The Crazy Step

Fans of mountain-climbing literature may be familiar with Mount Everest’s most famous feature: the Hillary Step, a 40-foot outcropping of snow and ice that’s the last major obstacle to the summit. Located at 28,750 feet, the step—first overcome by Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay—gives way to gentle slopes that are comparatively easy to traverse. Once you get past this tough spot, the summit is within your grasp.

As we discussed in question #5 there is a “step” we have to get past in our understanding of God to make sense of a vast amount of learned contradiction. It’s what I call the Crazy Step. Understanding it unlocks a tremendous amount of apparent contradiction in mystical accounts of God dating back thousands of years.

It’s the first or primary twist on God’s laws that allow this mental projection we call spacetime to exist; an upside-down universe based on an inversion of God’s laws.

The illusion cocktail: take your reality and add a twist of impossible

The Crazy Step is the same process we use to create any mental projection laid over an actual reality. We observe the laws all around us and the reality these laws create, then we invert, twist, bend or manipulate these laws to create a “separate” reality out-of-step with the actual reality. By separate I mean as in a mirage of an island is “separate” from the ocean. It’s only separate as long as someone wants it to be separate and maintains the projection in his or her mind through the power of intention and purpose.

We look right at something we are experiencing, then apply the Crazy Step to mentally project an imaginary image, idea, story or reality over that reality. It is the mechanism of imagination we have explored in earlier posts. We look right at dots of light in the sky and apply the Crazy Step to imagine they form the shape of a great bear, a scorpion or a bull. A child holding a stick looks right at it and uses the Crazy Step to mentally project the image of a sword over it, losing himself for hours in a game of pirate ship.

The sword, which exists on the imaginary side of the Crazy Step, is wholly out of accord with the laws of nature. We can’t measure it, record it, test it, do an experiment on it or produce any physical evidence in accordance with the laws of nature that the sword exists. It exists only in the child’s imagination.

We define real as “in accordance with or obeying the laws of.” To be real in nature means an object must exist in accordance with the laws of nature. To be real in a child’s imagination, the sword must obey, or be in accordance with, the laws of his imagination, however he defines those laws. When we create alternative realities we are free to make up whatever laws we see fit.

And again, to say imagination is not “real” is pointless. Mozart created wholly formed symphonies in his imagination. Einstein undid pure Newtonian causality—the reining physical science canon for 200 years—with thought experiments in his imagination.

A thought, world, universe or reality created by the Crazy Step exists solely in the mind of the one imagining it. It exists nowhere and can be laid right on top of any actual reality without impeding, limiting or interacting with that reality in any way. It “blocks” the presence of reality only to the extent that the one doing the imagining focuses and holds their awareness inside the illusion created by the Crazy Step. Just as a movie “blocks” your awareness of the theatre around you only to the degree and intensity of your focused attention on the movie.

Cleaning up after the pink elephant parade

Using the Crazy Step I can imagine a parade of pink elephants going down my street. Yet using the laws of nature—the reality I share with other humans—I can observe not a single real ant has been crushed by this parade. The laws of nature do not testify to the reality of the parade. It never happened, occurred or was recorded into reality and cannot be observed using any known process of nature or the tools nature allows us to create.

The Reality Stapler takes extra-large, imaginary staples

Yet if I tried to bridge or connect those two disconnected realities which share a common background only in my mind, and in reality can exchange no effects at all, I have used a tool I call the Reality Stapler. I could “staple” those two realities together by thinking, “The ants on my street were squashed by a parade of pink elephants today.” Or, “Since a parade of pink elephants went by today, I now have to spend my evening cleaning up all the elephant dung in the street.” And, “I hate those pink elephants for being so inconsiderate of my time. They are evil. They are evil, sinning pink elephants.”

I have stapled physical reality and fantasy together using the Reality Stapler. This is the source of a vast majority of the world’s theological error. And again, we shouldn’t dismiss the power of our imaginations. How many women died because the Church imagined they were witches?

The Crazy Step and Reality Stapler turn pure love into pure evil.

Ignoring or misunderstanding the Crazy Step and applying it in conjunction with the Reality Stapler allows a truckload of errors to enter into theology and to be passed along to the faithful as the Gospel truth.

For example, we say God’s love is unconditional—which is a true reflection of ultimate reality—but I learned as a Catholic growing up there are these things called mortal sins which doom the sinner to an irrevocable eternity in hell. Am I missing something or is that not one heck of a condition on God’s unconditional love? Is there a person on this planet who would argue burning someone forever without chance of relief is a loving act? The correct absolute—God is unconditionally loving—is marred and degraded by the contradictory and incorrect teaching of hell. The Crazy Step and Reality Stapler have struck again.

