Siti's Election

Here is the thing: I (Dan Steele) was raised an ignorant, naive dork in the suburbs east of Los Angeles. No father around, mother worked--pretty much a loner. Born in the first half of the previous century, I came of age just in time to be a 1960's hippie and join the Navy to evade the draft. Influenced by Eastern religions and the occult in the early 70's, I got into metaphysics. In Honolulu, Hawai'i, in a meditation, I encountered a "fer real" demon--a deceiving spirit. In my new jargon, I realized I had been spider-bit. I went forward to get saved at the House of Praise, a kind of communal Youth-With-A-Mission/ Assemblies of God outreach to the likes of me. Walking back to my seat, I had moment of lucidity. I saw the world I had lived in with everyone's understanding of how it worked, the science we had all learned from school and experience and "normal" expectations. This was the world we all live in, eventually die in--the world we "see" when we look through our natural eyes.

And here is the thing I said, "Here is the thing" about: I saw that this world is not real. It is an illusion. I mean, it is really here, but we are all wrong about it. It is in another game than the one we all think it is in. There is something else that is going on. We think gravity and the natural course of things, physics and all that; while in reality it is under God's guidance for His purposes. We think happenstance and coincidence around us; while in reality God is orchestrating His becoming manifest in and through us. He really is in control. We just do not recognize it.

"Life stinks!" says Mel Brooks in his movie by that name. No, no. That is the old, wrongly perceived reality we grew up in, the illusion we all presently live in in delusion. In real reality there is the life of God, what He is doing. That is the life, the reality I entered when I was saved: I saw that this earth is, in the real reality, the Bible's world. Oh, look, there is Siti's street.

Siti knows we have to fight for the reality we choose to live in. Living in that reality is our CHOICE, our ELECTION by what we believe. Said She, "I threw the tv out many years ago. I do not allow the world in through a box to tell me a vision; only God has that position and privilege" (my paraphrase). "I really feel that reading God's word, Neville’s work and your blogs are important to me...not just to be read but to be doing, put "into practice" in my thinking, pondering, and praying. That is how things of this world--or rather my negative thoughts about it--get pushed out of my being, how I overcome my flesh, if you will" (again my paraphrase and emphases).

"It is my continued desire to live and dwell in the secret place of the Most High and abide under the shadow of the Almighty, utilizing my mind to love my neighbor as myself. Maybe that sounds too much like Brother Lawrence, but I do not lead a monastic life as traditional thinking goes." "'Biblically correct thinking is thinking like God, as God, with purpose and expectation of effect.' --That is what I do each evening before bed and each morning when I wake up. I use the scriptures twice a day that you mentioned in your post of November 18, 2019."

I have a lot of links on that page. My point in this is, as I said, that we have to fight--make a choice, an enforced election--establishing which reality we as Christians believe we actually are in. "The just live by faith," said the prophet Habakkuk (2:4). That means there is an alternative. "Life stinks!" is the sad reality of those who are not saved. That is the reality we do not want, so we choose to not let our thoughts dwell on it, except to pray for what it ought to be. Most people do not know how to get out of delusion and into the real, manifesting-God reality. How can they elect what they do not even know what is?

Get saved. Believe that God is the Consciousness of the Unknowable, and Jesus Christ is that Consciousness becoming manifestly expressed--that we are connected with that. That we are in fact that. For THAT is the thing: It is all ONE. That is, the Unknowable, Its Consciousness, Jesus Christ, and all us bumpkins--are all one organic unit. THAT is Deuteronomy 6:4. In eternity the Whole is becoming. We are on board and in the process, else we would not even exist. Existence means we are Him. Election starts with accepting, surrendering, and submitting. The genuinely humbled, contrite heart is accepted and imbued with the Life of the new reality, the real reality it is to conform to. And there you go in the Pentecostal reality...electing the reality you live in.