I had a “one in a lifetime” opportunity (at least one in my lifetime) to talk to a born and raised Born Again Christians few days ago. It was two wonderful young people visiting from Virginia. They were both raised in a very strict, very literal christian way, and they both realized at some point that it’s not quite for them and started searching for a different path.

I was very interested in what they had to say. I have often wondered at the thought process that would lead to conclusions, values and ideas so very different from mine. I surround myself with people who basically agree with my model of reality, so I had no chance to find out how the “others” think, until now.

We had a very nice conversation, I heard all kinds of stories and as I listened to them I started realizing that the problem (if there is one) doesn’t lie in Christianity or Catholicism. It doesn’t matter what the particular religion is – what matters is what we do with it.

It occurred to me that religion can be a guide, a path to God – just like any other spiritual practice. Religion can provide a way and a reflection, religion can help one create a personal relationship to God. I have met some, and heard of some more, Christian monks and priests – wonderful people, incredibly conscious, open-minded and loving. There was not a bit of judgement or dogmatism about them. They did not depend on the religion to provide answers, they did not simply obey the rules – they meditated on them, considered them, allow the rule to develop them and help them grow.

Religion is a tool, the question is: what are we going to use it for? To discover our own connection with God, to, ultimately, discover that we are God and there is no other God – or to use it as an excuse to avoid responsibility, as a way to simply follow orders and remain “safe” and “taken care of” with the comfortable knowledge that we are “on the right side”.

Things change in the world these days, quite rapidly. I can’t quite put my finger on it but I have a sense that the old rules don’t apply anymore, old ways of life, old structures don’t bring the results that they used to. The system crumbles. I see many people around me whose life falls apart – they don’t seem to have any money anymore, they don’t seem to know what to do with themselves, they seem lost and confused.

When I open to this change what occurs to me is that this is the time to take a stand. This is the time to say: this is who I am and this is how I am going to create my life. Depending on a system, on a company, on government, on economy, on religion, to organize my life for me doesn’t seem to work anymore. There doesn’t seem to be anything to be dependent on, nothing that could tell me: do this and that, obey the rules, and I’ll give you a comfortable life.

What is there, however, is a space. An open space where one can say: I am creating this. This is who I am, this is how my life is. I have spoken.

I didn’t want to wake up yesterday. I opened my eyes and thought: “I have to get up. But why? So that I can go to work? Again?! I don’t want to go to work, I’m tired of work! Might as well stay in bed.”

Why would i feel that, I wondered as I dragged myself out of bed. I work at home, I don’t have to go anywhere I don’t want to be, what I do is what I have chosen to do, I like doing it, no one forces me to do anything, so … why would I feel that I have no choice? Why would I feel this tiredness and resistance?

As I looked into it I realized that “getting to work” means giving up myself. It means that for certain amount of time I “have to” do things for other people, because they payed me for it, or because I need them to pay me for it. It is not my own time, I am not in control, I am not even present. This, the work, is a time when I turn into a picture-producing machine.

This has nothing to do with where I work, for whom, or what I do. I do just what I want, when I want and how I want it, and still, when I don’t pay attention, my work becomes simply a way of surviving the reality, making money, being productive, being a good girl. Not because my boss tells me so – but because my mind tells me so.

I have realized that as soon as I sit behind my desk I remove myself from the situation and just “do what needs to be done”. It has very little to do with me, generally.

And then again, there are moments when, caught up in creating a design, I forget that this is for someone or something, I get lost in it, excited and totally absorbed in the creative process, and at the end I cannot believe that this is what I do for a living! This is not work – it’s fun!

What is different? I am different.

I realized yesterday that when I remain present, when I don’t remove myself, when I don’t separate my day into “my personal time” and “work time” then there is only my time.

I don’t design because I have to, because someone paid me for it – I design because I am in a certain relationship with a person, with my client. I choose to engage in this relationship. Inside of this relationship we both agree to work on a certain project, we both contribute to the project, the project becomes an expression of who we are, the client and I. It is a full, and absolutely equal partnership.

Me working on a website is not me producing something to sell for money – it is me expressing who I am, in relationship with the project and with other people involved in it.

