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Exploitation for Sale

I am judging my desire for unconditional love as good.

Acknowledging and embracing my desire for unconditional love brings me closer to living life fully, one day at a time. Conversely, denying it brings me closer to living life in a bubble of delusion, one day at a time.

When I get confronted with a conscious decision regarding my desire for unconditional love, I am aware that the enemy of my soul has a primary strategy in his mission which is to kill, steal and destroy whatever moves me closer to living a life of love.  Satan's strategy involves his proposal being presented in decorated goods or theories, that will cater to what I am created to desire, because he relies on bait.  Without it, his strategy to exploit my desires towards accomplishing his mission, which is to keep me from living a life of love, are exposed.

The proposal will always be one which appeals to my desires, that is the bait.  But, it demands a high down payment.  The down payment is not in the form of money or material goods, although similar to money and material goods, it is in a form that holds universal value nonetheless: spiritual faith.  Which perception of God will I bet on being the real God when it comes to investing my faith?

There are 3 options, no more and no less:

1. the God who is for meeting my desires.
2. the God who is indifferent to meeting my desires.
3. the God who is against meeting my desires.

In each decision I become consciously aware of making, I can choose which of the above options of God I will invest it.

Investing in the God who painstakingly incarnated Himself in the person of Jesus and laid down His life on the cross to cancel our debt of sin, is a spiritually risky business.  No wonder why Jesus said few will enter in.  It requires investing all my faith in the God who is explicitly for meeting my desires, or else I'm done with because I've invested everything (all my faith) in him.

But the other alternative God-options come with covert and hidden assumptions about the Investor (person with free-will regarding their faith) that needs to be explicitly acknowledged at the same time:

• the Investor believes one can live fully without God.
• the Investor does not have desires.
• the Investor is not worth living a full life.

In my bias opinion of spirituality, I believe that believing in those assumptions above about myself as the Investor, creates pain that I would need to swallow if I swallowed the bait.  The bait entices because it appeals to meeting my desires, because it needs to disguise the lies I need to believe about myself in order to invest.

The hidden assumptions about my own self that I consent to agreeing with if I am to invest my faith in a God who is not for me or is indifferent with me are that I am defective or I have no desires, in which then the bait would not be bait in the first place and I wouldn't be drawn to it.  And there the the double-bind comes out of hiding.  The self-destructive contradiction which the sale is dependent on is exposed, this is a scam that I'm being tempted to invest in, based on a double-bind, a sly lie.


Decision-making tool:
Is this bait, or is it presenting the full picture of God and what it means to be human, revealed in Jesus?

"Exploitation for sale, 1 life a pail..."

Buyer beware, seller holds you liable for everything. no exclusions.

Spiritual Growth Centers Around a Mirror

Knowing and seeing God as he really is, (not who i want him to be, but who he really is apart from who i want him to be) is essential to knowing me.  often i discover that who i want God to be, is not far off from who he really is.  actually, in many ways, he is a better version of who i want him to be.

just as in my own childhood and young adulthood i denied certain parts of me and what i experienced regarding reality and disassociated from the truth and created my own truths or beliefs so that i could keep my parents in the parental role without fearing them or seeing how far off they were from what i really needed them to be for me.  i idealized them, out of survival.  because if i couldn't trust these people and saw them as less then perfect or strong, who would provide for me?  I couldn't do this on my own.  when they proved to be less than perfect or strong, i raged because i internalized it as me being the defective one.

as an adult in recovery, i am starting to uncover the truth, and seeing my parents as they really are, not in the lenses i needed to see them through in order to keep them in my idealized parental role.  the lens of seeing my parents or other adult authority figures as more ideal than real, is indicative of me being dependent on them for my survival.  i needed them to care for me and provide for me, so i had to see them as able and capable, and when there was any discrepancy between what I needed them to be and how they were for me, i took the blame for it.  that was the safest route i could take as a dependent child.  i can now see they are broken and wounded people who are just as prone to sin and hurting themselves and those closest to them,, just as i am.  they are much more like me than i could tolerate before, because of the power differential and dependency needs I legitimately had with them as a child.  I needed them to be so much stronger and wiser and able to guide and provide for me and my needs...simply because of the fact that i was unable to do that for myself.  i depended on trusting my parents in order to survive, and when they did things that betrayed my trust by not meeting my needs, i filled in the gaps by blaming myself.  I would reason that it was somehow my own fault, that i had done something wrong or that there was something wrong with me, and that is why I was feeling pain.

But now, as an adult.  I can see the whole picture.  I can see my parents for how they were and really are AND I can also start seeing myself as I really am, beginning with how I was as a child.  My needs were legitimate and not defective, but my parents were the only people who could provide for those needs.  They held that position, but they themselves are imperfect humans, trying to meet the perfect needs of a child, while they themselves as children, went with their own perfect needs unmet by their imperfect parents, who as children themselves had their own perfect needs unmet, because their parents were imperfect...on and on, all the way down to Adam and Eve.

