4th December 2019 I'd rather have questions that can't be answered than have answers that can't be questioned. Richard Feynman As I approach the end of thinking capacity and possibly pen down a pageful of imaginative nonsense I sit down and wonder whether God approves of being the subject of my investigations? Am I taking it too far? Can a man rightfully ask who God is?...oops, Moses beat me to the buzzer millenniums ago and God said "I am who I am." What an answer for what a question. Anyway, here we go again as modern day Moses's.... curious, doubtful and puzzled. It's one thing to believe in what you know and see, it's another whole otherworldly thing to believe in what you don't know or see. You see, for believers, there are divine books written by God through annointed prophets who describe an invisible God, an invisible Satan, an invisible heaven, an invisible hell, invisible angels, invisible demons, invisible spirits, a past so incomprehensibly long before us and a future equally so incomprehensibly long after us. Then somehow, all humanity is expected to shake their heads vigorously for three seconds then "voilà " like magic, we are all staunch believers. I don't know how exactly all that is working out for you as a person. What I know is, some close-minded believers have already been so offended and have closed or are closing this page cursing me under their breaths "How dare Vic, to hell with him." Well if one really is a believer they should in the very least say a prayer for me instead of cursing me, so on their behalf and for my sake and yours "May God guide and bless us all"... you can say amen in your heart but also feel free to type it in the comments section. Well first, I understand why someone would react by dismissing me this early and to some extent I expect to be dismissed by a couple of people...you see every perspective boils down to an individual level and I would not hold anyone against their individual perspective on anything. Second, I don't write for Christians and neither do I write for Muslims, I don't write for traditionalists and neither do I write for scientists, I don't write for believers and neither do I write for atheists...I write first and foremost for my own clarity and then for every other pair of eyeballs willing to engage their mind in belief-challenging rhetorics. See, writing and reading are more alike than we realize...readers and writers must at all times be objective. One must set aside their personal beliefs and analyze information for what it is and not for what they think it should be....a reader must be totally unbiased when receiving information and a writer must restrain himself from selling his personal prejudices to recipients of his craft yet at the same time convey his messages as personally as he can in an honest attempt to primarily portray a message rather than to compel a reader into accepting the message, the final decision should remain with the reader.
Now you see the tight space I must restrain my pen to. It's the mark of an educated man to be able to entertain a thought without conceiving it. Similarly, it's the mark of a fool to discard a thought that differs with his own thought merely on the basis of his thoughts being the only thoughts he considers truthful. We defend our belief systems and guard our heartheld truths, and the entire time we put up these defences we almost always forget that these beliefs and truths were almost entirely inherited and not self-acquired. So much of our personal beliefs and truths were passed down to us by our parents and their faiths, our teachers and their education systems, out tribes and their cultural practices...then we come out with this second-hand knowledge that was passed down to us by someone who had it passed down to them by someone else who had it passed down to them by someone who had it passed down to them and you guessed it right (there is no end in sight).....then we take this information as first hand knowledge that is unquestionably true and we dismiss everyone else who thinks different from us forgetting that they also had an origin that shaped them in the same way that our origin shaped us. We are all at arms ready to unleash verbal and physical nuclear power on anyone who challenges our beliefs, even when those beliefs are detrimental to our progress. I am a writer, this blogsite literally recreates the world in a miniature fashion... Articles are mirrors and at the same time provide a writer and a reader with a common space in which they can exchange thoughts thus creating a mental community where we agree, disagree, agree to disagree and most importantly disagree to agree. So if I offend any of you then I have no apologies for the offence, it's impossible not to offend in a community. Take a bunch of people and throw them into a class, say something totally general to them and best believe that ten out of ten times one or two of those people will be offended everytime you say anything to them and am not excluding myself, I have been very stupid as well and got upset a couple of times when someone said something truthful. Then another reason for my unapologetic approach is that nowadays people are so over sensitive. You say something to someone they get offended, you don't say anything to them, they get offended that you ignored them. You say "Merry Christmas" to a Muslim, he gets offended yet Merry Christmas is a festive greeting. You say "As-salamu alaikum" to a Christian, he gets offended yet the phrase is not Islamic, it's just "Peace be with you" in Arabic. You say this or that, a black person is offended or a white one or a yellow one or even a green person if he exists. You say Guten Morgen to a Jew and if you are a German the Jew labels you a racist, you say bomboclat in some parts of Jamaica and people applaud you but you end up in police custody for saying the same phrase in other parts of Jamaica. People are so damn sensitive it's become annoying, holy cow....oooh daaaaamn...I just offended an Indian priest. Talking about holy cows though, how are you going to convince a native Indian to eat beef when he grew up worshipping cows together with his parents and grandparents? How is my Muslim friend going to convince me to throw away half a kilo of fried pork chops just because pork is forbidden in his faith? How am I going to convince my Muslim friend about the trinity of God if the concept was not stated in his faith's doctrine? How did our colonizers convince us of the gospel when they came and found our forefathers worshipping trees and rocks? Long ago in European mornachies, royal families had a culture of in-breeding. That means siblings would marry each other to give birth to pure breeds of their bloodline so that to retain the purity of their royalty and marrying outside the family was taboo.
