The Path to Personal Freedom: The Sage Within

By Frederick A. Patchen

What I share in this book is my mission in life. That is why I refer to myself as a missionary. There is a second reason for this idea. I believe that we each have a sage who lives within our spiritual being in life. It is as if this sage cannot be found because of the fog of day to day living. We must learn how to be quiet and listen to our own heart in understanding that we can identify those things around us that are positive at all times. Each of us has a voice that some call a conscience, some call a guide, and some call an angel. It is something intelligent that looks out for us and lets us know if we are getting into trouble along the way.
I very deeply feel that this inner sage also has a mission. This sage is our own inner missionary. However, this inner missionary is unlike any you may have heard of in the world around us. This missionary will never infringe. It teaches by the example I want to share with each of you. We must learn the power of not infringing on others or allowing them to infringe upon us. As this is their mission, they will not infringe upon any choice you make in life. They allow you to experience the result of that choice on your own in order that you might learn that different choices bring different results into our life. I will use the word sage and missionary interchangeably throughout this book.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Dec 10, 2009
• ISBN: 9781465327451

Frederick A. Patchen

Frederick A. Patchen Frederick Arthur Patchen was born in Pennsylvania on December 5, 1941. By the time he graduated from the 12th grade he had attended 13 different schools across the United States. He graduated high school and one college in Sacramento California. His continuing education saw him attending four more colleges and ministerial school in California. Frederick was a Division Manager for Sears when he was 24, opened his own business when he was 30, and became a minister of his first pulpit when he was 38. After nine years and serving in four pulpits Frederick left organized religion on a personal quest for a deeper understanding of how life expresses itself through us. Now with over 30 years experience in working with people Frederick has successfully lived for more than the past 20 years with no outside income other than the love offerings he receives from this work. He is an advocate of individuality and the individual’s personal relationship with the Universal Mind of God. Feel free to contact me with questions or comments at any time. [e-mail]

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Copyright © 2009 by Frederick A. Patchen.

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Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Conclusion

Introduction

Missionary in My Own Country

Where do I begin? What is the most important thing to know about what I am doing here with this material? First, I love the country in which I was born. The United States holds great beauty and potential for personal growth. At the same time, I have always had a personal higher calling. I believe I am first a citizen of the world. I see all people of all races and cultures as being equal in the eyes of life itself. I believe there is a great presence in and through all things called the God Force. It manifests itself through every thought and every act that we perform.

I believe this God Force is within each and every person regardless of his or her thoughts, choices, or priorities in life. When we are balanced, we feel this inner connection. We might come to see it as an expression we call love. I believe that this conscious expression is within every living thing that moves, not just humans. I also believe there is no such thing as an immovable thing. All of life is made up of atoms and molecules that have some level of consciousness of their own movement. I believe this as a premise for all else that I have learned about life. I believe this conscious force is the force of God, which is omnipresent and I am capable of becoming aware of being a part of God.

As my story unfolds, I will share with the readers how I have come to understand this premise. This book has one simple message. God and love is one and the same thing. Whenever we are in touch with love, we are touching God. When we lose that ability to touch love as we interact with life around us, we experience a feeling of being separate from God, and in this separateness, we cannot trust the very life that is flowing from within us out into the world around us. As this book finds its own path and its own voice, it is up to the readers to see it at the level that serves them. At any time, if there is doubt, confusion, or inner reaction to what is being read here, you are invited to simply drop that part of this material out of your mind as if you can drop it upon the floor and sweep it away. The voice in this book that is important is the ability to find the positive in all things. That is the intension with which it has been written. If any part of it does not hit a positive note for you, please simply forget what you have read and move on in a personal quest to find that which is positive for you within the rest of this material.

So why, Missionary in my own Country? This idea came to me from a classic movie starring Gregory Peck. The movie is entitled, Keys of the Kingdom. It is about a Catholic priest who spent some forty to fifty years as a missionary in China. As I was watching this movie again in the recent months, I realized how strongly I identified myself so much with the experience this priest was having in his life. So much of his efforts in his life did not seem to go as well as he had intended. People around him so often misunderstood his intentions and so often reported back to him on the weakness of his efforts. I have identified myself with those feelings for some thirty plus years in doing my own kind of missionary work.

