Candle by Vladimir Kush, Chalk Farm Gallery
What if the Divine is evolving and therefore allows us to evolve? I find it
inspiring to contemplate all of the possibilities that God could be evolving.
The Evolution of God
A Conversation with Chris Griscom
by Gershon Siegel
The lord of the Bible, the Torah, the Koran, was a lord of those times. But is
it of our times? Are we ready for a new God whose covenants are different, a
God who does not punish, a God who introduces us to the cosmos? I think we are.
— Chris Griscom, from The Evolution of God
erhaps more than any other one person, long-time New Mexico resident and “new paradigm” pioneer Chris Griscom has helped bolster Santa Fe’s international reputation as a center of spirituality. She first came to the
fore in 1985 when she founded The Light Institute in Galisteo, a center
dedicated to spiritual healing and multi-incarnational exploration. Just two years later, she rose to international prominence in the
psycho-spiritual, healing and transpersonal psychology therapy movement when
she was acknowledged by actress Shirley MacLaine as her spiritual mentor in the
TV movie Out on a Limb, based on MacLaine’s book of the same name.
Griscom’s humanitarian contributions in holistic health and education have been twice
recognized by the Indian Board of Alternative Medicines, based in Calcutta,
India. In 1996, the board awarded her the Sewa Chakra Award, whose past
recipients include the late Mother Teresa and the Dalai Lama. In 1999, she once
again traveled to India to receive the Lifetime Achievement Award.
More recently, Griscom jumped into the political arena by successfully lobbying
the state Legislature to pass the 2003 Peace Memorial for the state of New
Mexico. Continuing her work in what she terms the “development of spiritual technology,” she travels the world giving talks and seminars.
Griscom is the author of 14 books, with her latest titled The Evolution of God. In her introduction, “To the Reader,” she writes:
We are growing by catapultic leaps in every facet of our consciousness. . . . We
have no trouble using a computer that processes almost instantly any command
into a coalesced increment of cognizance. We dare dream of traveling beyond our
planet, of miracles and magic — but we don’t dare touch our god. We don’t dare imagine The Divine actually within us — or beyond our own small world of human form. . . .
. . . We cannot continue with our limited concepts of God. We cannot breed
hatred and fear and war in the name of God. We must activate the intelligence
of our hearts and — evolve God. This is not a sacrilege; it is our human right — and our responsibility.
Griscom denies that The Evolution of God is a discourse on religion or God, but rather calls it “a descriptive synopsis on how we have related to our Source and molded God into
a being that we ourselves created through our interpretations of subjective
experience.” As humanity’s own consciousness is evolving about itself, the world around it and its own
place within it, she seems to be saying, so must its consciousness about its
Divine Source evolve.
The book is divided into four parts. Griscom begins with “Primordial Awareness,” in which she traces the earliest concepts of God by describing the forces of
nature that became the embodiment of God. Our ancestors, in their limited
awareness, saw themselves as victims of nature and its mysterious ways as
something apart from them. This idea of being separate from God left humanity
in a place of fear and helplessness. Eventually, religion evolved with its
rituals, including those of sacrifice, which were intended to please God, to
stay on its good side. Once religion was established, politics and the need to
mold the populace were not far behind.
As we have left behind those eras in our history when human sacrifice was part
of our attempt to please God, Griscom believes it is now time to leave behind
the concept of God as an entity separate from ourselves. In fact, she uses the
term Divine Source to replace the term God, which she feels brings too much personification and hence reinforces the idea
of something outside ourselves. The Divine Source is within us and without us
and is infinite and beyond our comprehension. “Let God grow,” she says, adding, “the Divine essence holds its power and its truth from within us.”
For the fundamentalists, those certain of the “truth” they have inherited and accepted, the message of The Evolution of God will be sacrilegious. For those of us not so caught up in the literal, however,
Griscom’s newest book could prove to be inspiring, uplifting and affirming.
Last month we were able to catch the globe-trotting Griscom briefly at her
Galisteo Light Institute and talked about not only God’s evolution but her own as well.
Gershon Siegel: You volunteered for the Peace Corps in 1962 and served in El Salvador, Bolivia
and Paraguay. How did those years living in South America affect that
blond-haired, blue-eyed, Los Angeles–born, middle-class Catholic girl?
Chris Griscom: All the death I encountered blasted open my sense of reality, my sense of
safety, my sense of God and what life is about. So I had to begin from a
completely different perspective.
