My head is still full of thoughts, so as the only way for me to effectively digest my own thoughts, here I am again writing them down, so I can slow down the road inside my head and let each words flow by one by one in an orderly fashion.
A few years back, somewhat around my seminary early years, a book caught my attention.
"God Chasers" written by Tommy Tenney.
Now, that phrase catch my attention, and somewhat amuse me in my personal journey in my own pace.
If I'm not mistaken, the author paraphrased the term of chasing God in an analogy of him playing chase with his daughter. As a grown adult of course it will be almost impossible for a young child to chase him if they were to be competing seriously.
So Tenney depicted the question about how can a human being "chase" God, with the phrase that I quoted in my own interpretation:
"Of course it's not possible for us to physically compete in chasing God, but there is this moment in the analogy of my(Tenney's) daughter, where she finally get tired of chasing me, and finally called 'Oh, Daddy', and that very instant, I'm going to switch back to be a Dad of her and returned to hug her in my embrace."
End of quote,
That particular vaguely reckoned from my memories about the content and main center of the book, is somewhat transformed into a new driving force within me, to pursue God, and trying my best to understand what I catch through the personal journey I experienced from those impressions, and translated them into words so I can understand them better.
No, I never wanted to publish any book, nor becoming a best-selling Christian author, I felt too inadequate for that, and I'm pale in comparison in my message from the trending mainstream Christian books, they won't sell for sure, so I'm not gonna bother at it. Lol once again.
Despite my several disagreement about the later half from the very book I quote, about the supernatural occurences parts to be exact, I can say that this analogy of chasing after God's heart as a possibility, is what become a new ray of hope for the young me, that's only been a Christian for at the very least of 2 years.
It's somewhat motivating, at least for me personally, I finally get my main goal, to pursue the knowledge of God, to have a personal relationship, an intimate one, with God, that's been the quest of mine, to enliven the words from the Bible so the resounded to me deeply, and that has been my personal subjective miracles that bring me this far in my theological reasoning, my personal devotion, and my way of coping with my own inadequacy and shortcomings.
Of course I'm far fetched from being the good role model, I even failed my closest inner circle time and time again, at least I'm hoping I'll never become your holier-than-thou lukewarm hypocrite, I hope not.
And I'm also trying my best not to sing my own praises by acting such. I'm trying myself to be constantly in check as best as I could, despite I am far from being a perfect nor even good enough to be honest completely.
.....
I'm doing the transition with those [....] btw, I hope you got my message, so I'm switching back to my topic in mind, about what I believe and of how I finally come to this far.
If I looked back, and trying my best to reflect on what I did and of how I approach some things and of how I try to approach my way out of doing things done.
I can surely say, that I'm always full with curiosity. And I'm unorthodox in some cases in my approach. I opt to drastic measures sometimes, but at another, I'm even too afraid to thread and stay freezed with doubts and anxiety.
I'm sure is complex, and I'm sure is unique, but for sure, I'm weird.
So, I'm going to pick a little from my previous post that I hope never spark any controversy, despite who am I talking to, I put those statements out on the internet, everyone who stumbled on this post by a mere luck or perhaps my misfortune, can easily accessed them, but here I am hoping nobody found it.
Okay, here is one dialogue in the past with an aunt of mine, who in and out was and is and perhaps will always be, a devout Buddhist.
This probably took place around 13 years ago, after graduating seminary, I joined my dad to return to Sumatra, they moved back to Sumatra since mom got the job offer in Pekanbaru, the city I currently resided at the moment.
I'm staying in Padang, with the relative, which is a Buddhist household, and a devout one.
One reason is that my graduation thesis still need some fixing and I'm not completely sure that the house in Pekanbaru is ready yet for me needing a quick online correspondence with this urging matter.
The other reason, is I'm still not seeing my dad head to head, as he's still the abusive dad that I know, and he sure still attempted to physically assaulted me in his fit of anger, so I'm thinking not to follow suit with their plan of restarting life in Pekanbaru.