Hell voids God’s unconditional love policy. We have to be insane to argue otherwise.

We have stapled the actual universe of God’s unconditional love to a universe of sinful fantasy, then mentally projected on God the idea He must be furious about our sins. A Being that is pure love, and has never, in the history of His existence, ever harmed a single hair on anyone’s head, burns them for all eternity!

Does Jesus hurt anyone? Didn’t he say he and the Father were one? I would assume this means they share the same turn-the-other-cheek, non-violent core values, not that they’re conjoined twins.

How do we reconcile Jesus’ seventy-times-seven forgiveness policy—implying God has infinite compassion—with the idea of hell? God said he was well-pleased with his son at the baptism of Jesus. He didn’t say, “Except for that whole forgiveness thing…”

The Crazy Step and the Reality Stapler have turned God’s love into pure vengeance.

The Crazy Step and the Reality Stapler attempt to make true absolutes meaningless

All the time true God absolutes (see question #5) are broken, breached and contradicted in our minds by the Crazy Step and the Reality Stapler. Somehow, somewhere we got it right, God really is unconditionally loving, infinite, indivisible, eternal and other absolutes we will explore in this blog. But the Crazy Step and the Reality Stapler allow us to undo those absolutes in our mind and create all kind of crazy, twisted, illogical theology rife with irreconcilable contradictions. Then we must go to bizarre extremes in order to make this insane theology make sense, when it simply cannot be done.

It’s like saying, “The other day I was arguing with my flying green unicorn about God being transcendent versus immanent and… ” Whoa, back up partner! You took the Crazy Step from the start. Until theology can learn to accurately recognize and realize when and where it’s taken the Crazy Step—by getting its collective noggin’ around true absolutes about God, which it teaches but continuously contradicts—it has the flying green unicorn problem: its core foundation is nonsensical.

God’s packin’ a gat?

God is love, and only love—that’s His reality, and our reality in Heaven. That’s truth. Everything He creates, without exception, is made of love and nothing else—that means us, our true Selves. Philosopher Baruch Spinoza argued that God was one substance and only one substance and thus could create only like Himself. That’s correct. LOVE is that one substance. That is the law of Heaven; pure love defines what is “real” or “actual” or the “minimum unit of existence.”

In order to exist in reality in Heaven, an idea or thought or Being must be made of love and nothing else. We could say its primary orientation must be benevolent (otherwise living in perfect union with others for all eternity is going to be a massive drag!) Einstein echoed this sentiment with his quote, “Concern for man and his fate must form the chief interest [primary orientation] of all technical endeavors.”

But we don’t hold love as an absolute, and thus all kinds of contradictory ideas about God arise. He’s unconditionally loving, my pastor said, but He also isn’t afraid to hurt or kill humans when they cross the line. The Kindly Grandfather in the Sky Packing an Uzi model of God. He’s unconditionally loving, but…watch out… here comes the tsunami!

Why bother saying unconditional in the first place? Why introduce an absolute then contradict it? Clergy must strive for absolute precision in their teachings, just like a scientist or a mathematician. 1+1=3 theological discussions aren’t going to get us anywhere. I spent 35 years in church trying to make sense of these arguments—it can’t be done.

We take the Crazy Step and invert the absolute truth that God is love and nothing else, then imagine a universe where we believe His perfect, flawless children can somehow “sin.” Then using the Reality Stapler, we try to staple that imaginary universe of sin, suffering and death back onto a universe where only perfect love exists, creating flawlessly blissful eternal life. The imaginary island of spacetime has thus been stapled to the infinite, perfect ocean of God’s love. We get that Heaven is perfect joy, but we’re confused on the mechanism that creates it.

We say God is offended by our sins, when all He sees around Him testifies to the perfect, flawless unconditional love He has for His children. Sin, flaw, offense, hurt, attack are all conditions on this side—the imaginary side—of the Crazy Step. Stapling them onto God with anthropomorphic projection confuses and clouds our understanding of the truly flawless nature of God and Heaven.

Forget flash drives: love is the ultimate storage device

Sins that have happened in this universe never happened, occurred or were recorded into Heaven for the reasons we’ll look at in a moment. In order to be recorded in Heaven, those sins would have to be made of pure love. Love is the “recording media” of Heaven, if you will. If your idea or action can’t be written in pure love, it never really happened. What staggering freedom this mechanism creates to explore all kinds of realities without soiling our actual home in Heaven! Auntie Em really is safe, Dorothy.

The Crazy Step is the twist or inversion on God’s laws in the first place that allowed us to imagine a universe or a reality where we could “sin.” Correctly understood absolutes (see question #5) help us understand this is not possible in reality; such a universe can only exist with the mind trick of maya.

