As promised in recent posts, I want to share some of my spiritual beliefs and start to explain them.
The specific question which I asked you a few days ago was: what do you think about the apparent “divine intervention” which saved Evette and I from teaching in Tokyo when the earthquake hit?
In the comments section of that post, readers like you immediately hit on the fact that it’s a question of definition. What do you mean by god or “divine,” what’s the difference between “upstairs” and “inside”? I realize I cannot give you my thoughts without trying to be clear what I mean, and I invite you to write in and point out any inconsistencies.
But first, I explained yesterday that I would start my own personal views with this disclaimer: The following views are the personal opinion of one of the co-founders of RPT but do not represent the RPT technique. These views have no bearing on how effective RPT is for you. The other co-founder and teachers of RPT have quite different beliefs.
Can you guess I’m a lawyer – always covering my butt! 
So, after lots of contemplation and philosophy, my firm belief is “No. I do not believe in divine intervention of any sort.”
Let me explain.
Intuition and higher consciousness
The higher consciousness that I believe in is my own (and your own). I do believe in super-consciousness – that there’s much more to us as Beings than we realize. For most of us, our brains cannot fathom the enormousness of our potential, so we make ourselves small.
Intuition to me is not information from outside, it’s information from parts of our self that we can’t squeeze into our consciousness. When someone says “God told me…” or “my message from my angels…” or whatever – what they are basically saying is this: “I cannot believe that I am so extraordinary to have these insights, so I’m parceling that spiritual part of myself into a separate being that I call God / Angel / Higher Self / etc.”
This belief about intuition is derived from my readings of Peak States research. What they found was that as you clear trauma from your body, those external parts of you become internal. What you thought was God / Angels / Higher Self are part of your Being, and you can unite with them. We have applied this idea in Reference Point Therapy (using our own simple clearing techniques).
When these different voices or “minds” integrate with the rest of you, it’s a state I call coherence. Click this link to see the videos I made and articles I have already written about this important topic of wholeness and how it can help you to heal.
Divine intervention
Given that I believe that divinity is a part of our own sense of self; clearly I am not going to believe in an invisible hand that creates, or closes, opportunities for us.
If there is a guiding force that makes things happen (or not happen), then that guiding force is a part of You. [As I quoted Sir Terry Pratchett last week: “Someone up there is looking out for me. It’s probable Me.”]
OK, so what happened in Japan?
As you might recall, our courses in Japan were cancelled or postponed due to a series of bizarre events including a strange technical error which everyone forgot to check. It was weird and we didn’t understand it.
Later, when the earthquake hit, both Evette and I and our Japanese translator Yukiko all had the identical thought: “wow –this must be why the course was cancelled. Good thing we aren’t teaching today.”
I’ve already said that I don’t believe that there was an invisible hand upstairs guiding the cancelation of the course. As grateful as I am that I was not there for the earthquake or radiation leak, I don’t believe that it was divine intervention.
I meant think about the idea for 10 seconds and you can see how foolish it is – why would I deserve divine intervention but not the thousands who died? What about my friend Paul who was married in Tokyo last Saturday? Didn’t he and his guests deserve a bit of divine intervention? Clearly, the idea is silly.
I have the same thought every time I watch the Oscars or the Olympics and see the medal winner thank God for their win. Why would God favor that winner over the hundreds who tried – and whose belief in God is just as strong?
It just does not add up.
OK so there’s no Divine Intervention. What about Your Higher Intervention?
OK so I’ve left till last a really interesting question. Since I don’t believe in upstairs help, what about My Self helping myself? What about that higher part of me, what we call our Beingness? Is it possible that that part of me caused the course to be cancelled to protect me and our work?
On the plus side, this argument doesn’t fail the above “favoritism by God” problem. But’s still a difficult argument that borders on the absurd.
For the argument to hold up (for you to believe that some higher force – possibly Me – sabotaged my Japan course so I’d be safe), it would require believing that:
- there was some force, possibly part of me, that knew that the earthquake was going to happen at least 2 months before it happened;
- that part of me was powerful enough to sabotage a website booking system, but not powerful enough to say, nudge me to teach the course a month earlier or a few months later; and
- even though that part of me knew that 10,000 people or more were going to be killed, He didn’t think to warn the higher parts of everyone else to get the heck out of there!