So, just to be done with it, I stayed with this relatives, the aunt is my dad's older sister, for 3 months before finally moving to Jakarta, finished the paperworks and try my luck landing a job, which turns out to be my first office work for the past 9 years until I resigned back in 2020.
So, of course as a passionate Christian, I shared the gospel with this family, trying all my best of knowledge to try and attempt to convince them about the truth of the Bible.
I was met with an even stronger Buddhism ideologies, which I bet you the truth, a kind of shaking my knowledge up and down, but thankfully not my faith in Christ upside down. Joking.
I try to philosophically discuss about the zero chance of reincarnation to be true.
But was countered with the hypnosis card. That there is some cases a person induced in a deep hypnosis state, and was asked to return in time according inside their memories timeframe, and suddenly some cases shown that there might be a possibility of this unrelated to the timescale and the present life memories, this completely new memory of another life, as a proof that reincarnation exist.
As I told you at front, that I, am a weird person.
I bet you know my answer already.
I learned about hypnosis and hypnotherapy, and auto-suggested myself using self-hypnosis, to try to proof that reincarnation is an illusion.
I'm already graduating from seminary btw at this time, but me, learning hypnosis, a complete ungodly mundane way.
They say, trance state can alter your consciousness and will bring you back in time, to the memories etched in your soul.
So I tried, to no avail.
I'm a stubborn person, so I tried hypnosis.
But years of mental training made me pretty unreceptive to suggestions during hypnosis, I tried multiple attempts, using all way I can think of to proven the existence of past life, and I didn't get the deep enough state of hypnosis needed for the suggestions to work it's charm, but nothing.
So I stop this approach.
They say supernatural truth need a supernatural approach.
I begin to compile my whole knowledge about my past mistakes of learning about occultism. I get to deepen my philosophy about all you need to know about magic, but still no past life answers.
I did this, I did that, all to prove my curiosity, by which is unproven, on the particular topic about past life hypnosis.
You see, a human mind is divided into two, the subconscious and the conscious mind.
NewAge believe that tapping into our subconsciousness can awaken us to our deepest potential.
Hypnosis is one way of many to get in touch with our subconscious.
I learn hypnosis quite much just to come to this conclusion.
Delusions.
You see, our subconsciousness is our mainframe of our thinking process, each person is unique to their each respective mind.
They might be similarities in ideology and many common knowledge stuffs, but on the personal level they differs.
A way of thought process of a person is unique to themselves. Why?
Because not everyone is equal in their life experience.
What you heard in childhood, what music, what cartoon you watched, how you were treated, dictate how you perceive the reality.
That is, why, a human can enter hypnosis, and hallucinates or deluded to believe about them being this and that experiencing such and suchs and they think that's a previous life.
Human mental capacity, is capable of generating memories, by compiling what input that the brain already received.
That's the same process when the brain generated dreams.
And that's the basis for claims that a person capable of recalling a memories from past lives.
Past lives induced hypnosis can be random or even vague, which is prone to misinterpretation, as we can just close our eyes snd conclude that this might be a memory from past lives, or we can be very critical and argue that those scene quoted from the speaker's memory, might be possible originated from a movie show that the person under hypnosis recalled from their childhood, or it could be a dream, or anything.
.....
The next curiosity of mine is the big hole and doubts that it could be possible for some claims from religions, even Christianity, to be false claim exaggerated record that made to be so to fit the theme the writer had in their mind.
So, the only option I can concentrate is, to study each and every believe that I can find, from the internet of course, I'm not going to excavate a historical site from this religion or that religion just for the sake of research, it will be much time consuming and also draining much fund just for the sake of curiosity.
I'm grateful that I am a polyglot. Or was it all the way around? That I turned into a polyglot during my quest to learn about religions and cultural backgrounds from each religion?
Doesn't matter which one came first.
