Higher Power, Lower Power

Higher Power is sometimes a hurdle for newcomers to get over.  Their brains have already been hijacked by a religion of Lenthe, drug abuse  and they feel that they are betraying the Lower Power when they even acknowledge a higher power.  They don’t see themselves as knuckle dragging monkeys or recognize that they have a monkey on their back at very least. They’re more like barn yard animals in many of their behaviours than civilized humans. Their self care and personal hygeince and obsession with lust, food or simply hedonistic pursuits has override the program of civilization and culture they might have had before they became the devotee of drugs.
It’s not surprising, even the government wants the marginal and contrary to be addicted.  They carry resentments and didn’t easily fit in somewhere or with someone so have turned their back on most if not all of the human race.  They are great rationalists.  Intellectuals and artists, Deep thinkers.  Couch potatoes and computer fans.  Anxiety is common.
So to grasp a higher power is to acknowledge their slavery to a lower power.  It’s fundamental to accepting a negative state as the naming of it. “I am hungry”.  “I am sick”.  Yet to say I am ‘addicted’ or I am ‘an alcoholic’ is to admit that the lie of many years has been so massive as to realize one is thoroughly duped.  A higher power. There is something ‘else’.
I like the idea better of an inner power.  I get caught up in words and the notion of ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ is confounding.  Yet there is the easter idea of the chakras with spiritual domains in the higher levels.  Errors at the  lower levels are associated with lust and gluttony and sentimentalism.  True love and wisdom are seen as residing in the heart and head regions.  The age of rationalism was associated with the recognition that warriors recovered from wounds of the ‘lower’ regions but if the heart or brain was destroyed there was no life. Hence the association of the ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ at the individual level.
Inner and outer appeals more to me. I like the eastern mantra, “I am the bubble make me the sea”.  There is much on the surface of things that is understood best in the depth.  I am a scuba diver and know that there can be storms on the surface of the sea but below the water there is calm. So there is homeostasis in the centre whereas the outer regions of the body are most responsive to environmental change.
I believe too in Dr. Carl Jung’s conception of the ‘collective unconscious’ .  There is the idea in Emmett Fox of the individual power of the imagination and the Biblical notion of God as creator and prime dreamer.  Sometimes I think that my life is a reflection of the collective prayers or desires of my own life interfaced with a long line of competing desires and prayers resulting in my having this waitlist of responses. While I appreciated my sportscar today it really was my greatest wish as a child.  Fifty years later the object of my teen age desire manifests in my life.
The externalization of my inner self occurs daily. I am more ‘true’ to who I am and less a product of the superficial. Yet when I was younger and thought myself more individual I wore all the uniforms of the day.
Today I resist the propaganda of Climate Change and Globalization and Excessive Government taxation and question the propaganda and mainstream superficial noise of urban culture.  I joined right in as a teen ager never questioning who was ‘picking’ the songs that were ‘sold’ on the radio and what ‘forces’ were behind the ‘peace movement’ and ‘why abortion was good’.
Today I can frankly resist the hurricanes of public opinion and go to the deeper calm within and know that I don’t have to wear the uniforms of our times but rather seek a deeper truth.
I may be wrong but I’m no longer dependent on Hollywood lemming mass cliff seeking.  I can find a balance between the insanity of the isolated genius with angry aberrant thoughts to much the matter of schizophrenia and the selfie seeking crowd pleasing insanity of the shallow social chameleon.  I can find this ‘inner place’ where I believe the ‘higher power’ is as well.
When I am ‘inside’ I am most at home. I find this inside place most in meditation.  Sitting quiet in nature, or churches , and sometimes in libraries I am not alone there but in touch with a consciousness that is like the ocean.  This inner place is my higher power.  I am very thankful for this.  The world is so loud at times. The cacophony of the city communication loudspeaker computers, radios, traffic, all recedes when I enter this inner sanctuary.
There my love is.
There I am loved.