In a country that has many churches and many ways of portraying God to the public, I have never found a place where I feel I can fit. First, I have great challenges within the idea of being told to fear God. With all of my being I see a God that should never be feared but identified as the Loving Father force of life that expresses itself through feminine power. As God has set us free in order that we might learn not to infringe upon the freedom of others, we are in his very dynamic mystery school. We learn that as we infringe upon others, we pull back to us in like kind others who will be determined to infringe upon us. This is the simple message that I want to share with others through many pages of personal experiences that I have had in my life and what I have learned on the subject of love, acceptance, and not infringing. But this great lesson also means the ability to learn how to love and accept ourselves. The greatest challenge I have found in life is the commitment to know that I do not need to allow others to infringe upon me.

And so with this premise, I begin to share my personal experiences along my path as I have walked it now for over sixty-five years. If what I have shared so far is not bold or straightforward enough, I have an even more blunt statement to make. I do not in any way believe that there is a physical place called hell in which God will throw a person as a punishment for his or her choices in life. My God is the God about whom Jesus said, What father if a child were to ask for bread would give him or her a stone. Where does this image of God come from that wants to tell of a buggy man who will send you to eternal pain and suffering because you did not belong to the correct church? When we compare any human parents in their interaction with a child who has caused great chaos, what are the odds that the parents would choose to send the child into permanent irreversible torment and punishment forever and ever as punishment for their actions? And yet it is said by so many in my own country to be God’s way.

If man is intelligent, then God must by nature be more intelligent. A man torturing a child forever and ever without understanding the consequences is not intelligent. It would be a blind superstitious act for a man to do this. Why then would God? We are his children. God must be greeted with intelligence and he must be trusted as being more intelligent than man. Life teaches consequences, and the moment that we learn, those consequences are behind us. To understand this is to be intelligent.

Life teaches through free will. It must be set up in an intelligent manner that will support the learning about life through our interaction within our free will. We learn what works through action. We learn what does not work through action. There can be no true loss in life, only change and evolution into higher states of knowing or vision. Apparent loss is only our inability to see a bigger picture of life. It is as if we see a bird flying into our field of vision and thereby declare that it has just been created and when it flies out of the range of our vision, it has been destroyed.

It is in the face of a society that fears God that I wish to introduce and offer the God of love that I know to be real for me. As a tool in doing this, the next chapter of this book contains several theories that I will propose for a template from which we can start. I am not declaring that these theories about life and God must be the truth, the whole truth, and there can be no other truth. These theories are but one possible set of explanations as to why we are here and why we cannot see because we are too close to the page. By too close to the page I mean have you ever buried your face in a newspaper comic strip where it is just colored dots or even an Internet picture when you keep enlarging it until it is just pits of material? When we are too close to a thing and our five senses are busy seeing what they see, it is a great challenge to see an option that might come from God’s point of view, where the whole picture can be seen.

One premise I will start with here is that energy can neither be created nor destroyed. It can only be changed into another form. If this is universally true and God is the creator of all, then he can recreate anything at any time and nothing can ever be lost to him. The most horrible suffering and loss is just temporary and can be set anew by God’s will in the blink of an eye. Understanding why there is a need for the possibility of suffering in the human experience is the question at hand. One of the goals I have in writing this book is to offer the answers I have found to this question through my personal path of balance and imbalance. God does not choose for us to suffer. God chooses for us to learn from the path of free will that he has given to us. What I ask of the readers is that they stay with this material and release any momentary reactions until they have had a chance to see my point of view in what I am sharing.

Fear shuts us down whereas love opens us up to a higher vision and a higher understanding of life. Most reactions in life come out of fear. Love does not react; it encourages and guides others into the positive paths in life. This is my intention and my purpose. Many will say that love can lead us astray, but they cannot say it without coming from fear as they do. I am making a stand here in a country that deals with much public fear and the spread and teaching of fear. I am a missionary for love in a country of fear. What I want and expect of myself is to be a positive voice in this world. I want to have the courage to speak out and share what I have learned. I spend many of my days walking within the kingdom of heaven that is at hand here and now. I would love to have the power to guide and share that kingdom with others. But, regardless of how much I might want to, I cannot lift another person above his or her own beliefs. They must find the path when they are ready.

