Psychic Mind: Why I Am Not a Christian

Why I Am Not A Christian etc. by Richard Lee Van Der Voort, M.A.

Bertrand Russell, the British Pragmatist also known for his bad breath, already used this title for his well-known (among students of Philosophy) essay, but he won’t mind if I use it again since he has been in the Spirit World for quite a long time, if the notion of “time” applies “over there”. I don’t even remember Bertie’s reasons, but I know my own. First of all, I am definitely NOT a Christian for the same reason the Biblical Jesus of Nazareth was not. I’m not sure he even knew that he was, according to the Bible, the New testament, he stars in, “the Christ”. But I do believe that the Spirit of God worked in and through him. I believe that he was an authentic, a genuine First Class vehicle for God, the Father.                                                       

Well, I don’t know about that term either, “Father”. How about “Father-Mother” God, the One and the Two Principles, or the Creative and the Receptive, that the One through the Two is the cause of all Being or Reality, like the Ancient Toaists of China believed and explained in the great work, THE I CHING or CHINESE BOOK OF CHANGES. God the Creator or Manifestor, the Ultimate some have referred to as The First Cause or Prime Mover. The ancient Indian trinitarian or triadic principles of dynamic, ever-changing process, THE CREATIVE, THE PERPETUATOR AND THE DESTROYER. He, She, It, or That is also known as the Ground of Being, or best yet as in “Star Wars”, THE FORCE! “May the Force be with you!” declared Obi Wan Kenobi! while Cary Fisher, daughter of singer, brief husband of Liz Taylor and dope addict Eddie, wore braided hair buns over her ears, stood with her slim shoulders slumped, and wrung her hands in concern and fear.

Yes, MAY THE FORCE BE WITH US INDEED! And I believe the Spirit of it always is, IF we invite and open to it, the same as Jesus apparently did and maybe still does. If the stories can be believed. Yes, or No, I am not a Christian for the same reason(s) that Jesus was not a “willing dupe for the Dark Force”. He, Jesus, was a follower of, a vehicle for God the Father. Says so in black and white right there in the Bible if you need a ground for belief such as “authority”. “Of myself I can do nothing,” he is reported to have said, “the Father doeth the work through me.” I’ve always liked that great line and the idea it carries. I or we, like the Master Jesus, are the receivers of what the Force works through us super-dynamically. We may be knowers, speaker-teachers and even healers, movers and shakers, but always as the vehicle for the Prime Mover, God the Father. Like Jesus, some of us follow the Force, or God who is the source of all. The ancient Taoists of China made a big deal of FOLLOWING, and “flowing with” the “Way” or what IS.

If it is true as the Christian Bible says, that we “live, move and have our being in Him,” then we can never go wrong, IF AND WHEN we are tuned in, or, “attuned” to the Mind of God which is Absolute and Infinite, or so we’ve been taught, ever so in the abstract, to believe. At least on Sundays. The rest of the week may be “the Devil’s domain” during which time we mostly devote our energy or Life Force, our mind and being, to “getting and spending” as the poet suggested. Actually it is not quite accurate to say “the Mind of God” since ALL IS MIND OR SPIRIT.                                                  

God is Spirit which is Mind which is Spirit. How do, how can I know that? I choose to believe it, quite apart from Biblical authority, and differing from the atheist and agnostic. Actually I contend that I know it to be fact a priori or intuitively since as an experiencer, as a knower, I “live, move and have my being in Him” or God. I am never not “of God” even if at times I have felt alienated, as the Existentialists point out. But, I contend, that feeling of separation is an illusion, and not one to be needlessly suffered. So if I or we do not take advantage of being that “particle”, that “particular” in the Greater Being, the All, the One, the mind-spirit that we are as participants in Him, whose fault is it? for God’s sake!

But, alas and alack, our Self or Spirit is encased in material here on dualistic Planet Dirt! We are temporarily embodied beings so that we may live out our dramas in experience for our personal evolution or learning. So that we may operate, pragmatically, as vehicles for the God-Force if and when we are hooked up and working right.

No, I am not a Christian for the same reason Jesus wasn’t. Like That, the Ultimate, that we are a part of, inextricably bound up in, we, like our Source, were never born and are undying but rather, always were, as a particular within the All... the Force, the One, the Source. That is the essential TRUTH of our particular or individual life, however embryonic. “Ye are gods in the making”, Edgar Cayce, the great American seer, proclaimed repeatedly while in deep psychic trance. He meant to say that we are EVOLUTIONARY BEINGS, neither fixed nor static, however much we try to limit ourselves by definitions and descriptions. All Knowledge, all Wisdom, all Truth is within since we “live, move and have our being in Him.” And yes, I take that fact to be self-evident, so why quibble about it? Yes, neither I nor Jesus called ourselves Christians even though the culture we live in is always after us to describe ourselves that way. Ol’ buddy Bertie Russell and I agree, even if for different reasons.

Let this writing be seminal. You know, analogically speaking, like the MASCULINE semen that fertilizers the FEMININE egg that causes you and me, or essential spirit-selves, to come into embodied being. And for what reason? To EVOLVE ourselves of course, which follows if Cayce’s source was right that we are “gods in the making”. And could it, might it be that God the Ultimate is an evolutionary ever-changing boundless entity also, just like those of us who are never not in and of Him? No beginning, no end, only always was and ever changing, ever evolving. Can we ever wrap our little earth brain-mind around that concept? Not likely, but, if we meditate right or well, we can move closer to and maybe become one with our IN-SIGHT, our deep Inner Knowing. And with that, perhaps, we can become content, even if we do not label ourselves as “Christian” or anything else other than human and evolving.

