Joanna Cherry

• I am an infinite spiritual being

• an amateur god

• hidden in a finite human body and personality

• telling myself a victim story of separateness, lack and entrapment
• investigating my suffering and symptoms

• welcoming with understanding and gratitude their true meaning

• so that I may awaken to the full enjoyment of the power of God’s love and peace that is in us all.

He has planted eternity in men's hearts and minds

Ecclesiastes 3:11

Know ye not that ye are gods?

Jesus, John 10:34

2 Peter 1:4
… that you may become partakers of the divine nature

…until we all come into the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the son of god, unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ

Eph 4:13:

I John 3:2

Great is our Lord, and of great power: his understanding is infinite.

Psalm 147:5

The eyes of your understanding being enlightened

Ephesians 1:18

I in them, and thou in me, that they may be made perfect in one

John 17:23

In 1981 I was working in a mental hospital in Virginia. I was asked to visit a young Mexican male patient who was in forensic lock-up. I went into the padded cell and sat down on the padded floor and talked with him. After a while he got up, went outside of the cell, and locked me inside, and grinned at me through the glass in the door. Soon he let me out and we walked across the unit talking. He turned to me and said "Are you a human god?" I was quite taken aback, but I looked at him in the eyes and replied "Maybe I am, and so are you." I was quite surprised at what he said and at my reply. After that experience, I began to keep a journal about my visits with patients and I entitled the journal "Dialogues With Amateur Human Gods" I realized that this entire planet is like a giant mental hospital, and that we are all locked up in our little cells by some kind of symptomatic aberration, and that we all have profound cosmic questions waiting to be asked and addressed.

About a year later I was asked to visit a 40 year old female patient named Mary who was withdrawn and claiming to be the Virgin Mary. I visited Mary in her darkened room. I introduced myself and asked her why she was here in the hospital. She said that she is schizophrenic. I asked her how she knew that. She said that the doctors had told her. I asked her if she believes everything she is told. She looked puzzled and said shyly "I am the virgin Mary." I asked her what she likes about the virgin Mary. She looked even more puzzled and said: "No one ever asked me that before." She was quiet for a few minutes, gazing off into space, and then she said "She is beautiful." I said to Mary "Then Mary you must be beautiful also or you could not recognize such beauty." She seemed shocked and said "Oh, no, I am not beautiful. I am ugly. Everyone thinks I am ugly and always have been." I replied to her "Mary, you are a beautiful spiritual being and you know that ugliness is not the truth about you, and that is why you say that you are the virgin Mary." Two weeks later I was again visiting on the ward and I saw Mary out in the day room, dressed quite neatly, playing classical music on the record player. She greeted me with a big smile and we made small talk.

All of our conversations have the potential to be profound and meaningful. Are we not amateur gods in human disguise? Out of the mouths of babes and mental patients comes strange truths. My friend, Paul Fairweather, took his first assignment as a psychologist in a mental hospital. He was sent to interview a 22 year old male patient who had killed his father. Dr. Fairweather asked the young man why he was in the hospital. The young man said "I killed my father." Paul asked him "What do you mean that you killed your father." The young man replied "I was awakened from a deep sleep at about 2.a.m. by yelling and screaming in the next room. Furniture was being knocked around and a raging drunken figure stumbled into my room and as it lunged at me I grabbed my shotgun and pulled the trigger. The figure fell dead at my feet, and it was my father." Dr. Fairweather said "You shot at a drunken raging figure, but you killed your father!" The young man said yes and cried deeply. This experience deeply affected my friend, Paul, for the rest of his counseling career. He had seen that the deep intent of the young man was not to kill his father, but to protect himself against an imagined threat.

