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WuPart1

My Rise to Christianity and My Transcendence From It 1983 - 1992

Page 3

by Winston Wu

That Summer I was able to use my new found insight and understanding to re-evaluate the Christian beliefs I had.  While on a plane on a vacation to Florida, I looked out at the night view below while we passed over Houston, Texas and the following thoughts came to my mind:

"There's something very wrong with Christianity here.  I've known this a long time but was always afraid to face it.  But since I value integrity of thought and a clear conscience, I might as well be honest now and face it no matter how blasphemous it may be.  Now, I know that according to Christian teaching, billions of people out there in the world are going to go to hell because they're sinners and don't even know it.  But why is it their fault when they don't even know it and were born with it?  Sin to the Bible is any imperfection that we have, but since we were not born perfect no one can ever be perfect, so then why is it righteous to send them all to hell for an eternity for something they were born with?  That's like sending Zebras to hell for being born with stripes!  It just doesn't make sense no matter how hard you try to justify it.  Now let's put myself in the place of a nonbeliever.  Suppose I was a boy in Africa some time in the past who had lived and died without ever hearing the Gospel.  This means that no matter how good or bad or anything I was, I was guaranteed to go to hell anyway not only because I was never saved, but because I was born a sinner as a result of the Fall of Man and never even knew it?  This means that I would wake up someday before the judgment throne of God about to be thrown into hell for something I never even knew existed, which was sin.  After being thrown into hell, I would be tormented for billions and trillions and zillions of years and beyond without end.  All for something I never even knew existed.  This would be the fate of billions of people who had lived and died throughout history without being saved!  Now if I were that boy in Africa and had that fate, would I feel that that was fair in any way at all?  To be honest, I wouldn't feel that that was fair in the least bit.  In fact I would feel that that was 1000 percent unfair!!!!!!  Something is definitely wrong here. Something is inherently not right about Christian theology.  I am absolutely SURE about that!  There's no question about it.  There MUST be other answers out there somewhere that makes more sense than this!  And I fully intend to find those answers from here on!"

At that time I knew that these thoughts I was having were blasphemous to the Christian faith, but since I was so SURE that there was something inherently wrong here, that certainty gave me the courage to continue to think these things through.  That's when my search for truth, meaning and answers began.



New Spiritual Insights

Aftermath and the Spiritual Insights I Discovered:

The vacation in Florida was great.  After summer, I started community college.  It was there that I learned a lot about the world that I didn't know before - its diversity, different cultures and beliefs, and different viewpoints and opinions from great people throughout history from the past up to the modern era.  At this point I started seeing the world from a whole new perspective which helped me appreciate life even more.  No longer did I see the world as a world of sin and darkness as I had been taught.  No longer did I see the world as a giant dungeon where everyone was enslaved and chained up by sin, darkness, Satan and demons.  Instead, I saw the world as a rich beautiful diverse place with its own problems and challenges to work through over time.  I saw that each unique person in the world was on a path to evolve which included challenges and lessons to be learned.  I realized that it was wrong to try to convert someone from that path, and that it was best to let people grow, learn and evolve on their own path and find their own destiny.

But what about finding the answers about the truth of God and religion?  I wasn't sure where to begin.  I knew that each religion claimed to have the truth and that they disagreed with each other on many things, so they couldn't all be right could they?  But how would I know which religion was true and which wasn't?  I thought there was no way to really find out until after you die.  So I just became an agnostic and left it at that for a while.  But eventually, I believed that if there were answers out there, then there must be some way to find them.  I wasn't satisfied with being an agnostic and dropping the issue for good, so I decided to search again.  It was then that I found some New Age spirituality books that had caught my attention.  I had remembered that a few years ago my Youth Pastor had warned of the dangers of the teachings of the New Age movement.  I had no idea what it even was at that time, but now I was curious.  Maybe it would show me something that the traditional organized religions didn't.  Fortunately, it did.  Many of the concepts made so much sense to me and showed me the big picture.  It was like it borrowed all the truths from each religion and put it into a giant wheel that represented the total sum of cosmic divine truth.  That was it, I thought!  Each religion represented a different aspect of the truth, and when you put them all together you get a better view of the whole picture!  Bingo!  This was the answer I was looking for.  Now I understood what that secular adage meant that said that all religions are different interpretations of the same God.  Before I thought that was just a cop out, now I understood how much sense it made.  The reason that the great religions contradicted each other were due to the differences in man's interpretations of the divine, not the fault of the divine.  In fact, the more I learned about each religion, the more parallels I could see between them.  The same underlying themes seemed prevalent and all pointed in the same direction.  I also learned that since religion was man's interpretation of God, that God didn't really fit into any organized religion, but was far beyond the limitations that they imposed on him.



