Tao Of Now

- Strephon Says 38 God In The Now

God defined realistically in terms of our now experiences. Relating to the God of Now, the Tao of Now, is conscious practice for all the moments of life, positive or negative.

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This is Strephon Kaplan-Williams speaking about God. Actually, you cannot speak about God. You can only speak about yourself, and you are a human being.

When we apply the way of clarity and good thinking to living now in the immediate experience of our lives we come out with the conclusion that only God can speak about God and only human can speak about human.

Thus, we have to say that what you, or I, think we are saying about God, we are using human brain power and tongue and breath power to say.

Now I ask you, are these things God, or are these things animal parts and functions called a human being?

Is all this fancy dress that any of the religions wear a product of humanity or does God have a sewing shop somewhere?

So let’s talk facts and reality. While our talk about God may be about some reality beyond us it is human talk and human experience.

Laugh heartily at some guy writing about his thoughts and calling these Conversations About God. My Gott, what is he doing? Trying to make lots of money with a gullible, unconscious public. Well, he has done it! He is God to a lot of people.

I had a good friend once, which means we communicated easily and deeply about real issues of life. She was married to a boring man. At age 56 she got cancer of the face and had operations, then died. Her husband read to her passages from a book called, Conversations With God, I don’t care to remember the author.

I was horrified that when it was time for my bright and compassionate woman friend to die her only felt recourse was to go to a book full of platitudes and general concepts from others and re-make them into passages claimed to be God talking directly to this mortal creature. Ah, what a man! Ah, what a failure to have as the only recourse a book of platitudes.

What was she to do in her dying? She was in a rage, so much so that while I had a couple of amazing hours with her earlier in her affliction her last months on earth she refused to see me. Probably her face was half eaten up by then. She had been such a beautiful and loving woman.

What went wrong?

You don’t find God in a book about God, or coming from God.

You don’t buy time to live on from God. God does not kill you or let you live on, or does He?

Who am I to speak for God?

I am merely human and doomed likewise to die, while supposedly the real God lives on and on.

What good then is God? What good is your God concept?

Why not give up any belief in or need for God?

I think then, quite naturally, but what if there is a God and in denying there is a God am I not jeopardizing myself right into hell?

Am I giving up then any help from the other side should some problem overwhelm me?

Hey wait, I thought we already established that God did not help my friend live on healthy and living?

She died, my listeners. She died!

Yet, she tried to understand what was happening to her and to understand God. I assume such, but was not allowed heart-felt conversation with her. She had a number of children and two fourteen year old girl twins who were naturally enormously upset to lose their mom.

There mom was most upset of all.

When we had our conversations lying down on the bed in a darkened room she was most upset at what was happening to her. Why? What had she done wrong? And then she said how terrible the suffering had been of that first operation taking the tumors out of her mouth.

I don’t know about these things really. I can’t say what causes what. The practice in the now is not to analyze causes of events already happening but to analyze situations happening now so that we can best relate to them with the present measure of choices we do have.

God in the moment? No idle talk this. She had to have answers and there were no answers. She was due to die.

God the savior was not present.

God the source of meaning was not present, not certainly in the superficial books that was being read to her by a husband who had no loving wisdom of his own.

God as healer was not present. She died rather horribly having her mouth, jaw and face cut up.

She died.

God was death!

Yes, just as God had been life, God now was her dying into death, and there was no one there to guide her in this. I had to go home soon to another country where I currently lived.

God is reality.

This appears to be the real truth.

What do you do when you are dying?

What do you do when you are living?

What do you do when in pain?

What do you do when in pleasure?

The ego’s way is ineffective and inadequate. Yes, for all of us listening to these words and taking them in, the ego’s way is ineffective and inadequate.

Then admit it, why don’t we, that we are ill equipped to understand or have a God.

Don’t wait to your pain and dying phase to take up the question of the God issue.

You must find God everywhere or he is nowhere.

God is the nothing wanting to become something. This from a mystic, Jacob Boomed

It’s not profound but maybe very real.

For God to exist he must exist in you. Angelus Siliceous another mystic wrote this.

The Tao of Now is the point of meaning in what is happening now. When you are caught in your experiences, when you are your experiences, what do you do with that. Is it not, as I have said and implied many times, that you are not your experiences? You are in your experiences but you are not your experiences.

What can this possibly mean? Yes! What?

If you, if I, can give up the childish concepts of God as a Great Parent in the sky, someone who will save you when you are desperate for help, someone who answers your prayers, then we might get somewhere real, all right?

What I would have liked to have conveyed, ney, even forced on my cancerous friend, is that she needed to face and live her cancer fully. This means, if you are meant to die now, die now, die now, don’t try to put it off.

God is not your savior who will get you alive and healthy again.

You have made the choices in your life that you have made. You have done creative and destructive things. The sum total of all your choices has brought you to this place of cancerous dying, so accept this, my friend, accept this. Don’t any long fight it.

