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.

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