GOD

Creator, Father, judge, punisher, rescuer, omnipotent observer, potent program ...

"It's God's will."

For thousands of years, this has been the Western world's go-to explanation for everything from the death of a child to volcanic eruptions to the Black Death to the Divine Right of Kings.

Things are the way they are because God wishes it so—and who are we to argue with that no matter how bad things get? And if things are bad, it's obviously punishment from God for our wrongdoings. Even people who profess not to believe in religious teachings talk about such things as fate and not being able to outrun one's destiny.

So how did this hopelessly slavish, "Do with me as you will" orientation come about?

Well, we're talking about GOD here.

And if you're thinking in terms of the God of Abraham, who, at age 99, apparently arranged man's covenant with God in 2047 AM (Anno Mundi aka in the "year of the world" or the actual age of the world as calculated by Hebrew scholars) aka 1714 BCE—we're talking about 3,739 years of serious religious and social indoctrination.

That's 150 generations of programmed obedience to a Higher Authority that has carte blanche permission to righteously destroy us if we step out of line.

A hundred and fifty generations of unquestioning obedience to a punishing authority epigenetically vibrating our modern DNA, influencing our thoughts, emotions and choices on a daily basis.

The individual and social ramifications of such an influence cannot be underestimated.

Sitting in church as a little girl, hearing the priest say things like, “We are not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs from underneath Thy table Lord,” I remember how indignant I felt hearing such words.

They flew in the face of everything I knew to be true deep down inside, which was basically that life was exquisite and precious and important. And I was part of that life! We all were!

I felt beautiful inside. There was something radiant and sublime and intelligent in me—in all of us. Why was the priest saying such terrible things, making us so small when we were anything but?

Furious, rebellious, insulted, I wanted to stamp out and slam the church doors behind me. But obedience kept me in my seat. And then guilt over what the nuns judged to be my "ungodly rebelliousness" and "pride"—which I eventually bought into—kept me quiet and in my place for decades.

Well, enough of that.

Today, social programming and fear of punishment and death at the hands of a supreme authority is why billions of people don't question ludicrous governmental mandates and seem willing to accept global totalitarian control over every facet of life on this Earth.

But then rigid control is only what stupid, lowly worms need and deserve. Right?

Well, doggone it. As I said—enough of that.

Hammer blow

The story I’m about to share I've only gone public with once when Simon & Schuster published my book The E Word: Ego, Enlightenment & Other Essentials back in 2017. But it underpins this whole conversation, so it bears a full retelling here.

It was somewhere around year twenty on the spiritual path and about 20,000 hours of meditation that my personal identity and the illusion of worldly appearances in general began to crack. The ego “I” naturally started falling away during meditation, making room for what I can only call “non-dual awareness”—a blissful state of unity consciousness where the separate sense of self disappears, opening the door to an awareness of the much vaster ocean of consciousness referred to as I AM.

After all those years of hard work you’d think I would have been thrilled at the accomplishment. You’d think I would have danced with joy, shouting to the heavens, “I achieved Samadhi and union with the Divine! Hooray!” But I couldn’t cheer and I couldn’t take credit because the state itself made it quite clear that “I” hadn’t achieved anything at all. Samadhi occurred despite me. It happened without me.

Grace arrived upon my departure. The absence of “me” was bliss. How the hell could I own that?

Plus, it didn’t seem to have any effect on my life.

After a few hours in meditation not being me, I’d open my eyes, get up and spend the rest of the day being me—writing articles for magazines, running my online newspaper, living life, worrying about money and other personal issues.

The non-dual state of consciousness didn’t persist two milliseconds after I opened my eyes and got off my meditation pillow. Which frustrated me to no end. What good was bliss and unity if they were only available with my eyes closed? But I persevered. What else was there to do?

Then one cool October morning in 2007, I opened my eyes after meditating in the yard and ... there was no “I” around. Well well well …

I got up and strolled past the gardens towards the bottom gate of the yard. I say “I” because there’s no other way of putting it without sounding ridiculous. What I mean is, there was no personality around to do anything “normal” with the information that was arriving through the senses—no normal “Cate” reactions or thoughts, like feeling dissatisfied with how the flowerbeds were looking and stopping to pull some weeds.

“I” laughed. There was no one home to judge anything. Which is when it hit me that not only was there still no sense of a personal “I” around, the deeper truth of the matter was “I” had never existed in any meaningful way in the first place.

