My conversations with Supreme Intelligence began a few years ago when I met ‘Mahesh’ at the Ritz Carlton Hotel in downtown Los Angeles. We were discussing the possibility of collaborating on what would become The Hindu Way To Wealth.
While I can’t go into the circumstances or processes involved, for obvious reasons–everybody would want to access God and God is, you know, busy–I can provide a general summary from a recent conversation I had, here in Paris, this morning.
I initiated this conversation originally to address a couple of concerns I had about what role belief and ‘God’s will’ play in the everyday affairs of men, and how much responsibility humans have in their life outcomes. I’d had extended conversations with a couple of Christians who shared with me how God had ‘led’ them to certain conclusions and ‘shown them the way’ through certain difficulties.
Endeavoring as always to be non-judgmental, I listened patiently, but still tried to separate faith and inspired wisdom from the rationalization and convenience. To me, the faith and inspired wisdom are priceless in life: knowing that the ‘right answer’ is out there and having the tranquility to recognize it when it arrives is a great thing. I am concerned that we, as hopeful but often too human beings, may rationalize unpleasant outcomes or outright failures as the divine will of a more intelligent deity with a grander plan. That can be more convenient that facing the hard reality of a situation.
One of these particular situations involved a long time friend who had been laboring at an unpleasant job for a couple of years. He was laid off recently after stellar job performance: he had implemented a program that had saved the company he worked for millions of dollars. It was abrupt and traumatic, not to mention ungrateful, but the disappointment as short-lived. 48 hours after his dismissal, a vendor he’d worked with contacted him and offered him a job as vice-president of their start up.
In my conversation with him and his wife, she alluded to the ‘perfection of the Universe’ inherent in the sequence of events. I concurred, as they had been praying and seeking a way out of this less-than-perfect employment situation for almost a year. I do believe that thought, attention, prayer, and meditation influence outcomes in the material world.
I also know that my friend’s stellar, world-class, kick-ass performance at the company he was working for influenced the vendor to immediately reach out to him the moment he became available. Talent is talent and the work ethic is the work ethic, and neither will ever be in a surplus of supply. I said as much to him and his wife. They agreed, appreciated the compliment, and we scheduled a celebration for the next time we’re in the U.S.
The other conversation found the participants in question leaving everything up to God. It was His Plan, His Will, and He was holding them back or sending them in a different direction, and little was in their control. This is the part where I just kept my mouth shut. Rather than disagree with someone’s belief–which is a fool’s errand–I decided to take it up with the Supreme Being directly.
“I am not a dictator,” She replied, initiating the conversation. Of course, in Her infinite wisdom, She knew what I was going to ask about. “Nor am I impressed or upset with the implication of male gender as a characteristic of my being.”
I was glad to know that God didn’t take things personally, and I was glad to know that my inclination to discount the blanket rationalization of something being ‘God’s will’ was somewhat accurate. “I created the world and all in it in order to see Full Potential, which includes the possibility of the greatest good and the greatest evil, to see my work at play, to offer human beings the chance to discover, grow, evolve, and eventually, with effort and understanding, return to their divine natures, origins, sources, and resources in order to create more humanity and more divinity, all at once.”
Kind of a run-on sentence, I thought to myself, but profound. ‘Mahesh’ had told me that God was not Room Service, someone to ask for this, ask for that, or the One to be blamed if, like a child at Christmas, you didn’t get what you asked for. This conversation provided a fuller picture.
“The bad decisions of men and women cannot be filed away in the ‘God’s Will’ basket,” she said. “Rationale is a human exercise. It is not something that I do. I am a source of creation. I am a source of love, which people can embrace and funnel to any extent they wish. I provide peace in any time or space that human beings can allot for it. All it needs is the absence of fear.”
“So is ‘being blessed’ really working your butt off first and then leaving the outcome in the hands of the Universe?” “Pretty much. I do provide Grace at certain moments, but, you know, faith without works is dead.”
