By Raphael Awen

(This is Day 7 of an ongoing series, to begin at day 1, go here: https://goo.gl/CgrWXZ)

Raphael: Good Morning everyone here in this growing circle on this first day of the New Year, 2018, and those reading and tracking this Journey, expanding it out and beyond. The Demiurge wasn’t created overnight and it’s going to take a sizable something to reach out to it, wouldn’t you say, Metatron?

Metatron: I wish and intend the very best possible for everyone here and reading this for the New Year. I don’t live much by your calendar, as you know, but I do feel you, as you do. It’s a good way to measure and reflect, as well as to set intentions for the year to come. I’m very excited for the intention at hand to connect with the Demiurge. Your planet and humanity has been under his rule to such a significant degree, far more so, than most realize. Believers and nonbelievers alike.

To your question, Raphael, I feel it does take a sizable something as you say, but maybe not in the way you might think. This isn’t a numbers game that creates a tipping point, per se. Numbers-based tipping points in the collective are more a downstream outcome of what we are setting out to do, rather than the intention or the necessity. What I mean by that is when one of us opens our heart to really connect with the Demiurge, not out of subservient fear, or worshipful reverence, but mutual respect with a healthily boundaried open heart, this creates a very sizable something that hasn’t been done before. The actual number of us approaching only increases the resonance of this one-heart ambassadorship. One of us could do it, but more is better.

Raphael: You really don’t see this as ever having been attempted before, Metatron?

Metatron: I can’t see where it has, Raphael. If it had, there would be a different frequency coming from him, I feel. Up till now, he has still felt to me like he is largely unmoved from his trajectory. This was evidenced in your story, how solid it felt and immersed it felt to be living in his world, like it was thee reality of all realities. When this shifts, Christianity itself will look and feel very different. Christianity tires itself out at times, but the basic piece of duty and obligation keeps returning one way or the other. That is the Demiurge. He doesn’t care about the label, or the setting, as much as the energy.

Raphael: Okay, wow…

Metatron: I’m curious to ask you, what you felt since sharing these big pieces of your story so far?

Raphael: The year-end reflections have been expansive, appreciating the huge difference from where I once was, when I didn’t have any sense of ever being outside of that, to where I am today, very much outside of that. Yesterday, while celebrating with close beloveds, there was so much to let-in, in gratitude and also to feel in exciting new desires arising too.

Last night, I had a dream of a man, someone close from my past, asking for help and looking so worn out. I’ve never had that kind of a dream before, or real life contact either, where I was being approached as a resource from one of the characters in my play this life. So it feels to me like a big ripening is happening for people around their souls timing to make a similar exit from ‘serving God’ as I did.

I feel a ton of compassion for what there is to go through, having felt and lived through every piece.

Metatron: Yes, I feel you need to share how you actually made your exit, not just from a church community, but from Christianity itself, and how that played out.

Raphael: Yeah, that feels like an important piece to digest going forward. I’m wondering about launching into that at the moment or if there any other pieces to digest first. Maybe feeling of any intentions arising for the journey and the year ahead possibly?

Metatron: Good call. I’m all ears.

Rhodes: Raphael, I’m feeling how intensely you went into Christianity, and I did too, embedded in there with you, how we both slowly, but surely, made our exit. There are so many vistas before us now that we are wanting to enter, but it feels like this Journal intention and undertaking is a prerequisite somehow to inhabiting this new land, like a piece of unfinished business. Up till now, we’ve never spoken publicly much about Yahweh, or Jehovah, or the Christian capital ‘G’, God, being a false God. It’s kind of interesting, because one of his Ten Commandments was about not having any ‘graven image, false gods, before him’, when he himself was and is that very thing, a usurped personalization of the source of everything.

So, in all that, I’m feeling we need to make it formal, a coming out publicly, that we are no longer under any kind of fear-bound duty and obligation to the Demiurge, which is what we’re doing here. If we had any tinges of this false fear-based reverence towards him, it only would trigger his default pattern of his God complex.

I am hoping that 2018 goes down in history as the year that this false god domination over humanity and the planet finally dissolves, and a great turnaround occurs. I am willing and wanting to serve that end.

Raphael: Yumm! I love feeling all that in you, Rhodes. I so need you on board with all this. You’re right about the publicly coming out part, onto the archetypal stage, creating a new story to confront an old story, this ‘his story’ to be remade into the true story of the people, of their true origins, their true dimensions, and their true destinations.