Adam and Eve had perfect needs.  They were not defective because of their needs.  They were created in likeness of God.  They had emotional, spiritual and physical desires that they depended on God to meet.  he alone is the perfect parent who can meet the perfect needs of his children perfectly....until sin entered in.  Sin entered in through exploiting our perfect desires and distorting ourselves as defective and in need, and that God was not the solution to our problem...the problem that didn't exist...us not like God.  It all began with Eve being told two lies, and then given a false solution to a false problem by seeing a false picture of God: a lie about herself; that she was not like God, a lie about God not wanting her to be like God, and the false solution to the false problem: eat the fruit that God said not to eat.

The way I see God is all important.  It is not just a peripheral issue.  It is central to who i see myself, which gives way to how I see others.

Just like a baby.  A baby will look to her mother to absorb her own self.  The thousands of times a infant sees her mother's face and how she feels in response to her mother's face, is forming her own identity and how she sees her own self.  Her mother is her first mirror.  She doesn't even exist yet, outside of her relationship and dance with her mother.  The primary way she will learn how to dance with her own self is profoundly wired by the way her mother dances with her in the first few years of life.  

God is like the birth mother.  The primary caretaker of an infant.  The way I see God and how he dances or interacts with me is profoundly impacting the way I see and dance with myself.  And the way I perceive, dance and relate with my own self will be replicated in various degrees with those who are closest to me.

My picture of God is all important, for I came from him.  His being breathed life into me and I am made in his image, just as a baby is made in the image and likeness of her mother and father.  god is the mother and father.

relationships are critical to emotional and spiritual health.  the relationship i have with others is directly linked to the kind of relationship i have with the different parts of my own self, and the relationship I have with the different parts of my own self are directly linked to the relationship I have with God and how I see the way He sees me.  Jesus is the face of God.  no other comes close.  any other face would be a reflection more of humans, not of God...the parent.  God doesn't want me to settle for less than when I relate with my own self, others, and that's why my picture of God is all important....

What picture of God does your mirror hold?  It has one, regardless if you admit it or not, you imitate that all the time.  Spiritual grown for me is aligning my mirror to reflect the true God back to me, and that is by staring at Jesus.

Damn Diabolical Double Binds

"Be alert and of sober mind.  Your enemy the devil prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour."  - 1 Peter 5:8 niv

"We don't want Satan to outsmart us.  We know how he does his evil work."  
- 2 Corinthians 2:11 nirv

Satan is crafty.
Oxford Dictionary's definition
"clever at achieving one's aims by indirect or deceitful methods"
" of, involving, or relating to indirect or deceitful methods"

One of Satan's primary ways to bait us is through using double-binds.  It's a psychological strategy which fits in very well with how Satan operates and communicates.  "Damned if you do, damned if you don't."  Nobody wins.  But that is the point, since Satan already knows he is defeated.  Misery loves company.

In double-binds, there is a psycho-logical illusion that you will come out ahead by choosing one of the options the controller wants you to choose, which traps you because it's not what you really want, it is an illusion.  What you want is being used against you, to bait you.  Double binds are crafty baited traps, which trap you in and leave you with no options that truly benefit you.  Double binds are incredibly covert, and often go undetected if the unsuspecting person cannot recognize the underlying distorted and flawed assertion.

In the garden of Eden, Satan temps Eve by putting her in a double bind.  He knew she was created in the image and likeness of God, and that she enjoyed reflecting her Maker, whom she adored.  He used her desires against her, by fooling her into thinking she was missing out of getting her desires fulfilled.

At first, Satan tries to misquote God and twists His words around to portray Him as restrictive by withholding from her what she desires most; to be godly or just like her Maker because she adored Him.

"Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the Lord God had made.  He said to the woman, "Did God really say, 'You must not eat from any tree in the garden'?"  -Genesis 3:1

The woman thoroughly corrected the serpent, thinking it was harmless at worst, or perhaps helpful at best. Imagine that, ladies!

"The woman said to the serpent, "We may eat fruit from the tree in the garden, but God did say, 'You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die.'"  -Genesis 3:2-3

She set him straight!  Or so she may have thought.  Instead, she was unknowingly giving him another chance to deceive her, and to gradually go for the kill.  She kept engaging with him, even though she had just corrected how the serpent misquoted and misrepresented God as being - a withholding jerk.  But without her realizing it, she was giving more space to the serpent to worm (no pun intended) his way into undermining her pure image or portrayal of God according to HER truth, based on HER own experience of God.  He was very subtly and covertly, yet progressively discoloring the woman's experience with her Maker.

"You will not certainly die," the serpent said to the woman.  "For God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil."

When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it.  She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it.  Then the eyes of both of them opened, and they realized they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves."  - Genesis 3:4-7

Time out.

This serpent just called God a liar.  He just confronted what God told Eve and injected his own twist, with God  now sitting in the liar seat because what God told Eve was not true, per the serpent.

