Tag Archives: Love

The God Of My Understanding

Now

I was not satisfied yesterday, as I usually am not satisfied with any post, or sometimes page, I write. One reason is that I could not find, or actually did not make the time, to find an image for this post, this ‘page’, and it seems I am, or my ego is, compelled with finding or putting an image on every post or page I write here. And yes, of course the reason is Search Engine Optimization (SEO), as Google is said to rank internet pages lower if there is no image or if there are no images. And if there is no image, no page image, I cannot properly share this post in Facebook, as of course if I share something there must be an image, otherwise people won’t like my post so much, or not click on the link, not ‘see me’.

So yes, it seems all those rules I set for myself seem to be related to ‘be seen’, to be recognized. And as I know now, that is the ego that wants to be seen and recognized.

And right now I am not satisfied either, as this text, this chapter, probably belongs to another post, another page, not this page with the title “The God Of My Understanding”.

And strange, the image I found when searching for ‘ego’ in AllTheFreeStock.

.Alter Ego

And right now my ego is causing me a lot of stress as the image is not uploading fast enough to my liking. Ah, and that is what I wanted to share, that I am trying to learn a lot recently from the teachings of Eckhart Tolle. I was just starting to listen to his book of which a spoken version is available on YouTube.

And weird, right now the complete opposite is happening to me as to what is being taught by Eckhart Tolle: my ego seems to have taken over completely and I am trying to do many things at the same time instead of staying in the now, what would give me peace, what would give peace, what is the only thing that probably is important: staying in the now.

Yesterday

For quite a while I have been very angry with God. Or at least I am very much struggling with the issue of “God’s will (for me”. As I have the feeling God’s will for me is completely opposite to what I want. I have the feeling God is completely against what I want and wants me to do something else than what I want. And this goes so far that I have virtually completely given up wanting anything, as God is against it anyway. So why would I want something and even do effort for it if God is against it anyhow. As also in my belief system is that God is all powerful and that nothing that God does not want will happen. And what God wants will happen.

So today I found myself verbalizing what I believe God wants from me, what God’s will for me is in my understanding. And I found myself writing something that God wants me to go to the US working in some kind of ‘simple’ job like cleaning in order to pay for my livelihood, for my food and such. And  what God wants from me would imply I would need to leave my house and the dogs behind, and basically leave everything behind and start anew somewhere else, somewhere in a strange place I have no connection with, don’t know anybody and things like that. He would also want me to leave my computer systems behind, a computer system that holds all my data, including a lot of history and photos and web development stuff and such, a computer system I have put an awful lot of effort in building, even though I can’t fully maintain it the way I want it at the moment and was even confronted with a disk crash yesterday where part of my data was kind of lost. A pretty ‘impossible’ situation, as normally I keep almost everything in duplicate and next to that keep backups of my most important data that cannot be replaced or cannot easily be replaced.

Actually that disk crash was the starting point of a pretty bad mood in which I started writing down those thoughts about God’s will for me. And that might actually be a good thing, as it made me verbalize, realize what I believe God’s will is for me and what keeps me trapped in virtually doing ‘nothing’.

The strange things about my belief in what God’s will for me is, is that He always answers my prayers related to the dogs. As Ulla died at home, for which I prayed very hard and serious and Arf survived a very bad situation and Iwa’s tumors are gone. And with Ulla I even got more than I asked for, as I only asked for her to come home and die at home. God gave her even half a year more to live. And Arf’s tumor appeared not to be a real tumor and he survived as I was guided to the vet at the very last minute. And Iwa’s tumors disappearing recently is a real miracle. I could have never believed that really as it appeared to me she would die very soon as the tumors started to spread very quickly. And suddenly they just disappeared.

So God answering my prayers about the dogs is kind of contradictory to me for leaving them behind. And God wanting me to do a simple cleaning job or something is kind of contradictory to having a more than higher IQ than average and even having a Masters degree in Mechanical Engineering. And don’t get me wrong, nothing wrong with any job, whether simple or complicated or whether requiring intelligence or not. But it just doesn’t make sense to me God gave me a more than average intelligence and not wanting me to use it (in a job). And I have a back injury, so not very convenient for me to do a lot of physical work. And having this pretty advanced computer network at home and giving it up also doesn’t make much sense to me, even though I don’t really need it anymore. But just letting it go is just too much to me and doesn’t make much sense, which is why I am still kind of keeping it alive.

