What does it mean to trust the universe/Source/God, when that thing/person is the source of all your trauma, agony, betrayal, and continued unanswered desires/prayers, along with all the good of life? Supposedly, anyway. This is a question that has plagued me since...
Yesterday at the Emergency Room, after the doctor examined my ears and consulted his peers, he returned and asked me, “This might sound strange, but do you believe in God/spirituality and have you had any experiences recently?” I told him the truth, that I had seen...
The cross Jesus was crucified upon has become a sword in the hands of the militant Christian fundamentalists who perpetrate the violence he experienced, in an act of Godself-mutilation. Were Jesus’s dying words, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do”...
“Satan masquerades as an angel of light,” the Bible claims (2 Corinthians 11:14, NIV). Surely then, he must frequent in Christian robes. The idea that Satan, the literal or mythical personification of evil, presents as his opposite has caused no small amount of...
Religious groups aspire to be agents of psychological and spiritual healing. Yet frequently they stigmatize people who suffer from mental health conditions or problems as sinful, demonically influenced, and weak-willed. Depression, anxiety, psychosis, and addiction...
The gospel message believed in by many Christians that Jesus died to save you from your sins is based on a victim-persecutor-rescuer psychological complex, commonly known as a trauma (or drama) triangle. Those who buy into this version of the gospel inevitably play...
Unconditional love is a universal longing of the human heart. We all experience the agonies of rejection, not-belonging, and love tainted by strings attached. We seek unconditional love from romantic partners, peers, social groups, and from ourselves. We benefit from...
How can a person be possessed by the will of another and convinced that will is her own? Possession is a state of consciousness where one’s agency is being used by another entity (person, group, ideology) against one’s own interest. It is a form of psychological and...
The Law of Attraction (LOA), also known as manifestation, is a cardinal doctrine of self-help, New Age, and New Thought movements. Defined as the central law of the universe, LOA claims a level of authority similar to that of a creator God. This ideology is accepted...
The Bible contains many depictions of God, some benevolent, others less than praiseworthy. One of the Bible’s main images of God lies on the diabolical end of the divinity spectrum: God the Fascist. Although the Bible never calls God a fascist outright, many of...
What would it be like to channel all the belief you could muster for a creator of the universe into yourself? What if you could stand in your power and believe in yourself with the same fervency the most hysterical evangelist believes in God? Our turnings to faith and...
Religious belief in hell fills the waking moments and dreams of untold numbers of people with terror, many of whom seek therapy to break the nightmarish fear. Treating hellfire trauma requires knowledge of the client’s religious indoctrination and upbringing, as well...
Summary: This article explains a spiritual solution to hell on earth and in the mind and provides a psychological understanding of religious doctrines of terror. It proposes a psychological view of hell as trauma seeking to resolve itself through a reenactment of...
Christian history is a two-thousand-year-old dinner table argument over whose version of Jesus is the right one. People have been debating about who Jesus really was—what he said, what he meant, where he came from—for ages. The reality is Jesus is a metaphor into...
This is a caution about the dangers of hyper-spiritualizing and spiritually-bypassing the coronavirus or any other calamity. Viewing COVID-19 primarily as the physical manifestation of a spiritual problem or encouraging magical spiritual solutions without preventative...
Learning how to cope with suffering and evil is perhaps the greatest challenge of life. How can we survive our darkest moments and make some meaning of the mess without trivializing agony or condoning evil? The symbol of Satan is a powerful representation of the...
The science-of-consciousness schools of the world (mysticism) have observed that the highest states of human potential can be achieved through loving another person. Universal love is a more vital endeavor than any other kind of progress because love is the lifeblood...
Many of the insecurities and negative relationship patterns we struggle with stem from the degree of security and attention we experienced in our connection to our primary caregivers as infants. This idea is known in psychology as attachment theory. Psychologists view...
I spent most of my life longing to be more spiritual but dreading spiritual practice because I felt like it’s onerous drudgery, agonizingly boring hard work. I never considered myself a particularly disciplined person and felt deeply ashamed as I compared myself to...
Jesus is the greatest heretic to establishment Christian orthodoxy of all time. Jesus was murdered by the religious establishment of his day because they understood his heretical claim that he is God and so are you. Christianity has downplayed the radical nature of...
Christians understand that divine grace can be experienced through ingesting a sacred substance. Jesus instituted the eating of sacraments in the Lord’s Supper, a central ritual in Christian gatherings around the world. Psychedelics are an official sacrament in...
