Lot’s Wife
As they fled the city, one of the angels said, “Flee for your lives! Don’t look back, and don’t stop anywhere in the plain! Flee to the mountains or you will be swept away!” (Genesis 19:17).
“Then the Lord rained upon Sodom and Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the Lord out of heaven; and he overthrew those cities, and all the plain, and all the inhabitants of the cities, and that which grew upon the ground.” (Genesis 19:24-25).
As the cities were being demolished, Lot’s wife “looked back, and she became a pillar of salt.” (Genesis 19:26).
“Out on the road today, I saw a DEADHEAD sticker on a Cadillac.
A little voice inside my head said, ‘Don’t look back. You can never look back.'”
Don Henley ‘Boys Of Summer.’
1
You can never be two places at once.
To be in the field of presence,
In the Godhead consciousness zooming,
In the moment of now,
In faith,
With God,
Clear and focused.
Means we can’t be
Held hostage by the past,
Or in the case of Lot’s wife,
Even look back, or else we turn into a pillar of salt.
Life relentlessly moves forward,
Or really doesn’t move at all, but perpetually stays in the now.
And for us to stay with life,
We have to make sure the now
Is somewhere we want to be.
Make it comfortable.
Make it habitual.
Turn it into a practice.
The realm of thought or thought-based identity
Exists only in the past or the future,
Cultivating resentment or regret as pillars of salt,
Crumbling into the past,
Or fear and anxiety imagining the future.
Many lives are spent purely identifying as their thoughts and never arriving into presence or the now at all.
To live an entire life in the past and the future
Is to never live at all.
So why is the now so difficult to arrive at?
Why is it the space of the enlightened master or Eckhart Tolle and other so-called gurus,
And not just as natural as breathing?
After all, there is, in fact, nothing else but now.
And it is always now.
So why do we choose the illusion of the past and the future to predominantly reside in?
I’ve got no idea why, to be honest.
It’s a strange predicament to be human.
2
And it’s understandable, albeit endlessly frustrating,
That as a result of the cruelty and seemingly insecure and potentially devastating world called planet earth that we populate,
That our function for defense or self-protection being outsized in our beingness.
Or to put it another way,
Our ego becomes who we think we are.
And our ego is designed to self-protect and to look for dangers.
The ego gets a bad rap, really, because the ego is like the junkyard dog of our soul.
It can’t help to be what it is.
And you wouldn’t want it to entirely go away either.
And it probably didn’t even ask us to lay our whole identity at its feet next to its bone and water bowl.
But because we feel so vulnerable and because faith and surrender are this ultimate kind of challenge, really,
It just becomes natural, I guess,
That we get used to being the junkyard dogs of our soul,
And keep barking behind the fence of the illusions of our past and future,
Never standing upright on the other side of the gates basking in the glory of the infinite now.
And here’s where total and absolute forgiveness becomes key.
To achieve freedom from ego identity,
To escape the fortress of thought that incessantly drones on.
And also why forgiveness is as difficult as it is.
Because with forgiveness is the release of our souls from the junkyard dog of ego.
A crumbling of the stories we keep active and alive and afraid to let go.
They crumble in the light of forgiveness like pillars of salt.
And we are released into the now,
Or into the space of where our lives actually are.
We trade with real forgiveness,
From being a barking mad junkyard dog,
Into an upright man or woman in communion with God,
Or presence,
Or the field of consciousness.
The ego now quiet is still a dog,
But he’s walking beside us no longer growling,
But rather wagging his tail,
Friendly with his tongue out panting in the sun.
Probably also thanking God that you’ve stopped pretending to be him.
The weight of your identity was driving him crazy.
And now that he is released from that burden,
He can function as intended.
Be there when he needs to be there.
But outside of that mostly chilling,
Hoping you throw him a treat now and then and take him for a good walk on the daily.
The realm of the ego isn’t evil,
Or unnecessary.
We still live in the world.
We have work to do.
There are dangers and at least partially sideways people we can’t help but deal with,
Most of which are still pretending to be junkyard dogs.
So it’s not about telling your dog to go away,
And abandoning him on the side of the highway,
And being some guru of nowness and floating on a cloud of bliss without any worldly concerns at all.
But in his right size,
As your trusted companion,
And not the entirety of your being,
He behaves himself.
You become his alpha.
When he barks about the past or the future,
You hear him.
You notice immediately.
You pet his head and say, “calm down, boy.”
Never leaving the moment of now.
As opposed to in the past when you would start barking with him,
Getting on all fours and pretending to be him,
Reinforcing the barks,
Until years were lost in barking cacophonies,
When you were nothing but one dog barking at ghosts and calling that life.
And in that misunderstanding of identity,
The imagination as well,
Became fully invested in the barking cacophony.
Imagining dangers,
And reinforcing resentments,
Making assumptions,
Assuming ill will behind others’ intentions,
Trapped behind a fence in a junkyard,
And calling it life.
But in presence free of all that,
Walking in the sun of the now,
The ego dog wagging his tail and chilling.
