TEDxSF – Louie Schwartzberg – Gratitude
‘Oh my god’. Have you ever wondered what that meant?
The ‘oh’ means it caught your attention, makes you present, makes you mindful.
The ‘my’ means it connects to something deep inside your soul. It creates a gateway for your inner voice to rise up and be heard.
And god? God is a personal journey we all want to be on, to be inspired, to feel like we’re connected to a universe that celebrates life.
~ Louie Schwartzberg
It wasn’t really that long ago that I cringed at the mention of God. I went to Catholic schools growing up, and maybe that had something to do with it.
I remember tuning out.
I remember thinking, when I bothered to think of God at all, “It’s an unnecessary crutch” and “God has no basis in reality” and “Why would you want to sacrifice your freedom for anyone or anything?” and the good old, “If there is a God, why do bad things happen to good people so HAHinyourface.”
And I had the unsettled feeling that God-believers were sprinkling glitter over all the awfulness that exists and blindly calling it a pretty picture. And then I generalised and thought that all of them had a kind of stick-fingers-in-ears-lalalala-look-rainbows! approach, which confused and infuriated me when I thought about it too long. So I didn’t.
I didn’t really want answers to my questions. I was just fine sitting in my righteousness.
And it didn’t come up with anyone else, either, because no one I talked to regularly believed very strongly in God, or at least, if they did they didn’t tell me about it, which was probably a very smart move.
I came to the concept of God slowly.
I had lots of misconceptions to undo. I considered my rational thinking and logical argument to be among my strong points, so it took me a while to be open to the idea that maybe my mind doesn’t and can’t actually know everything, and that just because I don’t understand how something works, doesn’t mean it doesn’t have a real and deep positive effect.
It started with this desperate question:
“How do I know what I should do?!”
Life wasn’t working properly. I didn’t know what I wanted. It seemed that I knew nothing about what I really needed, so I was clutching at everything – anything – that might be true to help me. I looked at meditation, productivity, creativity, exercise, time management. I experimented with them all. And then, when they didn’t become everyday rituals, I decided that I had failed, again.
I eventually realised that the answer to my question was intuition. And I began searching for everything I could find on how to develop my intuition. I came to see that people who trust themselves and their decisions, trust their intuition, not necessarily their rationality.
And in searching out intuition, I came across the concept of soul.
This resonated with me. The idea that there is a part of me that is untarnished and untarnishable. That there is a part of me that is free from all fear and all suffering. I began to think, “If this is true, what would that part of me say to me? What would that part of me be like?”
I intuitively wrote out conversations with my soul when I felt alone or confused or upset and I always felt comforted, more clear, more centred, more me afterwards. The words back were encouraging but not pushy, loving but not needy, accepting without exception. They were gently curious. Soul had no compulsions and could not be even slightly shaken.
So now when I came across the God word, I had some recognition. In my mind I replaced God with ‘soul’ everywhere I saw it, and it made sense. ‘Right, this is the thing that is bigger than my problems, bigger than me. This is the thing that will never leave me, even if every single person in my life does. This is the thing that never judges, that accepts me exactly as I am, accepts life exactly as it is. This is the thing that is flawlessly composed of love.’
And I came to see the truth in the addage ‘Love is stronger than fear’.
This didn’t make sense to me before because my idea of love was conditional and external, since that’s what I’d been taught. Love is the thing you get if you’re lucky, if things match up right and if you’re good enough. It’s the thing you get from other people. It means people are kind in this very specific way and that other very specific way. It means people do not behave in this way and that way.
Conditional, external love can’t be stronger than fear because it’s based on fear, it is fear.
There is something much more everlasting, deep, true and healing in unconditional love, which cannot be explained in its totality. The video above does a gorgeous job of showing an interpretation and appreciation of it.
To me, God is a way of explaining unconditional love, the energy that connects all things. To me, religion is rich with metaphors which I can take or leave as I please.
To me, God is just a word, but I have found that the thing it describes is unadulterated magic.
