How to Save the World

Hint: It's an Inside Job

My posts could be more erratic until the new year as it’s the start of guest season here in Puerto Rico where we own and operate two epic mountain jungle cottages (and here) with nature immersion experiences in the central western mountains. We anticipate a really busy season because we added the second rental unit just this month and opened a small outdoor spa where I offer an array of spa and intuitive services. It’s actually been great, getting paid to hang out on a beautiful ravine listening to birds and spa music while making people feel wonderful. It sure beats running around a hospital ER for 12.5 hours saving the lives of others while slowly watching my own life ebb away from stress and toxic work environments.

As you can see where we live, it takes a heroic effort just to get supplies up to the property. Building anything takes time and patience. But it’s been absolutely amazing to develop such a dream and see it change the lives of our guests.

It’s holiday season for many religious traditions. I remember back in the day, celebrating Christmas as the Jesus holiday. Jesus, born on Christmas Day (not really, but…) as the Savior of the world. This teaching was purported to be the foundation stone of one’s life, my sole reason for hope and happiness. In those days, I also believed that it was my Christian duty to proliferate the message of Christian Jesus in order to save as many souls as possible, albeit not using the same methods Jesus did. It was my greatest purpose to offer the salvation message to everyone who would listen, because the world was, by default, in darkness, depravity, and eternally separated from God. As one of the few special club members, I was privileged enough to find, be receptive to, and hold the light for others.

It’s a lot of pressure to be responsible for saving the world. And when you’re good at it, like Billy Graham, it brings about so much admiration and respect. Maybe even marvel and awe.

Unfortunately, I was not that good at it (winning souls). Probably because I noticed the cognitive dissonance that, despite jumping through all the hoops and doing everything a good, submissive Christian woman should do, I often noticed that life wasn’t as neat and tidy or as responsive to the algorithms as they were promised to be. I finally admitted the truth to myself in my late twenties: I was a salesman who didn’t believe in my own products. This is why I rarely shared the gospel with friends or clients. I was ashamed of the fact that I couldn’t get it to work for me. And until I did, I wasn’t about to try to give false hope to others.

Later I realized, after deconstructing all of the false teachings and fear mongering, that the Christian ethos of spreading the gospel and saving souls, while it sounds admirable and spiritual, is completely founded in ego. It’s up to you to be this Jesus-like person who is invested in taking the “Good News” (which in Christian speak is really bad news for most people who have ever lived) to all those darkened heathens that need what you have. It’s clearly its own form of colonialism and has certainly been a part of those historical heinous endeavors, notably by the Spanish conquistadors who scattered Catholic Christianity around the Caribbean through force and violence, and later by the American settlers as they moved west and began trying to civilize and colonize the Native Americans and their children into Christian ideology, also through force, abuse, and violence.

Even today, Christian missionaries located around the globe are doing similar spiritually violent work, in my opinion, by proselytizing, educating, and “discipling” people from a myriad of cultures and languages to be more like white American Christians.

I remember when I deconstructed hell more than a decade ago. At that time, I was financially supporting three different missionaries around the world with a small, regular monthly donation. Upon learning the truth, I approached all of them with what should have been the most liberating, wonderful news! They could now leave the life of self-sacrifice in trying to save the world, because there was nothing to save them from. Hell, the fearsome motivating factor behind all of their life’s work, was a fairytale. How wonderful the news should have been that all the people they were trying to save…were already saved! Shouldn’t that set their hearts on fire with excitement, joy, and relief?

Unfortunately, it did not. One woman had been working for six decades in Japan and could not imagine that it had all been for nothing. Another of the missionaries said to me, “So if there’s no hell, that would mean that my life’s work is meaningless and there’s nothing for me to do here.” Yes! That’s exactly what I’m saying! You can go home and find a new dream and a new purpose, but it will cost you something because you will now have to figure out how to support yourself since you will be cut off from all of your supporters and your church. Life will get real. The cost of admitting their work was in vain and that they were not the crucially important saviors of the world they thought they were was too high for all of them.

Thankfully in modern times, we don’t see the physically violent form of colonizing Christianity in effect. But today’s conservative Christians are still egoically tasked with making sure they “save as many souls as possible before it’s too late.” This means indoctrinating people around the globe in ways that pull them out of their own unique cultures, squeezing them into modern Western molds of ideals and behaviors centered around fear-based, mentally enslaving doctrines. The justification for such heinous activities all stem from mistranslated and misinterpreted Bible versions resulting in unnecessary and even detrimental Christian activism.

