87 Releasing "Christian" Guilt And Fear

Unfortunately, millions of people experience "Christian" fear and guilt. As a college student I came to church with and open heart hoping and trusting for a deeper opening and Christian support. Love quickly turned into guilt and fear of what was a severe and punishing God. After two years I knew something was wrong so I enrolled in a 4 year residential Masters of Theology program at Harding Theological Graduate School. In this podcast I relate what helped me on my path to eventual awakening.

Transcript

Hello,

This is William Cooper.

Welcome to Awakening Together,

Relaxing into Happiness.

I trust you're doing well.

When I was in college,

A friend suggested that I read the Bible because I really loved God and was very spiritual.

I had started to meditate.

So I went across the street from the art department because there was a church with a sign out front that said Bible study.

It was a fundamentalist church as it turned out.

And before too long,

I was so confused.

I was worried.

I felt guilty.

I hadn't done anything,

But I felt guilty.

I felt like I was going to go to hell.

I felt that God was such a horrible,

I felt like I was horrible,

But this God was mean and he was itching to throw people into hell.

Now as a college kid,

I didn't really think it all through.

I just felt so horrible.

It was terrible.

Why am I bringing this up now?

Well,

There are millions and millions of people who are all twisted up inside and worried because of their religious background.

So I want to tell you what I did,

What I found helpful,

And it's just about my path.

It doesn't mean it's the right path for you or anybody else,

But for somebody out there,

It might be helpful.

I had to solve this before I could move forward.

It was a big stumbling block for me.

And as my friend Bob always says,

In awakening,

You first have to get out of the pounding surf and stabilize your life.

Resolving this deep worry and guilt and fear was a huge stumbling block for me and possibly for you.

I had always had a good relationship with Jesus.

As a child,

I would pray to him every night and I felt so connected and close.

That continued throughout my life until I went to this church and through their Bible study they convinced me that I was on thin ice if I didn't get everything just right.

And there was always something I wasn't doing just right.

And even if I was,

There was always the worry that there might be something I wasn't aware of that I wasn't doing just right.

I remember actually being afraid that when I got on an airplane,

If that airplane crashed,

I would be going straight to hell.

I still traveled by airplane,

But I was nervous.

Some of you know exactly what I'm speaking about.

And even after I got out of that church,

It haunted me for years and years and years to come.

My solution is one that I wouldn't say is necessary for anybody else.

But what I did is went through a four-year theological program where I lived on campus,

Was with other ministerial students,

And I studied hard.

I learned Greek so that I could read the original manuscripts in Greek.

I studied theology.

I did everything to get the tools so that I could sort out all of the stuff that I had been taught in church,

In this particular church.

You see,

When I first started going to church,

I had the idea that God was love and Jesus was loving and he was my friend because that was my experience of being with Jesus every night as a child.

And as I went through the day,

I would even talk to God.

And it was very open-hearted and I was just thinking that Jesus was on my side and he was going to help me open into a ball of love,

Basically,

Become one with a loving God.

Well,

I was in for a rude awakening once I went to church and found out what they had in mind.

It started out as all God is love,

But quickly devolved into God is love if you do the right thing.

If you don't do the right thing,

Well,

There's an eternity where you will be burning in hell because he will torture you.

To those of you that haven't been through this experience,

It sounds absurd,

But as I said,

There are millions of you that know exactly what I'm talking about and this podcast is for you.

So let's back up for a moment and take a breath.

When I was a child and I would talk to Jesus,

My heart would open.

He would take my worries from me and he would answer my prayers.

He was and is my friend.

That was my direct experience of Jesus.

And as we've talked about in other podcasts,

These various beings do exist on different levels of reality.

And just like you can talk to your guru by looking at a photo and talking to that photo and listening for a response,

You certainly can talk to possibly the most powerful guru ever,

Jesus.

And that's what I did as a child.

That was my direct experience,

Pure love.

In another podcast,

Somebody asked me to talk about my experience with Jesus when he appeared to me and I did.

You can go back into the past podcast and you'll see it in the title.

If you want to know more.

But basically when he came to me,

When he appeared,

I was the only person in his life.

That's what it felt like.

