By Cathy Eck

Guns or Unconditional Love

We live in a crazy time where people who say they love Jesus shout words of hatred to those who are different.  Many of them pack a lot of heat.  It’s hard to know how to handle these types of incongruent people.

The false God of the Old Testament plays loudly in the religious zealot’s mind.  They don’t realize that they’re caught in a bait-and-switch program. They consciously honor Jesus while unconsciously projecting the rules of their false, punishing God on to anyone they feel fits their description of evil.  They don’t seem to notice that Jesus didn’t obey or honor the punishing God, and he didn’t think much of organized religion.

These Christians aren’t Christ-like.  They aren’t “Loving their enemies,” nor are they remembering that Jesus said that what kills us is what comes out of our mouth, not what goes in.  I’m not religious, but I do take the words of Jesus seriously because he speaks the words of initiation.

Fundamentalists might have numbers in their favor, but they have no real power.  We just have to know what to do when we’re in a tough situation with anyone who has a rigid, one-track mind.  Beliefs only have power over us if we believe them; but often, our automatic training causes us to believe people even when what they say feels terrible.  If we can let the belief that is laced with emotion go, we move back into power.

The Masculine Side

Let’s examine a conversation between a straight fundamentalist man projecting his beliefs on a gay man.  The fundamentalist says,  “If you keep up your behavior, you’ll go to hell.  The Bible says so.”  We know he’s speaking from beliefs because the words are emotionally charged and not win-win.  They fail both tests of truth.

Forget the words for a moment, and just focus on the emotion.   The speaker does feel the emotion (even if he doesn’t show it), but he believes the emotion is saying he’s right (psychological reversal).  He thinks the gay man is causing his emotion when his own poison words are causing his emotion.  Eventually that emotion will push him to think another thought to elevate his position because he has no concept of letting go.  He’ll think something like, “I’m doing this to help him so he doesn’t go to hell.”   He feels calmer since he now believes that he’s being helpful or kind to the gay man.  But his new statement is still not true — it doesn’t pass the win-win test.

Masculine-oriented minds are pretty accomplished at falsely elevating their position with thought.  They believe that if we’d think like them, everything would be perfect.

The Feminine Side

Let’s assume that our gay friend doesn’t consciously have the typical religious good-and-evil world view.  But subconsciously he does, or he wouldn’t have encountered this zealot.  He now has three choices:

In the first choice, he doesn’t discriminate.  He believes what the fundamentalist says because he shares the belief that what feels bad is true.  If our mind has this belief, we’ll be triggered to accept beliefs that are laced with emotion.  That belief shuts off our natural discrimination.  He’ll most likely try to defend himself, but he won’t win because now he’s on the same false playing field as the fundamentalist.  He’s stuck.

In the second choice, he’s a bit wiser.  This time he hears the fundamentalist’s words but realizes that what he just heard isn’t the truth. He recognizes his inner emotional signal to let go.  He doesn’t take on the fundamentalist’s projection or even try to fight him, he just realizes that the fundamentalist is stuck in false thinking.  He’s won the battle, but he hasn’t yet won the war because he remembers the event and the horrible feeling of being judged.  It worries that it could happen again.

He has a third choice if he discovers the power of unconditional love or true forgiving.  True forgiving means to go back to your state of mind before the first giving (the negative incident).  The fundamentalist’s giving was the statement that the gay man was wrong and was going to hell.  To forgive, he must ask himself why he would encounter such a man and get this unwanted gift.  He’s looking for the cause inside of his OWN mind.  Most likely, he believed that if it happened to others, it can happen to him.   Perhaps he also had some religious beliefs of his own that he needs to clean out.  He could have quite a complex of beliefs in his mind that attracted the hater.  If he let’s go of ALL causal beliefs, his power will return.  It’s no longer possible for the fundamentalist to project his beliefs on him.  When authorities can no longer project their evil on others, they’ll all wake up very quickly.

Winning With Unconditional Love

The LGBT battle for equality affects us all — it symbolizes the return of the powerful feminine.  The feminine aspect of man and woman became powerless when the patriarchal God was elevated and the Goddess disappeared.  This has caused us all to feel powerless when we are in a feminine role.

A few years ago, I was researching ancient Polynesian stories for a presentation.  I found one story that I really loved.  The story said that humans have long struggled with the problem that the masculine mind gets too power hungry, too righteous, and too war oriented.  At crucial times, large numbers of courageous souls volunteer to come to the planet with feminine minds in male bodies to return peace to earth.  They called them fairies because they thought they were magic.  Their strong feminine mind balances the overly masculine mind of the straight men in power.  Consequently, the birth of gay children was celebrated because they knew that fighting was about to end.  I’m willing to believe that story — it feels really good.