Richard Lee Van Der Voort, M.A. Please see my website that includes books, blogs and psychic services at http://psychicconsultingbyemail.com. For more information about psychic readings my e-mail my address is psychicmind.vandervoort231@gmail.com

Psychic Mind: Up from Down, or, Getting Over Mild Depression

Up from Down, or, Getting Over Mild Depression by Richard Lee Van Der Voort, M.A.

As a counseling psychic I encounter a wide range of human problems. One of the most common is boredom or periods of mild depression. I have client-friends who display symptoms of that pervasiveness sense of unhappiness that indicates mild depression. After a night of unrelenting pain and very little sleep, I was headed in that direction myself today... until I thought about it. As an active psychic counselor, I always have work to do, and if not that, projects that also need attention. But when in a gray mood, head seemingly stuffed with cotton, the inner eye unable to focus and an aging body that loathes to move for fear another muscle cramp will wrench my leg, I remain in a half stupor but more awake than asleep. So what to do. How to get going. How to come up from under a dark funk and become positive and active once again is the problem to solve.

While growing up, I was fortunate in some ways, though creative people always view their childhood as having been fairly bleak or even rotten. I was an only begotten child and both my parents worked. Being generous folks, they bought me toys. Everything from boxing gloves to a microscope to view my own eyelashes through. Not everything I thought I wanted at the time, but I got a lot. Toys that I enjoyed, that I used to make me happy in my alone Land of Pretend. My closest buddy lived a couple of miles away so I spent long periods sans company. I loved humor as a kid and for quite a while wanted to be a cartoonist since I waited each long week for the Sunday “funny papers” to come. Growing older I decided I’d rather be a stand up comedian like the ones I heard on “radio”. Funny people such as Bud Abbott and Lou Costello. But before becoming a touring psychic counselor and speaker, I became a stand-up classroom teacher with a sense of humor. But even as an adult I’ve spent prolonged periods of time alone between girlfriends and wives which gave near-constant opportunity to suffer mild depression or find ways to get up and over whatever seemed to be bothering me.

Toys and developed interests always got me through. Instead of slumping and slouching around wasting my precious time, I’ve had a range of toys and interests to choose from to get up and over mild depression, those feelings of empty loneliness and general unhappiness. Fortunately I had a father who messed around with many musical instruments, my favorite being the mandolin that I also took up when I was maybe fourteen. Why I left the school marching band is another story. Oboe was best left, I decided, to snake charmers. The drum had been denied. In short order I was playing lead mandolin in my teacher’s band, all of us his students and that became my social life. And once again I was fortunate to have parents who loved and listened to all the old time popular music. So many, many down times over the years, when mild depression and feelings of unhappiness struck, I’d gather up my mandolin and sheet music and play for an hour or so, and maybe even sing, and then the blue funk was gone. Not everybody plays music, but everyone can have an equivalent, something they get off on doing when alone and a bit down. Mandolin has been my adult toy, but not only that.

One of the best things that can happen to a person with at least moderate intelligence is to become schooled in reading and writing. Reading that matters, not the junk and pap of the day. Books that makes one think while being entertained. And if so blessed with talent to write, one can come up by going within and writing a personal journal, a book of observations and reflections. When I used to write “Confessional Poetry”, I called the results “harnessed hang-ups”. That which could depress me, mildly, I turned into expressive poems that other people could relate to. So, I was not only a musician, but a poet as well. Those have been two of my many basic toys always available when the dark clouds descend and cause unhappiness, my vague sense of loneliness and emotional distress. My toys are and have been both positive and compensatory.

As a psychic counselor, I sometimes help my client-friends to remember their favorite toys, their positive and potentially fulfilling activities that can help them up from that occasional blue funk that like a fat toad squats on one’s soul and won’t get off. Developed or developing talents or interests can save us from much generalized unhappiness and emotional distress that we call being depressed. If we have identifiable problems, the first thing we might ask ourselves is if we have any control over such situations. Or if what we concern ourselves with is any of our cotton-pickin’ business in the first place! Letting others live their own lives as they see fit and the best way they know how can go a long way in getting rid of problems we don’t have in the first place. Meddlers and control freaks need to learn that for starters. Doing so, by sweeping out what does not belong to us, can clear up a large portion of what we regard as “depressing” problems. As a psychic counselor, I teach my client-friends such things when I can and if they listen instead of choosing to wallow in problems that are not problems at all since they are not the owners.

But, that squat toad can still sit on one’s soul for other reasons, ones that do belong to us. That is a good time, a very good time, to remember our adult toys, that which pleases us to play with, that energizes and gets us up and doing once again. If nothing else, a curious person always has much to learn. I am a book store addict, same as I was when riffling through the magazine rack and book stand at the town drug store when I was a kid. Now, as then, I buy what I can afford, books that might possibly be interesting, if not at the time, later, like when suffering a blue funk. In current time, I have my Best Friend Mister-Doctor-Professor Google who always has rousing material I’ve wanted to know about. As I say, learning to read and write, and think a bit, can save us from the unnecessary pain of unhappiness and mild depression when it descends. And the best thing is that there are toys for people with every bent or kink, not only us verbal-conceptual types.

Richard Lee Van Der Voort, M.A. Please see my website that includes books, blogs and psychic services at http://psychicconsultingbyemail.com. For more information about psychic readings my e-mail my address is psychicmind.vandervoort231@gmail.com