Hans Christian King on God, the Force, and Who Makes Us
Erik opened by pointing out that spirituality means wildly different things to different people. Say the word God and one person pictures a figure seated above the clouds, another pictures something vast and impersonal, and a third assumes the whole idea is a projection of the mind. He asked Hans to say where he lands on that.
For Hans the answer borrows from a movie line. God is the force, the way Yoda meant it. Something that wraps around every one of us, present in the morning and still present at night, never absent. It does not judge. It holds you up. It loves without conditions and without keeping score. Hans was blunt about what he rejects: he does not picture a deity perched on a cloud handing out favors to good little boys and girls. That image means nothing to him. What his years of work have shown him instead is that God is love itself, a force, and that a few universal laws run alongside it.
The first of those laws is cause and effect. Whatever you think, whatever you send out, is the thing circling back into your life right now. Hans reaches here for Dr. James Allen and the book As a Man Thinketh, which carries the reminder that people are the makers of themselves. He calls this the single hardest thing he has ever tried to get another person to accept. Almost nobody wants to own their own thoughts, their own reasoning, their own choices.
So he poses a test, and he offered it to Erik's audience. Can anyone name a single thing happening in their life today that they did not bring about? The clothes on your back, the place you sleep, the kind of work you chase: all of it is yours. Hans once put the question to a room of more than a thousand people, and not one hand went up, because no one could point to a piece of their life they had not had a part in making.
He pushes the idea further than most will go. In his view we even pick our own parents, chosen for whatever lesson the soul arrived here to study. We begin at the beginning. It is a hard thing to sit with. And what he has noticed across all those years, he told Erik, is that somewhere between half and sixty percent of people have settled into being victims of their own circumstances. They have a ready explanation for why the thing never happened, why it never will, what was done to them back in childhood.
We spend far more of our existence away from home than we ever do in it, Hans says, and certain lessons follow us out. Old souls in particular tend to carry one. He counts Erik among them. Nearly every old soul he has ever met wrestles with the same assignment: self-esteem, and learning the worth of their own soul. It does not matter what they teach or how accomplished they appear. He was heading to a large conference in Los Angeles, and he said he could look straight at the people on stage and ask how their sense of self-worth was holding up, and they would tell him.