Sacred teachings are all around us and have been for centuries. There is great wisdom to be received in these teachings and at the same time, our human interpretation of these teachings have often led to immense separation and unspeakable acts of cruelty towards each other.
I grew up learning about and reading the bible. I wouldn’t call my family overly religious, but we did attend church regularly and there was a general agreement of belief in God and identification with Christianity, in particular.
Later in life, through both personal and academic exploration, I began to alter my previous beliefs to some extent and connect more with the essence of Universal Spiritual Truths as opposed to any one religions’ interpretation of those Truths.
Early on in my academic career, I took a World Religions course that was extremely interesting and informative. I began to recognize as my studies progressed that when you peeled away all the ritual, tradition, and interpretation, that almost all religions were based in some core foundational truths. Love, compassion, enlightenment, divinity, service were common in most of the religions I reviewed.
I started to think that maybe there was more than one way to experience connection to something beyond my human experience. I had always felt that some of what I learned in Christianity didn’t quite line up ~ there were contradictions that didn’t make sense to me along the way. Perhaps, we are all travelling toward a similar destination and we have a number of routes we can take to get there. And isn’t that okay ~ isn’t that diversity? We don’t all want the same things. We aren’t all here to contribute in the same ways. And we don’t all have to travel the same path.
When my academic pursuits eventually led me to focusing more intently on Religious Studies, I started to learn that human beings transcribed any sacred teachings that we access through the written word. This was a light bulb moment for me.
I never really thought that the bible, for example, fell out of the sky in its earthly form directly from God. Yet, at the same time I had not considered the role of human interpretation so intently until later in life.
The Role of Personal Interpretation
We cannot ignore that those human beings who were involved in the writing of any sacred teaching did so through the act of their personal interpretation of Sacred Spiritual Truths. Further, this was all done in the context of social structures and societal norms of the time. Huge epiphany.
I believe that Jesus Christ was an enlightened being who walked this Earth some 2000 years ago. I believe that he had learned how to maintain a sense of divine connection and was able to ground that consciousness here on Earth within his very being.
And I believe that we all have the capacity to be able to do that. For most of us though, we tend to see glimpses of this divine connection as opposed to a continual flow ~ but that doesn’t mean it isn’t possible.
Our interpretation of knowledge, wisdom, and experience has everything to do with the way we realize our reality. We are constantly making meaning out of things and situations. We are continually trying to make sense out of what happens in life. We make decisions about what is happening and then act in accordance with those decisions and beliefs. All the while, we can be challenging ourselves to see anew ~ to dig deeper ~ to expand our consciousness ~ to create an alternate reality.
We are that powerful.
So, when you access Sacred Teachings, remember that you are the observer and interpreter in this process. You are translating those teachings based on your own personal lens. What are you coming up with? Can you expand your understanding even further?
Join Us
We are going to take a deep dive into this topic with a specific focus on the Teachings of Jesus on the next episode of Serving Consciously coming up on June 9, 2017. Remember you can join us at 12pm PST that day by going to www.ctrnetwork.com and clicking on Listen Live.
I will be welcoming my guest, Roberta Grimes, to the show to help me explore Sacred Teachings and how we can actually apply these Universal Spiritual Truths in our life today.
Roberta Grimes is a business attorney who had two extraordinary experiences of light in childhood and then spent decades studying nearly 200 years of communications from people we used to think were dead. Using this material and insights from scientific research, she has been able to assemble a detailed picture of what happens at and after death. Having majored in religion at Smith College and extensively studied the Bible, she also has learned that Jesus in the Gospels told us things about God, reality, death, the afterlife, and the meaning and purpose of human life that we could not have confirmed until the twentieth century. Roberta’s books include The Fun of Dying, The Fun of Staying in Touch, Liberating Jesus, and The Fun of Growing Forever. Her weekly Seek Reality radio program has hundreds of thousands of listeners, live and by podcast at webtalkradio.net. Roberta blogs and answers questions at robertagrimes.com.
Let’s get started!
What philosophical teachings do you hold sacred?
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