In short, my answer to the question is “no.” I think it’s preposterous to suggest that there is any connection between the cancellation of the course and the earthquake.
In fact, this is a classic example of the fallacy that I wrote about a couple of weeks ago – human being look for meaning in things. Sometimes bad stuff happens (a tiny website error cost me a lot of money) and sometimes that’s followed by really bad stuff (thousands of people died). The human brain likes to connect the dots. “Oh that’s why I had to cancel the course…” It’s pure Ego – that part of us that needs there to be a reason and an explanation.
The truth is, stuff happens. If there has to be a reason then the reason is that, I attracted the cancellation of the course. I know that I had some fears about language / translation issues. I probably unconsciously sabotaged the course. And, totally unrelated to this an earthquake occurred. You can see how the human brain would prefer to blame the cancellation on an earthquake than self-sabotage!
Should we believe in coincidences?
A lot of New Agers say “there’s no such thing as coincidence.” So you might be wondering, am I suggesting that the cancellation of the course was a coincidence? My answer to that is “yes and no.”
I think coincidences are underrated. I do believe (from chaos theory and law of attraction) that vibrations affect other vibrations. Everything has an effect. This is beautiful in theory, but in practice it is so incredibly complex (there are so many vibrations going on) that you can almost never say that “A caused B.”
In other words, coincidences are things which are probably connected but we’ll never really understand all the strings that connect them. In that sense, no I don’t believe in coincidences, but I also don’t believe that “everything happens for a reason.” Things just happen, usually it’s something to do with the law of attraction. But the actual mechanism is so phenomenally complex we can never really hope to figure it out. Nor are we meant to!
In fact that’s the beauty of the system. Life is huge and complex, and we are but little players. Instead of feeling overwhelmed by that, embrace it. It’s fun, it’s a little silly, sometimes scary. Embrace the unknown and live an amazing life, which means freeing up all that time you are wasting by thinking “now why did this happen?”; “what does that mean?;” and “what are my angels/guides/god trying to tell me here?”
There – I promised my 2 cents and you got it. Now it’s your turn. Time for you to comment and share you views. Remember – you don’t need to agree with me, it’s usually more fun if you don’t. Comments can be anonymous. Let me know your opinion; comments are your method of “paying” for anything you liked on this site.
Blessings
Simon
Kryon 
Donna Kuck 
Tom Jones 
Shane Marsh 
Yael 
Kim 
Renee from Melbourne 
Maysan Marouf 
teresa 
Sarah 
Dalben 
Robert Johnson 
As much as I’ve tried to find something here to disagree with I am struggling. All very well thought cogent arguments.
That said I’m going to nitpick:-)
“Things just happen, usually it’s something to do with the law of attraction. But the actual mechanism is so phenomenally complex we can never really hope to figure it out. Nor are we meant to!”
I agree up until the statement – “nor are we meant to.” Meant to by whom? This implies a higher being that decides what is meant to be and what is not. Nonsense, we decide it by our thoughts and actions. There is nothing else….until it can be proved to exist.
It is our nature as humans to be inquisitive…it is what has dragged us out of the cave after all. As humans we will continuously seek to find answers to any and everything. This has been the way always. Simply because something is complex is no reason to give up on attempting to understand it. If we were living a mere 100 years prior it would have seemed unfathomable to understand even half of the things that exist as common everyday knowledge today. Going back even further out of course when man thought the earth was flat it was the spirit of finding out what was the truth that brought us the knowledge that in fact we live on a ball not a plate.
[Reply]
Simon Rose Reply:
March 16th, 2011 at 4:01 pm
Well said Chris. I’m so glad you agreed to visit the site and take up the reins of “resident skeptic/atheist!”
I agree with your criticism of “nor are we meant to.” With reflection what I really should have said is “nor do we need to.”
To me some of the magic of the universe is that it works without us needing to understand the details. Does a baseball player become a better baseball player after studying Newton’s laws of gravity and thermodynamics? Probably not.
Just thoughts.
Simon
PS if you don’t promote your own blog I’ll have to do it for you. People should click Chris’ name to visit his capitalist exploits blog. According to the blog it offers opinionated, rational analysis that will get you questioning everything from politics to what can make you successful in life, while candidly discussing profitable investments being made by two self made investors.
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