Three things I'm learning about God

“Three things I’m learning about God” by Midjourney

I grew up in a conservative, evangelical Christian home. My dad was a pastor until I was in second grade. We went to a megachurch in Scottsdale, Arizona until I was in middle school when my parents switched to a small, culty, fundamentalist church.

To my parents’ credit, they gave me the choice to come with them to the new fundamentalist church or stay at the megachurch. I went with them because I didn’t care enough about the megachurch to make them drive an extra 10 minutes out of the way. And again, to their credit, once I turned 16 and was able to drive, they gave me the choice to not go to church at all if I didn’t want to.

It was an easy choice for me to stop going to church. My brother and sister kept going to church even after they left home; I’ve met countless people who struggled in early adulthood to “deconstruct” their faith and painstakingly leave their conservative, evangelical churches. But for me, it barely registered in my emotional world.

The truth is, I was busy with friends and smoking weed and having fun. Looking back, however, it’s striking how I never worried about God, hell, or salvation. It’s not that I was a young nihilist; I just couldn’t take the conservative Christian cosmology seriously. I remember thinking: if any of this stuff is real, it will show itself to me in an obvious, tangible way. Thus far, I had only seen obviously fallible people interpreting ancient texts that had nothing to do with me.

Deconstructing God

The year after high school I worked in a coffee shop next to Auburn University, pretending I was going to college. I hit rock bottom that year in January of 1996, returning from the holidays with friends and family in sunny Scottsdale, Arizona. My girlfriend had broken up with me in December before I left, and when I returned, Auburn was like a ghost town until the semester started back up in late January.

It was cold and dreary, I had developed a severe sinus infection with no health insurance, and I was alone. I experienced deep depression for the first time in my life. One day in that depressing January, dragging myself to work at the coffee shop, I saw a book on the counter called The Master Game by Robert De Ropp. An immediate flash of recognition hit me: someone told me I needed to read this book.

I asked other employees and customers around the coffee shop and no one claimed the book. Who had told me I needed to read this book? Did my subconscious somehow know I needed to read this obscure book I had never heard of in my life? And did the universe magically produce a physical copy of this book on a coffee shop counter just for me?

I didn’t look a cosmic gift horse in the mouth. I took the book and devoured it in a few days. Today, its content isn’t important.¹ What’s important is that it led me to other writers and over the next few years I became deeply interested in consciousness and spirituality. It taught me that spirituality was possible without God.

When I finally attended college, I majored in religious studies, looking for more grown-up, empirical answers to my spiritual questions. I was disappointed when I realized that religious studies was just the anthropology of religion. I switched my major to psychology, but not before taking a class where we read Emile Durkheim’s The Elementary Forms of Religious Life.

That book shaped my view of God for the next 20 years of my life. Durkheim essentially argues that what people worship as God, whether they’re Aboriginal people in Australia or Catholic people in Europe or Muslim people in the Middle East, is actually the communal group. God (and the sacred) is just a symbol that binds individuals together into a community.

I went on to get a PhD in cultural geography and write a dissertation on megachurches. This Durkheimian idea of God was the frame for everything I wrote. And it was a powerful frame!

My way back to God

For 20 years, when asked for my religious leanings, I’d say I was a Durkheimian. The idea of God, the sacred, rituals, and so on, bind individuals together into communities. Without religion, we’re atomized individuals ping-ponging around an uncaring, random universe.

Parts of me didn’t fully buy into this rationalist view because I had several profound psychedelic experiences in my late teens and early 20s. And such experiences broke the academic frame I was trying to fit into personally and professionally.

In 2015, I began a serious daily meditation practice that helped the rational, analytical parts of me relax and notice a much vaster world of internal experience. It eventually opened up a well of curiosity around consciousness, emotions, and trauma.

I had my first intentional therapeutic psychedelic experience in 2017, which I committed to doing at least once a year. These experiences renewed my interest in spirituality, but as I returned to the readings (like De Ropp) from my late teens and early 20s, I found that it all fell flat for me. My Durkheimian worldview hadn’t budged much over the years, and I couldn’t help but see both spirituality and religion as forms of social identity formation.