Who else?

Merlin: I’m amazed at where your journey has taken you, Raphael. And I’m looking forward to feeling the next pieces of what happened next, and how it happened. What wants to happen now couldn’t unfold if you hadn’t courageously gotten real and honest with yourself in all those choice points. This is true leadership, being able to lead yourself, to lead parts of yourself through the gauntlet of what you dialed up this life. Leadership with others then naturally arises with others desiring a similar awakening, like a spring loaded easy thing. No manipulation or control needed, because it has no relationship with those very low and dense frequencies. I, too, want to feel and state my desire to complete this mission, to take it to where it wants to go, to whatever outcome can arise from it. I so want to second Rhodes’ desire for 2018 to be known as the year that the Demiurge packed up operations on earth and in humanity’s reality. I say, ‘long enough, and no more’.

Raphael: Okay, that’s a vote of love and confidence to take in. Thank you, Merlin. I guess with that I’ll drop back into storytelling mode for a bit then again.

It’s been a good digestion for me again to take in this period of my life from two or three decades back. Sometimes, we need an even longer vantage point from which to look backwards to feel certain things.

All that story I shared about the airport synchronicities got me to feeling that life really is that magical all the time. At least, that’s how I recognize it to be more and more now, with magical moments coming together at all times holding the fabric of reality together, we just struggle to let it in as being that magical, so we have this other equally magical ability to normalize it and numb ourselves to it. We must also need those abilities too for some good reasons or we wouldn’t be doing what we are with them. I personally would like to dial back a big chunk of the normalizing though, that I still do, in order to let in more of the magic.

Wait, that’s philosophizing again, not storytelling. Let me see if I can shift gears. Sometimes it’s easier to teach than it is to vulnerably share experience and feelings.

So, yes, there I was, leaving a beloved and only church family behind, one where I had recognition and was well liked. Mar-yam was with me on that one as we were both done at the same time with these charades, as I called them. There was a ton of other churches around in our home town of Abbotsford, British Columbia, which happened to be the church capital of Canada, in the sense of having the most churches per capita. We had no thought of leaving Christianity, but our dedicators were admittedly tiring of the rededications.

We joined a much larger fancy congregation, of the non-chandelier-swinging variety, that had some big things happening. It was reputed to be the second largest congregation in Canada at the time. This gave us a place to simply attend often entertaining services and be with some friends and family who had joined us from other settings and  also had made a similar switch. I really felt thinly attached however. Part of me liked it that way, and part of me didn’t.

We never tithed anymore, the practice of giving ten percent of your income, which had been a long time practice, since my late teens. One year, back in our old church, Mar-yam and I alone were responsible for over 20% of the churches income that year as we had decided to tithe not only on our personal income, but on our business income as well. Later, I came to realize how much of a financial fear was rooted in my heart around the practice. We were addressing our money anxieties by doing a deal with the Demiurge. Many places in scripture promised a big blessing and return on giving. Tithing was also a command, rather than an option, as far as our theology went. I so recall the first bit of income we decided not to tithe on, after feeling how controlling the whole teaching was, and how the most controlling leaders and teachers used it to their advantage. We were feeling mostly okay with it all, but an unmistakable part of us was half ready for the sky to fall on our heads at the same time.

Finding our way out of tithing was a pretty big ‘handwriting on the wall’ kind of event for us. Of all the strict ‘law’ type practices from the Old Testament, this was the one that kept surviving from right on through the Roman Catholic Church, through every successive Protestant movement and down to every last latest greatest church deal right up to the present. One very well-worn Bible verse spoke about you were ‘cursed with a curse’ if you withheld the tithe, and were guilty of ‘robbing God’.

Remind me to take that one up with the Demiurge, for sure.

Dollars in the bag, and bums in the pew, with chapter and verse to prove it all, is still thee deal that Christianity thrives on. When you break with tithing, as a dedicated Christian, you are beginning to play on the creek banks of the river to your freedom. You are saying that you can pick and choose your own interpretations and even defy the Demiurge (God) while dressing it up (necessarily) as something different.

With that kingpin of a legalistic relationship with God/the Demiurge finally shifting for me, as in the ‘obedience in exchange for blessing’ kind of relationship, I was significantly setting my sails in a new way, and ‘backsliding’ from ‘true Christianity’.