I was his best friend and he was so excited to see me.

He loved me and I felt immense love.

He wanted to know everything about me and my life flashed before my eyes and we enjoyed it together.

However,

I didn't expect that my whole life would flash before my eyes and when the things that I was embarrassed about flashed before my eyes,

He just would laugh and laugh and laugh.

What were you thinking?

He would say.

That is so funny.

There was no judgment.

Jesus was a great,

Big,

Loving smile.

Your best friend.

That's who I experienced him as even today.

He's my friend,

Jesus.

That's the real Jesus.

And what I'm about to say is the real Jesus is quite different than how he's portrayed often in churches.

There's the church,

There's Christianity,

And then there's Jesus.

Jesus is not the same as Christianity.

Remember,

Jesus wasn't a Christian.

The very first gospel was written 40 years after he was killed.

So think about it.

Forty years.

What were you doing 40 years ago?

How clear are you?

I think the Bible is very clear on the general strokes about his life,

But on specific things,

You know,

A lot of it revolves around answering political and religious questions of the time so that the reader of the time was reading this account of Jesus would be drawn into it and guided in a direction that the writer wanted the reader to go.

We'll talk more about that later,

Perhaps.

But I do want to say in the broad strokes,

I think the gospels give a very good picture of Jesus,

His open heart,

His love.

The problem is the Bible as a whole has a lot of contradictions in it.

If you Google the number of Christian denominations now,

It's around,

Guess how many?

Ten?

A hundred?

Five hundred?

What would you guess?

Forty-five thousand different Christian denominations.

Why do you start a different denomination?

Because when you read the Bible,

You have a different perspective and it's so strong you want to leave the denomination you were in before and start your own because you feel like you have a better take on it.

Forty-five thousand denominations.

Google it yourself.

See what you find.

But that just tells you the Bible is not that clear of a document and there's no agreement on how to interpret it,

What it means fully,

Or why those particular books are in the Bible to start with.

So often you'll hear,

Oh,

It's in the Bible.

As if,

If it's in the Bible,

It's Holy Scripture and you need to obey all of it.

No,

Jesus didn't.

I put all this together in theological school.

You don't have to do that.

You can just look for yourself.

Perhaps you've already had that discussion in your local church where you attend.

I just bring it up now in case there's some sort of authoritarian spin that you've heard like,

Well,

It's in the Bible.

You need to obey it.

It wouldn't be in the Bible unless God wanted it to be there.

Stuff like that.

That's some of what I heard.

Hopefully the discussions in your church are more open than I had.

The Bible was written over probably a period of 1500 years thereabouts,

And it captures a culture that was evolving during that period of time.

And it was written by good people trying to do their best,

But it captures such a large span of evolving cultures.

Remember,

It starts with Genesis and it's directed to a tribe,

A nomadic tribe in the desert called the Habiru,

Later to be called Hebrews.

And back then in the Middle East,

It was tough.

It's still kind of tough today.

If you created a problem,

If you did something wrong and you didn't want to be punished because they had severe laws and somebody had to be punished,

You would put all of the quote unquote sins that you did,

Put them on your cow and let the cow get killed so you don't have to get killed.

The cow would atone for your sins.

That would be called a blood sacrifice.

So you had a lot of that going on.

Later when Jesus got killed,

It just made sense because he was in the Middle East and most of the readers of the gospel,

The early Christian Bible,

Were Jewish.

So you took that tradition of killing other things when you had a problem,

When you did wrong.

And you said,

Well,

Jesus was killed,

So the blood of Jesus will atone for any problems that you have.

Now of course,

That presupposed that there was a mean God somewhere that was going to really take it out on you in a very vengeful way if somebody didn't pay for what you did.

That by itself is a bit of a problem.

Now my friend Jesus that I have told you about,

The real Jesus,

He's not that way.

He's very loving and he doesn't see God that way.

What does he do when in his day he was Jewish and he would read the Jewish Bible and it was so full of contradictions and problems and severities,

What would he do?

I'll tell you what he would do.

He would dismiss it.

He would honor it,

But he would stick to his heart.

You may remember that the early bird illustrator in the United States was John Audubon.