Me working is no different from me hanging out with a friend, going for a walk, having dinner with my husband – it is me engaging in relationship, and expressing myself through and in it.

There is no separation between me and work. There is no boss (or client) that has a power over me because he hired me, because he pays me. There is only a partnership. There is only me, creating my life, being involved in relationship, expressing myself in whatever way I choose at the moment.

In this reality there is no such thing as “work”, as opposite to “not working”. In this reality distinctions such as “productivity” loose their meaning, because the focus is not on how much I am able to produce in a certain amount of time. The focus is on how present I can be with a project, on how I can hold space for the project to grow, open, develop. Actions, “doing things”, come naturally, effortlessly, as a result of the space I hold, as a result of how I choose to express who I am.

In this reality there is nothing to resist, literally, there is nothing else, separate from me, that I could resist. There is only me, expressing myself inside of myriads of relationships.

German Tots Learn to Answer Call of Nature
By MIKE ESTERL
April 14, 2008

IDSTEIN, Germany – Each weekday, come rain or shine, a group of children, ages 3 to 6, walk into a forest outside Frankfurt to sing songs, build fires and roll in the mud. To relax, they kick back in a giant “sofa” made of tree stumps and twigs.

The birthplace of kindergarten is returning to its roots. While schools and parents elsewhere push young children to read, write and surf the Internet earlier in order to prepare for an increasingly cutthroat global economy, some little Germans are taking a less traveled path – deep into the woods.

Germany has about 700 Waldkindergärten, or “forest kindergartens,” in which children spend their days outdoors year-round. Blackboards surrender to the Black Forest. Erasers give way to pine cones. Hall passes aren’t required, but bug repellent is a good idea.

Trees are a temptation — and sometimes worse. Recently, “I had to rescue a girl” who had climbed too high, says Margit Kluge, a teacher at Idstein’s forest kindergarten. Last year, a big tree “fell right before our noses.”

The schools are a throwback to Friedrich Fröbel, the German educator who opened the world’s first kindergarten, or “children’s garden,” more than 150 years ago. Mr. Fröbel counseled that young children should play in nature, cordoned off from too many numbers and letters.

They are also a modern-day snapshot of environmentally conscious and consumption-wary Germany, where the Green Party polls more than 10% and stores are closed on Sundays. Only a fraction of German children attend Waldkindergärten, but their numbers have been rising since local parent groups began setting up these programs in the mid-1990s, following the lead of a Danish community. Similar schools exist in smaller numbers in Scandinavia, Switzerland and Austria. The concept is sparking interest far afield — even in the U.S., whose first Waldkindergarten opened in Portland, Ore., last fall.

“The computer arrives early enough,” adds Norbert Huppertz, a specialist in child development at the Freiburg University of Education and a Waldkindergärten booster in Germany. Academic studies of such schools are in their infancy. Some European researchers believe Waldkindergärten kids exercise their imaginations more than their brick-and-mortar peers do and are better at concentrating and communicating. Despite dangers, from insects particularly, the children appear to get sick less often in these fresh-air settings. Studies also suggest their writing skills are less developed, though, and that they are less adept than other children at distinguishing colors, forms and sizes.

In the rolling countryside of Idstein on a recent rainy morning, parents dropped off their children at a muddy parking lot a bit after 8 as the temperature hovered around 40 degrees Fahrenheit. Some of the children, wrapped in thick winter clothing, stooped over to inspect a worm. Then the five girls and four boys trudged into the neighboring woods with their two teachers before pausing to hold hands in a circle. “Good morning, sun, even though we can’t see you today,” said the 51-year-old Ms. Kluge, as the children joined in song and then acted out a play involving rabbits.

They hiked a few hundred feet into the forest before settling down to jump in puddles, examine a hibernating lizard and paint Easter eggs. A girl named Maxi went off to whittle a branch with a hunting knife. Another made “chocolate-vanilla-strawberry-herbal pudding” by stirring mud with a twig.

At snack time, the children sat on logs and munched on carrots and nuts while Ms. Kluge told them about the life cycle of toads. A boy named Ben wanted to know whether a North American visitor accompanying them was “a cowboy or an Indian.”