Between one footfall and the next, the entire illusion of “Cate” was revealed.

I looked around and could almost see it—a scintillating holographic network of neurons in the shape of a human brain suspended in mid-air; a tangle of concepts sparkling insubstantially in the early autumn light; pure information holding my birth, childhood, thousands of boring classroom hours, my marriages, my orgasms, my careers, my hopes and dreams … everything. All the lived experience of a lifetime dangled in front of me.

And I thought this was me?

Laughter bubbled up from the gut—a great Buddha guffaw where the joke is cosmic in the extreme and you finally “get it.” Except there was no one home to get anything … and that was the joke.

Cate Montana didn’t exist. She never had—at least not in any real way. She was a fabrication; a mental construct created from physical experiences and perceptions starting at conception that created neuron patterns that, firing in the brain in the right order, continuously produced the identity that labeled itself “Cate.”

I looked downstream along the river of time and saw no death waiting for me, only the flow of eternal life. If my body had dropped dead in that moment it wouldn’t have mattered a bit. Nothing would have changed. I glanced upstream and saw that I had never been born. All there was and ever had been and ever would be was eternal I AM.

Which is when it hit me: Now I know why all those statues of Buddha show him laughing ... and I laughed and laughed and laughed ...

Found and lost

For three days I simply existed.

I ate when hungry and slept when tired. I left the phones shut off and ignored the computer. Frankly I don’t know what I did those three glorious days except simply live.

What more needed to happen?

But then the mind of "Cate" began to reform. Thoughts began to take on personal significance. Like contrails in a spotless blue sky, thoughts with personal meaning attached—”me” thoughts about not wanting to lose this freedom—began to criss and cross, gradually hemming in the infinite, defining something, giving it boundaries and limits.

“Cate” was taking shape once more. And it was the most devastating, horrifying process ever.

Imagine an existence as boundless as the universe gradually being shut down, the stars winking out, until all of forever is collapsed, compressed, and shoved back into a tiny dark, airless closet. That's what Cate's return was like.

For weeks I moved in and out of non-dual awareness, struggling against the noose of my personality. But it was a losing battle.

You cannot fight an illusion. Doing so only further cements the reality of the illusion.

Within five months of those days of enlightenment my life in the States—my business, my partnership, my home—had completely dissolved and my life fell apart.

How not? It wasn’t “my” life in the first place.

For two years I traveled on the money from the sale of my house … Peru, Ecuador, Chile, Costa Rica, Panama, India … rootless, directionless, rudderless. Everything had been peeled away—passion, career, purpose, partnership, friends, home, possessions, pets—even the languages spoken around me were not my own.

Coming back to America I settled again in the Pacific Northwest and plunged back into writing, gradually coming to terms with what was left of “me” and figuring out what remained on my human life’s “To Do” list.

Number one, sitting squarely at the top, was: Let go of all attachment to liberation. Number two was: Make sense of fact that I was apparently stuck in a state of consciousness that contained two opposing points of view: Unity & duality.

The place I still am today 18 years later.

Perspective

Fortunately, I have finally (YAY!) come to recognize this state of consciousness in psychological terms as the transpersonal mindset psychologist Abraham Maslow talked about.

The transition state between personal (ego) consciousness (I am Cate Montana) and the transcendent state of egoless enlightenment. (I AM.) The in-between stage of ego expansion (not ego inflation) where we are set free to be our true selves—spirit beings of pure love expressing through what show up as physical bodies in this natural world—deeply interconnected bright sparks of infinity literally capable of creating heaven on Earth.

But here's the deal and why I'm talking about this right now:

If these bright sparks of infinity don't see past the God Program and step into their own authority … if we don't finally shake off the hypnosis and realize What We Really Are, we won’t accept personal responsibility and …

We won't self-actualize.

We won't step into our power. And we won't create the New Heaven and the New Earth.

We'll sit around on our hands, waiting for God to forgive us for our sins and then save us from ourselves. We'll wait for The End Times and Jesus' return. Or we'll submit to whatever Higher Authority shows up because it's "God's will," and "Only what we deserve."

Seriously.

I know how insidious and powerful the God Program is. And how stupifying. Despite fully realizing I was never created and that I AM an eternal sovereign being—I didn't even begin to question the God Program until a couple years ago.

