the same way, I applied this technique of light observation to boulders and rocks, confirming my discoveries of the morning. Their form is only defined by the light. Their crevices and shapes are determined by light’s intensity. Their solidity is only created by light’s illusion.
In all of these cases, however, each creation was unique. All creations are unique, purely in the eyes of the beholder, which leads us to the greater discovery learned from these lessons of light. We are the creators of our world. If God is the creator, then we are exercising our divine power in co-creating with the whole universe. We are all equal partners in the co-creation of our illusion, which is the universe, because in reality, if there is any reality, we are the universe. Everything, animate and inanimate is inter-connected in our universe—our creation.
Excitedly I tried to write down my discoveries in the form of a poem which I called ‘Lessons of Light.’
Reflections of the Sun on the Surface of Water
‘I am the reflection of the sun.
I don’t have form—
Some just call me “Water.”
A fish breaks my surface.
I am no longer the reflection of the sun,
I am a divided circle of dancing balls of light—
Shimmering light.
But, the breeze stirs my bed;
I expand before its force.
My shape is now undefined,
But my feeling is expanded.
So many balls of light—
Expanded balls of light.
I am not the sun.
Nor am I a reflection of the sun.
I am now the energy of the sun’s light.’
A Reflection of Sunlight on a car’s windscreen
‘I don’t exist except in your creation.
Your stance, your pose, has determined my form.
I am a reflection of light that only you can see.
You think I’m on the windscreen,
But, the windscreen doesn’t know I’m there!
I am a reflection of the sun’s brightness,
Boring my energy into your selected spot.
My centre has no form—just intensity.
It is only known to you.
Focus on me—
Feel my power.
Can you see my rays?
Rods of brilliance pulsating from my centre—
My radiating energy in union with the source.
You can see them;
You can feel their force;
But, they are not there.
They are only known to you.
You have become at-one with our secret.’
Hidden Reflections of Light formed by the Breeze
‘I am the grey light.
You think that I am water—
A pool of liquid.
You have constrained me in my edges—
Stones, grass, natural bounds;
These have made me into something that I am not.
I am the grey light—
The tone of the middle distance.
Darker tones form the foreground of your vision,
Lighter tones its backdrop.
I am the grey light in between.
Do I hear the wind?
I can respond to the wind.
It races across my surface of light,
Rippling your vision of water.
It reveals my power—
A thousand sparks of freedom—
A burst of eternal energy—
A split second of the source,
Vanishing as fast as it came
But, changing you forever.’
Definition by Light
‘You call me a “Rock”,
But, I don’t know such a name.
I am light.
My form is defined by light,
I am at-one with the light.
Light gives me my flow;
Light gives me my texture;
Light creates my shadows.
Light gives me the form that you perceive.
Feel my flow—
When I plunge you into darkness,
I destroy this perception,
But, my darkness is necessary.
Then, you still call me a rock.
This is your label;
But, I am only vibration.
Feel me in the darkness—
Feel the constraints of my density—
Sense my radiation,
The heat of my vibration—
The life-force of my existence.
But, my density is not your perception;
Not until my form is revealed;
Not until my light-being is restored—
Then I am complete.
My density is now defined by my light—
Now, I am whole.
Call me a rock if you like,
But, I am your co-creation.
You have experienced the oneness of the source.’
The Lesson of a Dull Day
‘Where is your shadow?
What has become of your shape?
Rock, tree, pillar and post,
What are you now?
There is no sunlight to define your form,
Only defused light
Beamed down from the greyness above.
Soft shadows fail to clearly define
Those forms I thought I knew.
We are changed.
New forms have emerged in the grey tones
Of this reflected light.
That tree is no longer there.
We have become one with our surroundings—
A sweep of grey-green shows the form of a copse,
We have become a clump of trees—
Or a dark area of foreboding woods.
The rocks have also joined with their companions—
There is only one form now—
A group of rocks, a cliff, a mountainside.
It is the grey light—
Without defined shadows
It has recreated our universe.
It has shown us that our perception is not static,
But, a constant creation.’
Guided by Light
‘So, as light I have become your guide;
I have shown you your form—
Your vibration is cushioned within
The limits of my light.
My light creates your density—
Feel its flow.
It holds your life force
And contains the atoms of your existence.
Without me you would not know yourself,
But, together we have become a creation.
Through your perception
You can create all things.
Allow me to be your guide.
Together we are the source;
And all that we create
Is united with our source.
You have felt the invisible power
That has made what you call the “Universe,”
Don’t call it the “Universe.”
We are the “Universe”.’