At the tender age of twelve years I had an experience of the infinite Christ light and love that left an indelible impression on my psyche. But also in my youth I saw human suffering in my family and neighbors that seemed to be a complete contradiction to this inner experience of light. My talented sister died of peritonitis at 15 years of age and my family sank into grief and despair. I felt a deep unexplainable calling to reconcile my inferiority and loss feelings with the incredible light within. I had no idea what psychotherapy was at that time in 1945 when World War II was ending and I began college. I had friends who were killed in the war and had heard contrasting stories of heroism as well. I began to prepare for a service but I did not really know what it was to be. I studied psychology, sociology, history, theology and later majored in the newly emerging psychology of religion programs born out of the depths of suffering in World War II. I worked in mental hospitals, a home for delinquent teenagers, jails, and rural churches where I was struggling to find the tools to integrate the conflicts within my soul and my society. It was many years after my master’s and doctoral programs that I began to see the vague meaning of this calling clearly enough to articulate it even to myself.

For the last 45 years I have been engaged in the full time practice of what might be called spiritual psychotherapy, for want of a better word. It was like I was trying to learn what was not even known. The greatest frustrations of my life have been my inadequacy feelings in the practice of therapy. Of course, these inadequacy feelings were not just about psychotherapy, but more basically about myself.

I was really an amateur studying with amateurs. Although my teachers, supervisors and training therapists seemed much more professional and adequate than I was, why couldn’t they teach this process more efficiently? Just as with my younger sister, I had admired something in them, that I didn’t see in myself except as a shadowy possibility. To even think that we are struggling amateur gods at that time would have been impossible. I was too mired down in my own inferiority problems and addictive solutions. The thing that kept me going, however, was the memory and continuing inspiration of that inner light in spite of the darkness of human suffering. This paradoxical puzzle has dominated my entire life experience. I could neither give up the puzzle nor solve it. I kept alive the tension of the opposites through years of relative failures and successes in my own life and in the lives of my patients. While I recognized that other therapists had similar struggles, it did not relieve my own responsibilities nor dampen my determination to find some kind of reconciling answer to my soul’s dilemma.

Little pieces of the understanding of this riddle came here and there to give me inspiration and encouragement, but the final formula presented in this book did not emerge until I was in my 70’s. Neither traditional religion nor traditional psychology satisfied my voracious appetite for a truth deep enough and powerful enough to reconcile the opposites fighting within me. I was pursuing an unspeakable calling to reconcile the opposites by finding a greater unity. I was drawn to Carl Jung and to the mystics of all religions, as well as to the major resources of traditional religion, psychiatry, and science. Any real reconciliation of the opposites would have to satisfy both the demands of spirituality and psychology in the healing of human suffering. If it didn’t work, it wasn’t true.

I worked with every kind of neurosis and human conflict imaginable in myself and others, offering the best understanding and caring that I could muster, but it did not satisfy me. It felt mediocre and fell short of the infinite possibilities that seemed to be just out of reach. Thank God there were breakthroughs and clearings as I struggled through this forest and moved up the mountain of experience.

In December, 1999, just as we were entering the New Milleneum, I went for broke. I asked for a revelation that would serve the 21^st Century and bring a spiritual renewal for me. I asked for my own personal pentecost. I was told to wait for ten days and to write what came to me. After the ten days of writing down all that was in my mind, there was nothing for three days. I was told that those three days were added because of self-betrayal. It was not just Jesus that was betrayed, I had betrayed myself, and that was to be the chief preparatory lesson for humanity in the 21^st Century. I had worked with all sorts of betrayals in counseling people for years. Human betrayals were just the symptoms of the deeper spiritual self-betrayal which was being revealed to me. I was shown that Other-betrayal was just a symptom of Self-betrayal. Ego betrays Self. Which Self? We are amateur gods, infinite spiritual beings, who in our stupid ego story, have betrayed and crucified the True Self.

