The word “God” means “deity.” “Deity” comes from Proto-Germanic guda, from Proto-Indo-European gutos, which translates to “invoked one.”
My Early Experiences with Religion
I was a member of Rock Grove A.M.E. Zion Church growing up. My mother had my sister and me at church every Sunday.
It was the church that my mother’s side of the family grew up in and attended regularly. So most of the adults in the church were related to me, and I had opportunities to see them outside of the church setting.
Aunt Ro’s Observation
As a child, I looked up to all of my elders: my parents, grandparents, my sister, aunts, uncles, and older cousins. I looked up to and respected everyone until they gave me a reason not to.
Even then, I continued to see the offending parties in a positive light by default. I was a naive child and preferred calmness and peace over loud, “fun,” chaotic environments.
I had a great-great aunt, Roberta Barber, who babysat and raised multiple generations of children. When I was in my mid-twenties, she told me that she thought I was “slow” when I was a child.
She was a matriarch in my family but had no children of her own. Her words carried weight, and I knew her observations of me were honest and not meant to be hurtful.
I smiled, and we laughed when she told me this because she was always very loving towards me and all my cousins. I don’t ever remember her having to discipline me like she did everyone else.
Quiet observation was my way of socializing, just watching everyone else run around the yard like they couldn’t control themselves. It was like they were happy to be alive, and I didn’t even have an idea of what being alive was.
Lessons Through Observation
I learned how to be a kid by being around my cousins. We would watch 80’s and early 90’s movies and they would repeat funny lines from the movies. I didn’t even know which lines were funny enough or worthy of being repeated.
I really didn’t even know that I was “here.” It felt as though I wasn’t being taught anything substantial at that time. Everything I was learning was through observation.
If I did something I hadn’t observed someone else doing—and seen them being punished for—I didn’t know whether what I was doing was wrong. The result would be punishment without education.
Punishment without education taught me to be observant and resilient. I relied on my observations to educate myself and my resilience to help me bounce back from the many trials I would go through over the years.
Independent observation undervalues itself. I learned to watch the outcomes of other people’s decisions.
If there was no one to learn from beforehand, I made the best possible choice based on instinct and necessity. I figured if I was still alive after the smoke cleared, I could bounce back.
I watched my father bounce back from catastrophe time after time. If he had the strength to get back up, I knew I had it too.
My Relationship with the Church
My father didn’t go to church often when I was a young child. He worked a lot of overtime, and Sunday morning was better suited for resting or perhaps church just wasn’t his scene. It wasn’t mine either.
On the Sundays my father did go to church, I had to be on high alert. A good number of those Sundays resulted in me getting a whooping.
I never liked going to church and wanted to leave as quickly as I could. I didn’t know why I had to go, and I don’t feel like going to church regularly brought me any closer to God.
To me, church was just singing, which I didn’t like to do either, and performance in the form of preaching. People would start shouting, the music would pick up tempo, and I would either try to restrain my laughter or focus on the people shouting.
I couldn’t comprehend what was making them act that way. I remember asking my version of God not to have me act like that in front of people.
I’m thankful I’ve never lost control of myself in that manner. I’m not even sure it was the Holy Spirit causing those people to act that way—it seemed more like skilled musicians creating the perfect storm with the drums and piano.
Knowing God Beyond Church
I don’t doubt God was in the midst, but how would these people allow God to use them outside of this church environment? I’ve seen people engulfed in the Holy Spirit for three hours on Sunday, then permeated by ill will toward others for the remaining 165 hours of the week.
If you learn about God and righteousness from these types of people, it can be easy to start off life on the wrong foot regarding your relationship with God. This is why I’ve learned to value individual choice when it comes to religious views.
God is not one size fits all. I was taught that things like homosexuality and drug and alcohol abuse were wrong and sinful.
According to the Bible, jealousy, envy, and gluttony are also sins that will draw God’s wrath. I’m learning daily to open my mind and heart to understand people with traits society deems undesirable.
But I’m becoming more aware that these “undesirable traits” may also be characteristics of God on an individual level.
