I think I have already mentioned the very graceful way in which my parents introduced me to the idea of a God. I haven’t mentioned that before this conversation with my parents, when I was about seven, I was talking with someone I understood to be God long before the idea of questioning these conversations ever occurred to me.

It all started with Santa Claus. I remember noticing something, maybe some inconsistency, which made me question whether this Santa was a real person. I went to my mother,

“Mom, is Santa real?”

“Well dear, the spirit of Christmas is really what Santa is about. The spirit is real.”

“But is Santa a REAL MAN?” Not to be diverted from my point, I was a seven year old who liked to be precise.

My mother took a breath, a moment of quiet thought and said, “No, Santa is like a game that all the adults and children play every year. It’s imagination.”

This rocked my little world. The idea that something I’d experienced, that families around the world participated in, wasn’t “real”. The idea of what was “real” and what was “imaginary” hadn’t yet solidified firmly in my brain anyway. It began, really, with Santa.

But it didn’t end with Santa. That same conversation killed off the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy. I wasn’t upset about it, it just took a few days for me to adjust to the mean reality that I lived in a world without a Santa Claus.

It took me a week to think to ask whether God was real.

I don’t know who it was I spoke with in my early childhood years. Maybe it was a relative, maybe a spirit guide; at the time, I believed I was talking to God. I experienced a nervous anxiety when the thought occurred to me that God might be an imaginary cultural creation, just like Santa. But then, who was I talking to?

“Mom, is God real?”

This question gave my mother pause. She said she’d talk to my father and get back to me. That was an interesting development. My parents didn’t need to have a conference before telling me Santa was a cultural game.

Sometime later they got back to me, “We believe that someone got everything started, but that we as people have control over our lives and our choices.” That was the official parental word on God. What I decided in my own head, the answer to my original question, was “Yes, God is real.” This came as a great relief to me, to know that the voice I spoke to in my head, who I believed was God, wasn’t my “imagination”.

Besides, I’d never spoken to Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny or the Tooth Fairy in my head.

This is where some people might wonder if I had a mental illness, having conversations in my head and hearing replies. There is not one psychic who hasn’t wondered whether they’re crazy. I think that’s why faith and spirituality is so important to me, it fills in the gap between what I experience and what I can prove.

My family wasn’t particularly religious. Both of my parents abandoned formal church-goin’ Sundays during the sixties, and while my mother returned to the church for work and social opportunities, my father never returned. When I was seven, I met my best friend Krista, whose mother Miriam was also my mother’s best friend. Miriam was romantically involved with the Minister at the local Trinity United Church, and she attended services weekly, and soon I was accompanying my best friend to Sunday school every week.

The two years of Sunday school, along with the brief sermons before children were sent off to the church basement to hear bible stories and draw pictures of Noah’s ark, was pretty much the extent of my formal religious instruction. I don’t recall much of it, but one thing I remember distinctly was the Minister, Jim, talking about talking with God.

He’d say something like, “I was thinking about this week’s sermon and I asked God, Lord how can I help these people? And the Lord said…”

I’ll never forget it, because my little heart fluttered in my chest. Here’s a full grown man, talking to a group of fifty other adults about talking with God, and hearing God’s reply. I was so relieved. From then on, I never questioned my connection with Heaven, even though I’d question just about everything else.

I was thinking about all this over the weekend, and I wondered at what point I stopped talking to God every day? Somewhere along the way, I learned that God was too busy to bother every day, and that I should only talk to him when I was truly in need. At some point in my early twenties I recalled God as a friend I’d lost touch with, someone I hadn’t contacted in over a year. I felt like a bit of a tool asking for help then… but help was given anyway. I resolved to speak with God more frequently after that, but I’d fallen out of the habit.

I think that because of this early connection, my habit of thinking of God as masculine, I never fully embraced the female-only idea of Goddess worship popular in the lesbian community. I remember dating this woman once who actually corrected me when I said, “Thank God!” She said, “You mean, thank Goddess!”

Yeah, that didn’t last long.

By the time I heard that sentence from a short-lived romantic partner, I’d already formed a strong idea of a couple of female-associated divine figures in my head. I had a vague idea of a Mother god, the figure Sylvia Browne calls “Azna” and a strong relationship with Mother Earth, thanks to my exposure to aboriginal culture through school programs and the Indian Friendship center, and my own teen years spent walking in the bush with my dog, Heidi.

But neither Azna nor Mother Earth carried their end of the conversation. They listened, they sent love and strength, but they didn’t speak.

These stories from the First Nations’ people, stories about Nanabush, the Great Creator and our mother, the Earth, made more sense to me than one figure, the one I spoke to as God, making absolutely everything. It didn’t override my relationship with God, it expanded upon it. Now instead of one voice up in Heaven, there was a silent choir, and a loving mother down here with me to boot.

Even now, I still understand my reality through these basic ideas – mother earth who gave us our bodies, father god and mother god in heaven, we, all their children all over the universe.

At some point, I stopped hearing God’s reply. I’m not sure when that happened… probably somewhere around the time I learned that we shouldn’t bother God with any old thing. Or maybe it was around the time I learned to pray – that prayer was like a telegram sent into the sky, that a phone call with God wasn’t possible.

