Spiritual Portal

I have an 'uncle' who is a Christian minister. He sneered at the Buddhist religion when I asked him about his trip to Asia and he expressed racial prejudice when his daughter brought a black friend and sat in the front row. So I stopped going to all family reunions there and seeing them.

My family is my spiritual family. I no longer have a family based on descent. Just people I know. That is a broken tradition.... It no longer has significance. Someone may be in a spiritual family that considers themselves a niece, nephew, grandmother etc. They are part of my family....My Spiritual Family.

Christians? I have met true Christians but that's just a name for many people. It has no meaning. There are more people without such classifications which fit the true description much better.

Throughout my life I have seen those who have had pride of pedigree that has taken them away from their spiritual family. Some people look at people like dogs with impressive ancestors. Your spiritual family seldom has the same graphs on your soul as your pedigree.

My experience of my own Christian family is very similar, Steve. Our religious differences seem to be the unbridgeable gap.

It's not uncommon to find strains of racism in Christianity. They seem to have a very long history together. My cousin told me that her father had said that the black people were destroying the white race. He would never say this openly, but I have no doubt he believes it and that she was telling the truth. It is just a fault in reasoning. I have a book called "Race and Reason" which was my great granddad's. In was reading through it and the guy was giving all of these calmly reasoned arguments for why segregation is necessary on rational and calmly reasoned grounds. He argued that the people who were for integration were influenced to much by sentiment and not the facts (the same argument that was made towards the segregationists).

Keep in mind, I was raised in Alabama.

But I have experienced that same split with Christian relatives as you, Steve. My whole extended family is Christian, on both sides. Not a dissident among them. Uncles, aunts, cousins, all Christian. It is really amazing. You would think there would be at least one stragler besides me. My sister is almost not Christian, but even if not a card carrier, she is still Christian in her psychological structure.

I noticed as time went by that I was developing a sort of "lost sinner" complex. I was picking it up from my relatives that I was a lost sinner. Not that they were saying that. But subtle things can give you the idea. So you can see that makes communication tough. Still, they do not try to convert me anymore like they did when I was younger and not as capable of challenging them.

Now I assume they just write me off as lost. Strange.

Well, to be honest, I used to get frustrated that way. Sometimes I would end up using an object that is cheaply made, and I found out it's from another country, or recycled, etc., well, that didn't help solidify my opinion in quality products from those sources. Maybe that's all it meant, since I might've said something like that as well, at the same time knowing it's not the actual root cause of poor quality.

It's possible. He definitely was not thrilled about the quality of the pen. Although he does not had a high opinion of environmentalism in general. He associates it, mentally, with "liberals" which he also has a low opinion of and just generally "idealistic dreamer" types. You know, the kind of people who might kill 10 people to save 1 tree.  :D Not saying that liberals or environmentalists are like that, but in his mind...

I try to veer away from people who see things black and white, liberal and conservative and all other such polarities. Life and people are not so easily pigeonholed. It shows a rather simplistic view of people. Polarity and duality is part of this material dimension not in the higher realms. When we start blending higher dimensions into our consciousness it becomes apparent that such views are a result of reactions to past life stimuli and some events even surrounding this life. They polarize people and cut us off from an expanded view of humanity which states that most all views have something to offer to the table.These contacts serve to show us a bit about our own state of consciousness. Especially if we seem bound together with such types.

Many times we have perfectly legitimate views of our own. If someone cannot even consider or listen to our views it is time to leave them to their own mental prisons they have constructed for themselves. Many times in life we just have to move on and let others drift out of our lives as we move upward and are rewarded with higher contacts.

Yes it would be nice to avoid people like that altogether, I have to work with all kinds of different people and their thoughts on life and attitudes/actions. Sort of a bummer since sometimes you have to adjust to "fit in", you can't just call them out on their BS. Kills the buzz if you know what I mean.

At our best we are in a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. ... This is the dimension of imagination..but the worst aspect of our time is prejudice.