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Spirituality - a broader perspective
By Robert Burney
"Perspective is a key to Recovery. I had to change and enlarge my perspectives of myself and my own emotions, of other people, of God and of this life business. Our perspective of life dictates our relationship with life. We have a dysfunctional relationship with life because we were taught to have a dysfunctional perspective of this life business, dysfunctional definitions of who we are and why we are here.
It is kind of like the old joke about three blind men describing an elephant by touch. Each one of them is telling his own Truth, they just have a lousy perspective. Codependence is all about having a lousy relationship with life, with being human, because we have a lousy perspective on life as a human."
"So now I share this message with you, the reader of this book, in the hopes that it will help you to remember the Truth of who you are, and why you are here. This information is not meant to be absolute or the final word - it is meant as an alternative perspective for you to consider. A Cosmic Perspective that just might help to make life an easier, more enjoyable experience for you."
"We were taught that death is a great tragedy and that we should spend our lives fearing and ignoring it. We were taught to fear death and to never live life. That's backwards.
Death is a transition, a transformation, death is a milestone in the longer journey. It is not a tragedy to be feared - it is an eventuality to be accepted. What is tragedy is not enjoying living while we are here."
Quote from Codependence: The Dance of Wounded Souls
In this series of articles, I am sharing my beliefs. As the quote from my book above states, I am not trying to impose my beliefs on anyone else. I am sharing them as an alternative perspective for you to consider. These are the beliefs that work for me. I do not need for other people to agree with me, I am just sharing my perspective because I have found that many people find it helpful.
I do not waste my time and energy arguing with people who think I am wrong. People who believe that their beliefs are the only "right" beliefs, and any others are "wrong" - are reacting out of the black and white thinking of their codependency, in my opinion.
I have over the years had many people - usually ones who were raised in a shaming religion - who objected to any use of the word God, or anything they thought was "religious." I wrote an article for them on my web site - in an attempt to help them stop reacting to the extreme so that they could start seeing the gray area between the extremes of "right" and "wrong." For anyone who would like to check that article out, there is a link to it in the left hand colum: Spirituality for Agnostics and Atheists
I have also over the years received periodically, what I call Christian hate mail. People who would write to me and tell me how wrong I was, how I would be damned for my beliefs - how I had to be "washed in the blood of the lamb" for my soul to be saved.
That there could even be such a thing as "Christian hate mail" is to me evidence of how twisted and perverted the teachings of Jesus Christ - whose message was about Love - have been in some versions of Christianity. I believe that Jesus Christ was the greatest Master Teacher in the history of mankind - and that great harm has been done in his name throughout the history of the planet because of twisted, rigid, black and white interpretations of the bible by wounded, terrified codependents.
Codependency is at it's core, a relationship with life that is based upon fear, shame, and scarcity. Codependency recovery in my belief, is about changing our ego programming, changing the conscious and subconscious beliefs that are dictating our relationship with self and life, to ones that are more aligned with the belief in a Loving Higher Power / God-Force / Goddess Energy / Great Spirit - not a punishing one.