Quite clever of Her, quoting the Bible. I felt better about my own situation, leaning over the keyboard for long stretches, until I was dry-eyed and stiff-fingered, brain-drained from extended bouts of ‘creativity’.
“Do you have any requests?” She asked me.
“No, I’m going to just keep my head down, keep working, and let Karma take care of the rest.”
“How very Hindu of you,” She replied without sarcasm or malice. “You will be blessed beyond your wildest dreams. Just remember to step forward when you are asked to sacrifice and serve.”
Crap, I thought to myself, forgetting that She could, of course, read my mind. At that very moment, I was transported with Her to a detention facility on the Texas/Mexico border. We were inside a small, caged holding area with two dozen children from ages 6 to about 15. Some had blankets, some did not. All slept on the concrete floor. A few were crying, their sadness greater than their fatigue.
I stood in a corner as She filled the dimly lit and stale room with fresh air and then a comforting, comprehensive, divine expansion of Pure Love and Complete Peace. It fell like torrential rain and rose like a flood, whooshing in from the four walls like a dam had opened, filling the space in an instant.
The children calmed. The crying stopped. The fitful sleep was, for that period of time, ended. Without opening their eyes or waking up, each child reached out and found another with a gentle touch. A hand, a foot, and arm. The circle was unbroken, and their slumber was complete.
As I stood in a corner and watched this, the same Love and Peace had washed over me as well. My heart swelled and tears filled my eyes. It was like this every time, but each time was still a surprise, still a relief, still a joy.
Her Presence retreated to my side. She had created the galaxies, lit the sun into an eternal blaze as casually as you might fire up the backyard grill, and sent the planets into perfect orbit. But She still had time for this.
We disappeared from that scene and went back into the Void. I asked her if she ever got depressed. “No. It’s not possible. Depression is the absence of Me.”
“Any concerns?”
“Global warming, but the earth will take care of itself. If it gets to hot, the glaciers will melt and the oceans will rise. Violently, if need be.”
“Should I build an ark?”
God laughed. “I know your carpentry skills. Keep writing.”
“Putin?”
“No. His particular brand of evil has a lifespan. I am more wary of the loss of privacy. A person’s inner most thoughts should be between that person and Me. With social media and the internet, I’m afraid a few people are going to have some of the intelligence I have–knowing what people are thinking, what they want, and what they are capable of–without a morsel of the wisdom and none of the compassion.”
“Artificial intelligence?”
“Oxymoron. And dangerous. It’s like having a Bengal tiger as a house pet.”
She was always so precise, and I love that about Her. It was never just a ‘tiger’. It was a Bengal tiger. She really is in the details, I thought to myself.
“Yes, I am,” She replied, smiling a smile that I could not see, only feel.
“I really should write some of this down,” I said.
“People might think you’re crazy. They might lock you up.”
“But it might help for people to know what You’re thinking,” I countered. “If it goes sideways, I can just say it was God’s will.”
“Don’t be too clever. I have created and laid to waste more than you could imagine in 10,000 lifetimes. And it was effortless.”
“You know, you’re right.”
“Why do you even say that to Me?”
Now it was me who was laughing. She was and is the Supreme Being, God, the Universe, the Alpha and the Omega. Of course She was right. I paused. Then just said, “Thank you.”
“You are welcome, Byron,” She said. “The people who read your blog.”
“Excuse me?”
“The people who read your blog. They will read this and understand. They won’t think you’re crazy.”
Now it was me who smiled, and being the wicked sinner I am, I could resist the temptation to say, “You’re right.”
And with that, my conversation with God was over. She’d had enough for now. I returned from the Void, opened my eyes, and found the sun coming up in Paris.