But, he also came to Eve and served her an illusion on a silver platter.  The illusion of her satisfying her deepest desire to be like God.

This is the diabolical double bind which went undetected: she would need to mistrust God in order to be like God. 

The desire to be like God, but not to trust God because He isn't trustworthy, is the diabolical double bind.  It is damn sneaky.  If the woman desired to be like God (which she did) AND she believed what Satan was saying, then these were her options:

1. Miss out on being like God by knowing good and evil.
2. Don't miss out on being like God, by mistrusting God and by invalidating God's words and doing the only things he said not to do.

There was a third option, had the double-bind been detected.  This would have required the woman to doubt the serpent, be assertive and tell him to leave her.  This did not happen because she did not doubt the serpent, she trusted him.

Now, just as with all double binds, there is a strain of truth which gets twisted and dragged out of its proper context, therefore causing confusion.

God did know that when the woman and man ate from the tree, it would cause their eyes to be opened. Opened to shame.  Their eyes were opened to Satan's version of God, not their own that was based in their reality and experiences of God.  They exchanged their own perceptions of God for Satan's, and in doing so, were introduced to shame.  Shame's first target: their own bodies.  They were ashamed of being naked.  They were ashamed of their own bodies.  That is like living in a double bind, being ashamed of your own body.  How can one live and not be in their body?  It's impossible, but there is an illusion that people buy into all the time, bodily-dissociation, in which gives way to all sorts of ailments, disorders and illnesses on every level; physical, mental and emotional.

Back to the story....

God went looking for them, even after they sinned and ate from the tree he commanded them not to...God pursued them.  Their response?  - to hide.

"Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the Lord God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from the Lord God among the trees of the garden.  But the Lord God called to the man, "Where are you?"  - Genesis 3:8-9

Sin does not separate us from God, shame does.  And sin induces shame and THAT is why God prohibited the tree's fruit from them, because they would then experience death.

Shame kills the human spirit because it separates us from God.  

Shame doesn't separate God from us, but us from God. 

There is another example of Satan trying to bait a human being, to completely thwart God's plans, but it didn't work.  The human was Jesus.  The most noticeable differences to me are the ways Jesus responded to Satan by not engaging with him outside of Scripture and he kept with it even when Satan tried to misuse Scripture as well.  He didn't explain himself or enter into debate with Satan.  He used God's words within context and being consistent with God's character.  After three attempts by Satan, Jesus told him to get lost.

"Jesus said to him, "Away from me Satan!  For it is written: 'Worship the Lord your God, and serve him only."  -Matthew 4:10

Jesus sets us free from the lies that shame brings and leaves.

Scripture says, "The one who trusts in him will never be put to shame."
-Romans 10:11/Isaiah 28:16

One way to detect diabolical double binds is to ask the question:
Does this temptation or offer present me with a substitute that subtly invalidates God's trustworthiness?

If so, proceed with caution, trusted community and mindfulness that God looks like Jesus.

Downward Spiral of Shame and Sin

Shame

 Sin

Shame
Sin
etc., etc., etc.

The symptoms of believing a lie about myself and about God is palpable, it is painful.  It is shame.  My body has a physical reaction to it.  Shame is feeling bad about who I am, it's a symptom of believing a lie about my own self hood, which brings immense pain.

Shame is like a painfully malignant tumor.  If ignored, it will grow and multiply.  It's survival is based on me believing lies about myself, which produces shame, which produces pain, which produces a desire to stop the pain.  When I try to numb out the pain of shame, by depending on my own devices, it keeps the pain at bay, but only temporarily.  Eventually, the pain will present itself again because the food source of the malignant tumor is still present: a lie about God and my self.  

When I believe that I am bad (a lie) based on my own judgment or the judgments of others, not God's, I am feeding shame.  The common remedy is a more culturally accepted solution -yet a false solution to solving the root problem: believing a lie about God and myself, because I am made in his image. 

Extracting the shame by relying on my own resources introduces more sin (depending on myself and not God because I don't believe He is trustworthy) to numb its pain.  This results in further shame and hence furthering the addiction cycle or false dependency on myself in place of God, all while trying to get free from shame without trusting God's intervention is the vicious cycle of legalism and self-righteousness.

God's intervention: the Cross.  Jesus dying on the cross to cut off the root of sin, which is shame from believing that God is not trustworthy and that He is not really FOR me.  Any other intervention on this cycle of shame and sin, will miss the mark, because it depends on HUMAN effort which bypasses trusting completely in God because of believing a lie about God, that He is untrustworthy when it comes to the important things in life, and that is the foundation of sin - believing a lie about God.  To demolish the foundation of sin, which is believing a lie about God, I need to have the truth about God, which is the foundation of an effective intervention to disrupt the sin/shame vicious cycle.  God takes care of that himself by authentically revealing his own heart and character towards us, which is revealed in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus.