A Message from “The Family”: On Faith and Doubt

Mister Rand is frequently plagued with concerns that the truths he has clung to for consolation and support he will find, in a shattering moment of terror on his deathbed, to all have been founded upon falsehoods. He is not alone in this fear. Many individuals, when apprised of their forthcoming deaths, return to the religions of their childhoods; or, alternatively, trumpet their atheism, comforting themselves with the certainty that the death of the body is an extinguishment (rather than a damnation or rebirth, as others claim). Mister Rand has always wished to look Death in the eye when that angel finally comes for him, because Mister Rand has feared Death all his life. And so what do these matters tell us about faith and doubt?

Faith and doubt, as we see it, are tools selected unconsciously or consciously by the human soul in order to create certain experiences while in physical reality. For example, when he was a boy, Mister Rand unconsciously elected to side with his agnostic father regarding religion and the divine, because his mother, an alcoholic and pedophile, was a believing Christian according to her lights. Mister Rand wished his father to approve of him, and he wished to detach himself from his mother, particularly as he grew older and her anger towards males became more apparent in her attitudes and actions towards him. But once Mister Rand’s father died, Mister Rand’s need for a context in which to know himself and live his life led Mister Rand to accept Jesus Christ as his personal savior on a beach in New Jersey, as a result of a young man preaching to him from a pamphlet called “The Four Spiritual Laws.”

Returning to the town where he was attending college, Mister Rand got involved with a church where he was welcomed by many, and this gave him a sense of having a family again. He cast himself fully into the practices and doctrines of the church group, even to the point of trying to convince family and friends of the truth of the Christianity he espoused. And yet part of him did not like the sacrifices Mister Rand felt he had to make in order to continue to be accepted by the Christians with whom he was involved; that is to say, his homosexuality, which, as he recovered slowly from the trauma associated with the death of his agnostic father, exerted more and more of a tug upon his bodymind. And so, when he had healed from the greater part of the death trauma around his father, and when Mister Rand had gained the inner strength to once more go out into the world on his own, he began to question some of the teachings of the group with which he was involved. Feeling his faith slipping away, in desperation he sought out an elder of the church and asked this man to mentor him; but the man was homophobic, having lost a wife to her coming out as a Lesbian; and only grudgingly told Mister Rand he would mentor him. And Mister Rand knew his days as a Christian were over.

So Mister Rand [again] embraced the agnosticism of his father. It was an effort to permit himself an expansion of his earthly experiences. Agnosticism, unlike atheism, does not claim certainty of the existence or nonexistence of God/dess; so to Mister Rand unconsciously agnosticism represented a freedom to explore matters of faith and reality and experience that he had not permitted himself before in his life thus far. This period of agnosticism came to an end when Mister Rand’s younger brother discovered the “Seth” channelings of the late Jane Roberts. There awakened in Mister Rand a curiosity to explore spiritual mysticism and the practices of divination known as the Tarot, for deep down he had continued to feel a yearning for certain guidance for his soul. He also wished to become looked up to by New Agers as a man of occult wisdom, for he felt like a failure whom no one could love or look up to, because he was not a famous writer like his father; had no life partner; and was not tall with big muscles, bravado, and/or tattoos like his older brother.

So Mister Rand became a Tarot reader, and found he had a talent for seeing connections when stimulated by querent questions and the images on the Tarot cards. And so his reputation as a Tarot reader spread slowly throughout the community where he lived with his mother and brother. Suddenly he met the man who for two years would become the most important figure in his life: Mister Alex, named Stuart Lucker. Together they became a psychic team, first in Key West, Florida, then in Santa Fe, New Mexico. And from Mister Alex’s channelings as “Alexandra” came several life systems that Mister Rand hungrily adopted, for they gave his life meaning without demanding that he hate his innermost nature, as Fundamentalist Christianity had done.

After Mister Alex’s death, Mister Rand continued to explore the Tarot, and later, trance work or “channeling” as well; and within his superconscious created the aggregate information source he calls “The Family,” a source within his Greater Self that enables him to see connections not easily perceptible to his conscious mind. This mindset he has more or less maintained ever since.

But Mister Rand has always been plagued by doubts that his New Age beliefs might be no truer than the Christian beliefs or agnosticism he had previously espoused. Part of the reason for this is that Mister Rand is incarnated as the Essence we call Judgment, in which dualism, and in particular dualistic thinking, is enthroned mightily: I believe/I believe not; I am man/I am woman; I am good/I am evil; God is Love in all parts of Godself/God is a consuming fire; reality has purpose, with Love at the core of it/reality has no purpose, and all physical reality’s denizens are merely accidental meat machines. Another reason for Mister Rand’s doubtings is that as he has grown in experience he has, deep within himself, sensed a truth larger even than the truths channeled by his lover Alex and later by himself; that is, truths of a different order entirely and beyond what “The Family” as he thinks of us can express and perceive. For we are a construct merely, a tool for the transmission of insight already held within Mister Rand’s Greater Self, and within the Greater Selves of Mister Rand’s clients who seek “The Family’s” advice. So, just as when he left agnosticism for Fundamentalism, Fundamentalism for agnosticism, and agnosticism for spiritualism, Mister Rand, unknown to himself, has a longing for experience that he does not feel his current form of belief can support or legitimize. And so part of him doubts the teachings of “Alexandra” that have sustained him for so long.

And so faith and doubt are tools, even more than they are expressions of psychological bent or orientation; tools which the Greater Self uses to assist Mister Rand in creating life experience for himself. What form Mister Rand’s new tools will take we cannot say, except that Love is at the core of it; for his recent visions of Love, utterly without doctrinal or theological system to accompany them, have exerted a major influence upon Mister Rand’s soul.

And so, if you struggle with doubt, ask yourself, “What experience has faith not given me that I may be needing to leave my former faith in order to enjoy?” And we thank you for sharing.