So thinking further it appears to me that the God of my understanding is (still) completely against anything I want, except maybe when I pray for something with the health of the dogs. And thinking further a God who is completely against everything I want sounds more like a (the) devil to me than a (loving) God. As to me ‘loving’ implies helping and supporting the thing or person one loves. And being against everything I want and blocking it feels more like torture than like love to me.

Related to ‘love’ I often compare God’s relation with me with the relation I have with my dog Arf as I indeed want Arf doing what I want and not what he wants, regardless the fact that I love him very much. And that hurts me often, as I want to give him so much more freedom, but I don’t want him to fight with YokYok, which is why I keep him on a leash, and I don’t want him to get hurt in an accident, which is why I don’t want him to go out of the compound, out of the garden.

Anyhow, it is still weird to me that God does not seem to want to help me with restoring my relationship and with my career, with my business, the two things I want most, as my (ex-)partner still does not want to be my lover and partner again and I am still alone with my DoctorsConnect business, without clients or beta-testers even.

And yes, I understand God would not want to change my (ex-)partner as He gave us, humans, free will and He wouldn’t want to mess with that, even though I read many stories in the bible where God changed the mindset or thinking of human beings. I don’t understand why He didn’t let me meet the right people to either build a team or to find clients or beta-testers. I strongly believe God is capable of arranging something like that, and after more than three years that still did not happen. And I think “I did my part”, even though a few months I kind of gave up and decided to “let God” make my project happen as I think I did enough and have no clue what else to do (if God is so much against my project).

Enough for now I guess. And I hope you won’t consider this as a ‘negative’ post, as it kind of helped me writing down the truth about my thoughts and feelings about “God’s will”, love, and what I really want.

Love is blind?

I am more and more amazed with the power of sex; or of romantic love; or love; or whatever one may call it. Or is it something else?

I find myself more and more in an impossible situation, or not really impossible, but a situation I could have never imagined before, when I was a child. It seems that many things I was told about life when I was a child were a lie, or at least not true. And yes, I guess my parents and other teachers didn’t know better. They could not have taught me things they did not know. And how could they have known?

And I guess many things they did not really teach me. Many things I believed came from my own imagination. Or from what I read or knew or heard of.

And no, I don’t like where I stand now. And yes, it seems I still blame it on my past, on others, on God, on whatever. Or yes, on the person I love, the person I love most. And it is not true a human being can just ‘move on’. As I have a big loan to pay and I have no clue how I would do that; or even agree to the new, very fair, agreement that is in the making. How can I make commitments on things I don’t know, on things I can’t control?

Yes, I believed in love, and somehow I guess I still do. But it seems indeed love is blind, stupid. How can that be, as to me love is still sweet and nice and pleasant and a good thing. But no, it appears not to be, at least not the romantic love I believed in.

So what is this thing I used to call love? Just lust, just sex, just sexual need, just instinct? And why is it so bad, why did it have such a bad outcome for me, at least the last few years and as of this moment? And how would I make up? And how would I control my sexual urges, my sexual needs? Just suppress them? But that just seems to create more unmanageability. Or indeed, try to remove them through castration or something? Yes, that is how far I have come now, even somehow considering something like that, although not really seriously, as that seems to only kind of sure way to take away sexual feelings.

But then what, what is the world, what is life without romantic love? To me a day without romantic love, yes without making love or something, a day without sleeping together, yes, preferably with my lover and partner, something I don’t have and somehow don’t want anymore? What is a day without that?

Or is it still all about the emptiness, the spiritual emptiness I am trying to fill and that cannot be filled without believing in some kind of loving God or loving Higher Power? Or about loving myself, but isn’t that the same thing? I often wonder if it would not be hard for (a) God to love Himself, as He would also need to live with the consequences of his choices, like the suffering that is probably the result of giving man ‘free will’.

The love of God

I recently started a post A loving Higher Power. And maybe I better continue extending and improving that post, but somehow I wanted to start from scratch again as I am struggling so much with ‘Love’.

And today or yesterday the definition as given in The Matrix came back to my mind. It was said by, well, I forgot the name, but I will put later. The guy from the Machine World that Neo meets in the railway station. Found it: Rama Kandra.

Ah, and I feel so restless, not really in the mood of writing. But I also know writing is good for me. And so many things to do…

And it is a few days after I started this post now. And I just had a phone call with my mom in which she told me what she put on the grave of my dad: “God is love”. Not sure why she mentioned it and she did not know why she put it. She said it just came to here to put that.