With my awareness tuned in this way to any manipulative psychological pressure tactics that I couldn’t stomach any longer, I was also now reactive to the stories of God’s behavior in the Old Testament. What part of me used to hardly notice, I now saw as behaviors that could only be labeled as ‘asshole’ anywhere else. I was getting into a conscious ‘mid-faith’ crisis.

I sat through message after message gagging on what I was hearing. I recall, one Sunday, as service was just letting out, as we were walking up the sloped sanctuary aisles towards the foyer, with some close long-time friends who had sat close to us, Rene said, ‘Wasn’t that an awesome message?’ feeling genuinely touched. I looked at him and so struggled with my own long-standing image, our friendship, his being touched, Mar-yam looking at me and knowing full well what I was feeling, and my fuming internally over what I now felt was a big shit pile, to put it in Jim’s immortal words. I managed to get out a calm, ‘I didn’t like it at all’. Rene didn’t know what else to do, but to look away. What else can you do when one of the most dedicated and level headed and fellow loyal brothers is losing it?

A year or so earlier, the same head Pastor of that large congregation who preached that message that Sunday, happened upon me in the foyer as service was underway while on my way to the bathroom. He was a genuinely kind older man, and asked how I was, as I recalled he had greeted me similarly once before. I was a bit more surprised though when he followed up with, ‘If you’re free soon, please call the office so we can arrange a coffee out together one day.’ I liked the child-like guileless something about him that no doubt the congregation liked too when he had been selected as ‘Senior Pastor’ for this happening congregation. By this time in my faith, I was really putting in time as far as regular church attendance was concerned, ‘keeping something intact for the girls’ was one way of framing it. Really, I just wasn’t ready yet to come to terms with what was brewing. Privately, I was however very given to these ‘grace’ teachings I was exploring, in contrast with the ‘law’ teachings that were interwoven through everything I’d known and practiced. While still technically Christian, they were very outside of what my outer Christian world would consider anything close to orthodox. They sustained me in the interim, but also troublingly moved me further away from center.

I arranged with the office a week or so later to meet with Pastor Vern that same afternoon, what happened to be Halloween. We sat down in a small quiet coffee shop, and began small talk. Being a good conversationalist, he asked me a leading question or two, and I began to share a bit and weave in a thoughts of the alternative Christian teachings I was so deeply embracing, but knowing very well where the no-go edges were at the same time. He paused me mid sentence to find his pen, and to gather a napkin from the adjacent table to write down what I had said feeling the compelling alternative nature of my words. I knew I was way off into Christian Universalism, which is a breath of fresh air to anyone burdened with the standard fare law/grace mixture of ‘God loves you, but…’. Before we left that day, Vern had filled more than one napkin stopping me several times to transcribe my exact words. I so missed being able to teach or speak, and the camaraderie around that. I knew all too well however that if Vern had seen the deeper edges of where I was coming from, he’d not have sat comfortably with me that day in the coffee shop. Part of me felt like I got to my abandon my painting contractor costume for one closer to a spiritual teacher that Halloween afternoon.

As I share this piece in the moment, I so feel how aspects of my Metasoul would get activated in situations like this, even though I had no conscious sense of them at the time. I have come to know and discover a Metasoul Brother Aspect in Martin Luther, the Protestant Reformer, over the more recent years and have felt many of the angsts and passions that flow through Martin. I don’t claim to have been Martin Luther in a past life, but rather to share a Metasoul lineage with him connecting some similar frequencies and passions. Rhodes, as my Gatekeeper, has been a while in opening out this access, for good reasons I feel. I can feel Martin wanting to process and feel both passions and regrets, and maybe even to choose a different outcome somehow. I can feel him in an adjacent timeline, what we call the 16th century, but very much happening in the Now. It feels really fitting that Martin would find his way into my storytelling and this journal-journey, as I feel him possibly having a big stake in this ambassadorship to the Demiurge. I’ll let this mention brew in him and invite him to share as soon as he’s ready to. He’s quite different from what most have projected onto him and he’s changed a bunch too. I learned recently that he referred to the pope as ‘Pope Fartass’, which is great that he could take on the Pope. Hopefully, he’ll be up for the Demiurge now.