Still, I was becoming more comfortable with an impersonal sacredness. There was something undeniably transcendent about the therapeutic psychedelic experiences I was having in those years. I wasn’t coming into contact with God, but I was definitely coming into contact with the divinity of life.

My Durkheimian lens allowed me to relax around the feelings of sacredness and spirituality. We don’t need to believe in the ultimate reality of God, heaven, and hell to open up to the spiritual feelings of something bigger than my isolated existence. I could have a psychedelic session, a meditation retreat, a holotropic breathwork experience, and I could open up to the mysterious wonder of life.

The Sacredness of Self-Energy

It wasn’t until I began personal and professional work in Internal Family Systems (IFS) that the mystery of these experiences would begin to coalesce into a spirituality that would lead me back to God.

As I’ve written about elsewhere, IFS is way more about Self than it is parts. Everyone knows it as “parts work,” and there’s good reason for that. But the entire aim of IFS is to transform our inner system to be more “Self-led.” And Self, is nothing less than a ray of divine light at the core of every single person (and every single part).

I get to experience this everyday in my coaching work. When a client gets enough internal space to unblend from a part and help the part meet the Self, there is almost always a sense of awe coming from the part.

I’ll ask the client: “How is the part responding to you as it sees your light?” Clients often respond with: “The part is shocked. It didn’t know.”

And when there’s a critical mass of Self-energy in a client’s system, I can just relax back and let the client take the lead. Whatever happens next is always the right move. Why? Because it’s coming from this divine life-force inside. I just get to witness.

But because of my academic, rationalist parts, it’s so much easier for me to view this life-force as an impersonal flow of energy that emenates from an impersonal source of Oneness rather than as a God-being. Thinking about “God” as a being would always bring up parts of me that would ridicule the idea as childish fantasy.

But lately things have been changing . . .

Three things I’m learning about God

1. I can only relate to God as a person

Last month I had a real ‘aha’ moment when I was on the receiving end of an IFS session with a senior IFS trainer and therapist. I had heard about “guides” sometimes coming into people’s IFS sessions unannounced, uninvited but ultimately welcome. Often these guides would be experienced by clients as ancestors, angels, spirit animals, or other mythical figures.

In IFS, we’re trained to just go with it and get curious. It’s happened only a few times in my coaching, but I wanted to see if I had any guides. I have many parts that are skeptical as hell about this idea but I have enough other parts that are completely open and curious.

So, I went into this session wanting to know if I could open up to any guides I might have. The therapist said that accessing guides or “guide energy” is just like accessing Self-energy: you simply work with parts that are blocking it.

In this session, we worked with what I called a Sunday School part that was afraid of anything coming into my mind or body. The whole idea of guides was scary to this young part. And then there was an older protector part that would defend against any outside forces by walling off with rationalism.

Once we finally got these parts relaxed and feeling safe, the therapist invited me to think of

any times in your life when you experienced something that felt substantially larger than you. Or perhaps a time you sensed great beauty. Something so beautiful that it brought tears to your eyes. And see if you can remember and invite in that kind of opening just now. Now I want you to be exquisitely sensitive to what’s happening in your system just now.

I noticed an energy in my heart space, flowing in a circular motion. It was slightly warm with the color of diamond luminosity. I could also hear a faint chorus. The therapist invited me to say hello to this energy and ask if there was anything it wanted to say to me.

Throughout the session, he would refer to the energy as a being, which I noticed my parts recoiling against. They were happy with an impersonal, spiritual energy, but the idea of this energy taking the form of a being felt childish to them.

When the therapist asked what the being wanted me to know, I received a clear sense (not words) that I didn’t need to work so hard. I told him about this message and when I spoke, my eyes filled with tears and I choked up. He asked me to invite my parts to welcome the emotion and before I knew it I was weeping.

Why was I weeping? I couldn’t tell you. It felt like a release of tension and I just let it flowed.

The tears lasted for less than a minute. Afterwards, the therapist then asked how my Sunday school part was doing, and I responded: “He’s kind of in awe. He said, ‘Oh this is God.”