Work your ab-solutes with some mental crunches

If God is infinite, meaning unbound or unconstrained, where would He store or keep the idea of sin “apart” from Heaven in order to keep Heaven absolutely pure? Outside his infinite mind? Where’s that? If He is indivisible, how does He forget, overlook or block our transgressions from His mind? Remember, the Buddha said Nirvana was unobstructed, meaning no walls, barriers or divisions of any kind. If God can’t divide his mind into what He is aware of and what He’s not aware of, then your sins must be front and center in His knowledge this very moment. If Heaven is eternal and everything inside of it lives forever (see question #5) how can your sins not live forever in the mind of God? The answer is, they can’t.

Understanding indivisible, infinite and eternal, and holding each of them as absolutely true and non-conflicting with each other, we see that if God knew of your sins at any point in His existence, they would exist forever throughout all of Heaven. Think it through clearly and you will see Heaven would literally become your sins, for all eternity, without exception. There is no separation between thinker and thought; a fundamental tenet of non-dualistic spirituality.

We can summarize by observing any true knowledge is knowledge you must become. The Buddha said in order to walk the path you must become the path. Gandhi said become the change you want to see in the world. If God truly knows about sin, He must become sin itself; a logical absurdity. If God knows your sins, He is your sins—becomes them all without exception—for all eternity. This is a radical understanding, but applying absolutes correctly gets us to it.

Search Ministries’ Foundations makes offers a good analogy on the purity of Heaven

The Christian study guide Foundations published by Search Ministries says Heaven is like an absolutely pure glass of water; a single drop of cyanide would poison the whole glass. This is correct. Heaven is absolutely pure. The mere idea of sin entering inside its reality would poison all of Heaven forever. Why? Crunch those ab-solutes again. Being infinite, there is no place to shunt the idea of sin outside of God’s mind, so it would have to remain internal to His mind. Being indivisible, there is no place internally to wall-off, suppress or contain the idea of sin—it would “flow” through all of Heaven like the cyanide flowing through the entire glass of water. Being eternal, that idea of sin would live forever and all of Heaven would be poisoned forever.

The Foundations text gets to this idea correctly but also introduces contradictory information about God knowing our sins. This is not true. In Heaven to know is to become without exception. The mechanism of forgiveness lies entirely on this side—the imaginary side—of the Crazy Step.

Our sins are forgiven by God’s plan for salvation, but not by God knowing them, then ignoring them or shunting them aside, or forgetting them—that doesn’t fit with the absolute, perfectly interconnected clean-room model of Heaven. He forgives them by ensuring that our first step into fantasy includes a mechanism for perfect redemption of sin—the Holy Spirit—which we’ll explore later. The Holy Spirit is The Translator between the absolutely pure reality of Heaven and the sinful relative reality of spacetime. Witness its translation function in the Bible story of Pentecost.

Understanding absolutes correctly we see they create the radically pure, clean-room Heaven as the Foundations text correctly asserts, so vastly perfect and flawless a single idea of sin—were it granted reality status in Heaven by God’s laws—would poison all of heaven for all eternity.

The Love Court: a metaphor

Think of a lawyer trying to come before God’s court in Heaven to prove we have sinned. God listens to the lawyer’s case intently. Then, thoughtfully scratching his beard says, “I’m not quite clear on this idea of sin. Perhaps you could build me a model of it.” The lawyer says, “Sure.” But looking around he sees nothing but love. Nothing bad, impure, lurid, offensive, vengeful or evil in any way. So he responds to God, “Your honor, I can’t seem to find anything to build my model of sin.”

“Neither can I,” God says. “Case dismissed.”

Since there is no higher court, the lawyer will have to appeal to a court below the Crazy Step level. All the courts at the summit are love-evidence only. The Buddha’s one-pointedness of mind is about focusing your awareness wholly inside love. At that level of focused attention, there is no evidence of sin.

Case dismissed.

David Bohm gets it: no unified reality without benevolence

How does God keep the idea of sin, or any other malevolent idea out of Heaven in the first place? Simple. The minimum unit of existence, that is, the minimum unit of being able to exist and participate in the universe of Heaven—our true and ultimate reality is love. Benevolence. Altruism.

It makes sense. If existence isn’t altruistic or benevolent towards itself it would cease to exist wouldn’t it? If the very definition of existence included something that could destroy it, then it wouldn’t be existence, it would be part existence, part non-existence—an impurity.

God just is.

Physicist David Bohm understood the concept that any unified model of reality would have to include benevolence. Otherwise the very foundation of reality would contain the seeds of its own destruction. And how could Heaven be eternal and stable if this were so?