I was shown how we do this. It was not through intentional, conscious, demonic meanness but through an unconscious false belief system. We deceived ourselves unknowingly. "They know not what they are doing," Jesus said. Jesus was the guiding figure in revealing the meaning of my dilemma for our human evolution. He used his own life and my own life in explaining to me where this is going. He had appeared in person to me in California in a healing group to which I belonged. He had touched each member of the group on the head. I had no idea what this all meant. Later he appeared to me again concerning the role of forgiveness in this healing of the opposites process. But in 1999 his "appearance" was in the form of the revelation about the meaning of symptoms for our divinity. He had revealed the light to me at twelve years of age, had called me into this search at age 17 when my sister died, and had led me through all sorts of neuroses and addictions throughout the next 55 years but I didn’t realize it.

It was revealed that in the beginning there was nothing but godness, nothing but one vast omnipotent consciousness, and nothing to be conscious of. There was nothingness, no one to talk to, no one to eat lunch with or play checkers with, and worse yet, it was "impossible." How could God invent and experience a separate world when he was all of everything? God had a problem. So he self-hypnotized himself and thereby invented a time-and-space-world which was made out of himself, since there was nothing else to make a world out of. He contracted himself, reduced himself, divided himself, materialized himself. He had to pull an ingenious sleight-of-hand to fool himself into not recognizing himself. What fun would it be to play chess with someone if it was only yourself and you already knew the next move? He had to forget that it was all himself. He came up with amnesia, with forgetting, with self-hypnosis. He dreamed a dream that there was a world and there was. In this manner he could fellowship with the world of people, animals, nature and objects through a dualistic sense of creation. In this dualistic story, in this dream, God was over there and the rest of creation was over here. Of necessity God created a dualistic story in which he and his creation lived. This creation epic was real in one sense and a dream story in another sense What a paradox!

Although duality was a solution for God, it was a problem for man, in that everyone in the story, including God, felt like a victim of the belief system which had been created in order to have relationship experiences. And so the Cosmic Christ incarnated into the story through various avatars including Krishna, Buddha and Jesus, in order to try to solve the victim problem in the drama of life. They had some success but they also met with great resistance and "failure." How incredibly real those experiences seemed, even to God. The belief systems in the story were so embedded and powerful that it was almost impossible to break through them, even if a savior figure died to disprove them. After all, God did a great job of self-hypnosis! That is why in Isaiah 45 it says that God took the responsibility and the blame for sending both good and evil. God had put himself "under the spell" for the sake of relationship, and that means that we are all under this hypnotic spell as well. In the pre-dawn era of consciousness, we all knew the truth of it and we agreed to play the game of life within those rules and boundaries. We were equally responsible along with the Creator. And then we forgot and have been trying to decide ever since who is responsible for human suffering: God, man, society, our genes, the environment, or the devil?

And so, when a hypnotist puts people "under" , he is temporarily removing them from their already present hypnotic belief system. We are already under a hypnotic spell and the hypnotist de-hypnotizes us, actually, Under hypnosis, we move into the area of infinite potential, and we can do or not do many things heretofore unimaginable. We have documented painless surgery, amnesia, and many kinds of marvelous foolishness which demonstrate this de-hypnosis type of hypnosis.

God’s problem now is how to de-hypnotize without losing the benefits of hypnosis. Can we retain the finite world of experience without losing the infinite context in which the limitations of the finite world exist? Jesus and other avatars and enlightened people have accomplished this as a model for all of us, but mankind has not yet moved fully into the Age of Self-Realization. Hawkins says that in 1986 we moved from level 197 to level 206, which got us out of the ego box into a new degree of integrity for the first time in human history. Now it becomes possible to spell out through Infinity Theory how we can have more and more non-dual experiences above 600. Jesus through the Cosmic Christ role is taking the lead in this evolutionary step through A Course in Miracles and with the pioneering efforts of such people as David Hawkins, Eckhart Tolle, Byron Katie, Albert Einstein, Alan Watts, Nicholas Berdyaev, Paul Tillich, William Glasser, Ken Wilber, David Bohm, Wayne Dyer and other explorers in consciousness research and transpersonal psychology. Infinity Theory is an attempt to pull together some of the contributions to this evolutionary step that we are witnessing at this time in history.