I had gone there to do community service, but I had a background in nutrition
and health, so I ended up working in that way more than anything else. But we
were not trained to handle death, and at that time in El Salvador 50 percent of
the babies died from umbilical tetanus. It was such a shock to me that I had to
reconstruct the purpose of my life. The conversation of good and evil and
justice and the Divine began in me at that time.
GS: In reading The Evolution of God, I noticed you seem to have a bone to pick with the notion of “original sin.” My understanding of original sin, at least when it’s shed of its cultural baggage and warped interpretations, is just the Christian
version of what the Hindu call maya, the veil of illusion, or what the Buddhists term dukkha, which means suffering.
CG: I find that it’s not enough to say that original sin is maya or suffering or any of those labels. All religions suffer from the illusion that
to be born into a body is punishment. That it is less than divine. That it is
separate from whatever — whether it’s nirvana or God, specifically a male God. It simply doesn’t make sense that the creating force would create something that is imperfect
and needs to have its nose rubbed in its mess so that it will become
illuminated. I’m a mother of six. I’ve been the mother of thousands of people in reality, and what I’ve discovered is that punishment and negativity have never brought what one
would hope for in one’s creation or in one’s companions or in one’s reality.
All of these beliefs, no matter how ancient they are, come from the human mind,
which says, “You must try harder. You must come out of this black tar pit that you’re in so that you can become illuminated.” I have witnessed many births and more than a hundred babies die, and I can tell
you that there is no scar on the soul at birth or at death. So what can I do
with that? I simply cannot be caught in those teachings because they don’t bring truth. Yes, we fumble and we do terrible things to each other and we do
not remember that we are a part of the Divine, and yet we are. And
consciousness goes beyond the body. If you have a flicker of that, then those
tapes of the maya and the struggle and all of that just will not fit.
The concept of original sin didn’t begin with Christianity — neither did the virgin birth nor many of the points of reference that we cling
to today. They were all parts of authority in stories that go back to ancient
Egypt, back beyond organized religions. So, original sin — the concept that God would put a negative serpent in the garden to seduce a
woman, who would then seduce stupid man, who wasn’t smart enough or strong enough to say, “That’s a bad apple; we were told not to bite it” — just doesn’t make sense. And we don’t have to give up our religions to let go of our sin. But if we could come away
from that conversation and take that divinity and wear it — let it come out of our eyes, out of our voice, out of the energy with which we
meet the world — then we would live in a different place.
GS: I found quite a bit of The Evolution of God to be very controversial, provocative and even outrageous. From your urging of
the church to take down all images of Jesus on the cross to your discussions of
reincarnation and ancient extraterrestrial cultures seeding and harvesting
other species throughout the universe, what was your intention with this book?
CG: I was not attempting in this book to destroy religion. I was trying to point out
what it is causing us. It’s causing us to kill each other, to separate out and say, “I don’t like you because you’re different.” The book is looking at what in religion has poisoned human evolution. Because
as long as we hold fear and that kind of separate and negative imprint on
humanity, we can’t really evolve to the level that we wish.
My intention in writing The Evolution of God was not to be provocative. It was to inspire religions themselves to take a look
at some of the points of reference they have because they do not advance the
highest good. I was also asking us to think about what are the highest and best
things that we have learned from our religion and daring ourselves to live
that. Because if you live that, you will be in a place where the negative
imprint will no longer have power over you.
One of my first memories being taught about God was when I was 3 years old and
was told, “God is love.” But where is “God is love” when we say that a baby is going to go to hell? Where is “God is love” when we say, “You are the infidel, and so you deserve to be killed?” This cannot be right.
In today’s world it is unspeakable that we would think of using God’s name to override each other, to attack each other, to raise our children with
hatred. It is not acceptable anymore. There are things that were acceptable
when your parents were children that are not acceptable to you, and you wouldn’t do them. One of the Ten Commandments is that if a person does not honor the
Sabbath, he or she should be killed. Today nobody reads that part of the Ten
Commandments — they forget that part. We wouldn’t think of killing someone because they don’t go to church or keep the Sabbath. So where do we get off thinking that we’re being logical about religion? We’re not. We are the products of what we have inherited.
So I’m asking, “Is that really what you think or what you were trained to think?’ I have great compassion for religion because it has set up structures that are
there to help humanity. However, religion is now caught in its own structures:
after all this time of claiming that God said this or that, it’s difficult to now say, “We’ve changed our mind.”