With a rock-solid, absolutely unchangeable base of pure, omnibenevolent love as our reality—literally defining what is real every bit as much as the laws of nature define what is real in this universe—we are free to imagine all kinds of realities not based on love if we so choose. But returning our awareness (not our soul, that never left Heaven!) to our actual reality, we discover the unending bliss of knowing what truly defines our eternal essence or spirit and the absolute universe it inhabits, is nothing but love. Which is why it’s always so good to come home!

God doesn’t know what sin is

Not understanding that the Crazy Step created a universe that was an inversion of God’s laws, a universe where sin was “possible”, we try to connect or join our understanding of this universe of sin to the laws of Heaven. We believe God is sitting in Heaven with a checklist either forgiving our sins or not forgiving them. This is not true. God doesn’t know what sin is for all the reasons we’ve described here.

I believe this is why Einstein said god wasn’t a “personal God” sitting up in Heaven keeping an accounting of our sins. (But unlike Einstein I do believe God answers our prayers—that’s a topic for another post.) To me the discussion of personal versus impersonal is irrelevant if we accept the fact God is zero distance from where we are right now.

The idea that God doesn’t know what sin is, is perhaps the most difficult concept for Christians raised on the guilt culture of sin to grasp, but it’s true. We’ll explore it more in later posts.

Here comes the major conflict with Christian theology

Did Jesus die for our sins? This is the single most direct and deep challenge I will make in this blog to the core tenets of my own Christian faith, but the answer is absolutely not. Jesus died because of our sins. Jesus died because death, evil and suffering exist in this world. We killed Jesus; God didn’t ask Jesus to die for our sins. A major deviation from Christian theology I agree, but I wouldn’t offer it here without careful consideration after thousands of hours of research, prayer and meditation.

By dying and rising, Jesus showed us the most strongly held, most intractable idea of our fantasy—death—was not true and could be overcome. He rose from the dead, and like a mother looking under a bed to dispell the monsters there, our greatest fear in this imaginary universe was overcome. We created death, not God. Jesus says God is the God of the living, not the dead. Death remains internal to our fantasy, or all of Heaven would be poisoned with this idea forever, like the pure glass of water by the cyanide.

Death fixes nothing. God does not ask for a blood sacrifice to atone for our wrongdoings. Meditate deeply on this point in your heart and you will eventually realize you have known it all along to be true. Would you really like to spend an eternity with a Being who calls for blood sacrifices? Be honest. How can a blood-lusting God be so different from his ultra-pacifist son, a son who says he is one with his Father?

The idea of blood sacrifice to atone for the sins of others is wholly out of alignment with our core values as human beings. And if our core values are not in alignment with God, what is it we share in common? Nose hair? To be created in the image of God, as we will see, means we share the same core values in our true heart of hearts. And that doesn’t include blood sacrifice—or death in any form. Ask yourself, how many people have you heard say, “My core value is death.” Or, “My core values include blood sacrifice for atonement”? Death may happen to us, but we certainly don’t value it in our heart of hearts. We’ll explore later the ten things human beings want most from life—and see death isn’t among them.

If we believe this mechanism of blood sacrifice as atonement to be true and effective, why haven’t we implemented it in our own criminal justice system? Do we sacrifice the most innocent sibling of a serial killer as atonement for the serial killers’ sins?

Listening to some 1,000 sermons in my lifetime, I still have not heard one convincing argument about how Jesus’ death actually erases our sins. What is the mechanism of erasure? Is God a warlord, or a mafia don appeased by blood sacrifice? Is that how our sins are erased? How can this be true and God also be unconditionally loving?

Sin and death remain internal to the fantasy of spacetime. Releasing the fantasy releases their effects. So to the corrective mechanism of sin remains internal to the fantasy. The idea of sin, suffering and death remain inside the borders of the fantasy, just as the palm trees, toilets and sandy beaches remain internal to the fantasy of the island mirage in question #1.

The reality of the ocean remains pure and separate from the projected island mirage because their realities share no common interface but the mind of the man imagining the island fantasy. Heaven remains pure of the sins of this world because the interface between the two is a mind split between the two realities.

When the split is healed, the dream contents of the half operating behind the Crazy Step evaporate, just as the contents of your dream evaporate as you wake up. How does your actual, non-sleeping reality stay unsullied by the contents of your nightmares? Because your mind—split between your reality and your dream world—gives them up, or releases them, prior to awakening.

You don’t need to kill a single character in your dream in order to wake up. You don’t need to solve a single equation to wake up. You don’t need to answer every theological question. Don’t need to probe every archetype. You simply need to surrender everything you think you are to the Holy Spirit, who will replace the whole convoluted mess with what you really are.

A flawlessly perfect, radiant, sin-free child of God.