In protestant, well now more secular, Sweden, we serve mass on Sundays at 11 o’clock, like many who practice Christian faith. So each Sunday, weather I want it or not, I come to think about religion.
I was baptized by my own wish when I was 7. My parents were not really religious and they did not want to force me into anything. When I was born in Sweden in 1977, religion was widely considered to be a very personal choice, and often looked upon like an “opium for the masses” (Marx). But my parents, especially my father, had their private belief in GoddessGod, and I always strongly believed in GodGoddess, and I came to believe in Jesus. I also came to believe in angels, spirits, ghost, demons, magic, fairies, trolls and other powers.
When I got to know more concepts of GodGoddess, or the universal soul/consciousness, in Taoism and Buddhism I integrated these views into my beliefs, and when I got into shamanism and Wicca my understanding developed further. The later two also helped me to integrate my beliefs in spirits, fairies, magic etc into the picture, and like this I have been going on learning.
At the same time, philosophy and all kinds science have made me understand existence and GoddessGod in new, amazing and very inspiring ways.
Altogether, I have built my understanding of existence and GodGoddess by letting myself be enlightened of and inspired by many different sources.
I find it wise to believe that there has been(there is) human beings who have been(are) so in love, harmony and understanding with existence that they intensify their communication with and openness towards GoddessGod to an extent which makes them profoundly enlightened. They can then become prophets – a clear channel for divine love, inspiration and power, and words which helps others get closer to GodGoddess.
However – to believe that one of these individuals, these prophets, should have been able to express the whole truth of what we call GoddessGod is, according to my opinion, simple-minded. It is also believing to much in things like the capacity of the human brain and constitution, not to talk about the capacity of the human languages. Therefore it has never been an option to me to believe that any single religion holds the real truth about GodGoddess.
But I do believe in GoddessGod, in my own way. I also believe that the power of love is the strongest power of all, I believe strongly in the power of thought, intuition and persistence, and that one need to handle these powers with care and attention.
I find it hard to describe GodGoddess like GoddessGod is, I feel that no one can do that, but maybe everyone can actually do it, in their own, special, unique, way.
But to describe it like a universal truth???
I mean, how do you describe feeling?
Or being alive?
How can you truly describe the 6 hour long sunrises over the waters of Stockholm on midsummer mornings or the intense winter silence in the deep forests of the Scandinavian north; the views from the high Alp tops of Austria or the power and beauty of the fertile earth and floods around Vienna; the special light in the air on Mallorca, where the high concentration of moisture in the air is making the sky look so close…
I believe that there are power(s) and knowledge which are beyond our capacity of understanding, but that every human can experience all of them and some can even find the words to tell us about these experiences. To listen to them is wise.
But to follow anyone’s words blindly I believe to be neither wise nor the point of them telling these wisdoms to us. I think that the point is to help us all to experience life more profoundly, for us to love more, experiencing GoddessGod deeper and deeper… They do this for us to live a better life, so that there will be more harmony and love in our societies,
and so that we might find the words to contribute to the human understanding of existence and GoddessGod with our own unique knowledge.
This evening I have been thinking about love, and how it just grows and grows. How I endlessly seem to learn how to love deeper, more, all the time. I guess we learn about it every day, but sometimes, love just strikes upon you, opens up as well your heart as your mind – or is it the heart which is opening the mind? In any case, the everlasting power of love which makes our consciousness change, evolve…. Makes our thoughts take new roads, and move, in new circles, new patterns…
In the theories of Quantum Theory and Quantum Consciousness, there are people saying that how we observe things or beings actually are and act, physically as well as mentally. It has been discovered that the movement or behaviour of atoms is influenced by observation, actually, an atom does not “jump into place” before being observed. What this observer is to be understood as scientifically can surely be debated, but lets be creative with some metaphysical consequences of these theories.
This means that what many wise people have said for a long time actually could be true – we can change our lives and the lives of others through the way we think about them, and that even on a physical level.
If I love and expect love, I will receive love, at least to a certain extent. Since we create our realities together with all beings (and all matter? what is and what isn’t conscious?), we are dependent on the thoughts of others to change our life. Therefore psychic violence can be just as or even more terrible as physical violence, since it can trap a persons soul, and prevent it from developing.
Love can set a soul free, free to grow and spread love on its own… Love that comes back to you, mentally, physically, through projections, through thoughts as well as acts.
If you spread love, you will actually get it back, just from the well thoughts of the person you just spread love to, and the environment which experienced you doing so. You might get it back double, triple, ten times what you have given, maybe more – no one can know how much love one gives or receives, there is no sure measurement of love known to man. Maybe love is measurable somehow, but since we so far only can experienced it, and all beings experience reality in a unique way, we do not know how to compare amounts of love in different people. One thing is for sure: there is no use in gathering love, letting it flow on is just getting you more love in the end.