The point is, I learnt multiple languages, and their archaic form if possible, and spent gazillion of hours online, doing research, finding a digital scan of a rescued ancient scrolls, and many other myth debunking sources, finding a third opinion perspective, even trying to find the counter arguments from the sceptic scholars about the text and their interpretation, and if possible, learn the language so I can read it for myself and make my own interpretation about it.
They were time consuming, for sure.
So far, I can quote views about this religion, what the oldest text dictate about their origin in the earliest era possible, how the religion come to be during the past, and if they're still survive till modern day, how they transformed into their contemporary version.
The 5 major believe is the first target of mine, I read rigveda, study some parts that I can find from the internet, finding the variations and minor cults and branches of beliefs, then I begin to study the minor belief that probably survive to some extent till today. Or some, lost in time, but somewhat the documentation about it survive to this day.
Curiosity kill the cat they say, and yes I found much thing, much in the sense of too much even.
Which is not going to be spread out in this blog, and probably will not be spoken out ever.
But let say, people from the past is crazy in their belief.
And, magic, superstition and supernatural concept is closely tied with all belief system.
While some like the mainstream religion, those 5 major religion, such as Christianity, Catholicism, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Islam.
Those were pretty innocent in comparison to some practice of other minor belief system.
We know from Hollywood industry, about some unthinkable practice from some illustrated in their produce, human sacrifice and stuffs, and even cannibalism.
They were the thrice down-notched version in order not to traumatized their audience.
The real practice were gruesome, take Druidism for example. No, not this 18th century resurgence of interpretation, but rather the Iron Age Druidism.
What entertainment industry presented about druid, that those people are fully spiritual, living in harmony with nature and they were an expert of producing oracle. They are adept in healing, master of lores and crafts and suchs.
In real practice, druids did human sacrifice, and doing some gruesome interpretation of the process, such as the twitching movement of this poor sacrifice, or which side is the bodily fluids flow, how the liquid behave while trickling down from the injuries, and stuffs that I need to censor to some way.
Deep net even provide illustration for those unthinkable practice.
We know from entertainment movies that Viking believe in their Nordic gods. We even watched one of the Nordic pantheon figures becoming superhero defending justice, avenging the earth from threats.
But what we didn't know is how the origin of practice done by their original believers in the ancient times.
We think that contemplating literature quotes that those ancient Norse worship their deities through songs, rituals such as rune carving, bone carved with runes being tossed to goat skin, and interpretation were made through oracle done by the priestess song while they were in trance state.
Nope, the real one is far worse. They involved a heavily intoxicants during practice, making a person altered their mental state, and those ritual as any pagan practices, were usually surrounded by the act of consummation, some perversion through human intercourse, in multiple way that might make modern day human questioned their morality once again.
Not to say, some minor Asian beliefs also had those practice, they were everywhere, spreading all across humanity through ancient times.
That's why, I told you, curiosity sure kill the cat.
But satisfaction bring it back, not to forget.
My cat was killed already by doing what I did in those years of searching.
So I need to bring back my cat by being contempt with what I found, after researching many and numerous unthinkable findings, I felt that I had to retain my knowledge and transform it into wisdom, by finding a safety in what I already found.
Christ.
I learn once again, deepened my understanding of what I learnt through seminary, once again reading the Bible, in Hebrew as much as possible, understanding the Bible all over once again, and find my final comfort once and for all on the solid rock of my faith, Christ sustaining mercy.
I purposely left you hanging, as I felt that I'm way distracted and strayed you from those examples, which in comparison to the rest of example, were pretty receive-able and not too much trauma-inducing to anyone, but yes, as I said, my cat is killed and despite being satisfied in Christ alone, the cat of my curiosity is long gone on the past.
My current curiosity of a cat, is a new completely different cat, I'm talking in a parable now, no cat is harmed through the years of me doing those researchs.
No harm is done to any physical cat.
So, that's all
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