The energy didn’t change so much as my parts relation to it changed. After the session, he told me that he intentionally was referring to the energy I was experiencing as a being because “I think it goes better when we treat these things as people. I don’t know if they are people, but I know the inner work goes better if we treat them as though they were people.”

That opened up something I’ve been thinking about for a few years: that we can’t truly connect with things that we don’t see as people/beings/entities. And this is the beauty of IFS: it helps us relate to our feelings, emotions, thoughts, and sensations as beings or as held by beings. And this allows for a deep relational connection.

It’s the same thing for sacred luminous energy or whatever impersonal label my parts are more comfortable with. I can’t really connect with that energy until it becomes a being or person capable of relationship.

It’s been a massive shift for my parts over the past month as I’ve related to the larger force of energy I experience in meditation as a being/person. I’ve also realized that because of my upbringing in conservative Protestant Christianity, I don’t really have any other sacred beings that feel real to my parts outside of Jesus.

So for the time being, this is where I’m at: welcoming in the Spirit of Jesus. My rational parts want you to know that this is not a road into Christianity for me. It is the recognition that to deeply connect to spiritual energy, we have to make it personal.

2. Theonomy is how God can come into my life

One of my favorite people on Substack,

Tom Morgan

, mentioned in a recent post:

Due to my own exhausting skepticism, I am still not entirely sure what my relationship to God and prayer is. But my nightly reviews have increasingly been accompanied with the wish that “Thy will be done.”

This has been my experience as well, especially with the work I do. Whether it’s one-on-one with clients or leading groups, I get the sense that this is too much responsibility for my thinking/performing/managing parts. I need Self-energy to shine through and take the lead.

The “Self” in Self-energy is the opposite of the “self” in selfish or self-centered. The capital-S “Self” is a spiritual life-force that lies at the core of every person—it’s a ray of divine light inside each of us. It’s what Rumi meant when he said:

You are not a drop in the ocean. You are the ocean in a drop.

The Self is a drop of God that lies at the core of everyone (and every part, and every thing for that matter).

So, when I utter “Thy will be done,” “thy” is the God-source of that drop. Dick Schwartz, founder of IFS, refers to that God-source as SELF (whereas our drop is Self).

What’s fascinating about doing this is that it doesn’t feel like giving up my free will and submitting. It feels like surfing a wave.

The cognitive scientist and philosopher John Vervaeke calls this '“theonomy.” Autonomy is to be directed by oneself (auto); heteronomy is to be directed by other (hetero). Theonomy is to be directed by the divine.

When my parts have relaxed back and I’m open to the spiritual life-force coming into me and through me, I’m no longer autonomous. And of course, autonomy is the emotional and philosophical lifeblood of modernity and modern psychology.

If we are psychologically dependent on others, we’re not autonomous. We’re heteronomous. Our mind and heart are being directed by others. And so modern psychology and philosophy tell us to grow up and be more self-directed. But too much autonomy leads to isolation and fragmentation and so in the modern world, we ping-pong between the isolation of autonomy and the childishness or cultishness of heteronomy.

IFS and Self-energy show us a way out of this bind. Our parts, when disconnected from Self, cannot help but drift between autonomy and heteronomy, perpetually dissatisfied with both, always hoping that just the right balance will do the trick. But as they unblend, unburden, and shift into their natural Self-led positions, they find theonomy: surfing the wave of God-Spirit.

Theonomy, Vervaeke explains, is

where you're just naturally oriented and tempted to what is most deeply really relevant and real to you so that you are not making it happen but it is not being imposed on you.

So think about a really compelling argument. It's compelling but it's not compulsive. It has what Frankfurt calls voluntary necessity. You say yes, the conclusion follows, but you also feel like you're agreeing with it. You're choosing it.

Think about love. Love is a voluntary necessity.

I cannot do other than love [my partner], but I don't feel like I'm losing my agency. I feel like I'm fully expressing it. When I'm transfixed by beauty, that is that sense of voluntary necessity.

3. Redemption is real but not because we’re bad

Like every conservative Evangelical kid, I was taught that being human is an inherently sinful endeavor. You’ve lost the game by simply being born. And this is why you need the redeeming blood of Jesus Christ—to wash away the pollutant stench of being human.

