Testimony
What happened that changed my perception of how I view this world for good?
How can I describe an experience of One in All, All in One that cannot be described in words?
I wish I could give it you but it is not mine to give for it is yours to accept.
I'll try to describe the circumstances that led to my experience.
In my youth I learned about God through the stories of David slaying the giant and the story of the strength of Samson.
When I was a kid I believed as a kid.
However as a grown up which life had taken positive turns out of a hopeless start, I concluded that I would never
know God other then through the turns in my life. People that know me tell me that how I
managed to escape my circumstances is a miracle in itself and congratulate me with my intellect and resourcefulness.
My two younger brothers where not so fortunate and are addicted, homeless and suffer from psychological traumas.
Although I believed in a God I had problems with Christians and never went to church. I could not reconcile the acts of
Christians with the teachings of the New Testament. I have had to face to many hypocrites, narrow-minded, self-centred, small-hearted,
judgemental people in my life and middle class Christians were by far the worst, especially knowing we read the same
Bible.
I became a director of a company, a father of two and a partner to my wife for over twenty years. I was content
with my life.
After the Tsunami of 2004 I could no longer live with the image of God I grew up with. That of a God that allowed pain
and suffering as punishment. I grew up with the notion of a vengeful God, the God of the Old Testament that avenged until
the seventh generation, the concept of blood sin. The God that foretold that the Jews would be driven from their land,
scattered across the world, their numbers decimated, never to be completely wiped of the face of the earth, never to
have peace in their land, until he decided to gather them again and bring them home.
Read history as it is foretold in the Old Testament. Could I love a God like that?
I had to find the truth. Was it that of the God of the Old Testament? Or that of the Gospel? Or was it the God of the
Muslims? Or maybe there was no God at all, just coincidence.
I started a new search by rereading the Bible, the Quran and I found the Gospel of Thomas. This writing intrigued me as
it were sayings without a context. I read it and decided to buy the translated Nag Hamadi codices to be able to judge
where it came from. I read the Nag Hamadi codices during a vacation.
It was not the message of the Nag Hamadi codices, but the changed perspective that allowed me to see past the barrier of the image
of God I carried with me. This changed perspective opened me to the possibility that none of this was Gods will but that
of our own making. What it did was to reconcile myself with God.
During that vacation of August 2005 in a secluded protected nature park in the south of France, I received my first
moments of silence and enwonderment. I started to see the world around me in a vibrating sense of life and vitality.
It happened to me for the first time on a busy tourist market. A market of all places! I don’t like markets
as I had a problem with crowds. You had to force me to come and I was always pressing to leave asap. In this case I
was at peace, no thoughts just living silence and the flight of two swallows and a background of mountains and forests.
I only remember the flight of the two swallows as I moved through the crowd.
So I had a good vacation, so what. When people asked me about my vacation I responded that it had been very
good, a feeling of coming home.
Little did I know that it was a start of many more instances and moments in the months to follow.
I concentrated on the Gospel of Thomas, the pearl in the Nag Hamadi codices and tried to relate the sayings to that
of the New Testament. I tried finding the meaning of the sayings with the help from an online searchable Bible.
I started to meditate in an attempt to be quite enough to let the words of the Bible speak for itself.
What I remember most is the guidance of “to let go”, “to surrender” the doubts, the preset ideas, prejudices, the air
castles and instead experience.
I had a feeling of becoming whole again, my two sides integrating into one, I can love myself and I’m able to love my
fellow man. It is a gift; a fresh start. The feeling of walking through an empty house for the last time, before moving
to a new house. There where good times here, but it is time to move on.
What followed in the time thereafter was a glimpse of the state of connectedness we exist in. Science calls it the Zero
Point Field or the Akasha Field. In essence:
“To hurt another, is to hurt oneself”
“to give one’s life for the other is the gift of life”
“The ultimate gift is to give life for all”
All-in-all as the New Testament calls it or the Kingdom within. I didn't even know this was a Christian concept.
1 Corinthians 15 that God may be all in all and Luke 17, 21 KJV Neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! for,
behold, the kingdom of God is within you.
I experienced that the walls that we construct ourselves during our life to keep the world outside and our connectedness,
our love imprisoned, came tumbling down.
The building of walls is a psychological process during our lives to protect ourselves against being hurt by others.
I don’t know if the removal of the walls was the result of the experience of the state of oneness of love and unity we
exist in, or that that it was this that caused the experience. I believe the later.
I learned that suffering is relative, that there is a higher reality which is timeless and without suffering. I cannot
explain it; I can only say that “it is”. ”I am that I am” as was said to Moses.
I've tried many times explaining my experience and every time words fall short as it is not something what can be
communicated.
I can't say when and where it happened as it was a process which had several fazes and stages. The experience of
all-in-all is still remembered by me visually as I'm a visually orientated person. What I took for true (literal
translation of the verb to observe in my language) was like looking through a photographic lense with a colour filter.
This filter was yellow and had flares of orange and was on top of my normal vision. It was not just a colour as it had
substance, it was life itself and I was part of that. The feeling of the experience was a feeling of unity and
connectedness of everything in a sea of love. It was a connectedness of everything.
To be honest I could no longer distinguish the individual, the inside from the outside world. I lost myself as a
raindrop falling in an ocean. Maybe If I had been longer in this stage I might have been able to judge the more subtle
details of where what connected with something else, maybe not
What followed was a process that thought me much about myself, the Bible and the world we live in and I can tell you
it is far less pretty than we are aware off. I chose to hold on to the truth and dedicate my life to the connectedness
of all humanity.
We are leaking containers. The experience itself is fading but the effect will last me a life time. I learned that to
love God is easy because it is to love life itself, to love the other is to love that expression of life.
We have long enough seen the worst of mankind, I belief it is time for the good in makind to show. I will cherish every
expression of life without exception and I hope you will learn to as well.
Henk Blum
April 2006
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