I miss God’s voice.

I’m comforted, now, by the voices of many friends in Heaven. I’m comforted by my relationship with Sweetie, our blooming psychic adventure together. I’m comforted too by the antics and commentary from the creatures around me, my pets and the ever-present crows and eagles.

I also understand that *I* have created this separation from God. There’s something that stops me from reconnecting that telephone wire. There’s some reason I need that separation. And you know, you’re never really separated from God, you just think you are.

Sweetie has been reading Autobiography of a Yogi. If I may make a reading list suggestion, read in this order:

Behaving as though the God in All Things Mattered

The Findhorn book of… something about Nature. There are several Findhorn books and they’re referred to in Machaelle Small-Wright’s book, mentioned above.

Look at this bit I found on the Findhorn website:

It is over 50 years since Eileen Caddy first received personal guidance from a ‘still, small voice’ inside herself, a source she called ‘the God Within.’ From that day on she lived her life by that inner guidance, which led to the creation of the international spiritual community that is the Findhorn Foundation.

Well isn’t that just a lovely synchronicity to this entry?

And finally, I find Autobiography of a Yogi to be building on the ideas we were introduced to in the previous books. The concept we’re working with right now is Manifestation: the belief and therefore the ability to manifest matter out of thin air.

You know, like Jesus. Actually, there are a number of people throughout history who have demonstrated this ability, and the ones in Yogi have lived more recently than JC. In fact, several of the Gurus who walk the earth today have also demonstrated this ability.

But you don’t need to be a Guru to understand and work with manifestation.

Machaelle, in God Matters, talks about her very first manifestation: a pile of perfectly composted manure, formed in front of her out of thin air, as she meditated with the Nature spirits and asked for their assistance. As soon as I read that, I *knew* I could do it. I haven’t really tried, though.

It’s one of those things that I really need to see in order to understand how it works. Just like I needed confirmation from another animal communicator to believe that talking to animals was real, and not something I’d just made up in my own mind, I need to see a master at work to really understand on an intuitive level how to do this. And really, to truly know that it is possible.

Just like most people need some sort of confirmation before they can truly believe their dead relative is communicating through me, the medium. I think it’s natural – seeing is believing, believing is understanding, understanding is learning.

And isn’t that the whole point of being here?

Last night at Crystal Meditation, both Sweetie & I were visited by one of the Gurus from Yogi. I spent my meditation time attempting to manifest the scent of a rose, and someone came in to help me. He explained that in order to create the scent of the rose, you must attune yourself to the vibration of a fragrant rose, and the best way to do this is to “laugh through your heart”. Like, create the feeling of laughter in your heart chakra, and then exude it outwards, like a perfume.

I thought I may have detected a mild whiff of floral perfume by the end of the meditation, but it could’ve been coming from one of the other people in attendance. I was going for something that makes everybody notice and smile. I’ll keep working on it.

Sweetie’s discussion with this Guru was more in depth – she asked who she was speaking with, and he showed her a picture of himself from the book.

Sweetie said he had a moustache and looked very serene, so it probably wasn’t this photo:

But for some reason this is the one that came up in the search which he wants me to post.

Anyway, he was saying to Sweetie that becoming a Guru wasn’t so much about *becoming* something, achieving something. It was more about stripping things away – removing the layers, the attachment to the idea that the physical body is you, that your thoughts are you, that your emotions are you, that you are in any way confined to a particular time and place. Stripping and stripping away the layers until what is left is a point of light, that which makes up everything in the universe and unlimited possibilities.

It is about knowing your divine nature while remaining humble.

After meditation a visiting energy worker offered her services and I volunteered. She explained a bit about the sort of energy work she does – where reiki works on the physical energetic body, she works on a different level which pours white light energy into all of the energetic bodies surrounding our physical body. I’d never heard of this before, and I sat in acceptance of the energy for about five minutes. I didn’t hear or feel anything except the teasing desire to smile.

When the healer was finished, she commented on all the movement around my throat chakra, and that it was all good stuff, and to keep it up. It was a nice confirmation that someone who had no idea I’d been working with an energy-shifting pendant on exactly that chakra and connected issues, had picked up the movement. It was really cool, actually.

Sweetie later told me that during the healing, she distinctly heard the low vibration sound of “Om”. The same tone you hear in Gregorian chants and from didgeridoos. Sweetie says,

“You know how in the super-old testament there’s the quote In the beginning there was the Word? (I googled it and it looks like it’s John 1:1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.)

Well, I think that word was Om.”

Om, the base tone, the sound of creation. It acts on the vibrationary resonance of what, particles? Waves? We don’t have the right concepts exactly, or at least I don’t have the right concepts right now.

It ties into the idea of creating the rose scent – you attune to the vibration of the expression, whether it’s an object, a scent, an emotion, a complete human physical body – and then you can ask the molecules surrounding you to harmonize with that vibration. Maybe the sound Om helps them to synch up, or resets them to a base vibration so they can attain the feeling and movement of this different thing.

The adventure continues. I received my energy shifting pendant yesterday, but that deserves its own entry.