Dog,
I'm with you on this one, why should I believe in something I can't feel, hear, taste, smell or see? It sounds too self delusional.

I used to drop acid with this other burned out helicopter mechanic in the jungles of Viet Nam many, many years ago.

We would get really stoned and he would take out this black marker and he would write "The kingdom of God is within you" all over helicopter gun ships. He wrote that simple spiritual statement on machine gun ammo boxes, on the insides of radio access panels, on rocket launchers, cannons, everywhere.
I thought that tagging those death dealing machines with "The kingdom of God is within you" was the funniest thing. And it really irritated the Army, which was also a good thing.

Years later I found myself trying to not drink for one day at a time, and somebody told me that God could relieve me of that obsession. I wasn't at all sure that was so, but I remembered what my most spiritual friend had penned many years earlier.

Then I read in the Big Book, way in the back, the "Spiritual Experience" and it says, "we have tapped an unsuspected inner resource". And it clicked.
Maybe my old stoner buddy and the guys that wrote the Big Book are talking about the same thing.
Just like that sorry little voice telling me good things won't last is an undesirable inner resource, the Kingdom of God may be that unsuspected inner resource that is the counterstroke to that insanity.

The Hindu's have an interesting take on God, You, Me, all of us are God, we just don't know it. The Buddhist have a similar idea, (Buddha means to awaken) once we awaken to the true reality of the world, the fight over questions about where God lives are over. This power greater than myself has always been in me, I just blocked it's existence from my rational mind. This program doesn't go out and find anything, it removes in us the things that keep it a secret to us.

The reason I chose to become willing to accept any part of this idea of spirituality is pain. The pain of active alcoholism was worse than the pain of swallowing my pride and admitting that maybe I didn't know everything.
Just a thought


Richard S.