And when one time somebody came up to him and said,

Dr.

Audubon,

I have your book.

It's amazing,

All the illustrations of the birds.

But I saw a bird and it didn't match the illustration in the book.

And Dr.

Audubon said to him,

Whenever there's a discrepancy between a bird and the book,

Go with the bird every time.

Trust your direct experience.

Well that's what Jesus did.

He made an early decision to trust his heart and he didn't leave his heart.

He is love.

God is love and Jesus is love.

Jesus has dissolved into God.

God is coming through Jesus.

Pure,

Pure love.

And Jesus would not leave that love even if a book would tell him to leave the love.

He wouldn't do it.

Let me give you some examples.

Remember the adulterous woman in the Bible?

Now under,

In the Jewish Bible,

Which is now the Christian Bible for Christians,

If somebody committed adultery,

They were to be executed,

They were to be stoned to death.

So somebody had committed adultery,

The woman was caught and everybody was picking up stones to stone her to death.

Jesus came by and he picked up a stone and he looked at everybody and he said,

He who is without sin cast the first stone.

Nobody could do it.

Because they had to check their hearts and that's what Jesus centered them on.

Their hearts.

He didn't go with what the Bible said,

Which was to kill the woman.

He instead stayed with the heart.

He was known for breaking another law that was punishable by death,

Which was to work on the Sabbath.

He would do things that were considered work on the Sabbath.

And he turned to his accusers and he said,

Who of you,

If you had a sheep that was lost,

Wouldn't go out to find that lamb on Sabbath to save its life?

Who wouldn't do that?

So they let him go.

He centered them back into their hearts and he said,

Sabbath was made for man,

It was a day of rest.

Sabbath was made for man,

Not man for the Sabbath.

In other words,

Listen to your heart,

Get things in right perspective.

At another time he said to Pharisees,

He said,

You know,

You're focusing on little tiny things and you're missing the big picture.

What is the big picture?

It's love.

That's my Jesus.

For any guru,

Buddha,

Love,

Krishna,

Love,

Jesus,

Love.

Do you know Ram Dass,

Krishna Dass,

Their guru in India was Neem Kroli Baba.

And Krishna Dass tells the story that he and a group were visiting Neem Kroli Baba and they would often notice that he would not give them a practice.

He would just sit with them and they would sort of follow him around and feel the immense love and presence that you feel around a very clear being such as Neem Kroli Baba.

They would feel that,

But they wanted to be like him and they wanted a spiritual practice and he never really gave them one.

If they pressed him,

The most he would say is meditate like Christ.

This is Neem Kroli Baba in India.

He would say meditate like Christ.

Well,

What does that mean?

How do you do that?

So one day,

One of the people in this group,

Raghu,

Asked Neem Kroli Baba,

How do you meditate like Christ?

How do you do it?

So Neem Kroli Baba closed his eyes,

They all closed their eyes to meditate with him.

And Krishna Dass says,

There was so much love.

So much love started pouring through the group.

So much love.

So much love it became painful.

It was that much love and when Krishna Dass tells that story,

He starts to cry and he says,

I can't love that much.

I can't do it.

It was that powerful.

That was the love of Christ.

And that's what he came to show us.

So that was it.

It's very simple.

Jesus came to show us profound love,

The love that we are,

The infinite love.

That was all he did.

He didn't come to give us one more Bible verse to put into the Bible.

His love was so immense,

You could feel it for miles around.

In the Bible,

We read about 3,

000,

5,

000 people coming to gather around Jesus.

They couldn't hear what he was saying.

They simply felt from miles around the power of his heart.

Have you ever been in a room when there's not a microphone because Jesus didn't have a microphone and somebody tries to say something,

Maybe there's 25 people there and somebody coughs or a baby cries?

You can't hear a thing.

Think about 3,

000,

5,

000 people.

Nobody's coming there for doctrine or to learn the correct interpretation of the Bible like what we hear in church.

That's not why they're there.

It's not like church.

It is there to transform.

Jesus is there to help us open,

To transform,

To awaken in his presence,

In his immense heart,

The same heart that you have.

And he's simply inviting us to follow what he's been doing.

Open your heart.

