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Circle
Letter
Dear Circle Friends:
Spring 2008
Last fall, after
I resigned from the Unity board, I decided that except for special occasions,
my traveling days were over, and I settled down to a day to day routine.
As time passed I began to feel spiritually dry. The messages in my meditations
were less rewarding and pertinent than those I have become use to receiving,
and the spiritual tide seemed to have gone unusually far out. Whether
from memory or inner guidance, I hung on to the belief that when that
happens it presages an unusually creative revelation when it comes back
in.
On December the 27th, a most exciting breakthrough in meditation took
place. Now I am charged up, re-born, ready to hit the road again, and
have received some remarkable daily inspirations. The only problem is
that what I am beholding as significant in the evolutionary process
of expanding consciousness flies in the face of accepted popular theology.
That means that I must be careful not to load too much on to unprepared
thought.
In other words, the language I use that is designed to eliminate old
superstitions and dualistic thinking needs careful explanation or it
will seem to contradict the very foundation of faith. If I am successful
faith will be revitalized and reinforced by being freed from dogma and
misinterpretation rather than it’s being eliminated. As a result,
I am not only charged up and ready to go but I feel that the next few
active years will be taken up with getting into consciousness the revolutionary
nature of what I see no matter where it takes me or what I am called
on to do. In the process I hope to find words that will enhance the
intent behind past beliefs rather than contradict them.
Most significantly, before we can even begin to attain the deeper levels
of the mystical experience to which our spiritual evolution has brought
us to today, there is one all important major stumbling block we have
to deal with – God!
If it sounds sacrilegious for me to say we have to get rid of God, I
mean for it to. Before we can fully love ourselves and experience who
we are in the here and now, we have to let go of the divisive concepts
of God that are associated with the word and its equivalent in the world’s
religions, such as Allah, or Brahman. Not only has God been an excuse
to kill countless people, but nothing has universally kept individuals
from knowing who they are and the freedoms that they are capable of
enjoying than what we think of as God.
We have been taught all our lives to believe that God is a supreme being,
a concept, something outside of and apart from ourselves; so no matter
how hard we try, it is almost impossible for any of us, me included,
to think of or use the word without somehow still feeling that God is
something other than our own being. We may have taken the first step
by believing that God is “in” us, but that still implies
God “and” us, something in something else. As it is impossible
for us to eliminate the word from our vocabulary, we have no choice
but to reinterpret it or we will remain victims of our religions.
Religions, by and large, are primarily man-made philosophies, parables,
and superstitions that have kept human kind in bondage to a concept
of our becoming something in the “future”, rather than something
we are “now.” Religions tell us that God will affect our
lives if, when, and after we conform to their rules. Adding fuel to
the fire, religions lie to us by telling us that until we adhere to
God’s wishes, God is not presently in our lives. They tell us
that falsehood in order for them to stay in business, but, fortunately,
the God religions refer to does not exist. Sure, it exists as a theory
but not as a fact.
Unfortunately, we can’t avoid using the word all together or it
would just fester in our unconscious and subconsciously poison us. Also,
we are constantly confronted with the word in our literature and talk;
so what can we do about it? We have no choice but to deal with it, perhaps
appreciate the intent behind how it is used even when there is a fraudulent
application of the word, and, replace it with the truth.
If we are going to continue using the word, God, at all, for all practical
purposes we can begin by understanding that there are basically two
concepts of God, a lie and a truth. The truth is that God is the subjective
and impersonal expression of prime cause or existence, which is beyond
words and thoughts, though possible for us to experience. That’s
the truth. The lie is an objective, mental, a personal concept of the
existence of an entity called God, something other than and exclusive
of humankind. However, we can’t reprint the Bible and all the
books of the past; so the best we can do is to instantly disenfranchise
the word, and automatically reinterpret it with a new meaning, one that
is consistent with the double thread truth of our being, which is both
human and divine.
We have to watch out, however, and not resist what people’s intent
is behind what they mistakenly think of as God. Everyone is reaching
out to their highest sense of the meaning of life. Resist not evil applies
to our feelings toward how others use the word God, as well. What ever
ignorance you resist you perpetuate, because resistance gives it substance.
What we resist we create. No, if we want to get rid of the onus of a
mistaken concept of a God that is other than our own being, we have
to replace it rather than resist it.
When we see or hear the word, God, we have to get to the point where
in our thinking minds we automatically and instantly replace the lie
with a truth. Indeed there is but one cause, one creation, and one divine
process. Indeed, what ever that is it is not a supreme being sitting
on a supernatural cloud. It’s not an it. It’s a presence.
Let’s call it the presence of truth, supreme knowledge, divine
or higher consciousness. As such it is ever present everywhere and it
is the substance that makes up all things whether we recognize it or
not. That means it is present right where we are individually. As it
is not a thing, God must be an experience of consciousness, divine consciousness.
That is what we must automatically remember every time we hear the word.
Boiled down to two words, God is divine consciousness.
This is what I do. Every time I see or hear the word, God, I automatically
and instantly think “my own higher consciousness,” or “divine
consciousness.” When that truth is instantly affirmed duality
ceases to exist and omnipresence remains a livable fact to me, both
visibly and invisibly.