The track that held its course steadily in my life during this time was my contracting work and family life, kind of in that order. I engaged the services of a business coaching company called E-myth, and was assigned to a bright coach named Mark. I met three times a month for an hour on the phone and engaged in the processes E-myth offered, for over a year. During that time, I managed to double my business income, with less stress and more satisfaction in many ways. I gave myself to this brighter light in my life at the time and secretly hoped that maybe my dreams could be realized by becoming ‘financially independent’. Part of me was convinced that if I could set aside the focus of earning money, and instead focus on my now-floundering dreams and passions of teaching and leading somehow, then I could realize these dreams. The picture had several untidy seams in it, but I gave myself to it for this year plus, nonetheless, as it was the best thing going in a growing graveyard where my dreams made the tombstones.

Mark informed me on one of our calls that he would be leaving the company soon, and that I would be contacted by his manager to arrange another suitable coach from within the company for me to continue in the program with. My admiration for Mark had grown over the year plus together and I knew he was a part of something spiritual, but. non-Christian, outside of the company he worked for, but hadn’t found the courage to ask him about it. My soul, along with my Gatekeeper, I see now, was holding a timing around this, knowing the rumbles it would lead to. As I knew I was about to be losing Mark soon, I asked him one session a more personal question. I said to him, ‘Mark, how do you respond, when you’re really getting the results you want in work life and then depression comes up to upend all the progress?’ I really hoped, as well as suspected that he wasn’t going to give me a coachy kind of pat answer, but yet had no clue how he might address it. The one sentence answer he gave me proved to be nothing short of revolutionary. He answered my courageous question with another courageous question. He simply said, ‘Did it ever occur to you that a part of you has a very good reason for feeling depressed?’

I walked around for a week following feeling like I had just had spiritual and emotional surgery. I told everyone close to me about it. Mark’s words found their mark of hitting a nerve of wanting to stop making the emotional body bad or wrong. The words resonated deeply with the alternative Christian theology that had held my attention for what was by now, over a decade. What was so nourishing to me was the stance of not only no longer suppressing feelings, but even, god forbid, exploring them to feel what they were trying to tell us. We had no frame for any such thing in all of the Christianity I’d ever been a part of.

About five years prior, another life changing moment occurred that led up to this one, that, had it not, I wouldn’t have been ready for this one. For almost 20 years, since I was 19 years old, I simply had no conscious experience whatsoever with depression. Here I was as a late thirties guy, married, business owner, doing extra well, because I didn’t struggle with the lower emotions. When others around me got depressed, I simply noted it, maybe gave them a pick-me-up kind of response, and moved on. I simply couldn’t relate to it since ‘God had delivered me’ from my ‘inferiority complex’ back when I was a late teen. Something though was beginning to shift for me as that summer. My emotional weather dial took a big shift towards feeling bouts of depression. My newer theology and life experience it seemed helped me be more vulnerable and honest with myself in a good way to feel what was real. I instinctively knew not to hide it, and talked about it openly with those close to me, even seeing a counselor for a couple sessions and taking some St. John’s Wort herbal medicine to assist.

This life changing precursor ‘moment’ event happened one evening during this same summer of depression when Mar-yam and I were watching the movie, A Message In A Bottle, portraying a man’s loss of his wife to death and his processing of the deep grief that engulfed him. Evening movies had a way of either putting me to sleep, as was often the case, or holding my intention deeply, as this movie did. As I watched the movie, it began to get under something that was ready and wanting to move in my emotional body. I’m watching this portrayal of grief and trying to hold back my tears of the only thing dear I’d ever really lost; the 11 month relationship I’d had at 19 with the woman named Cheryl, that I mentioned earlier.

A year prior to meeting Mar-yam in Bible School, my life had gone from like two to almost ten overnight, and then ended suddenly without explanation, as Cheryl broke it off between us. I refused to feel any tears the next day, as I felt at the time like they were a hole I’d fall into and never recover from. Well, the ‘next day’ came back to me sitting on that couch, asking to be felt. I knew now that these feelings weren’t there as ‘the enemy’ or a nemesis that would take me down, as I had unconsciously related to them in my late teens.

Whoah, Metatron, my handrail, I’m really getting wound up in the story telling. How’s this landing, do we need to pause?

Metatron: Are you kidding, don’t stop now, my friend. We’re all on the edge of our seats.

Raphael: Awww, you’re the best, Metatron. I’m aching to tell this next piece actually and so glad to have your interest, so sit back in those seats for a bit, and I’ll take your cue.

So as I was saying, this movie portrayal of genuine grief moved through me like a freight train, in a good way. We finished the movie and went to sleep. When I could tell Mar-yam was asleep, I faced the opposite direction and cried quietly to myself some very rare tears, feeling the loss of the relationship with Cheryl those 19 years prior. The troubling night dreams I’d had of her into the early years of my marriage had long subsided thankfully as I consciously didn’t want to undermine my marriage ‘hanging onto the past’. In the morning, I told Mar-yam about the tears and the flow of emotions. She intuitively felt it was a good thing and supported me to feel whatever needed to be felt.

That next day, I reordered my schedule and took the day off to go spend the day in a park that Cheryl and I had enjoyed together. I sat there on the grass, overlooking the ocean and at first, a part of me wondered what we were attempting to do. Any apprehensions soon left as I wrote out my grief and loss in a letter addressed ‘Dear Cheryl’ taking my cue from the movie. Wave after wave of tears rolled through me as I went back and forth between crying and writing. I was so astounded feeling how though it was 19 very full years later, it felt like it was the very next day.

After the tears finally paused and the writing felt complete, I got out some matches and burned the letter on the rocks there. I made my way home and again shared the experience with Mar-yam, and in time, a few others close to me. I knew this was a life changing event, even though those around me seemed to tolerate my story of it more than celebrate it. Looking back, I can feel where part of me was tugging on them to see and feel the significance I knew was here, this willingness to feel, and in so doing to heal. This part of me knew it was changing, and could feel the fear of losing them if we didn’t change together.

A week or ten days later, I took another day trip to another park Cheryl and I had enjoyed together, and again the tears flowed, not as intensely this time, but sweetly as I said aloud to myself ‘I’m human. I get to lose. I get to grieve.’ It felt so good to come to this dawning awareness.

So, as I said, it was another five years of life and process later when Mark, my coach’s words found their ‘mark’. ‘Did it ever occur to you that a part of you has a very good reason for feeling that way?’

Holy Fuck! Why couldn’t all of the money and life and passion I’d put into Christianity ever come up with something so simple and so profound? Why couldn’t just one Christian leader drop the charade and get real, just one, all I ask is one? Why couldn’t one Bible verse have pointed to this? I’d have jumped on it! One would have done it. Instead, it’s this non-Christian business coach, from a pagan business coaching company, of all people!

As Christians, we were all too busy fighting the devil in our elevated spiritual warfare schemes, or flagellating ourselves trying ‘put on the mind of Christ’ along with a million other verses pulled out of our asses! Fuck, what a stinking shit pile of horse shit, Jim! With a great big Jesus rug, the size of a camp meeting revival tent to try and sweep it all under….

Go ahead, Rhodes, Is that you rumbling just now?

Rhodes: Yes, thank you for letting me get that out. ‘We’ were Marvin at the time, all mixed in together not very differentiated, but each of us were feeling this all on a bunch of different levels. I see now, all of this was perfect to help us find our way through a sequence of waypoints on an ongoing journey, one that we are still on, actually. I have that bigger picture coming to me now feeling you tell your story, which is my story and our story. We needed every sniff of that shit pile. We needed every pain and reaction. We signed up for it because we needed it. We simply couldn’t have found our way without it. All the way to now even to facing the Demiurge, the Demiurge within and the Demiurge without.

Raphael: Wow, Rhodes. That’s some heavy stuff. The Demiurge within. The taskmaster inside myself who wasn’t ready to feel, who then in turn gave that disowned life force energy over to the creation and sustenance to the Demiurge without. As below, so above. As within, so without. That’s pretty spacious now, though at the time, it just hurt like fucking hell, in dark times, with no light in sight. Thank god for the bread crumb trail out of the jungle, nonetheless.

Well, I hope you can pause along with me cause now I’m running out of gas. I can feel how I’d like to share the next piece of actually admitting to my known world that I no longer held Jesus as my personal savior and finding the courage to face Mar-yam to tell her I wasn’t willing to remain in our marriage bond, and then how I began to walk all that out. But, it feels best to let this piece digest along with what Rhodes just opened us out to as well.

Wow, this piece about how I created the Demiurge is hitting me. All my Christian life, my subscription to the idea that he was the creator was a way to deflect my own responsibility to my own creatorship. I can feel how this Journal is a way to accept that responsibility now and respond in a new way.

We’re off to see the Demiurge, people. It’s been a long long time in waiting, but we’re off to see the Demiurge!

I hope he’s open to company.
Raphael Awen is co-creator, teacher, and facilitator of the SoulFullHeart Way Of Life. Visit www.soulfullheartwayoflife.com for more information about Weekly Sessions, Live Streams, Videos, and Community.

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