I have thought long and deep of my experiences in Colorado. By unorthodox means, I completed the course and was given the status of ‘Avatar.’ But this has not given me a sense of belonging. ‘Avatar’ is a state, not an institution. I am no different for being an ‘Avatar’ other than it has helped me to find my light. I have always known that the light was there, but I still had to find that blend between my sceptical scientific mind and my internal spirituality. I see the Colorado experience as only one on the long path that took me from my initial vision of that empty cross to my understanding.
My sceptical scientific mind was still with me, but now more of a creating tool in establishing my spirituality.
By far the biggest challenge, however, remained in the nature of God. That ‘Honest to God’ debate still needed to be answered. Seeing God through a microscope looking inward rather than that telescope looking up and outward brings dramatic changes into our earthly interpretation of life. God is now seen as the life force of the universe rather than as the creator of mankind in his image. This life force is seen in the parallel of atomic science where the smaller the particles of our being become the more universal and powerful that energy becomes – nuclear physics. If we see God as the energy of the universe then God is indeed the source of all that is, but this source does not have human traits, it is the vibration of the universe – the first cause of the beginning and the end beyond the restrictive dimension of historical time, eternity. Can you pray to such a God?
Now this does not mean that we should not pray, but rather it does mean that we can look deeply within ourselves when we pray, igniting that energy of the divine that lies deep within us. The language does not create a dialogue, but it does create, if we are willing, access to the divine energy within us that can bring us literally healing and peace, rearranging the particles of our existence. It is our emotional response to the words that is important, not the conversation. If this God is the universal energy of all that is, both animate and inanimate, what determines good and evil? For this same energy creates both experiences within our lives.
If there is no God up there handing us tablets of stone and testing us to obey his laws in order for us to obtain some form of eternity, then good and evil become man-made decisions in how to order the society in which we live. Indeed, aspects of good and evil have changed over the millennia according to how we have chosen to organise a successful society for our self-preservation.
Now, we rub up against infinity and the illusion of time. In a post-Einstein world infinity becomes all that is and nothing at the same time. And what is nothing, but ‘no thing’, an illusion created by our brain’s interpretation set in historical time. Divinity is the sum of all that is, but without the trappings of the dimensions through which our brains are trapped, everything and nothing become one and the same in eternity.
So, how in this universally divine creation can God determine judgement on our lives, either through a re-incarnational progress of souls, like most eastern spirituality, or through the ultimate sacrifice of a divine personage to bring us salvation in a Judaic-Christian and even Islamic messianic sense?
Almost every doctrine and dogma of our faith is now turned on its head. We are living in a new spiritual and philosophical realm.
Bettine and I had a wonderful Great Pyrenees mountain dog we named Orbit. He lived a long life and brought love to many people. After his passing, he wrote his autobiography, only he had a little difficulty with his paws on the keys, so he had a lot of help from me. I would like to share the epilogue at the end of the book Orbit: Life with My People that Orbit called, ‘Over the Rainbow Bridge.’
Peter’s eye became a myriad of tiny dots…ever smaller, ever more numerous, until it was an eye no more. All I could see was red…millions of red dots. Gradually, the red became orange, then yellow, and then green. I could see these colours far more clearly than I ever had before. The green became blue, then indigo, and finally, violet. It pulsed, and it lightened to pure white.
Humans speak of us dogs “crossing the Rainbow Bridge.” Perhaps we do. But they want to relate this Rainbow Bridge to something they always call, ‘Heaven’. Call it heaven if you like, but it is not a place. I know now. It is all that is.
Oh, I know the human interpretation:
“Just this side of heaven is a place called Rainbow Bridge.
“When an animal dies that has been especially close to someone here, that pet goes to Rainbow Bridge. There are meadows and hills for all of our special friends so they can run and play together. There is plenty of food, water and sunshine, and our friends are warm and comfortable.
“All the animals, who have been ill and old, are restored to health and vigour. Those who were hurt or maimed are made whole and strong again, just as we remember them in our dreams of days and times gone by. The animals are happy and content, except for one small thing; they each miss someone very special to them, who had to be left behind.
“They all run and play together, but the day comes when one of them suddenly stops and looks into the distance. That dog’s bright eyes are intent. The dog’s eager body quivers. Suddenly, he or she begins to run from the group, flying over the green grass, those doggie legs moving faster and faster.
“You have been spotted, and when you and your special friend finally meet, you cling together in joyous reunion, never to be parted again. The happy kisses rain upon your face; your hands again caress the beloved head, and you look once more into the trusting eyes of your pet, so long gone from your life but never absent from your heart.
“Then, you cross the Rainbow Bridge together.”
But when we see the colours of the rainbow eventually pulse into that light that is eternal, we know that heaven is so much more than a place. It is everything that has ever been and ever will be. Once you have crossed the Rainbow Bridge, you know these things on every plane of being.