To MyDivinity beyond myself, who lives in perfect wholeness (“Our Father which art in heaven”) I am ever mindful of my I AM God nature in all things and theirs in me (“Hallowed be thy name”) I will create heaven on earth by bringing this divine awareness to every...
Human photosynthesis is the process of spiritual enlightenment by gazing at mystical light. Have you ever seen the inner light behind your eyelids? You may notice that certain people appear to have light emanating from their eyes, shining faces, and enlivening energy....
What if you could borrow the mind of God? Or perhaps manufacture something like it through technological sorcery. Imagine what your life might look like from the perspective of an all-loving, all-knowing creative intelligence. How would your infinitesimally puny human...
Transpersonal Hour Interview: Healing Religious Trauma and Experiencing Divinity: Watch my interview on the Transpersonal Hour Show with Anna Bobikova about realizing your divinity and healing religious trauma. The talk criticizes fear-based elements in religion and...
Omniscience means divinity is “all-knowing.” Omniscience has been traditionally understood as an attribute of God, something inaccessible to human beings. But understanding human nature as divine (godliness), omniscience can be applied to everyday people, literally or...
This is the God Complex: I make myself God to others to save myself from my suffering. Salvation from suffering through egotism is the problem of God. Humanity creates its Gods in the image of its ego. Ego worship is the source of the tribalistic us-versus-them...
Omnibenevolence means “divinity is all-loving” with “total goodwill,” and that includes you because your fundamental nature is divine. It means the presence of unconditional love is ubiquitous: everywhere, all around you, in everything and everyone, because the...
Atheistic Humanism lacks a developed language for psychological experiences typically labeled religious or mystical. It often focuses narrowly on the dangers of religion, which makes metaphysical claims about mystical-type experiences without evidence or critical...
The religious differences of the world could be resolved with the one true confession of faith: “I don’t know.” I don’t know who I am or the ultimate nature of reality. My spirituality is an open question I’m living into, and I’m avoiding the temptation to need all...
“God” must speak blasphemy to every truth seeker, total self-annihilatory heresy, in order to remain distinct from our ideas. God rages against your most treasured notions of God: your Jesus, your Buddha, your Muhammad, your Scientism, and must destroy God in these...
Many forms of Christianity do not resemble the spirituality Jesus taught. The teachings of Jesus and the Bible may require his followers to transform their Christian religious institutions in order to become Christians (lit. “followers of Christ”) because Christianity...
Martyrdom is an ideology that weaponizes its victim to conquer an indigenous culture in Holy War through human sacrifice. Human sacrifice appeases the wrath of diabolical gods of human aggression, which is mobilized through a persecution complex to satiate the greed...
A politician who uses Christianity to promote immorality and economic exploitation through lying propaganda is considered an antichrist in the Bible. Christians who embrace Trump and his promises of salvation (or any politician who uses God as a pretense) are...
An embodied existence comes with many unpleasant realities and limitations. No one is born wanting to die, get sick, or experience pain. Naturally, many religions envisioned spirituality as a way to transcend the afflictions of the body. They confused the site of...
Many religions teach ideologies that psychologically traumatize millions of people. Yet few helping professionals are trained to help people heal from religious trauma. Religious abuse can result in anxiety disorders, PTSD, spiritual suppression, sexual dysfunction,...
The kind of apocalypse foretold in the Bible is really happening right now. No faith or deciphering of arcane prophecies is required of us. We need only step foot in Nature and listen to her cries, and the cries of scientists who cherish her, to see our extinction...
The Tree of Life is a symbol central to many spiritual traditions. It is perhaps more relevant now than any other time in human history. We face a great ecospiritual crisis: the destruction of life on Planet Earth and human consciousness. Climate change, war, and the...
The Bible promotes a political strategy of division by othering everyone outside of the religion. Through divisive labeling, my neighbor morphs from a fellow human being into a distant other, the sinner, to whom I, the saint, no longer can relate with empathy: an...
The worldviews of biblical religiosity and materialistic isolationism arise from the psychological survival technique of splitting. When faced with overwhelming experiences, our psyche protects us by splitting the personality into two parts: the good me and the bad...
Hell exists as a real place of torture in the minds of those who feed its imaginary fires through their fear. It is only those who believe in hellfire religion who suffer from the real hell, and those escaping hell religion who are still in recovery from hellfire...