Then the imagination as well becomes a field of creation,
Or of co-creation with God.
And instead of catastrophizing a future that is born out of old resentments,
The Imagination as a Field of Play
The imagination becomes a field of play,
Where envisioning a future,
And indeed building a future out of God-given desire,
In conjunction with God’s own vision for you.
Your purpose here.
The field is wide open.
And so from the baseline of the now,
To allow for future vision,
To employ the imagination this way,
Isn’t the same as not being in the now
When rooted in the ego.
For you never aren’t in the now when propelling your vision this way.
Still centered in the now,
Building the structure of what your life is to become,
Or what really already is.
The imagination is a carpenter.
You and the dog walk by the construction site now and again,
And see what he’s working on basking in the sun.
His hammer and nail bringing you into the now,
With every clank.
Victory and Identity
But what is he building?
And what is the hammer and nail he is using?
(Victory is for those that endure.)
To see the imagination begin his carpentry in the warm sunlight of beingness is certainly a victory of sorts.
It took many bad dreams and illusions to see through to get there.
And you may be proud of the victory.
“But you are not to be called rabbi, for you have one teacher, and you are all brothers.”
Matthew 23:8.
The teacher is within.
And presence is where the line of communion is open to him.
All of us have access and a birthright to the kingdom of heaven within.
But we are vulnerable to choosing the noise and glamour of the world,
And the shame and suffering that follows,
Over the terror of allowing our egos or old identity to die.
But if we endure and make it to that place,
Or construction site of the soul,
Watching our imagination hammer away at a new identity,
The building blocks given through God’s revelations.
Conception and Perception
It’s interesting to notice that we are limited by only what we allow ourselves to conceive.
Our self-perception entirely responsible for who it is we become.
This is why it’s so difficult for people to overcome the trauma of past abuse,
Especially if it made up the building blocks of their very early identity.
And there are certainly levels of severity, but no human escapes trauma being born into this world.
And so the design of it
Is to overcome our old identity and to be born again into a new creation.
A butterfly.
A realized being.
A truly free spirit that is unlimited and living out of peace and faith.
Fearlessly.
From this place, the carpenter of the imagination
Is liberated to build.
And you can be the foreman looking on,
Receiving God’s revelations,
And expressing your own ideas about who you want to become,
And what you want your life to look like and be about.
Dream Life and Divine Potential
A room over here for creative work,
Innovative and adding value for others to enjoy.
A room over there for a faithful love and family life.
A room behind that dedicated to giving back and helping those that still need to overcome.
And another room for laughter and the pure joy of having fun.
A basement safe for financial freedom,
And a kitchen with the finest and healthiest food available.
A dream life.
If only your self-concept can rise to it.
Beyond those usual tropes of a dream life,
It’s interesting to keep in mind what Jesus had to say about it.
John 14:12-14
“Very truly I tell you, whoever believes in me will do the works I have been doing, and they will do even greater things than these because I am going to the Father. And I will do whatever you ask in my name, so that the Father may be glorified in the Son. You may ask me for anything in my name, and I will do it.”
When Jesus says whoever believes in me,
He’s not talking an ego or an identity.
He’s talking about whoever believes in the absolute limitless limit of what a man can become.
Then he will do greater works than he.
Meaning if you can conceive of yourself as the ultimate (beyond ego), then you have no limitation.
Whoever believes in me
Is the same as saying whoever can really believe in themselves.
Beyond our limited self-concepts, we are in fact limitless.
But try telling your junkyard dog that.
Presence and Transformation
3
Allow yourself to be new in this now moment.
Unhindered and undeterred by the past.
Free the imagination from conceiving of reasons to be angry and limitations.
And let him build in the power of forgiveness,
Using the tools of love.
It all sounds so hippy,
But it’s not really.
It’s true rebellion.
Because there are after all demonic influences who could never allow themselves to surrender.
Who choose the junkyard dog over the wisdom of Christ.
And maybe for some, the realization happens all at once and is complete.
But for most of us normies,
It’s a work in progress situation.
A daily guidance back to present moment awareness and presence.
Losing the habit of barking with the junkyard dog.
Looking Back
4
So why do we turn into pillars of salt looking back?
Salt is bitter.
And hopelessly unalive.
It crumbles to the touch.
And fills our mind with concerns we don’t have the power to really control.
Christians often look at the philosophy of manifestation with the same suspicious eyes they look at tarot card readers and astrology.
Like demonic doorways for false prophets to infect the perception of our lives.
But I think this is misguided.
We can surrender our will (or our egos) over to God,
And in doing so free up the power of our imagination to cocreate with God,
His will for us.
People debate the question of free will,
But to me, there is no doubt that we participate in our own rescue.
I suppose one could argue that even that participation is preordained.
But that would mean we are essentially puppets with souls attached.
And my experience of life doesn’t strike me that way.
I think there are stakes here.
And we all have the capacity.
To go from being pillars of salt stuck in the past,
Into the full expression of what it is to be human.
Realizing unlimited potential,
Carrying lumber to the carpenter.
Being in the now,
And moving forward.