The realization that it was impossible for a "God" to create an eternal being (that I AM) and that “God the Creator” didn’t fit into the picture of an ongoing eternal reality that “always has been and always will be” didn't "click" for 16 years. Sixteen years!

That’s how hardwired the God Program is.

And when it did occur to me, I wrestled, and I mean wrestled with the shock and the blasphemy of even thinking about deleting the God Program from my operating system. And then it took at least a full year to purge. And I don't even begin to have time and space right now to discuss what that was like. The uncertainty. The false sense of aloneness ... and then, finally, the sense of responsibility.

And then, finally, the sense of gentleness, freedom, autonomy. and support from life.

And then ... awe ...

Coming home

Deleting the God Program doesn't delete mystery, awe, and wonder. And it most certainly doesn't leave us to the untender mercies of science and technology. For heaven's sake why replace God with another God dressed in a white lab coat?

Deleting the God Program doesn’t delete life or source intelligence or nature or even divinity. It just sets it all up in a new light. Which we desperately need.

After all, if believing in an omnipotent Father in the Sky has gotten us to where we are today, isn't it a good idea to change our perspective about ourselves and all of existence and how we interact and relate with all of existence? Isn't the definition of insanity doing (and believing) the same thing, expecting different results?

The Old Ways and the Old Religions are grounded in a view of life that keeps us in the role of children. A view of life that insulates us from responsibility. A view of humanity and life that has led us to the brink of destruction.

New Age spirituality has bound us to the hamster wheel of self-improvement, endlessly fighting our “lower nature” struggling to attain enlightenment. (The attainment of which, as I’ve just explained, is an impossibility because enlightenment is the absence of any personal “I” attaining anything. Joke … remember?)

Which means the ever-striving “spiritual person” is trapped in an impotent state of forever “becoming” that never gets anywhere because:

How can we become what we already are?

We’ve banged around inside the rat trap of religion and spirituality long enough. Isn’t it time to try something new?

No rules

I’m not insisting on chucking out the old. It’s not my job to insist on anything. And if people find something they need in the old ways, so be it. This is not about setting up another set of rules and expectations to live by.

It’s not even about throwing out the word “God.” It means divesting “God” of its singular status (which the word historically implies)—the idea of a singular “Creator Being” that knows better than us and thus has dominion over us.

Nothing has dominion over eternal spirit beings of love that are by nature one with the Intelligence of All Existence.

Nor do we have dominion over anything but ourselves.

Personally, I have found that deleting the God Program, while temporarily disconcerting, has magnified my astonishment and appreciation for all life like nothing else ever has. It has thrown the door open to endless questions and curiosity, exploration, and excitement.

It hasn't reduced the mystery of life, it’s enhanced it. It hasn’t magnified my ego, it has humbled it.

It’s also made me realize “the buck stops here.”

Yes, deleting the God Program has brought an immeasurable sense of relief, lightness, and freedom. But it has also brought responsibility. If I want forgiveness, I have to find it in myself. If I want kindness and love, I have to find them in myself. If I want answers, I have to bend knee to life, get quiet, go within, and listen.

It has also reduced my isolation and increased my desire for connection with others. For it's obvious many of us are here at this time to create something beautiful, precious and new together ... something never known or seen across all space and time before now.

Who are we without God and 3,739 years of religious and social indoctrination defining and overshadowing us?

It's time we put our Big Boy and Big Girl pants on and found out.

Much love and aloha ~

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Check out the book:

Cracking the Matrix explores the astounding history and nature of what humanity has erroneously labeled "evil" on this planet, helping people finally see the very real, negative, interdimensional influence that exists behind historic and current global events and our social decline.

The book outlines how to break free of this Force's ancient controlling agenda and how people can stand up in the power of their true spiritual nature, ready to create the New Heaven and the New Earth that have so long been prophesied.

About Cate Montana

I’m a professional journalist specializing in alternative medicine and health, and the author of several books, including Unearthing Venus: My Search for the Woman Within [Watkins 2013], The E Word, Ego Enlightenment & Other Essentials [Atria 2017], and a spiritual novel titled Apollo & Me. After Cracking the Matrix: 14 Keys to Individual & Global Freedom, my latest book is Gender, Patriarchy & Sexual Mind Control: Breaking Free. I have a master’s degree in psychology, and am extremely blessed to have been called to Maui to live. I’m grateful every day I awaken here!

For more information you can reach me at www.catemontana.com and info@catemontana.com