A bit before 1 p.m., after jumping in more puddles, playing around a makeshift tepee and singing another song involving the Easter bunny, the children emerged from the woods grinning and caked in mud to be picked up by their waiting parents.
“It’s peaceful here, not like inside a room,” said Ms. Kluge, who has headed the Waldkindergarten since it opened five years ago.

The children rarely venture into a trailer in the forest that’s used as a shelter in extreme weather. Ms. Kluge says no child has ever asked for a toy. The children improvise instead with what the woods have to offer. And there haven’t been any bad accidents beyond the occasional scrapes and bruises.

Not everyone has a feel-good experience. Frankfurt resident Donna Parssinen sent her son to a Waldkindergarten last year but says he got Lyme disease from ticks. It resulted in meningitis that temporarily paralyzed half his face. “I still like the idea” of Waldkindergärten, says Ms. Parssinen, “but once is enough.” Her son now attends a four-walled kindergarten.

Still, many German indoor kindergartens take children to nearby forests once a week to tramp around. A spokesman for Germany’s Ministry for Family Affairs said it welcomes the arrival of Waldkindergärten, which typically receive local government subsidies similar to those of state-run kindergartens.

Iwao Uehara, a professor at Tokyo University of Agriculture, says he has been trying to set up such a school in Japan, but the project is struggling. Until there’s evidence that Waldkindergärten graduates end up attending “famous universities,” it’s going to be a tough sell, he says.

In Portland, though, Marsha Johnson launched Mother Earth kindergarten last fall to combat what she calls “early academic fatigue syndrome….We have 5-year-olds who are tired of going to school.” The 14 children spend four hours a day at the privately run school playing in a state park forest.

Among the nature-based activities, children learn how to handle a real saw. “A plastic saw is no good,” says Ms. Johnson. “You might as well give them a plastic life.” The worst that has happened thus far to the children is the occasional bee sting, she says.

Mimi Howard, a director at the Education Commission of the States, which advises states on policy from Denver, says some U.S. teachers feel pressure “to push academics earlier and earlier.” The federal No Child Left Behind law introduced standardized testing for reading and writing by third grade, but some studies recommend more “open-ended learning experiences” for young children. “We’re in the debate phase,” she says.

In Fife, Scotland, Cathy Bache recently took matters into her own hands and founded a private nursery school. About 20 children explore the local forests, “saw logs, make fires when cold and look at fungi,” she explains. Ms. Bache admits the children fall out of trees “quite often” — but that she doesn’t let them climb higher than 6 feet, the cutoff point for her insurance policy.

Brooks says that the original purpose of psychology was to describe human’s relationship to God. During last few hundred years this purpose shifted somewhat, and we ended up with psychology that strives to understand, describe and correct human behavior so that it fits inside of society’s norms and ideas of what is “normal”, “right”, “moral”, “desirable”. Psychology makes sure, in short, that we are all good boys and girls.

There is a certain format that psychological theories follow: there is a personality theory, which explains the structure of our mind/psyche/personality – however we call it; there is a theory that describes what motivates behavior; a piece describing disfunction and disorder; another piece on human’s social interactions and, finally, therapy, which is a practical application of all the above.

How does it apply to God psychology? I wondered about that for last few weeks, and realized that it doesn’t apply at all.

In God Psychology the perspective on reality shifts. Instead of organizing in relationship to society one organizes in relationship to God. So, to hit the point straight on a head – God psychology deals with the psychology of God. Not Ego, Id, Mind, Self, Persona, Personality, Character …, but God.

God in it’s fullness and totality, as a human being. I believe I’ll make a little shift of my own here – instead of talking about a human experiencing herself as God I’ll, from now on, talk about God experiencing herself as a human being.

So how can this be analyzed, how could one understand and explain God’s experience of being human? I don’t think one can explain that at all. But I do think that it can be described.

We can describe the experience from God’s point of view, we can describe God’s perspective on himself, others, the world, the life and everything else.

By doing so we present a different perspective on reality, we present God’s point of view.

From now on God has the floor!