And that brings me back to writing here, as this page is exactly about that. And I guess it cannot be coincidence that she mentioned it, even though I mentioned to her about my struggle with ‘love’ in relation to God, in relation to Higher Power.

And I thought I put a link to ‘Love’ as written about in Wikipedia, but apparently I didn’t. Or I did somewhere else. And this may be an important paragraph about it in Wikipedia:

Ancient Greek philosophers identified four forms of love: essentially, familial love (in Greekstorge), friendly love (philia), romantic love (eros), and divine love (agape). Modern authors have distinguished further varieties of love: infatuated loveself-love, and courtly love. Non-Western traditions have also distinguished variants or symbioses of these states. Love has additional religious or spiritual meaning. This diversity of uses and meanings combined with the complexity of the feelings involved makes love unusually difficult to consistently define, compared to other emotional states.

And I remember the word agape mentioned related to the love of God, I think from a religious meeting or attending church. Not much in the article worth copying here though at first sight, so I guess I have to write myself a bit more and/or do some more research.

And I am pretty tired and still kind of upset, as today it was confirmed Iwa, one of my dogs, has a tumor that needs to be treated. And unfortunately the vet is on holiday for two weeks, so I feel pretty stressed and confused, as I am thinking of cancer spreading. And I would like, love(?!) Iwa to stay quite a bit longer, as she is not that old yet.

So yes, I feel like stopping now, need some rest. And yes, I will try to pray, hoping God will cure Iwa. Not easy believing in a loving God with things like this, like sickness and possible death from that.

 

A loving Higher Power

I am attending meetings of Twelve Step programs and I think until now my biggest struggle is the concept of a loving Higher Power, with emphasis on the word loving. As in my experience God is not loving, in my experience God is punishing, implementing some law I have to follow. And I think I wrote about this struggle before, although I am not fully sure if it was in this site or in my Dutch blog.

Loving Higher PowerKeep in mind that I make a big presumption in the above paragraphs as I somehow replace “Loving Higher Power” with “God”, where in the program “Higher Power” is not necessarily God or a god. And “God” in the program is definitely not the God from the bible, the God I grew up with and somehow still believe in. No, it is “a God of my understanding”, which indeed in my case is kind of the God I grew up with, the punishing God, the God of Law.

And interesting, while searching for an image of a loving Higher Power I ended up in the page http://ohmygodlife.com/how-to-build-a-relationship-with-your-higher-power/, a page dealing exactly with what I am talking about here.

Ah, and I am still so tired. Yes, from all the things I believe my Higher Power, God, wants from me. As I have to do God’s will, which is tiring for me. Yes, that is another struggle for me, doing God’s will. As God mostly seems to want something else than I want. And as I don’t like that I keep struggling, and yes, trying to do my own will. And of course I can never win that fight, as God is more powerful than I am. Or isn’t He?

It is okay to beat myself up…

I am still searching for a loving Higher Power and found this: Finding Loving Higher Power.

What struck me right now were the statements “It’s okay to beat myself up” and “It’s okay to isoloate”.

Strange, how that just gave me freedom. Same like I just drank quite a bit as I needed, wanted it, just get a bit drunk. And no, I don’t consider myself an alcoholic, so no real problem, but still, of course it is, as I was and am trying to numb myself from the pain, the pain that Iwa is sick, that Iwa has tumor. So hard to accept. Where is the love here?

Struggle

It seems I am still in a big struggle with life, with God. And I really don’t know what to do anymore. And yes, it is all about needs, mainly sexual needs and financial needs. And I think financial needs only represent other needs, sexual needs are the hardest for me to deal with. As to have my sexual needs fulfilled I need another person; or at least I prefer to have sex with another person, as in my memory sex with another person is so much more than masturbating and/or watching porn and such.

Lee and GuusAnd I did not want to write about sex or sexual needs. I wanted to write about why my life is not working. Or at least I have the feeling my life is not working. But while writing I think unfulfilled sexual needs are my main problem. And that problem seems to be impossible to solve. As my partner does not want to have sex with me. And I want to be in a monogamous relationship; I only want to have sex with him. So I feel so much trapped; I have somehow trapped myself in some kind of impossible situation by setting some rules about what I want and need.

