Rasputin

Black magician? Holy healer? Saint or sinner? Saint and sinner? Who was Rasputin? Does it all depend on one's own beliefs?

These are just my thoughts. Nothing is really black and white and only when we live in a black and white world do we narrow people down to a category. Often, religions express saints and sinners to extremes. Women saints in particular, have been either plaster-cast virgins or wanton temptresses. Those who err towards the 'supernatural' have been seen as either witches or demons, or supernaturally holy and blessed.

Supposing, if you will, that there is only One Life, One Force in the universe, and that is the Force of Love. Some call it God, some call it Goddess, some call it Allah, some call it Life or Beauty. Humanity, all humanity, is an expression of that Beautiful power, which is far greater than a human brain can imagine. Being expressions of the power, what we think, what we believe with all that we are, is what we become and what we experience in our day to day lives. If we believe - on the deepest level - that we are failures, we fail. If we believe we are martyrs, we die a martyr's death. If we believe we are miraculous, we are miraculous.

Rasputin, I think, came to believe he was miraculous. He was. He did stem the blood flow in the little Tsarevich and healed him. He knew he could. He tapped into that power, which is in all of us. But, eventually, he became so puffed up on his own power that he forgot he had simple tapped into something that is in all of us. His arrogance was his undoing; the same power, which had healed Alexei, recoiled on him.

Before the discovery of electricity, no one would have believed that it would be possible to do the things we take for granted today. Imagine if Edison had thought that he was electricity!! I think that is what happened to Rasputin. Rather than knowing he had a gift and had tapped into a mighty force, he thought he was that force. He was not a black magician, nor a saint, nor a sinner. He was simply a man who became bloated on something that wasn't his, and it backfired on him.