It's about love.

That's his message.

Then you let everything else go,

Right?

That's it.

Here's what Jesus said.

In John 18,

The disciples came to Jesus and they asked,

Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?

Jesus called a little child and had him stand among them.

And he said,

I tell you the truth,

Unless you change and become like little children,

You will never enter the kingdom of heaven.

Do you remember what it was like to be a child?

Pure love,

Pure,

Open heart.

Did you love a dog?

Did you have a pet,

A cat?

Did you love nature?

Did you like to climb trees?

Did you love your parents or your brother or your sister?

Or maybe you loved everybody.

Do you remember that?

Take a moment.

Isn't that awakening?

When you love and let everything else go?

Isn't that awakening?

That's what happened to Jesus.

You know,

There are 18 years missing in Jesus's life,

According to the chronology found in the gospels.

And during those 18 years,

One of the things that did happen is Jesus was said to go out to the desert for 40 days and 40 nights where he was tempted in every way.

Well,

In Bible talk,

40 days and 40 nights simply means a very,

Very,

Very long time.

It's not a specific amount of time.

It's just a very long period of time.

I'm guessing he was in that desert sitting still for years.

And during that time,

Everything came up that needed to come up and out it went.

But he felt it and it felt like Satan himself was torturing him.

That's how it was described.

In the book of Thomas,

Second verse,

Jesus said,

He who seeks shall find.

He who finds will be troubled.

He who is troubled will inherit the kingdom of heaven.

Isn't that what we call meditation?

Jesus sitting in the desert quietly,

He was seeking God.

He found God.

And what is God?

God is our deepest self,

As we've talked about in our podcasts.

There is only one.

When he found everything that wasn't God came up.

That's what happens in our meditations.

That's why it's so difficult to sit still and we've talked so much about that.

We don't repress happiness.

That's not what comes up.

What comes up is all of our repressions,

Which is hurt,

Fear,

Anger,

Worry,

Guilt,

Every negative thing comes up to burn off.

That's what happened to Jesus.

That's what he did.

That's what we do when we meditate as well.

So he didn't come by his awakening easily.

And when he said,

You must become like a little child,

Open in heart,

He knew what he was talking about.

Just like you know,

You already know this.

His disciple John,

Who Jesus taught,

Says in 1 John that God is love.

Simple as that.

God is not this ogre that is portrayed in other parts of the Bible.

The Bible is so divided and complex.

We'll get back to that.

But God is love.

That's the point.

And John goes on to say that perfect love casts out fear.

Then he says,

Because fear has to do with punishment.

And then John says,

The man who fears is not made perfect in love.

Why is that?

Because we're so clamped down.

We're not out of the pounding surf.

We're closed.

So how can we flow when we're closed?

And how can we be open if there's a horrible God chasing us around the universe?

It's kind of crazy,

Isn't it?

It just doesn't make sense.

I remember being in church and hearing a sermon where it seemed to me that good people were doing exactly what we were trying to do in church,

And that was to interpret the Bible.

They were reading very carefully.

They were trying to make sense of it and to tell people to do the right thing so that God wouldn't throw them in hell.

Remember I wasn't able to sleep because I thought I would be going to hell.

It was very complicated.

And in that sermon,

Though,

The minister read this verse in Matthew chapter 23,

Verse 15.

He read,

Woe to you teachers of the law and Pharisees,

You hypocrites.

This is Jesus saying this.

You travel over land and sea to win a single convert.

And when he becomes one,

You make him twice as much a son of hell as you are.

Oh my goodness.

I was a college kid and I didn't know how to look at that because,

Like I said,

They were simply trying to follow the law and teach other people to do it.

And that's what exactly what we were doing in my church.

And we were working very hard to make converts and we would travel over land and sea.

But there I was.

I felt like I was in hell.

I was a son of hell.

I could not sleep.

I was so worried.

I was going to hell and I was teaching other people the same thing.

This is what happens when you get caught and like John Audubon said,

You go with the book instead of the bird.

If you leave your heart to get involved in what is a mishmash of cultural and religious writings,

And we call that the Bible,

Which is evolved and taken by itself.