With the loftiest intention in my heart, I would want to be an emissary and a voice of the God in whom I believe. I do not in any way feel or believe that I am above others, not even someone who is drunk or sleeps in a gutter. That also is an expression of the love of God. The greatest joy I have found in life is to be a servant in the house of mankind. I believe we are each like the candle added to many others in a great room. Each adds to the light of the room, and no one light takes anything away from any other. I know in my heart that I often have an old pattern of saying things in such a way as to have people react. I have been told many times that I enjoy getting a reaction out of others. That has never been my intent. I know that I am out of the norm, and I attempt to maintain a discipline of only speaking when I feel someone has truly been asking for my point of view. May this book find its own voice and its own path!

Regardless of who it reaches, may that person remember that it is intended to encourage the quest for love and understanding in a world that so easily dwells upon the bad news in all things. Remember first that you are being encouraged to follow your own path, your own values, and your own vision in life. These are just ideas for you to consider. The words that follow are just one man’s attempt to show something that is beyond words. It is the ability of the universe itself to teach through infinite possibilities of positive alignments. Pain is optional. When it comes we need to gather tools in order to step beyond the limits others will tell us must be the truth about our suffering. May you find one or two tools of value here in what is shared!

To me, relating to truth is like climbing a mountain. There are many paths on any side, but no one path is the correct or right path. Truth is too large to be held in the mind of any one person. Take every idea held by every human from the beginning of time, and you will still not have found a container large enough to hold the vastness of the truth of life or God. Speculate just this one idea. Take every idea of truth by every man who has ever walked the planet, and you will not touch what any one woman sees. Take the vision of every woman upon the planet, and you will not touch the conviction that one man is capable of holding. All of this is of course, just speculation and nothing more than a spec of dust floating slowly along the edge of one path on the mountain of truth.

Truth is that spec of dust; it is a pebble, a rock, and the mountain itself. It is the air, the wind, the rain, and the sun that lights each path. Words cannot contain it, and they cannot explain it. As the Taoist teaches, the Tao of which you can speak is not the Tao. Truth is the freshness of the morning air that touches the mind with a breath of inspiration. It does not stick around to be caught. It moves on. When we cannot find the words to describe the beauty we see, we might be in the present of the shadow of truth.

I have my own set of personal beliefs that I have been practicing for between twenty to thirty years. I have taken them on one at a time, either under the guidance of a spiritual teacher or because it was something that I had a very strong personal feeling about. Twenty years ago I left my pulpit and organized religion. I did this with a commitment to follow these practices or personal disciplines. This book is a chronicle of where and how I took on these ideas of my own and how and why I feel they have served me well in learning how to walk my own path into a very personal relationship with God. This is not intended to be a long book. It is intended to show a steppingstone process through which I made a series of choices to step away from pain and move into a path of peace and personal freedom. It is not an easy thing to step away from pain and into peace. Pain demands the attention of the mind while peace does not. It requires that you learn to ignore the pain, in particular when someone is knocking on the door and demanding that you take the pain they are assigning to you.

If you think or feel that it is unwise to ignore your pain, it may very well serve you to read this book. It is not for me to say what you will get from it. It is true that if you do not read the book you will never know. In the end, all we have to share in life is the experience we have gained upon our own path. This has been my path, and I have learned what I have learned. I have gained a personal freedom in my life that few may understand. I dedicate this text to anyone who seeks to set himself/herself free from the limits others around you place upon you. In my estimation, personal freedom in life and spiritual growth are the same thing. May you find something in these pages that inspires you to believe in the positive in your own heart and never again allow others to convince you that you must give us the things that speak to the core of your heart . . . to the very presence of the God Force within you.

What I share in this book is my mission in life. That is why I refer to myself as a missionary. There is a second reason for this idea. I believe that we each have a sage who lives within our spiritual being in life. It is as if this sage cannot be found because of the fog of day to day living. We must learn how to be quiet and listen to our own heart in understanding that we can identify those things around us that are positive at all times. Each of us has a voice that some call a conscience, some call a guide, and some call an angel. It is something intelligent that looks out for us and lets us know if we are getting into trouble along the way.