You may ask, “Then how do I consciously access or experience this
higher consciousness that is my true being when I need to?” In
the old days when we believed in a supreme being we prayed to it. Presently
we can do the same; however, now, in what we might call our prayers,
we are appealing to and reaching out to our own higher consciousness
- nothing apart from ourselves. We can literally talk to and pray to
our own divine consciousness. Perhaps that is what Jesus meant when
he said the kingdom was within, or as our own consciousness. What else
is closer than hands and feet?
If we consciously open ourselves to our higher consciousness miracles
may seem to happen, because our higher consciousness knows our intent,
and intent manifests in our outer lives. If we seek guidance we will
mentally hear the answer we seek coming from the infinity that is our
higher consciousness. When we can see the difference between ordinary
imagination and our intuition, we become aware that our intuition is
how our divine consciousness speaks to us.
Meditation is then not a spiritual matter so much as an attempt to listen
to our higher consciousness, our intent to open ourselves to universal
truth - not someone else’s, some other entities, or a church’s
truth but the truth that is included in and as our own being. This is
what having faith is all about. We have faith when we have faith in
the presence of our own divine being.
It may sound shocking, but in this context we have to stop having what
we have thought of as having faith. Having faith most often implies
that one believes there is something to have faith in that is other
than one’s self, and some thing they do not currently possess.
No, true faith and self-love - the recognition of self-completeness
- are the same thing and if it is natural, faith becomes a non-existent
word. It just is.
God Is Nothing
Once more trying
to de-condition our old concept of God, I’ll tackle it from another
angle. God is nothing. God, as a mentally created concept, is nothing.
If God were some thing it would be limited. To believe in God is to
believe in something, and if God is beyond words and thoughts, what
is there to believe in? You either experience it or you don’t.
To do away with believing in a superstitious God, there is something
divine that we can experience. Experience is different than believing.
You become an experience, but you have to have something or some concept
to believe in, in order to believe.
Why do we fear to not believe in a God? We fear letting go of limitation.
We fear being responsible for our lives. We fear being free, and as
long as we believe in and give power to a concept of God, we are not
free.
We are taught that we should feel love for God, and that leads us up
the garden path. In order to love there has to be some “thing”
to love, and, again, God is not a thing. In the same way, trying to
love God is to pursue an impossibility, because the finite cannot embrace
the infinite. The closest we can come to loving God is to love ourselves
- and life’s other creations.
We seek to image God, but images are things as well. No. The closest
we can come while still at the level of words and thoughts is to love
IS-ness. Just know all is, and not define what it is. God is, and yet,
God is nothing.
We are made in the image of God. That means we and our so called loved
ones have to stop believing in or loving appearances as though they
are an end in themselves. What most people call love is no more than
a concept of their own desires fulfilled, perhaps in or as another person
but it is their own thought-consent they are responding to. To truly
love a person is to simultaneously realize that they are not made in
the image of an imagined God but, rather, that they exist in the flesh
as divine beings beyond words and thoughts.
Hear these words and you may easily think, “They have taken away
my Lord.” Indeed, if getting rid of the old superstitious concept
of God means we have taken away your God, I hope we have. We have too
if we want to proclaim the Gospel truth. The good news is that experiencing
your own inner divine being will bring into your lives all that you
turned to God for in the past. It is the only way to achieve what we
turned to religion for in the past. In the past answered prayer was
hit or miss, not now. That is why I say that this realization of God
as one’s own higher consciousness gives faith back to us in the
way it should be.
When there is no “thing” to hang on to, not even a concept
of God, God is no longer a superstition, and one is finally free to
love and experience who they are.
You are not a “thing.” You are consciousness appearing visibly,
and as consciousness embraces all things, it need not believe in anything
but itself.
The Meditation Mistake
As I said at the
beginning, the number one deceit designed by ignorance to separate us
from our freedom is its invention of God. The second is a mistaken advocacy
of meditation or prayer. If belief in God as separate from our own being
is the number one deceit, the belief that we can attain our freedom
in the future through meditation or prayer is the second.
The word “meditation” and the word “mediation”
are almost identical. To mediate between the human and the divine is
to close the gap between our personal sense of self and our spiritual
reality as the presence of the divine now. Therefore, any belief that
you can get some thing from praying, or that you can call on God, or
your own higher consciousness to make something happen, does exactly
the opposite of what you have intended. Instead, you actually affirm
lack, and place yourself under a law of limitation that makes what you
desire almost impossible to manifest. It causes you to think you are
separate from your good, and your meditation doesn’t become a
mediation between your personal sense of self and the divine you.
The minute you seek something in meditation you affirm that you don’t
have it. That even includes your desire to feel the presence of the
divine. If you go to meditation without seeking to experience something
that you hope to become but rather for meditation to be a way for you
to recognize that you already are divine, then your meditation does
not have a purpose based on something that does not already exist. Perhaps
surprisingly, when you don’t try to make it happen in the future
it appears in the present. It does. In other words, let your meditation
be based on “I have,” and you will.
That is why Goldsmith and others say that our goal is to go beyond words
and thoughts, all words and thoughts, even those about spiritual matters,
particularly those involving a concept of God. The paradox is that if
you put into your intent the desire to transcend a sense of duality
and then let it go, you will find yourself beyond the thoughts that
have kept you in bondage. Don’t use meditation. Be used by it.
To meditate for the love of it is to let meditation use you for the
glory of your Self.
continued....
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