i was born into a roman catholic family, and raised on christian principles; these shaped and guided my morals until i became independent and left home to become part of the larger cultural family.
drug and alcohol use became part of my life in my mid teens, and i attribute this to a variety of factors, one of which is the obvious, being made the sex partner of an older brother. [i had already been using before i was raped several times while in the navy, once by a stranger a knifepoint off base.] alcohol and drug use became a staple in my life, but love was the elusive drug that i could never get enough of. during this time, i began to explore eastern philosophies, but felt tremendous guilt over it, because in my christian upbringing, those who engaged in such practices were considered heathens.
after the service, i found a semblance of that love i sought in the context of the evangelical charismatic community that i became involved in. it made sense to segue into this type of faith expression, since roman catholic experience did not connect me with the experience of the living god.
i tried to live according to 'the bible' but my shame and struggles with the influences of the past just increased.
my dependence on substances escalated, and eventually disenfranchised myself from that evangelical community, since, even though i had made the tragic mistake of getting married, i was gay, and at the time thought biblical ideologies as enforced by straight heterosexual men would 'fix' me if i only tried hard enough.
as the bottom fell out of the marriage, i entered aa and died to the image of god i had come to believe in, and embraced the concept of a higher power, someone beyond myself who would shape and form me in the manner in which i was intended to be.
after that, i continued to include my practices and studies of eastern traditions, yet still maintain the christ principle as the foundation of my belief. i have learned to embrace my own spirit and those of other sentient beings as loved and valued for the fact that they have been created and brought forth into being. my belief does not include a punitive god, nor does it exclude anyone from the ranks of the 'saved'. all are loved by virtue of their being.
my current practice is non-dualism with a christian foundation. however, while i believe that all religions have valuable contributions to make, none of them contains 'the truth' to the exclusion of others. i don't believe i need to be 'saved' except from anything other than my self, but rather, enlightened, which has been for me a process of becoming dispossessed of the attachments of self, and its tendency to self-contract as it develops in the context of its evolution in time and space.
the world in my view IS the appearance of god arising in the form of creation and all ideas generated by people cannot possibly articulate the non-conceptual being that god is prior to language and thought.
today i see myself merely as being being being. and to the extent that i invest in dualist notions of separation and division, i will suffer. i cannot escape suffering, and the way to deal with suffering has been modeled by christ, who, in my understanding, embraced it as the path to freedom from the attachment to dualistic notions, such as those that i constructed throughout my lifetime. in the sense that i have died to those, i have taken up my cross, and been born again into a new relationship with the living being who is ever present as my life. his presence manifest among us says to us:
'why stand staring at what has gone before? don't get lost in things of the past. i, says he will begin something new, it's beginning already....haven't you heard?'
my practice is simple: in every encounter of every thought and every feeling that arises, i ask: who am i? who is the person behind the senses translating its experience into thought and feeling identification? how am i continuing to regenerate the invested notion of 'me' from moment to moment? how is the 'me' who i have come to believe myself to be, living in such a manner as to build bridges that transcend the human tendency to divide up the infinite whole into parts.
when i live from that perspective, i remain in the moment, and, as close as is humanly possible, to being all i am created to be.
that's 'me' in a nutshell!
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