Now how do you tell a royal Princess on her wedding day about to marry her elder brother that incest is sin when her mother and father are siblings?...how do you tell her that incest is unnatural knowing very well that such an utterance would amount to calling her an abomination of nature and a product of a cursed lineage? Where do you start? You see, beliefs and truths got passed down to all of us and to question another persons beliefs almost always equates to insulting his/her entire ancestry. That's why, the subject of God is so avoided because it's something we all differ in and my version of God offends you as much as your version of God offends me. Some topics are no go zones and I appreciate your courage and open mindedness for not dismissing me at the first temptation to do so. "If any one man was given the opportunity to shape the world as he wishes it to be, each man would shape the world as per his personal beliefs and native culture as every man tends to think his own beliefs and cultures are superior to all other beliefs and cultures in existence"
You see, we pity the uneducated for their illiteracy without realising that we are illiterate ourselves. The true form of illiteracy is no longer a lack of education but the lack of an ability to unlearn our beliefs, become empty then continuously test these beliefs against reality, filter them as truths or as deceptions then relearn the beliefs that come out as truthful. That's what life is, an endless journey of learning, unlearning, relearning and we are at different stages of it with most of us caught in the loop of understanding the truth because "our truths" always seem to be clashing with other people's "truths"... learning therefore demands that we develop the ability to set our truths aside and analyze other truths presented to us then finally decide what to consider and what to discard. So now that we have emptied ourselves as empty as we've chosen to empty ourselves, let's really talk about God. I have many friends who are believers, I have three who are atheists, one who believes in nothing and many who don't really know where they stand on this matter. Personally though, whether I choose to believe in God or not, "I'd rather live like there's God than live like there's no God then die and find out that actually there is." So first, I removed all doubt about God's existence, I searched for God though without really knowing how to search for God yet somehow and in the least expected time and place I managed to find Him. God is like a pencil in an Afro, I frisked my pockets, cleaned out my desk drawers, asked my mum if she had seen God that morning, called my girlfriend and asked if I had left God at her place, I checked my bags and all the pockets in the clothes I wore for the past week, I came up with a story on how I would convince my teacher that I had misplaced God, my pastor said I should check in the Bible and all I found in my old testament was a bookmarker, I perused the new testament and revelations didn't reveal anything to me so I closed the book and as humanly as we get we eventually end up desperately expressing our turmoil in prayer, and just as I was about to go to my knees i held my hands together on the top my head in despair and like magic...I felt God, I found him neatly wrapped in the strands of my nappy hair. You see, we look for God everywhere else except in ourselves. We look at that born again grandma and see God, we glance at that Muslim cleric and see God then we look at ourselves in the mirror and see eyebags and pimples. We jump from one church to another saying maybe their God is bigger, we move from Anglican to Catholic then to Presbyterian and to Pentecostal then end up as Jehovah witnesses at a Seventh Day Adventists crusade before finally turning to Buddhism after two attempts in Islam. We search in churches, temples, mosques, synagogues, shrines and sculptures as if God needed a concrete slab to stand on. We look around but never within. We look to the sky scanning for God's fingerprints but never look to feel his blueprint within our spiritual imprint. You see, we are eternal souls that have a spirit and a body. The union between a spirit and a body is called conception and the separation of the two is called death. The soul is who we are and that same soul is what links the spirit and the body. The spirit is for the supernatural just like the flesh is for the natural, the flesh cannot access the spirit realms , whether emotionally, psychologically, physically or mentally, since the two worlds are governed by different laws.