It was written to certain people at a certain time,

Different parts of it,

And it made sense.

But today when we look at it,

It doesn't make sense for us necessarily to follow it.

For instance,

In the Bible it says if your wife is defending you,

Somebody has attacked you and your wife is defending you and she is fighting off your attacker,

But she inadvertently touches him in a sensitive place,

His genitals,

You have to cut her hand off.

Now really?

Do we have to do that?

Or do we have to kill gay people?

Really?

Do we have to kill people that don't keep the Sabbath or that commit adultery?

Do we have to do that?

Do we have to,

If we have a problem and we do something wrong,

Do we have to kill an animal?

Of course not.

But I'm telling you,

And I'm speaking to people that have been in church and they feel so guilty because people have said,

If you don't do this,

If you don't do that,

God won't like you,

And you feel guilty.

No,

No.

It is true that the Bible says that,

But Jesus never left his heart and that's what he was showing us.

He said,

Look,

I'm the way.

Don't leave your heart either.

In fact,

When somebody asked him about how to interpret the Bible,

Jesus replied,

And this is in Matthew 22 chapter 37th verse,

Jesus replies,

Love the Lord,

Your God,

With all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.

This is the first and greatest commandment.

And the second is like it.

Love your neighbor as yourself,

All the law and the prophets,

Which is Jesus's Bible at the time is what we call the old Testament.

He says all the law and the prophets hang on these two commandments.

It's only about love.

So for me,

After four years of theological school,

I saw that it's only about love and yes,

I know Greek and yes,

I've studied the Bible.

When you get involved in this evolution through human history called the Bible and you focus on any part of it quickly,

You will be calm like a Pharisee and they were trying their best.

They were good people trying their best and you are a good person trying your best.

But anybody that gets involved in that,

Because there's so many contradictions and there is no clear path,

Nobody's ever figured out how to harmonize all of the crazy stuff in the Bible that you too will become like the Pharisees.

And if you teach what you know to somebody else,

You'll teach them to be twice the son of hell as you have become by doing that.

I would stick to what Jesus did.

He dismissed the Bible when it broke the Sabbath,

When it had to do with adultery.

He never left his heart.

He dismissed the Bible always.

When his heart came forward,

He looked at the Bible,

He referred to it,

He knew it,

The Bible of his day called the law and the prophets along with the wisdom literature.

But he never left his heart because he knew who God was.

If you know who God is,

Which is called awakening,

And you don't have to be totally awake to know who God is,

You could just be a little awake.

Trust your intuition,

Follow that.

The Bible is so complicated,

Just trust your heart.

Paul and Romans and also all through various other books of the Bible,

Other writers have said God has written his law or his beingness on your heart.

It's in your heart already.

Love your neighbor,

Love God,

Love everybody.

You are love,

God is love.

The Father and I are one,

As Jesus said,

Which means I am love.

I have let go into total love.

Do that,

Follow me and you do that.

That's the Bible,

That's everything.

All the rest is cultural stuff and laws of the time.

You know,

If the Bible said slap your wife in the face,

We don't need to do that.

But what we miss if we don't do a lot of studying,

We might miss that in the culture of the time people would kill their wives if they did whatever the Bible says deserves a slap in the face.

A slap in the face was a big upgrade.

So there's a lot of good in the Bible,

But you can go wrong real quickly if you don't study the culture around it at the time that that particular book of the Bible was written,

What was going on in that book,

And so much more.

Okay,

Back to my friend Bob.

So I asked Bob,

Who was a Christian.

I said,

Bob,

How do you read the Bible?

And he said,

You know,

I opened the Bible and I read it.

And if something jumps out on the page and it vibrates,

My heart feels good.

It opens and I find it.

I resonate with the spiritual truth.

I listen to that.

I reflect on that.

But if I look at the Bible and another part of it closes my heart or it makes no sense at all,

I completely disregard it.

That's what Jesus did.

And funny enough,

That's what Paul talked about when he wrote his protege Timothy in the Bible.

In 2nd Timothy 316,

Paul says all scripture is God breathed and useful for teaching.

God breathed.

That means your heart vibrates because it's glowing with true divinity.

You feel it.

Trust your intuition.

