The Bodice Ripper Theory of Spirituality

…or how our thoughts create our reality..:)

I caused quite a stir in the Forum class at my church on Sunday as we were having a discussion about whether there’s a God and life after death and resurrection. I go to the Unitatarian Universalist Church here in Little Rock, www.uuclr.org, and as a UU, it’s not unusual to find us in discussion of all sorts of things related to spirituality.

When it came my turn to speak, I said that my latest view of spirituality and afterlife comes from a bodice ripper book I’d read a few years ago. For clarification purposes, this name is given to a line of romance novels in which the heroine appears on the cover in a low cut dress showing alot of cleaveage..:) This group was mostly males this morning, and I have never had so much attention focused on me from the members of this group before..LOL

This book was a time travel romance in which the two principle characters (one male and one female) had been killed off early in the book and had been sent back to Earth in their spiritual forms to help a third female character cope with the death of her mother and the recreation of her life. This third character was the only one who could see the two "ghosts", although the "ghosts" could hear and see each other.

One day the "ghost" characters started sharing their stories of what they remembered after they died, and found they had vastly different experiences. The man, who was a cop, was taken to a cold, dank, gray interrogation room and was verbally roughed up. The woman was taken to a lovely field of flowers and had a delightful conversation with a woman in a long flowing dress.

In the telling of their stories, each character realized that their afterlife experience was based on what they thought the death experience would be like. I think that the point the author was trying to make is that in many cases, our thoughts create our reality, and in this case, created the after death experience.

It gives you something to think about, doesn’t it? How much of our reality is created by the negative, shrill voices we hear in our head when we lack self-confidence or have made a mistake or are just plain scared? I have a client who refers to these voices as the "Itty Bitty Shi**y Committee, or IBSC, for short.

If you’ve never seen the movie, "What the Bleep Do We Know?", www.whatthebleep.com, I encourage you to rent the DVD. There’s a fascinating study of the power of words on molecules of water. If that doesn’t make a believer out of you about the power of our words, then nothing will..:)