That message certainly seeped into younger parts of me, but by the time I was in high school, it seemed completely implausible. Why would a rational God create a such a system? I won’t spill any digital ink going over all the illogical aspects of this story; I’ll just say that in high school, the scientific materialist story seemed much more probable.

That story says: there’s no such thing as sin. All that stuff is made up, and so we also don’t need redemption. We make rules together so we don’t hurt each other and evolution has created us in such a way that most of us feel bad inside when we do hurt each other.

This was enough explanation to satisfy me. No sin = no need for redemption. I’ve held some version of this view for over 30 years of my life.

And then Internal Family Systems came into my life.

Let me say right away, that there is certainly no sin in the IFS framework. There are NO bad parts after all! But strangely enough there is redemption. And I mean like BIG TIME, old school, tent-revival salvation—all happening inside, with parts, non-parts, Self, and BIG SELF.

This real redemption happens when parts—burdened with their shame, feelings of unworthiness, hopelessness, and aloneness—begin to experience the unconditional love and acceptance of Self. Parts that felt like they could never be accepted, that they would never be worthy of anyone’s love, finally soften in the presence of Self-energy. This happens all the time in my coaching practice, and it’s a beautiful thing to witness.

As I wrote, last year, when we go inside ourselves and get a little bit of space from our protective parts, Self-energy begins to flow:

Supernatural levels of unconditional love are accessible to me and you, right now, in this lifetime. We all have a True Self (or you can call it Core, Essence, Spirit, Source, Ground of Being, or whatever) that mystics have spoken of for ages.

In the light of your own Self-energy, your parts feel salvation and redemption.

What does this have to do with God? If, as I wrote above, your Self is a shard of the divine light of big SELF then there’s an even larger, more expansive unconditional love beyond us.

If your tolerance for woo has reached its limit then please stop here and have a wonderful day.

But if you’re ready to plumb the depths of woo with me then consider the possibility that sometimes things get weird and we can have entities in our internal systems that are not parts. Sometimes these non-part entities are benevolent guides, and other times, they are not. Other traditions might refer to the not-so-benevolent entities as dark spirits or demons. In IFS, we call them “unattached burdens” or UBs.²

These are rare, but when we find a UB in someone’s system, it usually tries to hide and if it can’t hide, it will scare other parts. They often wreak havoc in the system by causing fear, despair, confusion, numbness and exhaustion. But an experienced IFS practitioner can help release these UBs to a higher realm, where they are welcomed without judgment or punishment. Just like the individual Self has unconditional love and acceptance for wounded and burdened parts, the realm of the big SELF lovingly welcomes home even the scariest, meanest UBs.

I was fortunate enough to witness this in action a few weeks ago, during an IFS consultation group I’m a part of. One of the members volunteered to do a demo with the lead consultant, who is a real maestro. The member had something in his internal system that he didn’t think was a part of him. The consultant led him inside and over the course of two separate sessions, the member was able to find, connect with, and release not one but two UBs in his system.

What was most remarkable about these sessions was that each UB showed the member that they were stuck here because they believed they had done such evil things that they couldn’t possibly go home to the light.

The first UB was the spirit of his grandfather, a Lutheran priest, who had struggled through WWII with a drug addiction, having an affair, and eventually committing suicide. After the consultant facilitated a lengthy back-and-forth between the client (eyes closed, turning his awareness internally) and the spirit of his grandfather, the consultant asked:

Does he have any doubts about his worthiness to go there that he might not deserve this because of the life he led? Just ask him.

Member:

Well, obviously to commit suicide for a priest is a big no -no and he was only allowed to be buried in the cemetery because the few people who knew hushed up because of his death and said he'd had a heart attack. So there's a shame about that.

Consultant:

Okay, tell him this: among the Desert Fathers, the greatest saints had been the greatest sinners, murderers, rapists, all the worst things. They were forgiven and were able to become great saints. Tell him this: take the worst of your transgressions, your affair, your drug addiction, your suicide, take that, turn and hand that to the light and see how it how it reacts.

Member:

It's a little bit of a blockage there between him and the light.