Courage For New Ideas

For the next few years, little by little I gradually developed the courage to read books with ideas from other religions and New Age beliefs as well.  For a while, each time I picked up one of these books, the words "Satan" and "blasphemy" would come to mind, but I as I learned more and became more confident in my new knowledge, those fears lessened and eventually diminished.  One day, I found another profound answer to what I was looking for.  I saw a quote in a book that said "The more and more you look at the universe, it appears less like a great machine and more like a great thought."  That's it I thought!  We don't have to look for God out there in some abstract place.  We are all a part of God.  We are all like atoms and molecules in the large organism we call God.  Like each atom and molecule in our body, we each serve a higher purpose that we aren't aware of yet.  This made even more sense to me as I realized that everything in the universe seemed to be made up of something revolving around something else.  For example, in an atom there are protons and electrons orbiting a nucleus. Likewise, on a planetary scale, moons revolve around planets.  On a larger scale, planets revolve around suns.  From an even larger scale, suns and stars revolve around the center of each galaxy.  So if we are all made up of atoms which contain things orbiting around each other, then maybe suns, stars, and galaxies are also like atoms which make up a larger whole we call God!  I envisioned that everything in the universe was like valuable parts of the inside of an intricate clock, each part was valuable, unique, and served its own purpose.  We just don't always see or realize that purpose unless we reach higher states of being and consciousness.  At the time, I thought I was the only one who came to the conclusion that God was the totality of everything.  Soon though, I realized that I wasn't and that others searching for truth had discovered the same thing, and that this view of God in fact had two terms for it.  One was "Pantheism" and the other was "Monism."

I also discovered that we could all find God and divinity in ourselves just by tapping into our higher selves and higher states of consciousness.  It was like we were Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz who discovered that she had the power to return home the whole time because she had already been wearing those red magical shoes the whole time.  Likewise, we could find God and the divinity within ourselves by just simply going within.

Finally, I discovered that many great great mystics and seekers of truth throughout history and in our modern era have come to the same conclusions that I came to as well.  This said to me that there must be something to my discoveries after all!  From their books and books written about them, I discovered very similar themes.  These themes reveal that we are all souls from higher levels which have decided to come down to Earth to learn lessons and grow.  We do this by either continuously reincarnating here or in other worlds or other planes of existence until we learn the lessons we need.  As we learn, grow and evolve, we reach higher levels of consciousness, which allow us to enter higher heavenly realms.  Some call these higher realms Heaven.  Others call them Nirvana, Astral Planes, or Re-unification with God.  There are different levels of these higher heavenly realms, and between 7 and 10 are named.  In addition, I learned that millions of people who have had Near Death Experiences (NDE's) and Out of Body Experiences (OBE's) have had these same higher truths and themes revealed to them during their experiences.  All this told me that there must be something to these themes if people from all over the world had the same things revealed to them somehow.



Christianity - Freedom Lost

Then I started reading books and articles that critiqued Christianity.  I learned that the version of Christianity that I had believed in was called "Christian Fundamentalism."  I was amazed at how many arguments there were against it, and also at how many irreconcilable contradictions there were in it.  Before, I thought there were no good arguments against it.  Now I realized that there were as many arguments against it as there were crops in a field!  Whoa!  The more and more I researched, the more came out.  Just when I thought that was all there was, more kept popping out!  I was amazed.

Now I realized why most non-Christians were so turned off by Evangelistic preaching.  As a Christian it used to baffle me why anyone would turn down the Gospel and reject free eternal life.  It was like they were rejecting a million dollars offered them for free.  Now I realized that it wasn't as free as I thought.  To non-Christians, the Gospel asked them to adhere to extreme beliefs, took away freedom of thought, used fear of punishment to invoke compliance, and forced values onto people that they didn't agree with.  As I Christian I never realized this because my beliefs put me in such a warped frame of mind as to not see this.  Now I realized that while non-Christians couldn't really relate to the Christian perspective, it was also true that Christians had lost the ability to relate to the perspective of non-Christians.  Since I became a Christian at 10 years old, I never really understood the non-Christian perspective until now.