And, to get back to what I was thinking about, wow – does love open and raise a person greatly. When I feel my heart opening, I can feel my soul landing more in me – I become wiser and greater as a person. It is the best beauty cure – it makes you radiate with inner beauty. It heals pains and fears and makes me relax my neck after long days.
Love is essential in meditation, it is the basis of the feeling of warmth which spreads in your body, the very foundation of relaxing. It is letting yourself feel well. It is wishing others to feel well. And its power is enormous.
Love overwhelmed me today, like love does sometimes. It opened my heart towards many things that I had forgotten to forgive, and things which I had more or less consciously chosen not to forgive. Now I forgave, and oh, I feel so much better. And wiser.
And if you should believe quantum conciousness-theory, and many teachings on spirituality and God, I probably became wiser today.
Through LOVE.
The traditional Chinese character for love (愛)
consists of a heart (middle) inside of “accept,” “feel,” or “perceive,” which shows a graceful emotion
The 34-year old supermodel Kate Moss has beautiful breasts and quite a tasty body to go with them, although personally I find her a bit too thin. I’ve just opened the issue of “Heute” – a free daily paper/tabloid, distributed in Vienna that has a naked woman on page 3 every day – which I found on the seat next to me in the Vienna underground. The almost naked Kate on page 3 is the first thing I see. Petite, with very well pronounced cheek bones and open mouth, she is hinting at her well shaved vulva, radiating with the fulfilment of some of the most cherished dreams of the contemporary woman and man: to have the looks of a 20-year old at least until the age of fifty and, above all, to stay thin. Along with this, one should preferably have a pair of small, firm and tempting tits, just like Kate.
Even if I am less bisexual than I sometimes would like to be, I do now and then find myself looking at other women’s breasts. They are soft and beautiful and well, irresistible somehow. Anyway, today I’m looking a bit extra carefully, since I’m on a mission to find breasts on the streets of Vienna and ponder on the position of breasts in contemporary society. I have been very lucky; right now the proportionally biggest breasts in town, the 15 FF-cup breasts of the 11,1 cm high female stone-age statue Venus of Willendorf, are decorating every second billboard. She just had her 100th anniversary of being found and the Museum of Natural History decided to celebrate this with a special exhibition. I decided to visit it and on my way I found Kate.
The British sculptor Marc Quinn actually finds Kate so much in coherence with the contemporary beauty ideals, that he chose her to sit for him when he wanted to portray these ideals in the statue Sphinx. This bronze statue was uncovered in 1996, but a gold replica can soon be seen at the British Museum in London. Made out of pure gold it shows Kate sitting in a yoga position, a pose that is quite a contrast to her reputation as a “sex, drugs and rock and roll queen”. My thoughts drift away to the Christian myth about the golden calf, at the same time that I ponder the fact that the statues Venus of Willendorf seem to have very little in common with the actual goddess Venus. But I’ll get back to that later, because my attention is drawn to another woman who occupies the opposite corner of page 3 in today’s “Heute”: Hillary Clinton.
Interestingly enough Hillary is hiding her breasts in this picture. It is just a result of perspective, but in combination with Kate’s lustful exposure of herself it becomes very symbolic. Like many other women in the sphere of political power, Hillary has quite an un-sexy image. I know a bit more than I want to about her husbands sex life, but absolutely nothing about Hillary’s. Even if her husband surely helped her with her campaign as much as her daughter, I rarely heard her mention him or her relationship to him, whereas she can’t say enough about her daughter and motherhood, mostly of her being a proud mother. Well, in western culture motherhood turned asexual through the icon “Holy Mary”, so I guess being a mother is ok for a female politician, but I’m quite sure that being a wife or sexy can be very difficult, even dangerous.
On top of page 3 in today’s “Heute” is a picture of a young, beautiful woman in a red dress beside her 20 year older boyfriend, some TV-celebrity. They just were engaged. Her generous décolletage is nicely framed by the fine, red silk, which, in contrary to Hillary’s appearance, does all but to hide anything. In between these three photos of contemporary women there is a story telling about problems in flight traffic with the headline Heaven and Hell and another telling about the quite late absolution of the last woman in Europe to be burned as a witch. Looking at all this combined, I’m going like: “Wow, here is the present dilemma of female sexuality on just one page!”, and it goes something like this:
beautiful tits can be a great mean of power, but to get real power today you have to hide your tits. As a woman, you can use your sexual power to get famous or married, or hide it as good as you can and go for an intellectual career. I have seen many cases with women who have tried to show that they have both and they ended up facing a real witch-hunt. Conclusion: one cannot both hide and show one’s tits at the same time. The whore-madonna-complex, the woman as a gate to heaven OR a gate to hell, is still very much present in our life. Looking at this page I feel that the way a woman keeps her breasts actually can have a great symbolic meaning, even telling what kind of power she is using at the moment.