Consultant:

Okay, ask him: is this you or is there something else blocking the light?

Member:

I think it's him he's still very troubled. He's offering up his sins and those sins are kind of blocking out the light that's coming out and they're not welcomed into the light.

Consultant:

Okay, tell him: lower the sins enough so you can see the light. See how it reacts.

Member:

Yeah. It’s like he sees the face of Jesus³ there and it's very intense and Jesus absolutely understands and forgives everything.

Consultant:

And if he will permit it, Jesus will come and carry him home. Will he permit that?

Member:

Yeah, he's crying, he's crying. But yeah, he does permit it and he knows it has to be. He has to let go of his earthly life. Yeah, and he has to let go of his will. Your will, not mine. Yeah, no, he gets that too.

Consultant:

Great and watch as he goes on ahead And let me know when he's all the way up there cradled in the arms of Jesus Yeah,

Member:

Jesus is carrying him kind of in a workman like way, you know. He’s getting smaller and smaller, yeah.

Consultant:

Now the opening what your grandfather just so courageously did can allow that light to shine down into you and to help us deal with what remains of the darkness in you. So if it's right for you now, focus back inside.

The consultant helped the member then focus on the larger darkness he felt inside. Eventually the member saw a very young, fetus-shaped part inside of him surrounded by a womb of darkness.

Member:

It's just like the sticky black residue off the walls of the womb or cavity or whatever it is. It's just glomming on to the light I’m sending it and sneakily fighting like a rear guard action, like some kind of strategy, like some kind of fight back going on. 

Consultant:

Yeah, It's very clever and devious and just tell the dark energy we need to give you this. You are very clever and devious, and you are only hurting yourself. You are stuck and lost and suffering and you're in the wrong place and you've never ever been able to get enough here. You've been starving this whole time and you just keep digging your hole deeper and getting more and more into this misery realm. I am sorry for your suffering. You can go home today, now, to a place where there's plenty for you and where you'll be forgiven for all the havoc you have wreaked over the centuries. How does the darkness respond to all that? 

Member:

You know, this darkness is more than just a personal darkness. Somehow, I seem to have sucked in all that World War II Third Reich darkness that I was in touch with at the beginning. Sorry, I have a part that is like critiquing this and saying this is extremely weird.

Consultant:

Whatever’s real, [name].

Member:

Yeah, no, it is real. It's like this pool, like it's something to do with this pool, this disappearing pool of darkness at the end of the Second World War. All this like evil had gone on. There's like flooding black evil everywhere and been defeated and yet it was still sticking on and it wasn't going away just because the war was over. It wasn't going to give up. And this little boy is like contaminated by this. This dark pool of evil that doesn't want to go away and doesn't want to admit it's defeated or knows it's defeated but is still fighting back.

Consultant:

I want to say something that might not be true for you and you're perfectly welcome to disagree. It wasn't defeated. It just went into hiding and it came back through in other political systems all over the planet. It's still all around us. And as I say that and recognize that, it might well be smirking.

Member:

Yeah, it's a little scared that you’ve kind of seen through it.

Consultant:

Yeah. And we can talk to it as a person. It is actually many, many persons, I believe. Like a command structure on a warship. . . . The one thing I think it's still trying to delude us about is that it's claiming to be a thing, a pool of evil. It's much more like a person and it can talk with us and we can talk with it and it can try and hide behind being a pool but those are the behaviors of a coward.

Member:

And it gets a little bit feisty about that and says, "Oh, you know, I’m more than you think I am." 

Consultant:

Well, I'm sure you think you're more than anybody else in the universe, probably. But you're actually terrified, you're hiding, and you're miserable. Powerful beings don't sneak into wombs and contaminate babies. You wouldn't do that unless you were starving and miserable.

Member:

Okay, what is coming to me is something I remember from long ago in my reading or studies or something. Do you know like the Manichaean worldview? Yeah, the battle of good and evil. Yeah, which are equal and opposite. And it feels more like that, that however strong and powerful the light is, the dark evil is there as much there and as strong there as well.