I very deeply feel that this inner sage also has a mission. This sage is our own inner missionary. However, this inner missionary is unlike any you may have heard of in the world around us. This missionary will never infringe. It teaches by the example I want to share with each of you. We must learn the power of not infringing on others or allowing them to infringe upon us. As this is their mission, they will not infringe upon any choice you make in life. They allow you to experience the result of that choice on your own in order that you might learn that different choices bring different results into our life. I will use the word sage and missionary interchangeably throughout this book.

The specific mission of the inner sage is to guide us to peace, understanding, and freedom in our expression of life. It is constantly assisting us in getting involved in our own expression in life rather than seeking to control others. It encourages us to express, explore, create, and learn about life in all things. It is about making our choices in life and allowing others the freedom to make choices of their own without infringing. When we ask for inner guidance and if it makes any difference, which way we step in the issue at hand, we will feel some inner pull or feeling on the subject. If we do not feel we are getting any inner input, it likely means that it will make no difference which way we step in the issue at hand, either way is likely take us to the same place. With this in mind, I begin my sharing.

The first idea I want to share with you might be called a theory. The first chapter will be dedicated to exploring this theory in more detail. Here I want to attempt to convey an image, an idea about our connection with God. It is said that God is omnipresent, omniscient, and without limit. Where most people seem to assume that this means he is watching us, I do not. I believe it is telling us that anything that is conscious is connected to God. All things are conscious with the very presence of God. Our consciousness is the consciousness of God expressing as us. This idea may be strange and new to many people, but it explains many things. It is a vital premise upon which I have based my life. This means we are connected to God through the act of being conscious. This means that God literally is all things, as an expression, being conscious in that expression.

This also means that self-awareness is the doorway to our relationship with God. As we come to understand our own awareness or consciousness, we develop a personal relationship with the force of God expressing through us. This means that all the wisdom and all the knowledge of the universe lies through an inner doorway within the very act of being conscious. All that we are seeking in life lies within us. There is that within our very consciousness that is wise beyond understanding and will guide us when we are ready to listen. This inner connection with the God Force has set us free so that we may grow in our own way, at our own pace. This is called free will. In this great expression of the God Force, we must have free will or we would have no awareness of having any choice at all. If we have no choice, how could we be aware of choice? This becomes our very lesson, to learn how to choose the positive in all things, or we learn the consequences of making choices that do not serve the greater force of life in the universe.

Chapter 1

Theories

This book is filled with a series of what ifs. Theories of what might be true. These theories are important as a tool in developing what might be called a sixth sense. This sixth sense is called perception. Perception is the ability to put pieces of this puzzle, this mystery school together. As we begin to understand what we are learning in being here, we can build a template for life that allows all of the pieces to fit in.

Each of us has an inner voice that speaks to us each and every day. Some call that voice intuition. Some call it the voice of their ancestors. It may be called a spirit guide or an angel. Whatever this inner voice is called, stories and images this presence will never go away. It has always been a part of the human experience, and it always will. This book is dedicated to that inner voice that I have given the title, The Sage Within. I will also refer to this inner voice as, The missionary within because I believe that this inner voice has a mission to guide us. What follows in this book is the result of my listening to the voice within me for many years. You may see this as just a theory if that suits your well-being. But I must declare in open consciousness that this is a part of my reality and to me it simply is what is real.

This book is about the pieces I have put together and the theories I have used that allow my pieces to fit in as I see life as one whole picture. Your path up the spiritual mountain of life may be different from mine and you may need different theories in order to climb from where you are at to where you are seeking to be. But what I ask of you is that you allow my theories to be considered so that you can see how they have worked for me and what I have gained from the way I have learned to use them. These theories may have begun as things that I have heard or things that I have read along the way. They are important to me because they literally hold a feeling of clarity and strength. They have come to be a foundation from which I validate my personal understanding of reality. This chapter will describe these basic theories upon which I have created a path that has over many years opened my eyes to seeing life from a much larger picture than the one in which I was raised. They have also granted me a personal freedom I never dreamed was