I didn’t realize that Jesus was trying to tell me his part in the Great Cosmic Christ function of healing. In the 1970’s when I first began studying the Course in Miracles I recognized the powerful authenticity of that document, but I had no idea of its meaning for the unfolding revelation about spiritual psychotherapy. I didn’t know that the Cosmic Christ was leading psychotherapy, science and medicine through all of their apparently convoluted twists and turns in the last 100 to 200 years.

I have been trying to detect and evaluate every major development in the science and spirituality of psychotherapy in the last 45 years, but I had no idea where this assessment was to lead. It was like we were on the stage of human history but I thought it was all of reality until I got offstage. It was then that I realized that you can’t get the spiritual perspective while on the stage. God came into our story and experienced everything, including death. Now he is telling us how to come out of the story and get off of the stage of dualism, and into the wholeness of reality as it was described in the Course in Miracles.

The healing process is basically the conscious awareness of how to go into the infinite and back to the finite. Only is this manner can the opposites be understood and "reconciled." That is why Jesus said there is no other way than the way he did it. That is, you transcend the story and re-enter life itself without the baggage of the story, because you are a finite/infinite being.

In other words, in this dualistic story God was disguised as God and we were disguised as humans, which was a necessity. This whole drama has been played out as a rather chaotic scientific/spiritual experiment which has now reached its limits and we have to move on up the ladder of consciousness until we can view our dualistic story from a greater non-dual awareness.

It is the intent of this book to extend Infinity Theory into the holistic practice of psychotherapy, particularly regarding the purpose of symptoms and the necessity for re-diagnosis. Usually the patient’s self-diagnosis is very similar to that of the professional except that the professional uses a more technical vocabulary about chemical imbalance, genetics, conditioning, family history, defense mechanisms, viral or bacterial infections, toxicity, substance abuse, codependency, repression, anxiety, etc. In spiritual psychotherapy, such descriptions are not considered to be causal but symptomatic of something deeper which is not usually suspected. Shakespeare was more accurate when he posed the question as "to be or not to be." We would revise it read "to be controlled by our story or not to be controlled by our story." Our symptoms take us all the way to the very roots of existence, to our sense of identity, to our lack of spiritual awareness.

The human dilemma was played out in the story of the captivity in Exodus. The Jewish people had been captured by the Egyptians because of their idolatry (sick religion) and taken into exile in a foreign land. For 400 years, they were slaves. No one could even remember being free, although stories about some ancient mythical freedom continued to be told. Moses, however, had been raised in the king’s court and he retained a sense of freedom. He saw a guard beating a Hebrew slave, and instinctively he killed the guard and fled across the desert and out of the country to protect himself. After years of living in the desert, he met God in a burning bush and was told to go back to Egypt to free his people. He went to the Pharoah and told him to let God’s people go. It took many persuasive magical actions to persuade Pharoah, but eventually the slaves were freed. However, Pharoah then changed his mind and sent his soldiers to pursue the fleeing two million slaves. The Red Sea was parted and the Hebrew people crossed over in safety while the pursuing soldiers were drowned. Then it took forty years of living in the poverty of the desert to get the slave mentality out of the people to ready them for the experience of the "promised land."

This is exactly our human dilemma. We have worshipped the false gods in our story and are in exile as slaves. This slave/victim mentality has controlled us for so long that only mythical stories of freedom remain to echo a long-lost divinity. "Let my people go" is the freedom cry of the 21^st century. Even though we have been delivered already from the domination of our enslaving Pharoahic ego, it sometimes takes 40 years to get out of our slave story long enough to enter into the promised land of our divinity.

I was reminded that this non-dualistic awareness, however, does not un-do the finite world itself, but only our attachment to it, when I had the following dream. There was a tree that was supposed to be trimmed, but it was cut down entirely. I felt very badly about this tree in my dream. The message of the dream to me was: don’t cut down the finite, just trim it of its false meaning.