Excuse Me, I'm Working Backward

There is a thread of religious philosophy that argues we must seek a goodness that comes from outside ourselves. Our bookstores are filled with self-help books intent on resolving and making correct all that we find inside ourselves to be wrong.

Evangelists on television implore us to ‘change’ and accept the correct way to walk. Muslim fanatics will kill children for no reason other than being told it will make Allah pleased if they do so.

We rush forward to buy the books that will set us on a correct path. We embrace the truth of the evangelist and he accepts our money, as we look for the secret of how we are to find our happiness. Muslim extremist blow their bodies into small bits taking other souls with them as they work toward their personal nirvana.

Place your forward looking thinking on pause for a minute and let’s surf backward through our lives. Are we looking for what went wrong on this search? Are we looking for what went right? Are we examining where we failed to equal the measure of the book's lesson or the evangelist’s message?

Move backward more until you reach your initial day on earth. Is the innocence of our childhood corruptible? Many would argue yes, and I think I might stand on the side of those that do so. But, is the original purity of soul forever gone?

The Christian evangelist and the Muslim extremist tell us that humans are evil and filled with greed. They declare even the children to be corrupted in this sea of unrighteous ignorance, doomed to an unmentionable fate. We are told every day, if we chose to listen, that we are evil, our hearts and minds diseased by all that is wrong with us.

Go with me now to a different way of thinking; a way that declares there has never been anything to correct. I want to give you a new understanding that we have been delivered whole and that the unnatural focus on correction has corrupted the innocence and correctness of our lives.

I am reminded of my father. With perfectly good intentions he would install television antennas on our black and white 1960’s version television in attempts at receiving a better picture. By the end of the day what had begun as a viewable quality picture became fuzzy and fuzzier throughout the day as the antenna grew taller and its direction was aligned and then realigned repeatedly. He was searching for ever more clarity rather than accepting the clarity as it originally existed.

We are all too often trapped in the far more serious task of seeking a better way than the way that was divined into us at our birth.

I offer to you that the process of addition undertaken by the applied application of the ‘lessons’ might actually be the reverse of what we actually require. Can we make more progress by removing false beliefs rather than adding more false beliefs?

A proud Baptist preacher once told me that without accepting the exact teachings under which I was raised, I was surely destined for hell. He told me life is about constantly correcting all that we do wrong until we find salvation and forgiveness for all that we have, in fact, done wrong.

I asked him if that meant we were sinners when we were born. He said “Yes, certainly!”

I asked him if he took two rocks and worked and worked by rubbing them together could he produce a diamond.

Smiling because he thought there was a trick in my question, he answered “Not unless the rocks were diamonds to begin with.”

Unwittingly, he spoiled his own argument.

We are all diamonds and we come from God to earth in that fashion. Life may create the need to wash the dirt off of our brilliance from time to time, but no more rubbing is required.

Work backward.

Remove the false beliefs, and embrace the paradox.