- BGT
Love this! May I share it on my own blog, with attribution, of course? Our paths are similar. I write a blog for widows and share both your sense of calling and your struggles. This, in my humble opinion, is one of your best posts. Mary Helen Tully (no relation), pen name Mary Lee Robinson
Serious but funny at the same time. Well done. Not to discount anything you’ve said, but most old money people are discreet (you would probably say “circumspect”) about their religious beliefs. For the OMGs I know, going to church is primarily a social activity. Nevertheless, I enjoyed this post. Thank you.
Interesting and aligns with the discussions I have gotten into lately in my college class on business ethics from a Christian perspective.
You might want to cut out the evening snacks, Byron.
Two fundamental and profound things I have seen, continue to see, and believe:
The fear of God, is the beginning of wisdom.
and
If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven and heal their land.
It is, or the lack of is, written all over the world we are living in.
Well said, David. I wholeheartedly agree.
Love this! (I don’t think you’re crazy, either).
“(Edited version of the speech given by the TJ Wormwood, Chief Demonic Officer – Finance, Lord of 3rd Ring of the 7th Circle, to invited audience at Davos.)
Dear Colleagues,
As you all know, I’ve been wrecking finance for millennia. [Pause for effect]
Nearly every major big idea, evolutionary leap forward, invention and discovery has improved the miserable lot of mankind only through their ability to monetise it. Forget the theft of fire – being able to monetise fire by attracting pretty and willing mates around a warm campfire, or cooking the food others have hunted, is what mattered. Strip out the noise, and the rise of mankind is largely due to improvements in the efficiency and ease of means of exchange.
From the realisation hunters could barter their furs for other goods, to the rise of complex products to finance global growth – the innovation of financial markets has been a major driver of success for the Other Side in raising the wellbeing and prosperity of mankind. Pretty much anything that holds back or disrupts trade, increases costs and holds back services is naturally positive for our goal of global destabilisation.
So, here is the big plan:
Since 2007 we’ve been turning the Other Side’s successful innovation of financial markets against them. Global Financial Markets are incredibly rich in opportunities to distort truth, hide lies, and undermine mankind – generating immediate greed, envy, suspicion and anger. We’ve uncovered previously unimaginable ways in which to financially screw the World with consequences that impact everyone.
We’ve overlaid the programme with our mastery and understanding of temptation, human greed, avarice and pride, while adding subtlety and cunning. We merely suggest and advise. We are facilitating the train-wreck of the global economy by destroying asset values while confounding their understanding of money and wealth – the pillars of their society.
At its simplest form we are manipulating and driving constant market instability to keep mankind distracted. Uncertainty clouds their future expectations – so we keep it raining. A Mortgage crisis one year, followed by a Sovereign Debt crisis the next, spiced with a couple of bank failures, and threats of global trade war. Overlay with confusion and distraction such as social media, fake news, Bitcoin and populism, and it all works rather well.
Keep their leaders arguing. Keep the blame game going.
Our success can be seen in current financial asset prices. These are now hopelessly inflated and distorted by foolish post financial crisis policy decisions. They are bubbles set to pop. Empower the regulators and bureaucrats to compromise finance through zealous over-regulation, making banking safer by destroying it. Usher in a new era of trade protectionism, the end of Free Trade and increase the suspicion some countries are manipulating their currencies for economic advantage. Sprinkle some dust of political catastrophe, the collapse of law, undo the fair, just and caring society, while adding some eye of newt and complex environmental threats. Make the rich so rich they don’t notice, and the poor so poor they become invisible. If the markets remain uncertain, then it distracts mankind from addressing these issues, making society less stable!
There as some things we’re really proud of, including the Euro, Social Media, Investment Banks, the Tech Boom, and especially Quantitative Easing (which is still delivering confusion and pain). New Monetary Theory could prove even better – it shows tremendous potential to thoroughly unsettle confidence in money. Cybercurrencies are particularly fun – despite coming up with the idea, neither we, nor even the distinguished members of our panel of eternal guests, understand the why of them. They are libertarian nonsense – so, naturally we continue to encourage them as get-rich-quick schemes, but they also further undermine confidence in money and government. We made something up in a bar one night and called it a Distributed Ledger – the humans ran with it and invented Blockchain, whatever that might be..
