A World Full of Goodness, a Life Filled with Blessings
Praying to Jesus is a Deity practice. Even writing down the positive, divine, blissful things that happen to me each day, any kind of progress, any kind of evolutionspiritually or even physically on this planeteven that practice of documenting that, honoring that, and feeling the blessing of that is, in fact, a Deity practice.
If you think about it, it is opening up to God’s blessing manifest in our lives. I mean, this is major stuff because as I begin to play, as you begin to play, in establishing your sense of your Deity Yoga Practiceas that new paradigm begins to amplify within you, the importance of maintaining your sense of victimization by life begins to vanish. It begins to evaporate. You don’t have to analyze it. You don’t have to figure it out. “Well, what situation happened in my life that caused me to feel this way?” It is not causal at all.
It’s totally not content driven. Its endemic, its replete through our cultural pattern. Joseph Campbell talked about this: he said that in India, the climate, for the most part, is pretty nice. The Vedic religion developed in this positive communion, this positive interaction with the flow of nature. In The Everyday Sanyasin, we talk about the annual cycle of temple ceremonies in Bali in which each time of year there is a different ceremony and a different ghat, a different big pond is opened up, and that pond irrigates the fields. For about 800 years, they had actually never had a drought in Bali. The scientists came in the 60s and said, “This is religious superstition. We are going to open up the ponds whenever we want to so that everybody’s crops get watered when they want them watered.” They experienced their first droughts in 800 years on Bali. It’s amazing!
That’s what happened in India. The Balinese religion is the Vedic religion of the 1200s of India. And so, that practice developed in Bali. The Vedic religion developed in the climate that had a wonderful interaction with human beings and the climate. Nature was this wonderfully positive helper in religious practice. They used a lot of the flow of naturethe annual cycle of life and things like thatas part of their religious practice and so their religious practice was enhanced.
Joseph Campbell said in contrast that Judaism, Christianity, and Islam developed in the mid east. Zoroastrianismwhich kind of precedes Islam and Christianitydeveloped in the mid east. In the mid east, it’s hot! Nature is an adversary. Within the religious teachings of those groups, nature is an adversarial position. In fact, in Zoroastrianism, the bad guy, the bad aspect, the devil, is aligned with nature.