Sexual violence is commonplace in the biblical narrative. It is perhaps most X-rated in Jesus’s recommendations for mutilation of the male anatomy in castration and emasculation. As a young boy, I was terrified when I heard Jesus’s suggestions that I mutilate myself...
The mass killings and sexual violence committed by dogmatic biblical religions are a small evil. The hidden dragon is the enslavement of the human race. Millions of lives to the slaughter, commanded by the Holy Word of God, weigh up as sawdust on the cosmic scales in...
Western religions have made narcissism a virtue through the worship of God, who bears all the markers of a Narcissistic Personality Disorder. Narcissism is a painful condition of low self-esteem masked by a shallow presentation of grandiose confidence. Through their...
Fundamentalist religion works on the psyche like mental illness. It functions by creating dysfunctional personality structures that sort of get you by, but also produce enormous suffering. Anxiety is created by messages of fear and judgment, psychosis (not being able...
Christian Fundamentalism’s evangelistic message is framed as a Holy War Narrative. The biblical call to world evangelism, as interpreted through fundamentalism, is a dictatorial King’s strategic vision of world domination. Holy War is a central metaphor in the...
Christianity claims to promote spirituality. I sought spiritual experiences for twenty-six years in the fundamentalist iterations of Christianity. Yet I only began to experience them after I left Christianity. And I’ve noticed a curious trend: all the spiritual...
Fundamentalist religiosity often looks like a severely traumatized individual trying to resolve his trauma in unhealthy ways. Fundamentalist Christianity attempts to resolve the trauma of humanity suffering by re-enacting it on other people in the vengeance of divine...
The Protestant work ethic is the notion that your worth is a function of your hard work: what you produce. This is the mental illness of our time. The idea of hard work put forth in American society is a burden that crushes the broken and disenfranchised and...
Christian fundamentalism criminalizes normal emotional expression and trains people to repress their feelings. Negative emotions aren’t merely unpleasant (which is bad enough); they become crimes of emotion against god. Emotion crimes come packaged with fear of...
Many leave Christianity simply because they are women. The bible was written by men and for men. God has a penis. Patriarchy informs the entire biblical worldview. There is no escaping that (try as liberal Christianity may); there is only damage control. Women often...
Fundamentalist Christianity is like a drug culture. Its drug of choice is known by the street names of the gospel (good news), salvation, and eternal life. Religious addicts consume the good news drug by various means, including compulsive prayers of self-degradation...
Many of us have learned to associate sex with hurtful things. Reclaiming Sexuality means breaking those negative associations by giving yourself healthy, life-affirming messages. Sex is not about shame, abuse, or fear. This is what sex means: Love. Life. Pleasure....
Many religions utilize mind control techniques to ensure the loyalty of their membership. Through cleverly applied biblical teachings, they implanted a chip in my brain and constantly surveilled my every thought to make sure I lived in conformity with their demands at...
When I was a little boy I asked a foreign entity to come into my heart and take over my body. He told me I was lost and hopeless without him, and that he would take my life if I didn’t obey his every word. I was very afraid. My entire community told me I needed this...
Millions of Christians have an abusive kind of relationship with Jesus, a spiritual romance of sorts. (I do not consider all relationships to Jesus inherently abusive; I speak to harmful interpretations of Jesus.) I used to be in an abusive relationship with this man,...
Christian purity culture is sexual immorality masquerading as purity. There is nothing more sexually immoral than shaming people for being sexual. Religion is the most sexually abusive system of all time. Religious sexual purity teaching is psychological sexual abuse....
God’s law is the gateway drug of indoctrination in fundamentalist Christianity. It seduces you to surrender critical thinking and decision-making to religion by making you feel helpless. Nothing tormented me more as Christian than the law of god. It’s a control...
Indoctrination stunts moral development. There is no such thing as a single “biblical morality,” but there are many immoral biblical teachings. Morality is more of a muscle than a fixed set of rules; it needs to be exercised, and it requires critical thinking, trust...
Hell is evil. This is obvious. Any idea that tells you if you question it, you will be tortured–that’s a trap designed to keep you in fear, to keep you from questioning its obvious faults. No one deserves to be burned with fire. A deity who tortures its creatures with...
I see myself wildly succeeding beyond what I am able to imagine is possible for me! Do you? Every time you heal or take action in a new way aligned with your heart’s desire, your eyes are opened to new horizons. Your realm of possibility expands; your previous...
Blog: Inspiring Psychological and Spiritual Wholeness, Healing Religious Trauma