And yes, my escape when my sexual needs are not fulfilled is internet, internet sex and things like that. And I don’t like it, I don’t want it, but sometimes I just feel drawn into it. It seems sexual urge is so strong that even(?!) I cannot resist it’s force.

And yes, I know I ‘should‘ talk about this with Lee, not write about it here. Yes, maybe this is an escape from really confronting the issue. Anyhow, let’s see where this goes. And strange I use the word should here. I am so much trying to avoid that, as it implies wrong and mostly it is easily replaced with ‘could’.

Or maybe I ‘should‘ just scream out loud here that I love him and want to be with him, no matter what. I have the feeling I never did that, at least not in the right way and in the right place or places. And who would be a better person than me to be with him, as I believe he cherishes monogamous relationship as much as I do, or maybe even more. And to me that is the most important thing in a lovers type relationship. And it is not easy finding people, especially gay people, wanting a monogamous relationship, or managing and able to maintain that. And no, I did not maintain it either. After years and years without sex and Lee being away for long times, also years, I finally decided to start dating almost two years ago. And yes, a few of those dates resulted in sleeping with someone and one even in really having sex. So I broke my own rules, I could not wait anymore. And I am still kind of breaking those rules, as I keep looking around, flirting, and using porn and sex chat and more to somehow deal with that sexual urge that seems so strong, unmanageable strong. But yes, for now I stopped the actual sex, meeting people, even though I have never really entertained that, except looking for love, a new lover.

And I guess the main reason for writing this article is that two days ago Lee kind of ‘caught me in the act’ of watching porn on the internet and having a sex chat with someone. I felt so bad as I know he hates that part of me. And I hate that part of me too, as ‘just having sex’ is so ‘not me’. But yes, somehow that internet stuff just happens to me. Like two days ago I just couldn’t sleep and I thought masturbating might make it easier for me to fall asleep.

And this post is not going the direction I want it to, so right now I am even wondering if I ‘should’ post it. But yes, sex and sexual urge, sexual need seems to still be such a taboo, that it may just be wise or right to indeed write an publish a post like this. Or isn’t it a taboo (anymore)? I know most younger people I am in contact with are much easier about it. Or maybe people were already easier with it than I am long time ago, when I was looking for sex, looking for a relationship after coming out, mainly in bars.

I am crying right now, as this issue seems to be so old, so much part of my life, and yes, having caused me soooooo much pain. I just wanted to love someone, yes, including the sexual part, the sex. Always, that never changed. And looking back on my life that never really happened. Yes, I fell in love, a lot, resulting in a relationship twice. But then in the relationship the sex died, both my partners didn’t want to have sex with me anymore after a while. And to me it is so much part of a relationship, the sex. It is the only thing that distinguishes a relationship from friendship for me. As I can do many things with friends, indeed, even sharing a house or a room or something. But I only want to have sex with my lover, my partner.

Wow, it seems this is the first time I want to write a structured article, a well written article. So maybe I will do. But that is not easy, as so many things are related to this subject, to my struggle, with life and with sex.

And yes, about a week ago I decided to change my tactic related to my way of finding some kind of way dealing with my sexual needs. I decided to try to love that part of me, that part that tries to find satisfaction on the internet, where the person I love and I want as my lover and partner is not available. And where real life sex is too dangerous to me with the risk of catching a sexually transmitted disease as I don’t like using condoms. I want to be free, feel free, expressing my sexuality. And the idea to better love myself instead of hate myself for that part comes from a tape from Louise Hay I regularly listen to, the idea that I can decide that I am okay as I am, that I am not a bad person doing things I don’t like to do or don’t want to do, and still do.

So yes, I hate that part of me satisfying my sexual needs in internet ways when my preferred way or ways are not available so much. And I am trying to love that part of me, or at least accept that part of me, but that has not proven to be easy, as my idea of how my love life is supposed to be is so specifically related to being in a monogamous relationship with one person, yes, preferably lifetime.

Ah, it seems so much is coming together in this article, in this post. My whole spiritual journey is in my mind now, but I have no clue how to share that, how to make you part of it. And yes, it seems it all starts with beliefs and family systems. And about validating those beliefs, and changing them according to our needs, according to who we are.

And yes, I will try to restructure this post and make it more readable, make it more useful to you, to my reader. Just know that for now it is just helping me to organize my thought. Yes, writing helps, maybe better in a journal, but for me it seems also important to share them in public.