How could homosexuality, jealousy, envy, or gluttony exist if they didn’t originate from God?
This won’t be a popular opinion, but even pedophilia had to come into existence through God. NOTHING can exist or be a thing unless it comes from the source from which all things come.
Every thought a person has comes from a level of consciousness connected to their core programming.
We should not allow acts like pedophilia in society to go unpunished. Such punishment, too, originates from God.
I believe our souls come from a realm like The Great Before in Disney’s Soul. In this realm, souls may choose their race, sex, birthplace, and socioeconomic class.
They might also select life-shaping events like abuse, fame, or even criminal paths. Accepting these choices helps one live as their true self—a soul, not just the body housing it.
A Theory About Souls and Choices
A soul might choose to incarnate as a bisexual white female in an upper-class U.S. family.
This soul may also choose to experience childhood molestation, adult rape, and struggles with drug and alcohol abuse.
Let’s break this theory down and give you something to ponder:
The path that the soul chose before incarnation would also involve the earthly parents of this person.
Meaning the parents, as souls pre-incarnation, chose to parent a daughter destined to face molestation, rape, and substance abuse.
To understand why a person would choose such events, consider life’s purpose as spiritual evolution.
Evolution of any kind does not happen without the presentation of obstacles that must be recognized, assessed, and adjusted to. As a result, an organism either overcomes these obstacles or succumbs to them.
The obstacles were chosen to provide developmental resistance and opposition. The person’s soul chose to experience molestation.
Another soul chose to become the molester. The person’s soul knew this choice would be forgotten and shape future decisions.
The soul that chose to commit molestation knew that punishment and stigma would come with it—maybe even death.
If molestation led to death, a soul chose to experience molestation and murder. Specific circumstances must align for molestation to occur.
The woman’s parents, as souls, chose to have a child facing molestation. They unknowingly created conditions for their child’s molestation.
The molester’s soul also chose to commit the act. If killed, the molester’s soul remembers molestation as a choice once the soul returns home.
The Great Beginning
Returning to “The Great Beginning,” they recall all choices made. The soul remembers the thrill of committing molestation.
They experience guilt for harming another soul. The offender deeply feels the shame of being labeled a molester. Death and these emotions are part of the soul’s growth.
All these choices contribute to spiritual evolution.
These energies then become known to the soul and contribute to the goal of spiritual evolution. It’s not only events that the collective consciousness deems unpleasant that will contribute to spiritual evolution.
But for the sake of the many people that have encountered life-altering traumas, I felt that I should shed light on the dark events.
Life exists and occurs on a spectrum, so the things that happen to us that we perceive as being “bad” or dark are just as important as the things that we perceive as being of the light or “good.”
I believe that the sole purpose of life in human form is to return to God consciousness by experiencing life over the course of infinite incarnations.
We are fractions of God. We’re all just experiencing different scenarios from the choices we’ve made before we incarnated.
The more lives we live, the more aspects of life we experience, the closer we become to knowing the totality of God.
The more we turn to our feelings and emotions with the intention of understanding them instead of being pushed around by them, the more we open the door for the knowledge of God to manifest in our lives as wisdom.
Delegation Revisited
Now, back to clarify the statement that I made at the end of “How Can Understanding Enhance Control in Your Daily Life?” about me delegating authority to lawmakers to do things such as post speed limits and me agreeing to follow these laws:
The life path that I chose for myself as a soul, before incarnation, does not include becoming a legislator, but it does include the pursuit of wisdom and knowledge. While acquiring wisdom and knowledge in greater quantities, I’ve come to the realization that everyone incarnates with a specific function.
When I’m in alignment with my own specific function, I’m apt to acknowledge others’ authority if I place myself in their area of specific function.
An example of this would be willfully obeying a traffic light that civil engineers put into operation. Another example would be obeying the reasonable commands of a corrections officer even if the officer does not behave in a manner befitting their position.
In this case, I would first have to acknowledge that I placed myself in a position to be under the authority of the corrections officer in the first place.
Punishment regarding disobedience to an edict that I had previously agreed to be subjected to can only remedy itself in the future through reasonable obedience.