I am aware of every dog that Johnny, Joanne, Peter, Bettine, Nanette, Marie (all people in Orbit’s life) and their families have ever known, and they are all a part of me, for now I am aware of all dogs that will be part of their continuing lives, too, and their future families’ lives. Yes, I am in Woolly and Woolly is in me. I know this now. But I know it without having to reason. It just is. I’m aware of my presence in Penny and Angel. I know you love them, Bettine—two beautiful retrievers. They share time with you in the meadows and mountains of a faraway land. Their love for you, now that I am no longer experiencing life with you, is the same as my love—it is eternal. What’s more, it’s not just about dogs. I am aware that everything is connected and that everything lives. I sense only the light, and that must be God. This God is in everything that we encountered on our earthly journey, but now there is no division as to who and what we are. The dog, the human, the cat, the horse, Princess Pony or the Piano Princess—the rocks, the grass, the trees, the river, the clouds—they’re all the same. They are pulsating dots of ethereal light, and it is as if they all sing one song in a sound that I can only know, but not hear—the sound of eternal beingness.
I’m aware that there is a marble bench that tells those still living in the illusion of the world that I once lived on Earth. I am aware that it stands in the Springfield Botanical Gardens opposite Peter’s English Garden. I am aware that Peter and Bettine buried the dust of my earthly life beside that bench, and scattered some in the garden. I know that Peter still talks to me there. I see you, Peter, every time that you are working in the garden, and I have seen you there, Bettine. I have seen Marie come there. Many strangers have also sat there, inspired by the beauty of the garden—strangers whom I never knew, but I know them now. They have read the inscription you had so lovingly inscribed there…‘Orbit-In gratitude-Beloved Forever-Bettine-Peter-Marie’…and I am in gratitude that you were, my people. Am I there? Of course I am or I would not be aware of all this, but I am equally aware of gaseous swirls that form what you humans call your universe. I am aware that the planet, on which we lived together, is a tiny speck on the outer rim of one of these great gaseous swirls. But, I am also aware that it is not there. I am aware that all those angels in the sky that I once believed to be above Alpha Meadows, what you call stars, were never there, and yet I know they’re all there, with many, many more. In the pulsing whiteness, everything is there, and yet nothing is there—nothing that we perceived when we lived the pattern that you call, life. As you wrote, Bettine, in that letter: It’s all love. All else is illusion.
There is no good, no bad, no rich, no poor, no ugly, no beautiful—only the love of all that is. You strive for it and call it God, but when you, too, cross the Rainbow Bridge, you will be aware of it in the pulsations of white light—you will be one with God, knowing every detail of your universe, past, present, and future. Every small particle of beingness that ever was, or ever will be, is one. I am in you, and you are in me. Over the rainbow there is no separation. Separation is the great illusion.
Once we know that we are the divine vibration of the universe at one with all that is we no longer need gurus and enlightened beings to guide us along endless paths of beliefs on a road to enlightenment or redemption. It is time to jump off that carousel and just be in the peace of eternity.
So why do I still go to church?
For all our curious flights of discovery in this new interpretation of our existence now thrust upon us in this scientific world of particles and atoms, some things still remain a mystery. If one day these mysteries become unlocked through the continued evolution of our brains, other greater mysteries will be revealed.
The many forms of worship of the unknown that have developed in historical time, have brought with them rituals. We give to these rituals our seemingly logical interpretation. Humans follow our inspired scriptures, whether in the Torah, the Bible, the Quran, the tenets of Buddhism or the laws of Confuscius. We burn incense, light candles, dress up in robes, and witness some of the most beautiful music ever written. We offer food to our gods because we know that if we do not eat we do not live, and as Christians we feed ourselves with sacred food that we believe is the presence of the Christos. All of these things create an emotional response within us whether we believe the stories in which they are encased or not. They bring us love, hope and light, and so too, does the beauty of nature, the majesty of the night sky or the physical love of one being for another regardless of our race, creed, gender or species. For a fleeting moment they take us from our historical time into eternity. As the poet John Keats so aptly said in his poem ‘Endymion’… ‘A thing of beauty is a joy forever.’ It suggests that beauty, in all its forms, provides enduring joy and consolation, and its loveliness persists, even if the object itself fades or changes. Emotion without judgement is a portal into the mystery of oneness with all that is. We become everything and nothing at the same time…the vibration of the universe. We experience the eternal God that I believe we really are.
PETER LONGLEY
Author of ‘Star of Destiny’ and ‘Fishers of Men’ the recently published first two books of ‘The Flavian Trilogy’. The third book, ‘Along the Eagle’s Way’ will be published later this year.
The first two novels in a thought-provoking trilogy looking at the life, love and passion of Jesus Christ set against the tempestuous world of first-century imperial Rome. An Easter message that resonates with the philosophical divinity of our present time.