Consultant:

Okay. I can see why the darkness would want you to believe that. Yeah, okay, this is like the difficult point for the darkness where it might have to admit it's not as powerful as it thinks it is. It's obvious: no rational being, no powerful being would live inside of other people's souls feeding off of scraps of their misery. That is not fit food for a powerful being. It is not a fit environment, hiding and lurking and subterfuge. Those are all the behaviors of a hurt, desperate, fleeing being. And you know what, darkness? It's your pride that keeps you trapped here. You have to pretend you're this great big powerful thing. I'm sorry. That is a trap for you.

Member:

I can see it's also desperate and needing help and it's just doing what it has to do to. You know, it's hiding in cellars because that's the only place that it can be.

Consultant:

Well, tell it that is absolutely not true. There's a circle of beings who want to welcome you home. Usually for beings like you the reason they don't believe that is because they think they've done something so horrible they can never be forgiven. Is that what it’s like for you?

Member:

Yeah it does feel like that. That at some point it realized what it was doing was really bad but it was too late to go back so it doubled down and did more of the bad stuff. 

Consultant:

Tell it: that's not true. Just like [the member’s] grandfather gathered the courage to take his worst sins, his worst transgressions, and turn toward the light with him, you can do that too. Surely you're at least as strong as [the member’s] grandfather.

Member:

It takes a lot of courage, you know because he’s asked to admit that he was wrong. and there is a matter of pride.

Consultant:

Yeah. Tell it this: there are two ways you can go. One is very quick and you can be home today where it's warm and you've been cold all these years, haven't you? And where there's plenty, and where you will be loved and welcomed back, like the prodigal son.

Member:

It's more about being loved than like the food, you know. It's really been sort of desperately hiding in bombed-out cellars kind of thing. 

Consultant:

Yeah, totally makes sense to me. So let it know you can go directly, or if you need more proof, we can prove to you further that you've been completely deluded about the world you're stuck in.  

Member:

Well, it just needs to process who it is and how it's changing right now. These are like big revelations for it and it needs to just process that and let it sink in. And it's doing that and it's assuming much more of a human form, and instead of this like gooey blackness, it's like turning into this, like desperate looking guy with a wild look in his eyes and a straggly beard and so on and fearfully looking around him. 

Consultant:

Okay, you're doing great. And maybe just let that guy know we're here to help you. We want to help you. We can sense some of your suffering. You've suffered horribly for a very long time, and we know this transition you're about to make is very difficult and scary, terrifying, and you can do it. There is no doubt you can make this transition.

Member:

Yeah, I mean, as I see him then, he almost takes the form of one of the, like, it looks like a monk or something and I'm just wondering whether he's like, one of the disciples like Judas, you know, who [felt] he just fucked up so badly and really judged himself to be completely beyond redemption.

Consultant: 

I want to say something that may be totally inappropriate. If so, just ignore it completely. There are some thinkers who believe that Judas was the greatest of all the saints because he took on incredible guilt to make something that needed to happen happen and then he suffered and suffered and suffered and suffered and hated himself and suffered some more and never even knew that deep down under all that there was a great saint.

Member:

Yeah, he gets that. He gets that. Yeah, it's like he was chosen as much as Jesus was. Yeah. To go through that. 

Consultant:

His own special kind of crucifixion that lasted centuries.

Member:

Yeah. Doesn't seem so far away from Jesus on the cross as I see him there now.

Consultant:

Ask this man with the wild look in his face if he can take a few steps toward the light now. I know this might take him a minute. 

Member:

[Nods]

Consultant:

He can do it? 

Member:

Yeah, he's so ready to go. He's forgiven. He knows he's forgiven. 

Consultant:

Okay, great. Encourage him. Go ahead on, go ahead on. Go in peace. You have suffered enough. Let go of all your tendrils. Any little wisps that connect you back to [the member] or anyone on this planet. Let go. 

Member:

He’s happy to throw them away.

Consultant:

Great, that's a wonderful sign. So take everything that belongs to you with you. Sometimes you can feel all that stuff streaming on up ahead of you. 

Member:

He kind of just wants to throw it on the ground and run forward. 

Consultant:

Okay, tell him he can do that. And any little bits that don't belong here, they can either disintegrate here or they can stream on ahead like a flock of birds. 