You'll know the difference.

That's what Bob was saying.

Conversely,

If you look at something and it doesn't vibrate,

You know it's not God breathed.

It's just some cultural thing that's in that book we call the Bible.

And I would just forget about it,

Dismiss it.

Don't get involved in it because I'm telling you,

You will be wound up in a knot.

It's tough stuff in there.

One other thing,

You know,

The New Testament was written in Greek and the Greek word for sin is hamartia.

I like the Cyclopedia Britannica's definition of the ancient meaning of hamartia,

Sin.

It says,

In ancient Greek thought,

Sin was looked upon as,

In essence,

A failure on the part of a person to achieve his true self-expression and to preserve his due relationship to the rest of the universe.

It was attributed mainly to ignorance.

Doesn't that sound like the Eastern definition as well?

Sin is a failure on the part of a person to achieve his true self-expression.

That's what awakening is,

Is to achieve your full self-expression.

As John said,

Fear does not help that.

You cannot be perfected in love if you have fear.

That's what John said that we just read just a little while ago.

In India,

They call being blocked,

They call that ignorance or delusion.

They call that ignorance.

And you do lose your part in the universe because you're all twisted up inside.

Now,

Of course,

In the big picture,

There's a role in place for that.

That's happening for a purpose.

But from your perspective,

You're cut off from life as it should be for you.

That's sin.

Jesus did not come to make things worse.

He came to help you untwist,

To be loved,

To feel love.

And all that stuff in the Bible,

Forget about it.

It is not helpful.

If you find it helpful,

Like John Audubon said,

Listen to your heart and go with it.

If you do find it helpful,

Go with it.

But if you don't,

Let it go.

Go with the weightier matters of the law,

Love.

I remember thinking to myself as I was reflecting on all this,

And there's such a horrible picture of God in a lot of the Bible,

How God will punish you and throw you in hell if you don't have something to atone for you,

Like if you don't kill a cow or if Jesus doesn't get killed and then let his blood sacrifice for your problems.

Rather than just clean it up yourself,

You got all this crazy stuff in the Bible.

I used to think to myself,

Well,

Wouldn't it be nice if this God talked to Jesus and learned about forgiveness?

Or maybe if God went to Sunday school a little bit with the little kids and just learn how to be nice,

Wouldn't that be good?

And of course I'm joking,

But that's really what it's come down to.

And I'm sorry for all of you that are tortured just as I was.

And I hope my talk about what I did has been helpful for you,

What my viewpoint is.

I do want to reiterate it.

It's just my viewpoint.

If any of this is helpful,

Then great.

If some of it is not,

Please disregard it.

It's just me.

It's just what I've done.

But I felt like this was an important topic on all of the various topics that we discuss in our podcast on awakening.

This is one part that is a big thing to certain people.

Okay.

I hope this has been helpful.

Take care.

And I look forward to talking to you next time.

Bye.

Reviews

I was raised Catholic and it was a wonderful experience. I think in part because my dad and I went to a church in a town called Isla Vista. That was the community next to UCSB. So the priest was there to cater to college students. He kept it young and fresh. and when I was about 12 years old, my dad encouraged me to study other religions, including Buddhism. Which in 1966 was uncommon… So I was lucky.
what I really loved in this talk was when Jesus said, I am the way and Understanding that as love is the way. That perspective is powerful. 🌹💜🌹🩷🌹♥️🌹💜🌹🩷🌹

I feel so overwhelmed with gratitude right now. I’ve been in recovery for Catholic abuse for what feels like decades, and been searching for the right words to help my body make a shift from existential fear into the Divine Love that my whole being has always known God to be. This talk helped me finally make that shift. I’ll be listening to this often, and sharing it with many. In my opinion, this talk needs to go viral; on this app and around the whole world. I love you so much, thank you, thank you, thank you 🙏 ❤️

Thank you for sharing your personal sufferings and encouraging us to push through ours. The only way out is through. Have a wonderful journey to India in 2023.

Such a wonderful explanation! Sounds familiar on my own experience.. helpful to so many.

William,
Another fantastic one. Thanks for being so transparent. This is really helpful stuff!!!

~ Jennifer