Some of the other stuff we’ve encouraged, such as The EU, ETFs, Hi-Frequency Trading, Neil Woodford and Deutsche Bank look likely to be highly effective vectors of short-term economic destruction and destabilisation, triggering systemic market events and regulatory backlashes across markets. We are only now exploring the full potential of market illiquidity to rob billions of pensioners of their savings.
We’ve persuaded investors to overturn proven tried and tested investment strategies and wisdoms, nurturing a whole range of overpriced unprofitable US Tech “Unicorn” companies which we are confident will prove utterly over-hyped and largely worthless. The success of social media, data mining and new tech has increased levels of dissatisfaction and envy – especially in our target younger demography.
The way we successfully pinned the blame on banks for the Global Financial Crisis – despite the fact it was people who wanted mortgages to buy houses and fast cars – ensured global regulators would over-react. We’ve allowed regulators to focus on banks while we target the next financial crisis in other parts of the financial ecosystem.
Regulators forced the banks to de-risk. But risk does not disappear – it just goes somewhere else. While banks understood risk and had massive staffs to manage risk, risk is now concentrated in the hands of “investment managers” who are singularly ill-equipped to withstand the next credit crunch and global recession, (which we’ve planned for next October – Save the Date cards have been sent).
We are particularly pleased that many banks now exceed the 2.3 compliance officers for every profitable banker ratio. Compliance and regulatory costs now exceed 10% of income at some European banks – a stunning success and substantially decreasing the efficiency of banking and exchanges.
We’ve some great new financial ideas we are still experimenting with, some of which show great promise for further weakening society. Facebook Money is going to be a cracker, and I particularly like the Spaceship to Mars project… if only they knew what awaits them…
By hiding inflation in the stock market, we assisted the accumulation of massive wealth by a tiny percentage of the population to ferment income inequality dissatisfaction. When capital is concentrated and the workers under the cosh, it creates all the right conditions for weak disjointed government to aid and abet the rise of destabilising populism.
It’s highly satisfying to watch the instability we’ve created in financial markets drive fear and distrust across society. The debt crisis we engineered led to global financial austerity, job insecurity, and rising inequality. We were surprised how easily we pushed the Gig economy concept to further exploit and cow workers through regulators and authorities – they barely noticed. Over this we’ve layered whole new levels of anxiety such as the unknowns of data theft, the rise in envy coefficients through social media, fake news while fuelling social distrust through resentment.
We’ve managed to persuade Governments to follow damaging and contradictory policies. As society reeled in the wake of the financial crisis, we persuaded policy makers to cut back spending through “austerity” spending programmes, simultaneously bailing out bankers while flooding the financial economy with free money through Quantitative Easing.
Effectively we’ve split the world into two economies. A real economy which is sad, miserable and deflating, and a financial economy that’s insanely optimistic, massively inflated and ripe to pop on the back of free money.
The resentment, instability, fear and general sense of decay has paid dividends in our drive to break society by undermining the credibility of the political classes. Our approach to politics has been simple – deskill the political classes, reduce their effectiveness as leaders, while engineering economic, social and financial instability to drive rampaging populist politics – just like in 1932! Populism may ultimately prove short-lived, but it’s difficult to see how the political classes will recover their power in time to reverse the damages being done to the global environment.
While markets have burned, society become increasingly riven, and politics has failed, we’ve distracted the humans from the rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere which threatens to create global warming and rising sea levels, while plastics poison the oceans and soil erosion threatens agriculture.
Now I love the ravenous hunger and sharp pointy teeth of polar bears as much as the next demon, but needs must… needs must. I was also rather fond of the dinosaurs…
Our approach to ensuring destructive climate change has proved very effective. We’ve supported, financed and advised the loudest green lobbies to ensure their message looks ill-considered, wrong and economic suicide. We also paid big bucks to fund the loudest climate change deniers. Our innovation of fake news to discredit and mitigate anything positive means climate change remains a crank topic – even as our polar bears drown.