It’s OK for us to weed through and take the most wonderful thing that makes us a
believer in whatever it is that we believe and live that. I don’t find that thought shocking. I think I am just echoing what many people
believe.
GS: Is part of your concept of the evolution of God that modern believers are less
attached than their counterparts of the past to the idea that truth is
immutable, unchangeable and always the same in every time and in every
situation?
CG: Modern believers choose what is convenient for them. They rationalize or say, “Well, I’ve read it in a book” or whatever, and they stand on that. But there is something going on in human
evolution. Evolution happens whether we like it or not. The world is no longer
flat, whether we like it or not.
Of course it’s an illusion to think that we’re living in an unchanging world. Look around you. This discussion that we are
having right now could not have even occurred 10 years ago. So the evolution of
God, to me, is a wonderful opening for us all to be inspired. What if the
Divine is evolving and therefore allows us to evolve? I find it inspiring to
contemplate all of the possibilities that God could be evolving.
What are we to do with the consciousness that we have today? Are we not to
explore that there are new prophets just as there were in the days of old? That
would mean that there truly is no evolution and that God is not evolving — that there is no new knowledge that will come to us. Then why are we alive?
From my perspective, the purpose of life is the evolution of the soul.
GS: Care to dance out on a limb with any predictions about where this country is
headed?
CG: If you look at it from a global and historical perspective, at this moment the
United States of America is treading down the pathway that England, Portugal,
Spain, Germany and all of the previous centers of the world have experienced.
We have come to the point of being the most powerful country and are about to
fall on our faces because we are not reaching out far enough to recognize our
place in the world. We simply see ourselves as the boss — that we’ll do it our way. We are in danger of losing our special place economically and
certainly philosophically. I travel the world at all times, and people talk
about our Constitution. They talk about the “land of the free and the brave.” And they talk about it in inspirational terms. And I smile and say that we have
the words, but we have not yet learned to live what it is to be free.
And so we are on the precipice — what will happen if we fall? I have a great intuitive sense that we will come
about in time, just as all humanity will come about in time, to correct the
directions. At the moment we have fallen into a state of suspended animation.
It is as if we’re asleep. We have to awaken. We have to insist on the accountability that we
wrote about in our Constitution.
America may not be center stage for very much longer, and it may be, in fact,
that “center stage” is an old pattern. That concept belongs to the “king of the mountain” syndrome, and we cannot continue the king of the mountain because the second
guy down from the top holds the bomb as well. We have to find many solutions
that satisfy us all.
GS: What are the chances for world peace? Are our children going to see it in their
lives?
CG: It depends on whether they can carry it inside their hearts. And they won’t carry it inside their hearts unless they find that it matters to them. In
other words, each person has to feel that world peace depends on them — their own actions, their own choices, their own heart’s desire, their own inspiration, their own inner messages/inner voices. We can
have peace in this world. Most likely, in the direction that we’re going at the moment, we may have to have a big bang of our own in order to
bring that about.
I feel that because the consciousness of our children is expanding, because they
have access to levels of reality that we have never had access to or have had
to struggle to gain, they can see beyond the good and evil, the left and the
right — all of those polarities — so they will find answers that we cannot allow in our limitation.
So we are here through that cosmic ripple of the evolution of our soul. To
realize that each path, each step, each ripple allows those who are here to
find new choices and recreate what it is to be human and what is best for the Earth. Our children will look at each other differently. They don’t believe our stories. Their stories are different, and therein lies the hope,
if you will, of humanity. Our job is to help them find their voices. And to
teach them cause and effect, action and reaction: If you think this way, here
are the possible realities that come from it; what do you choose? And to see
that, again, everything they do affects everything and everyone around us. They
get that. They are already multitasking.
I said in The Evolution of God that what was just created changes its source. This is true of our children. As
their questions expand, they will change us. We are changed already; we are bombarded by who they are presenting themselves
to be in the world. And what we want to do is pull away the veil and let them
find that power inside themselves and for it to be visible — to actually put on the vestments, if you will, of their true selves and stand
out there center stage.
They change us. We change the Divine Source. It’s all part of the ripple. I applaud them. We must give them access to the power
and ask them, “What do you think?” And say go ahead and do it. And stand back, and they will open the heavens to
us. All that we hold as the only truth in this world will very rapidly change
Chris Griscom