There was another benefit to all this as well.  Because of all these discoveries along with my new views of God and spirituality, I realized that my parents and relatives weren't going to hell after all!  This lifted a huge burden off me and gave me peace of mind.  In a way, I had saved my parents and relatives from going to hell just by realizing that they weren't going in the first place!  My parents had been right all along that I didn't have to convert them or any of my relatives.  All I had to do was appreciate where they are, because they were already where God wanted them to be.  I now had peace of mind to move on and discover my own potential.  I was free now to explore the limitless possibilities of life, knowledge, mind, philosophy, spirituality, etc.  A whole new adventure was just beginning.

Five years later in 1997 I met the most wonderful person in the world.  I met her online and we talked for a year before meeting.  When we finally met she turned out to be everything I wanted.  She was very beautiful both inside and out.  She was very much like Belle from Beauty and the Beast.  Like Belle, she adores and is adored by children and animals.  When we met, we knew we were a match made in heaven and the love between us was unconditional.  I moved up to Washington to be with her, which was a good thing because I had always wanted to live in that beautiful state someday.  We live together to this day.  I now work in a Human Services occupation and I like to read and write about religion and spirituality in my free time.  I hope to author some books in the future too.

I know that my problems aren't all over and that there will always be ups and downs in life, but my experiences have given me the ability to see a larger perspective which I otherwise wouldn't have had.  Seeing the big picture helps me to not be overwhelmed by every little thing that happens, but instead helps me to be detached and see life as a process with its challenges that allows us to grow and learn so that we can ultimately achieve wholeness within ourselves and unity with God.

Thank you for reading this, and may you all find your true bliss, true self, and ultimate destiny.

Sincerely,
Winston Wu

(End of story)

P.S. If you have any questions or comments about my story you can email them to me at WWu777@aol.com



Epilogue


Conclusion and My Own Theory About What Happened To Me


Well there you have it. I had intended to write a much shorter version, but as I was writing all this, it was like I was reliving all the pain and joy of it again, so I was compelled to describe so many details about it.  If that made it long and tedious to read this, then I apologize.  But I hope that you will try to understand and appreciate the life story I just told you.  In a way it was very therapeutic for me to write all this out.  It had been hidden and repressed for so long.  Many of these things I never wanted to tell anyone.  Even today though, it's hard for me to make sense of it all really, there were so many ups and downs.  I don't really understand why things went the way they did or if things went the way they were meant to.

But now I have a theory though.  In summary here are the main events:

  • I was a passionate devout Christian on fire for the Lord and believed I had found ultimate truth.
  • A snowball of odd tragedies struck, which turned things around.
  • Along with that, Schizophrenia or OCD came and made my life an inner hell.
  • The powerlessness of not being able to cope with it all led to deep depression as well.  I thought my life was truly over.

  • Things got better and with that my mental disorder symptoms subsided.

  • After recovering from all that, I attained a level of transcendence and awareness that I never had before.  My cognitive, writing, speaking, communication, insight and understanding abilities suddenly reached a level on their own.  It was then that I was able to understand higher spiritual truths.

So I was wondering then.  Perhaps my soul or higher self wanted to evolve to a higher awareness level and when it was in the process of doing so, my physical brain had trouble adjusting to it, so it started misfiring and malfunctioning, which created those obsessions and delusions.  Perhaps that is the reason behind some mental illnesses.  The reason I postulate this is because I recently read some articles about patients who recover from Schizophrenia and become better than before.  They become smarter and more successful in life.  I thought that my case was a fluke or a mystery, but when I learned that this happened in other cases too, it made me wonder whether going through a mental illness was in some way a path to transcendence of some form.  What do you all think?  In case you want to read the articles on the websites I mentioned, here they are:

http://www.webcom.com/thrive/schizo/articles/ehss.html

http://www.webcom.com/thrive/schizo/articles/wrong.html

Thank you for reading this, and I hope that you can get out of it whatever lesson you see in it.

Yours Faithfully,
Winston




WWu777@aol.com




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Copyright © 2000 Winston Wu







July 16, 2000