Our Golden Calves

Ah, to be human... What a wonderfully scary magical heartbreaking-open epic experience.

The human mind has a linear way of perceiving time. It’s just the way we get to experience this life in this dimension. It’s like an agreement, a contract: there is past, and there is future. The past is filed as memories in the brain, and the future as imagination, and all the moments seem to be happening one “after” the other. The only difference between the two is that one seems to have been crystallized in time, and the other is unknown and full of possibilities.

So here we are, us humans, with somewhat vulnerable nervous systems and bodies, usually rather traumatized – in the sense that birth itself is quite traumatizing for the nervous system at this stage of human evolution, so imagine anything else we all go through in our childhoods. And we grow up, living this life having to face all the hostilities of a world that isn’t all love and cuddles, not knowing what is to come in the so-called future.

In order to survive in this world, there’s a very intelligent program in our operating system called fear. Fear is a boundary setter. It informs our brain when something is dangerous and might cause death. It’s very useful. It allows us to not jump off a cliff just for the fun of it, and many other similar things related to survival.

The thing is, in the evolution of humankind up until now, in our unconsciousness of how powerful we are, fear has been the only thing most humans have chosen to trust.

It’s understandable: after all, with a vulnerable system in a dangerous hostile world, not knowing what the future moment will offer – who wouldn’t be terrified all the time? We would need some form of trust that the next moment is not going to be the death of us, that our desires will come to fruition, that there is some form of hope for some sort of happiness. And so, we learn to trust. That trust is what a mother caring for her baby for the first years of their life creates within their nervous system. That is regulation: trust. And as we grow up, we need to trust many other types of things, the more complex our lives become, the more possibilities of problems appear and the more we need to learn to trust. A common western culture human being will usuallyrely on statistics, science, what a parent or teacher has taught them for a skill, for cleaning themselves, for cooking food, some might trust in a religious guidance, we all rely on certain things to keep us safe, for all aspects of life. The usual ones in western culture are: money: I’ll be safe if I have food and a house, and some kind of freedom of choice ; accomplishments: I will be safe if I am loved and recognized ; politeness: I will be safe if I keep everyone happy so they don’t attack me or reject me, etc, etc.

As humans, we all need something. It’s normal. It has to do with our linear thinking. It allows us to trust in the next moments.

In a way, that is one definition of a God: an entity or concept that we believe in, that we trust is there for us.

In that light, for some, this God is Statistics, Science: I believe what I can see proven. I believe what the numbers tell me. In the Middle Ages, in southern Europe, God was… the rigidity of Christianity. Obeying it would keep us safe from hell.

Throughout the centuries, we have indeed developed a huge fear of being killed for disobeying the rules imposed by the “powers that be”.

We are the children of those who chose to obey and survive. We are the children of the shame that was meant to keep us alive, rather than the deadly courage to honor one’s unique truth in spite of the rules.

And so naturally, of course we have developed mechanisms whereby we trust that we will survive only on the basis of what is given to us from the outside: rules, statistics, proven science, money, power, the love of another, etc.

Those outside things we have learned to trust in, over the centuries, are the Golden Calves the bible speaks of.

It is a metaphor for the things we have decided to cherish and seek trust in more than anything else.

Our external gods.

In the story, Moses comes back down from Mount Sinai with the message of God in the form of holy scriptures:

"Listen, people of Israel, The Everything is our God, The Everything is One and one only".

"Schema Israel Adonaï elohenu adonaï ehad".

What it truly means is indescribable, but a pointer would be: there are no other gods, no other entities or concepts we need to believe in. We can rest assured that we are taken care of by the one and only! We CAN trust, there IS a God that is beyond all of that. But as he comes back down, he sees that many people have lost faith and chose to praise a golden calf, and Moses breaks the tables out of rage. The way I see it, Moses (God too, in the story) is angry not because they have betrayed him, but because they don’t need to do that! And he has spent 40 days channeling the scriptures for them, all that for this??!!!

The truth is, it doesn’t really matter, we can believe whatever we want to believe, we just get to see for ourselves that the golden calves don’t lead us anywhere. How many stories have you heard of people who reach prosperity and remain miserable, who reach fame and die tragically, eaten from the inside by their own shadow, or who sacrifice their lives to please others and end up beaten?

That search for gods in the golden calves is precisely what keeps traumatizing our babies, transferring the fears from generation to generation, and creating an environment where we grow up looking for golden calves to reassure our own trauma. And so, the cycle goes on and on. We have built education, health, industrial, and political systems on that falling foundation, that distorted belief. And it is now crumbling, thank god…

This is truly a magical time we are living in, for we now get to undo these fears from our systems, inside, and out, starting from within, cell after cell, and we get to rise to a higher dimension of trust. That is what healing means: since we need SOMETHING to trust in our future, simply because of the human condition, and that there are no golden calves that will fulfill that mission, that means that everything lies within us. We get to return to the original knowing that our bodies are actually programmed and fully capable to live by:

By knowing from within that we are already safe, loved, and powerful, we become safe, loved and powerful. Therefore, there is nothing to fear.

The codes are within us, we just get to reawaken them, and stop the cycle. That is what the laws of Moses pointed to. That is what Jesus kept repeating, in many different ways too. But everyone kept looking at the scriptures or at the human on the cross instead of looking to where they pointed to.

Now we get to rise.

What a magical time.