On my mother’s side of the family, her dad was an insurance salesman, but on Sundays he was the Baptist Church deacon and sang in the choir in a small Kansas town. On my father’s side, his dad was a Baptist Minister with divinity and education degrees, as well as being the college president of another small Kansas town.

Although we certainly could have had a serious religious mandate in our family, we were “casual Christians”, dutifully attending church on Sundays, but keeping spiritual matters to pretty much that one day of the week.

I remember one particular Sunday in my preteen years when I was lightly questioning what church was exactly. Why do we gather in this ornate building with all these other people to sing weird songs and be lectured to by this pastor guy? By that time in my Sunday school education, I was pretty familiar with what was in the Bible, yet I was having trouble making the connection to God. God seemed to be the goal, but I didn’t understand what the approach was to “getting there”. It seemed like a lot of work to get to God, and there was a lot of judging and self-recriminations involved. I just was having trouble buying the whole religious narrative.

I think this kind of cognitive dissonance motivated me to make further spiritual inquiries as I grew into my teen years. I read books by Teilhard de Chardin, Yogananda, dove into the Bhagavad Gita, and had my antenna up for any other kinds of spiritual inquiries that explained what God was, and how to get there.

I’ve written before about my psychedelic experience of “seeing God” that shook my reality for years. But it did crack open a small window to a reality I hadn’t known existed. That glimpse into the Godhead was a sort of “double down” for my spiritual inquiries that eventually led me to realize that God is not “over there” somewhere, or only available when we’ve executed some penance, worn the hair shirt, or performed self-flagellation.

God is right here, right now, no matter what emotional conundrum, existential crisis, or mental defect we may be going through. God is sitting right there through what I call the “God Portal” that is part of the standard equipment of being human.

It is our assumed “personality”, or “identity” that has created a sort of false reality about who we think we are, and what we think we are being in the world. We are aware of it–we call it the “ego” when it gets to be socially awkward, but really all it is is a cardboard construct we stand up in front of the God Portal to maintain a sort of automatic status quo of self that is easy to control and understand.

The reasons we erected such a deflective edifice was to virtue signal whom we consider our authorities to assure them that we are no threat to the narrative we adopted from them. This allows us permission to “go along to get along” in a good slave sort of way. But, it has nothing to do with the most important and vital truth that we are, literally, living God’s life.

It is through our God Portal that the Creator experiences his Creation, and if we tear down our ego edifice, the portal becomes an open and intimate two-way exchange of Universal Consciousness. Extrapolating this out further, we see the God Portal as connected to every other sentience in the Universe, revealing our innate human ability of sharing consciousness with anyone anywhere, since God is all there is.

Consciousness adept, Brad Johnson, in one of his YouTube series, “Prana Transmission”, offers a wonderful way to keep that God Portal lubricated: Breathe in Source, breathe out source. This simple exercise can be enhanced with what yogis call the “cleansing breath”: breathe in to the count of “4”, breathe out to the count of “6” five times.

A variation of this exercise is to use it to delete or de-energize negative thoughts and feelings that may be causing fears and disruptions in your life. First, breathe in and breathe out God/Source, then hold the offending thoughts and/or feelings while doing the 4 and 6-count cleansing breath. You’ll find the thoughts and feelings will fade pretty quickly. Simply repeat if they resurface or reveal other negativities. This can also be used to create something desirable by simply breathing in the Creator, breathing out the Creator, and then offering that vision while doing the yogic breath.

As I blatantly found out from my psychedelic experience, socialized and enculturated humans find it terrifying to be without their cardboard ego constructs. We haven’t been allowed to acknowledge our God Portal, let alone be shown how to access it. In fact, we have been trained for thousands of years that direct access to God is dangerous, despicable and even downright evil; and to be a “good person” we must obey authority, minimize our personal creations, and deflect any and all calls for the opposite by so-called social insurrectionists.

We are as much a part of God, as God is a part of us. There is no actual distinguishing demarcation between where we “end” and Source “begins”–it is simply a Universal continuum of consciousness where any boundaries or barriers are merely convincing illusions without any true substance or meaning.

By consistently breathing Source/God/Creator, that portal expands until it disappears into a ubiquitous, eternal Universal Life indistinguishable from Self. We experience our experience as God’s experience of our life–forever flowing and expanding in everlasting love, peace and gratitude.