Don’t pretend there is a God! Don’t pretend there is an Almighty. Accept your fate. You and I are almost nothing anyway, not really existing that long on earth anyway.

Against the measurement of time we are as nothing.

Agreed?

What I am trying to say is this. I don’t speak for your kind of God concept. If someone wants to hoodwink the people into believing that he really had God speaking to him and not just another part of himself, who am I to say No and stop him. He will get the consequences of his own actions, and maybe they will be beneficial to him and others. This is not for me to rail over.

My concern is my own immediate existence and how I deal with all my
direct experiences. I am not into speculations of transcendence and greatness, futile insinuations of a darkness mind.

I am into living life and dying with clarity and compassionate response.

Therefore if I had been clear enough and allowed I would have said to my friend, who before had been pretty clear about life, where is God in your dying, where is the meaning in your dying?

I would have demanded that she face and experience her cancer as a defining moment for her.

Where was God, the Source in the moment for her?

In the moment of existence for herself, not in some salesman book to make money with.

The only truth based on experience is that she would have to find God in her own moments of existence, whatever they were.

To be sure, she did not like the suffering and pain of having her face eaten by such a wild creature as cancer was to her, or the surgeons cutting into her body and thus also her soul.

Such things are painful, and if you are identified with your ego who does not like pain, then you will not be able to cope that well.

To achieve a God relation, it seems to me that you have to have a focus on that which transcends your moment, however terrible your experience of certain life moments truly is for you.

You still need to focus on the ‘meaning of the moment.’

What is the ‘meaning of the moment?’

We simply define this as a Source experience. Even in the worst moments of life there can be an integrating factor, some shift possible that lets you transcend the moment and accept it as it is.

If you can do this then you can truly learn something of value about yourself and the experience you are having.

Perhaps this was what I was inadequately trying to convey to my cancerous friend?

Her mind was still on discovering what caused her cancer? What had she done wrong? She thought in going to a therapist that they agreed she had not expressed her feelings enough in her life, what she wanted. This is almost a therapeutic cliche in California of her time and mine there.

The truth is more like, why are you wasting time and energy on analyzing for causes? Why are you condemning yourself because your cancer is making you suffer so?

Why are you not using all your brain power and energy to place yourself fully in the experiences you are having now?

Well, that California therapist must have made some money off of her desperation?

Don’t knock the poor therapist, Strephon, a voice says to me. But I say back, I can’t stand incompetent therapists, and therapists who are not direct with their clients about what they are doing or not able to do as well, are, well, junk, and should get out of the field.

Incompetence in any field is destructive. Watch out, God. You will be accused by some that you are not all powerful and all right because you let this good woman die painfully. What were her sins, God, that she had to die early before her time?

It’s not like that, and don’t let anyone tell you it is. God is not your savior? God is not all good. God does not stop cancer or explain to you why the just as well as the unjust are treated equally with disaster in this existence.

Again, then, I suggest that the only realistic recourse is for you, for I, to practice and keep practicing all our lives finding the meaning, the center, the point of clarity, the teaching, in a whole and present experience we are now living.

Practice finding the meaning in the moment.

If there is a God, a point of central value and meaning happening now, maybe not such a bad definition for God, then find that Point of Meaning in each whole moment of your life.

Thus no matter what you go through, you will be in practice to find the meaning of the moment.

Yes, practice this as well in your sexual intercourse, often seen as a great pleasure. If you see sex as only an elaborate variety of evoking pleasures, then you might become creative but I don’t think you will be equipping yourself to living fully each whole moment as it comes.

Will your practice in pleasures also equip you for equal practice in moments of pain?

I doubt it because of the nature of the modern ego that seeks pleasure over pain.

My suggestion is you find a practice and a focus that includes experiencing pain as well as pleasure, health as well as illness.

My poor friend! She was so life and health and vitality oriented that she was totally unprepared for the advent of pain, loss, suffering, disfigurement, remorse, guilt, anger, despair, and damn well excruciating fear, even greater than her pain, as I saw it with her.

I couldn’t get through. I seldom can with a person. How many listening to this talk will, can, will take it in for what it is and reorient their own lives and attitudes.

My God! You have to see through your known self in this business of conscious living. You have to not be identified with anything to participate fully in all your experiences and not stay overwhelmed by any.

I could go on, and on, and on . . .

Where will it ever end, this business of consciousness?

I sincerely hope you appreciate what I present to you here, strong stuff as it is. Note well. Reality is even stronger than I can ever be.

Practice, practice now dealing with the God question, dealing with God is Reality.

That’s all I can suggest. I am nothing. I don’t know you. I can’t be at your bedside when you are living and when you are dying. I am only a bit of limited existence myself.

‘Go where the energy is and there create life!’
Strephon Kaplan-Williams

Email strephonsays@yahoo.com
greatdreams2000@gmail.com

Forum http://www.takeforum.com/strephonsays/

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