Meanwhile, through our dominance of global boardrooms and investment firms, we’ve made sure that large corporates have bought-out and stifled new technologies that could solve the environmental crisis.
Our future looks great – because their future is bleak!
Thank you for your kind attention.
TJ Wormwood,
Demonic Chief Office – Finance”
thedevil@hel.hel
https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1078400601/ref=cm_sw_em_r_mt_dp_U_HkZiDbV2J3HT1
You’ll have to forgive Byron, Sir. He was caught unawares that with every conversation with God comes the Devil’s two cents. 😉
When God was a Woman/Merlin Stone
When God Was a Woman is the U.S. title of a 1976 book by sculptor and art historian Merlin Stone. It was published earlier in the United Kingdom as The Paradise Papers: The Suppression of Women’s Rites. It has been translated into French as Quand Dieu était femme (SCE-Services Complets d’Edition, Québec, Canada) in 1978, into Dutch as Eens was God als Vrouw belichaamd – De onderdrukking van de riten van de vrouw in 1979, into German as Als Gott eine Frau war in 1989 and into Italian as Quando Dio era una donna in 2011.
Stone spent approximately ten years engaged in research of the lesser-known, sometimes hidden depictions of the Sacred Feminine, from European and Middle Eastern societies, in preparation to complete this work. In the book, she describes these archetypal reflections of women as leaders, sacred entities and benevolent matriarchs, and also weaves them into a larger picture of how our modern societies grew to the present imbalanced state. Possibly the most controversial/debated claim in the book is Stones’ interpretation of how peaceful, benevolent matriarchal society and Goddess-reverent traditions (including Ancient Egypt) were attacked, undermined and ultimately destroyed almost completely, by the ancient tribes including Hebrews and later the early Christians. To do this they attempted to destroy any visible symbol of the sacred feminine, including artwork, sculpture, weavings and literature. The reason being that they wanted the Sacred Masculine to become the dominant power, and rule over women and Goddess energies. According to Stone, the Torah or Old Testament was in many ways a male attempt to re-write the story of human society, changing feminine symbolism to masculine.
The book is now seen as having been instrumental in the modern rise of feminist theology in the 1970s to 1980s, along with authors such as Elizabeth Gould Davis, Riane Eisler and Marija Gimbutas. Some have related it as well to the work of authors Margaret Murray and Robert Graves.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_God_Was_a_Woman
“Putin?”
“No. His particular brand of evil has a lifespan.(c)
Oh. Impossible. On this blog? I can’t believe it. Please, Mr. Tully, remind your God (Why do I think her name is Hillary? Winks, nods) at the next meeting, that reality is a little more complicated than Hollywood movies about good and bad guys. To demonize someone by repeating statements from TV is unwise and ignorant, in my opinion. I’m sorry if I hurt your religious feelings. Anyway, thank you (and Amazon) for the wonderful books. It’s not about money and not about Americans, it’s about values and rules of life that are clear and close to all decent and reasonable people in the world (even if they have never heard of button down, blazer, khakis and penny loafers).
PS: excuse me for my English, my native language is Russian. With best regards. Mariya, Moscow.
So, no free speech for me? (Winks, nods) Well, I’m not surprised and I understand why you’re doing this. So much the better, so I can speak plainly. Mr. Tully, I firmly believe that we should all think critically not only when we see another advertisement for another useless rubbish, but also when we see ridiculous propaganda that turns us against another country. (Hello to Mr. Powell and his magic test tube!) This is a very dangerous game (Only I hear the thunder of the drums of war?), and no honest person should take part in it, in my opinion. I will no longer “compromise” you with my comments. And I will unsubscribe, perhaps, from your blog, so that you are not accused of ” ties to Russia.” Sorry for my English. Goodbye. Maria, Moscow.