Love and Power: Earthly vs. Spiritual

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What we call “love” on the earthly level is not love at all. “Love” on the earthly level is about getting something for ourselves - approval, security, attention, understanding, sex, affection. Love on the spiritual level is about giving something to ourselves and others - caring, compassion, understanding, attention, affection. Love on the earthly level is about getting our emptiness filled by things, activities, substances and people. Love on the spiritual level is about learning to fill ourselves internally through connecting with our own essence and with God, receiving the energy of love and compassion from God and sharing it others.

Power on the earthly level is about controlling events and people; power on the spiritual level is about personal empowerment - power within. It includes the power to receive love and wisdom from Spirit, realize our creative potential and manifest our dreams. Spiritual power is the power to remain loving and compassionate in the face of fear.

Our beliefs about God are often at the root of our choice to operate primarily from an earthly perspective or a spiritual perspective.

Exploring our False Beliefs About God

Spiritual abuse, which disconnects us from God and causes us to live from an earthly perspective, leads us to many false beliefs about God. What are some of these beliefs?

1. God Doesn’t Exist

When parents (or other caregivers) do not consistently bring God’s love through to children because they give children disapproval or conditional approval instead and call it love, children may conclude that God doesn’t exist. This is especially true in homes where there is no religious or spiritual training.

Even if children are taught about God, they are often told that God is all-powerful. “But if God is all-powerful, why does God let bad things happen to me?” an abused child may ask. Even adults may ask, “Why does God allow all the bad things on the planet - the Holocaust, starvation, AIDS?”

The concept of an all-powerful God can be misleading. It is essential to understand that the Creator gave all souls free will. This means that you get to decide your own purpose in life, your deepest desires, your way of being. You decide whether you are going to be loving or unloving, responsible for your own feelings and behavior or putting the blame on others. You decide if you are going to be open to learning about your pain or avoid it with your various anesthetics - your addictions. You decide if your deepest motivation is to love yourself and others or to maintain “safety” by protecting yourself against loneliness, rejection and failure.

When your deepest desire is to be safe rather than loving, you close your heart to avoid feeling your pain. When you close your heart, you cannot feel God - God can only enter through an open heart. Free will means that God has chosen to relinquish power over your will. Even God cannot control your intent - that is, your deepest desire in any given moment - because God has given us all free will.

When parents protect against feeling their pain and take their woundedness out on their children, there is no doorway through which God can enter the parents’ hearts. God is an all-powerful energy that you can open to and invite into your heart, but God cannot enter your heart unbidden. Once you shift your intent and ask God to help heal your wounds and teach you to be loving to yourself and others, then the Spirit of love, compassion and wisdom that is God will always be there for you. But it is you who must decide to open or close your heart.

When our hearts are closed to ourselves, we are also closed to the suffering of others and can cause them untold pain. Because we each have free will, God cannot force an abusive parent or a Hitler to open his or her heart. No force outside of yourself, not even an all-powerful force, can open your heart to God.

2. God Exists, But Not for Me

When parents consistently bring through Divine Love to their children, the children learn that God is there for them. When parents and other adults are trustworthy - as opposed to abandoning, smothering or controlling - then children experience God as trustworthy. But when children are taught in church or temple that God exists, yet they have no experience (through their parents or other caregivers) of God being there for them, they may come to believe that God exists but not for them. This is not unusual. Children are likely to believe that if they are not good enough to be loved by their parents or other adults around them, they are not good enough to be loved by God. Most children project their parents’ or other caregivers’ feelings and behavior onto God.