While hell-preaching Christian evangelicals sit around on their ego trip, believing that they are the only hope within the world, meanwhile, their supposedly “all powerful, all knowing, loving God” stands by, letting his mere mortals be ultimately responsible for all of his dirty work: If you don’t live up to this standard (and who can?), you are personally responsible for eternally lost souls.

God, by Christian standards, has no personal or moral responsibility for creating such a place as hell, and then sending or allowing souls to go there forever. For some reason, they say, you and I are the primary conduits of salvation, since we are here in flesh. We are the responsible ones. Like I said, a total ego trip.

Counterproductive Activism
All activism has innate potential to be the work of ego. Social or political activism through opposing something you don’t want is the sure way to reinforce or invite it in for dinner. Setting up outward oppositional forces or dualistic (us vs. them) energies toward something creates an equalizing tension or opposing force (yin-yang, pendulum swing), according to the laws of this realm. In other words, every time you stand against something you don’t want, you energetically increase its power. This is why things like diets or any kind of energetic resistance doesn’t ultimately work. Through resistance, you are focusing on and strengthening the thing you don’t want. There’s a saying: what you resist persists.

A great example of this. When I stopped believing in, fearing, and resisting some demi-god named Satan, this terrible spiritual battle in my life disappeared in an instant. It was miraculous and I have never felt like I’m in a spiritual battle since. Life is so much more peaceful now that I’m not creating my own war.

You save the world by saving yourself.
“I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6).

Even Biblical “salvation” is not about saving anyone from ultimate or eternal doom. The Greek word Jesus used for salvation (sozo), meant coming into a state of healing and wholeness.

How do we apprehend this sozo-salvation healing and integration into wholeness of our minds and bodies? When Jesus said “I am the way…,” he was teaching a mystical truth about each of us coming into the conscious awareness of our “I AM” presence. His words spoken in a personalized manner are for each of us to personalize. “I (Julie) AM the way, the truth and the life. No one comes to God-consciousness except through this realization.” Said another way, “Be still and know that I AM God.”

I’m sure you’ve probably heard of the butterfly effect...that a butterfly flapping its wings can impact weather thousands of miles away. Though this sounds a bit far-fetched in practical matters, the principle is solid. When you change your perspective on the world even as lightly as the flap of a butterfly wing, or when you raise your energetic imprint in this world to a higher frequency, you affect the world in an energetic, profound way. The lightest energetic shift inside of you is able to radiate a special light and love to those around you that is subtle but also powerful. No big external attempt to change anyone by imposing your values and beliefs is necessary.

I have witnessed this phenomenon many times in my own life. I remember when I was working in the hospital. I would go into a shift in the ER, and I could often feel a negative vortex when I walked in. But I would go in with a very high vibrational energy, and I could literally feel the energy of the whole department shift. It was magical to observe such an energetic impact.

Be the change you want to see in the world.
“The eye is the lamp of the body; so then, if your eye is clear, your whole body will be full of light” (Matt. 6:22).

Envision what you want, not what you don’t want. This is the meaning of this verse. When you are able to see yourself as the creator of your reality, pure light and understanding will flood your experience.

When your “inner eye” perspective changes, you change. And when you elicit change within yourself, it is guaranteed that your external world and all of your relationships will change because they will have to adapt to the new you. I remember feeling so empowered when I first understood this. It resonated as truth that if I changed, those around me would be forced to adapt to and alter their behaviors as well.

I first used it on my father, who had considerable “power” over me until my mother died in 2009. My father is currently in his last days of life, and I plan to write more about him and the profound impact he has had on my life path after his death. But I implemented a new power dynamic between us after my mother died and no longer gave him any of my power. It took him about two years to come around after implementing my boundaries and changes. One Christmas two years later he sent me a Christmas gift that was his “white flag offering,” letting me know that he was complying with my new terms—with my new me. We have had a relatively peaceful relationship since with me feeling empowered in the relationship for the first time in my life.

We save the world or impact the world by being or becoming (or even envisioning) the change we want to see. When we finally come to learn that change in the world is accomplished energetically, not physically, that is when the miracles begin. Through shifting your own energy or through visualization, you bring in new paradigm shifts.

Miracles and magic are solely accomplished by working on the vibrational or energetic plane in spirit. I still too often get caught up trying to work out of my ego of this realm. But nowadays I am able to stop and ponder the most important work I have to do here: to energetically radiate love and freedom for all. That is how you change the world.

I would love to hear if this resonated with you and if you have any stories from your own experience to corroborate. Don’t be shy!