Member:

They're kind of just disintegrating. They're just turning into dust. But he really needs to know that he's forgiven and this is not some kind of trap for him. 

Consultant:

Yep. So tell him, look up there and see: who is welcoming you? Look into their eyes and see what is real in their eyes.

Member:

Yeah, again it presents in this kind of ancient way, but there's lots of faces there, kind of pulling him up, and happy to pull him up.

Consultant:

One of the most amazing lines in the Bible to me is that Jesus is on the cross and he says to the people torturing him to death, "Forgive them Lord, they know not what they do."

Member:

Yeah. He knows that. He knows that what he’s done was terrible, but it was kind of bigger than him. So if he really is forgiven and accepted up there, then that's great.

Consultant:

Can he start to feel the love? That's what he said he wanted more than anything.

Member:

[Smiles and nods]

Consultant:

Great.

Member:

Yeah, he's still a bit sort of shell shocked by the huge change that just happened. He’s gonna want it to sink in, but he's up there now and he's just an ordinary bloke, you know, an ordinary bloke who's just been through some bad stuff.

Consultant:

Yeah, really bad stuff. Sometimes we get to see the beginning of the healing of beings like this. Sometimes that opening just closes and they disappear. I don't know what will happen for you.

Member:

He’s just sitting with crowds of people there now. He's just an ordinary person with ordinary people now up there and everybody's equal. 

Consultant:

Great. Great. Wonderful. wonderful. So maybe if it feels right to you, just say to him and all of those people: go in peace. And if it's right, if the time is right, turn your focus back onto your own parts.

Witnessing this session fundamentally changed what redemption means for me. We don’t need redemption to wash away the stench of being human. It's about recognizing love even in the darkest corners of existence. Whether it was the grandfather's suicide or the entity that had absorbed centuries of evil, the message was the same: nothing you've done puts you beyond love's reach.

The redemption isn't needed because we're inherently bad; it's available because love is inherently infinite and eternal. Every part, every burden, every lost soul is just love that has forgotten itself. And the moment it remembers, the moment it turns toward the light, it discovers it was never actually separate. It was always already home.

A final thought

As I remember that consultation session, watching those UBs transform from formless darkness to desperate human forms finally willing to accept love, I’m beginning to see how all three of my learnings about God are really one learning. We need God to be personal (a being who can carry us home), we need theonomy (to let go of resistance and accept being carried), and we need redemption (only to remind us that no amount of darkness can make us unworthy of being carried).

That teenager in Scottsdale who couldn't take the conservative Christian cosmology seriously was right about one thing: if God is real, it will show itself in an obvious, tangible way. And here its—just not in the way my Sunday School parts expected. Through IFS, through opening up to the personhood of spiritual energy, through theonomy's voluntary necessity, and through the redemption that is always already on tap, God is showing up. This spiritual life-force is just like my own Self-energy that flows when parts relax back. But now I’m experiencing it as a being who wants relationship, and as a force that surfs through us when we stop trying to paddle out alone.

1. As I came back into spirituality in 2019 (a whole other story), I decided to track down the book and re-read it. It fell pretty flat for me. It was the right book at age 19. Not so much in my early 40s.

The big idea is that life is a series of games. Most people play lesser games like the "Hog in Trough" game (pure materialism) or the "Cock on Dunghill" game (ego gratification). But for those who see the futility of those games, there’s a greater pursuit: “The Master Game.” This game is about the development of consciousness and self-awareness.

All good stuff! But he was heavily influenced by G.I. Gurdjieff and P.D. Ouspensky, both of whom I became very interested in after reading his book. But it all felt too esoteric for me as a dad in his early 40s. And today, the whole Gurdjieffian system seems unnecessarily complex and mystical compared to my framework of choice, Internal Family Systems.

2. I previously wrote about unattached burdens here:

3. I feel the need to offer a disclaimer here and say that IFS is not Christian but is ecumenical and will use whatever deity/spiritual figures the client uses. Because the grandfather was Christian and the member was open to Christian symbolism, the consultant referred to “Jesus” as the personification of the welcoming light.