John 3:6
"What is born of the spirit is of the spirit and what is born of the flesh is of the flesh"
The spirit never sins and is your pathway to God, the body is ever sinful, the soul is caught in between the spirit and the body, or rather between righteousness and treachery.
When one dies, the spirit goes back to God and the body goes back to the earth, the soul is kept somewhere in wait for the judgement day where it's fate is decided and eventually goes to either heaven or hell.
Now you see, I once fell into a great darkness, a darkness so immense my soul was collapsing inwards.
A sinful life had driven me into a dead end, I was either going to come out dead or reborn.
My spirit demanded an overhaul of my core and a renewal of my being, this was a regime coup my soul was not ready for and totally rejected this change angering my spirit into a terrifying conflict that instantly produced a fight where I found myself to be the fighter, the opponent and at the same time the battlefield.
My thoughts were becoming more suicidal by the second.
My mind was racing against a sanity clock and I was losing grip of everything I knew as reality as each second passed.
Desperate to stay sane, alone in a room and in an unknown world, bedsheets drenched in sweat and an unusual heat surrounding me as if the house was on fire, and yes though there were no physical flames around, I could feel myself enclosed in a fire fence I could only extinguish through prayer.
I had two options on the table, getting consumed by the fire surrounding me or letting my spirit guide me into divine enlightenment.
This was like standing outside a door that was written God, then wondering what would happen if I opened the door but in that wonder I could feel a power pulling me and dragging my feet forcefully towards this door.
This power had latched on to my spirit and as much as my spirit fearlessly trusted this power and demanded that i follow suit, i was latched onto fear, doubt and a conviction that I was not ready for whatever was behind that door.
I then figured out that the only way to overpower this overwhelming power was prayer, which was pretty much pointless because that would be praying to the same power that was overpowering me and prayer would only result in submission to this power instead of resistance to it.
It was a lost cause, only prayer that would allow me an escape would be a prayer to beg this power to leave me alone, I was too scared and am as foolish as a human can get so I started praying to be left alone.
Problem was, after a sentence or two of resistant prayer I would forget everything else I rehearsed to say and would find myself praying for redemption.
My soul prayed to God for God to save me from God, my spirit prayed to God for God to save me from myself.
These encounters repeated themselves every day for a couple of weeks and for around six months I was not sure whether I was sane or insane.
Maybe I was a madman who sometimes acted normal or maybe I was a normal person frequented by temporary madness time to time.
It's such a hard task to put these descriptions into writing, it is like describing colours you've never seen and sounds you've never heard while walking through a place you've never been, it's a totally different place that one cannot capture with the human mind and for that reason there are parts of this experience I cannot cover no matter how hard i try.
You see, I figured my failure out and this is such a common failure with most people.
We don't see God because we look for him using our eyeballs.
We don't hear God because we listen to him using our ear lobes.
We don't feel God because we feel for him with our fingertips.
The list of failures goes on infinitely.
We try to fit God into a human logic and bind Him with space and time not realising God is everywhere at the same time.
Genesis 1:1
In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.
The beginning is not the beginning of God, the beginning is the beginning of time, space and matter and the end is not the end of God, the end is the end of time, space and matter, God began the beginning and ends the end so God doesn't need time and space to exist, God doesn't not exist within time and space but time and space exist within God.
That's supernatural and incomprehensibly complex to grasp with a human mind since the mind only comprehends what is natural.
This is as far as my mind has conprehended, to find who God really is one must silence the mind and amplify the spirit.
You see, the natural world works through logic and that's why we learn from the environment then internalise the knowledge, the supernatural is beyond logic and works through discernment where your spirit enlightens you of possessions of vast knowledge that is buried within your spirit, the source of this Knowledge being God who is accessible through that same spirit which is the deepest fibre of your being.
In other articles I ask questions and give answers, but with this...all I can provide is a question and a path to the answer.
You want to know who God really is?...log out and find your spirit.
Victor Mafusa.