I come to think about what one of my teachers in shamanism has told me about the view upon women and men in shamanism: women are seen as the more powerful of the two sexes, but they need a man to be the spark: to get that power going. Since I have grown up in Sweden with a mother and aunts with very feministic ideas and impressive careers, I used to find this idea to be traditionalistic, patriarchal fundamentalism. Don Garcia used to argue that this is the reason why societies that suppress women loose everything in the end, since women in these societies cannot produce enough power for the society to function. I had a firm belief in that we all have both creating and nurturing power and we can all be whatever we want, both at the same time. Nowadays I am not so sure any more, since I have found that men and women actually are different, but I do not know how we are different, or why are we different, or if our differences have anything to do with our physical features or if it results in us having different kinds of power. But that we women should be something like helpless collies carrying around loads of power without being able to do anything with it? I don’t think so. Suddenly I find myself thinking that breast milk is much tastier than sperm, and I have to smile at myself.
I am finally at my goal, facing the about 28.000 years old Venus of Willendorf. Such female figures in many variations are often found among stone-age findings, this one being one of the best kept in the world. She is very small, but very impressive with her huge breasts and a belly that tells the tales of several childbirths. In one of the books about her in the museum shop, I read that no one knows what she and her sisters actually stand for. There are theories saying everything from that they were stone age pin-ups, symbols for the domestication of the woman, just different women or dolls, to that they were protective spirits, fruitfulness symbols, the Mother Goddess or other goddesses. I suddenly think, what if they were like a “we-where-here”- sign in a time of matriarchal culture, where every tribe was symbolized through a different female figure?! Just as I think about this, I read in the exhibition folder that most of our interpretations are just projections of our own ideas and beliefs, and I have to laugh a bit at myself again. Instead of making more crazy assumptions, I turn to admire the Venus of Willendorf.
Looking at her motherly body I can’t help thinking that she must be an image of Mother Earth. If not, she should be, she feels like she would be. If she is, I am not sure that she would have liked the boring and way too organized exhibition of minerals on the second floor of the museum. She would probably be appalled and more than angry about the environmental crisis, which the museum is describing in the corridor just outside this room. I’m not so sure that she would have liked the three stereotypical images of women in “Heute”either.
With her worn out, faceless appearance the Venus of Willendorf is not really a goddess of “beauty”, like Venus. But she and her huge tits radiate power, the abundance of nourishment and care of motherhood – and she is incredibly beautiful. By looking at her it is easy to believe that women carry a huge surplus of power that they can share as they wish: I want to be her, I am her, I feel that immense power, at the same time I want to be Hillary and a little bit like Kate. Maybe even a tiny bit like the woman in the red dress and, well, many things. I feel that I am all that and yet I do not know what I am, but I will continue to show off my breasts, or at least parts of them, when and how I feel like it. And just like with the meaning of the Venus of Willendorf and her sisters, the meaning of me showing my symbols of womanhood will lie mainly in the mind of the beholder.
This gives that a particular being can only be “the best at” being the unique being that this particular being is.
How can you compare yourself to others if everyone are unique? Sure, comparisons can be interesting, for example, they can help you see in which areas your talents are the strongest, or what is better or not so good for you under given circumstances, but there are no guaranties for that.
To really compare two things to each other fairly to decide who is the best in some aspect, they would be required to be tested under the same circumstances and well, considering the fact that all beings are unique and that we all experience everything in a unique way, according to my opinion, this is as close to impossible as something can get.
A good example is taste in music, which is so obviously unique for every individual. We might consider a piece of music good or bad, but something that I dislike can be a fantastic experience to someone else. There might even be music that most of us consider horrible, lets say an unfinished, falsely played cereal commercial to choose an extreme. Hearing even this tune might for a particular person be an enlightening musical experience, and if it can be that, can it not then, under given circumstance, be the best for someone? In one aspect “the best”?!
What does that say about being “the best”?
Look, if a piece of music wins a competition, it doesn’t necessarily mean that this is the best piece of music in that competition, but more that it was the piece of music that most of the jury liked at that given moment in time. Ok, lets take another example. Lets take a running competition. If a runner wins a race in an arena at a given moment, it shows just that – this runner was fastest at that given moment in time under those circumstances. But does that make this runner the best runner of those who participated in the race? No, it doesn’t, because the runners are all unique; someone of them might have had a bad day another might be insecure, yet another might be really fast but haven’t developed their technique yet…
I think that one could reason like this around any competition or comparison etc which should decide who is the best. Yet, in our society, we are told to be the best, find the best, buy the best, every day; as if this was possible at all. How come? What effects does this have on us?
It is a true Sisyphus tale – you know, the guy who in Greek mythology who forever has to push a stone up a hill just to see it roll down again right before he reach the top –
trying to be the best or finding the best is a pointless task that can never be achieved, even if we try eternally…
except for when we do what is natural for us: being the best at being ourselves.
We are all the best at being the unique being who we are.
Shift into Power 