Asha Elijah ~ One with God

Asha Elijah (aka Asha & Asher Quinn) sings ’One with God’ from his album “Prayers & Invocations.“ CD/download in 2022. My intention is that this song I wrote speaks for itself, but I’d also like to add a bit more context here, because my wish is to communicate super clearly in the name of healing. To be truly one with God is the ultimate healing for all our divisions. To be one with God dissolves duality, and therefore conflict. So this is my experience: everything is in God. There is nothing that is not God. This includes life & death, good & evil, eternity & transience, faith & atheism. The very tongue that we could deny God with, is a gift from God. The very body that we might torment with our free will is a gift from God. Free will itself is a gift from God. The free will to choose disconnection from God with, is a gift from God. Our existence is a gift; a blessing, borne out of the divine spark of love. Our existence is not our possession. Two paths have evolved in existence. One is knowledge and the other is faith. The path of knowledge proceeds from the ’fall of mankind’, and eating of the forbidden fruit of the tree of knowledge, according to the Old Testament mythology. Knowledge takes us away from an instinctual, original communion with the divine, into material reality. The path of knowledge leads us out of the spiritual world and into the earthly world. Knowledge is not to be confused with gnosis, mind you. Knowledge is linear, empirical, statistical and historical, whereas gnosis is an awareness of the bigger cosmic picture, of how everything in the material world and time & space proceeds from the spiritual world and the eternal. Knowledge is natural science, I could say. Faith is the path that proceeds from our original state of instinctive communion with the divine. It leads us back to that communion if we have become disconnected through knowledge. Faith is art, I could say; poetry. It is not politics that saves the world, but poetry. Even quantum physicists grin and say: “The more I find out the less I know.“ So knowledge is paradoxical; we can be filled with facts and yet we can feel empty, existentially. The Old Testament view of God was ’of the time’; people felt afraid of the wrath of a manifestly transcendent power in existence. Hence Adam & Eve were punished; cast out. The symbolism here means that if we pursue knowledge to try and possess existence and ’outwit’ God, we can feel cast out in our soul; expelled from ’one-ness.’ There are 3 key events I’d like to mention. Firstly, there was the enlightenment of the Buddha, when he saw that the only true reality was the ’NOW’; ’WHAT IS.’ The second was the message of the Christ in Jesus of Nazareth, that the ’NOW’, the ’WHAT IS,’ is GOD. The third is the assertion by Descartes: “I think, therefore I am.“ Descartes was writing as the age of knowledge was accelerating, and the age of faith dissolving. Essentially, Descartes made man the centre of creation rather than God, and all natural science since then has proceeded accordingly. This thinking is now behind every system we have; finance, education, health, politics, art, religion, agriculture, housing, technology, media, entertainment and so on. As Nietzsche lamented: “God is dead.“ He did not mean HE believed that, but that society believed that. The mysterious fall of man has a purpose, however, as even the fall of man is in God. Mankind must fall out of the collective, instinctual communion with God (over aeons), in order to find God individually. This is the completion of humanity; of the individual. Demonic spiritual powers in the ether (also in God) aid this fall. Lucifer with materialistic temptation and comfort-zone illusion; the ancient, Persian, anti-light demon Ahriman with cold, Godless science, statistics and Kafka-esque systems; the demonic being of alcohol, even. Carl Jung talked of individuation, of the human being coming to the point of conscious self-realisation through his own, free-will choices. The sun shines above the clouds. We can choose to doubt it because we can’t see it, or we can choose to have faith in it. Either way, whatever we believe, it is there. Thus it is with God. Our free will must choose; doubt or faith. If we did not have free will, we would be controlled by God instead of loved. Christ ushered in mercy and forgiveness as truths about God, to transcend ancient beliefs about a wrathful, zealous God. Whatever we do, and whoever we are, we are loved by God and forgiven. God’s mercy is infinite. All that matters, despite endless mistakes, is that we come home to God, consciously, as individuals. Even after lifetimes of denial. There are 3 stages of spiritual home-coming, that transcend our current zeitgeist (“I think, therefore I am.“): Firstly, we come to realise that we are loved. Secondly, that we love. Thirdly, and triumphantly, we come to realise that we ARE love. We could then rightly say: “I have faith, therefore I am.“