My Imaginery Enemy

I had heard of imaginary friends but imagine my shock when I came to the slow realization that I had an imaginary enemy. It turned my life around.

I grew up in religion. My mom did a good job. You couldn't separate me from it. The two of us were somehow one. I knew I was Catholic before I knew my own name. I don't remember a time before religion.

God was the center of my universe. I loved him but I also feared him. Who wouldn't fear a monster that could send most of His creation to an eternity of eternal torment, burning in a flaming pit and gnashing of teeth. A God that would create a devil and make us spend our life fighting him with little or no victory. Yet I thought I had this amazing relationship with him. Lordship. That's what it was all about. I realise now that the God I was serving was a being that I had created. One that the church had created. A false "Sky God" that demanded worship and wanted to be appeased. This was not the real God, the creator of the universe. Someone that created all of this could only be rooted and established in pure love. This wasn't love. The only true God is the one that we find within ourselves and within others.

But that was not the worst part, the worst part was the day I realised that I had spent the last four decades fighting an imaginary enemy. Doing spiritual warfare against a fork tailed monster that didn't exist. Wasting my time, putting on the "armour of God" living each day in a spiritual battle, battling unseen forces, fearing their infiltration into my mind. Everyday problemo is s were seen as an enemy attack. Spiritual warfare would be needed to root him out.

It was exhausting and in truth, there was little or no victory. Any ground that was perceived to have been gained was always ripped back in a crippling defeat. I could never understand why their was no real "victory". Where was the freedom? What a fucking waste of time.

The day I realised that he was a figment of my overactive imagination that had been programmed into me from as young as I could remember was the day that I did find that freedom and victory. I just let it go. A monument was  shattered in my mind. It all came tumbling down. I would never go back into that kind of slavery again. That kind of crippling fear. It had been a part of me forever. Cammy and fear were one. That fear just evaporated. Gone..... Never to be seen again.

I was free. Freer than free. It felt amazing. I could breath. I could be myself. It took me a long time to find that self. I had to unwrap her from all the religions chains that I was wrapped in. I didnt know who I was after spending a lifetime of being one with religion I didn't know my true self. I didn't know how to think for myself. Was I allowed to?

God lives in you, as you....playing in our boodstream the way sunlight amuses itself on the water. No separation, no duality. Just one.

The ingredients of both darkness and light are equally present in us all...which wolf do you feed..? Remains my favourite question.

We are, after all, what we think.....our emotions are the slave to our thoughts and our thoughts are the slave to our emotions.

I am now revelling in my new found freedom. I'm enjoying being myself. Finding myself. Thinking for myself. No more fear. No more fighting. I'm not living in a battle. I have found myself in all men. One. One with each other. One with the creator and one with love. That's all. Sweet and simple.