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"Thou wilt show me the
path of life: in thy presence is fullness of joy; at thy right hand
there are pleasures forevermore. " -Psalm 16: 11 I've searched for the
path to God all my life- I
know you have- -and now I've found it
and I can't believe it. It feels like I'm sitting here, writing
this to myself. You
are. That does not seem
like what a communication with God would feel like. You
want bells and whistles? I'll see what I can arrange.
You know, don't You,
that there are those who will call this entire book a blasphemy.
Especially if You keep showing up as such a wise guy.
Let
Me explain something to you. You have this idea that God shows up in only
one way in life. That's a very dangerous idea. It
stops you from seeing God all over. If you think God looks only one way or
sounds only one way or is only one way, you're going to look right
past Me night and day. You'll spend your whole life looking for God and
not finding Her. Because you're looking for a Him. I use this as an
example. It
has been said that if you don't see God in the profane and the profound,
you're missing half the story. That is a great Truth.
God
is in the sadness and the laughter, in the bitter and the sweet. There is
a divine purpose behind everything- and therefore a divine presence
in everything. I once began writing a
book called God is a Salami Sandtvich. That
would have been a very good book. I gave you that inspiration. Why did you
not write it? It felt like
blasphemy. Or at the very least, horribly irreverent. You
mean wonderfully irreverent! What gave you the idea that God is
only "reverent"? God is the up and the down. The hot and the
cold. The left and the right. The reverent and the
irreverent! Think
you that God cannot laugh? Do you imagine that God does not enjoy a good
joke? Is it your knowing that God is without humor? I tell you, God
invented humor. Must
you speak in hushed tones when you speak to Me? Are slang words or tough
language outside My ken? I tell you, you can speak to Me as you would
speak with your best friend. Do
you think there is a word I have not heard? A sight I have not seen? A
sound I do not know? Is
it your thought that I despise some of these, while I love the others? I
tell you, I despise nothing. None of it is repulsive to Me. It is
life, and life is the gift; the unspeakable treasure; the
holy of holies. I
am life, for I am the stuff life is. Its every aspect has a divine
purpose. Nothing exists- nothing- without a reason understood and
approved by God.
How can this be? What
of the evil which has been created by man? You
cannot create a thing- not a thought, an object, an event- no
experience of any kind- which is outside of God's plan. For God's
plan is for you to create anything- everything- whatever you want.
In such freedom lies the experience of God being God- and this is the
experience for which I created You. And life itself.
Evil
is that which you call evil. Yet even that I love, for it is only
through that which you call evil that you can know good; only through that
which you call the work of the devil that you can know and do the work of
God. I do not love hot more than I love cold, high more than low, left
more than right. It is all relative. It is all part of what is.
I
do not love "good" more than I love "bad." Hitler went to heaven.
When you understand this, you will understand God.
But I have been raised
to believe that good and bad do exist; that right and wrong are
opposed; that some things are not okay, not alright, not acceptable in
the sight of God. Everything
is
"acceptable" in the sight of God, for howcan God not accept that which
is?To reject a thing is to deny that it exists. To say that it is not okay
is to say that it is not a part of Me- and that is
impossible. Yet
hold to your beliefs, and stay true to your values, for these are the
values of your parents, of your parents' parents; of your friends and of
your society. They form the structure of your life, and to lose them would
be to unravel the fabric of your experience. Still, examine them one by
one. Review them piece by piece. Do not dismantle the house, but look at
each brick, and replace those which appear broken, which no longer support
the structure. Your
ideas about right and wrong are just that- ideas. They are the thoughts
which form the shape and create the substance of Who You Are. There would
be only one reason to change any of these; only one purpose in making an
alteration: if you are not happy with Who You Are. Only
you can know if you are happy. Only you can say of your life- "This is my
creation (son), in which I am well pleased." If
your values serve you, hold to them. Argue for them. Fight to defend
them. Yet
seek to fight in a way which harms no one. Harm is not a necessary
ingredient in healing. You say "hold to your
values" at the same time you say our values are all wrong. Help me with
this. I
have not said your values are wrong. But neither are they right. They are
simply judgments. Assessments. Decisions. For the most part, they are
decisions made not by you, but by someone else. Your parents, perhaps.
Your religion. Your teachers, historians,
politicians. Very
few of the value judgments you have incorporated into your truth are
judgments you, yourself, have made based on your own experience. Yet
experience is what you came here for- and out of your experience were you
to create yourself. You have created yourself out of the experience of
others. If
there were such a thing as sin, this would be it: to allow yourself to
become what you are because of the experience of others. This
is the "sin" you have committed. All of you. You do not await your own
experience, you accept the experience of others as gospel
(literally), and then, when you encounter the actual experience
forthe firsttime, you overlay what you think you already
know
onto the encounter. If
you did not do this, you might have a wholly different experience- one
that might render your original teacher or source wrong. In most
cases, you don't want to make your parents, your schools, your religions,
your traditions, your holy scriptures wrong- so you deny your own
experience in favor of what you have been told to think.
Nowhere
can this be more profoundly illustrated than in your treatment of human
sexuality. Everyone
knows that the sexual experience can be the single most loving, most
exciting, most powerful, most exhilarating, most renewing, most
energizing, most affirming, most intimate, most uniting, most re-creative
physical experience of which humans are capable. Having discovered
this experientially, you have chosen to accept instead the prior
judgments, opinions, and ideas about sex promulgated by others- all
of whom have a vested interest in how you think. These
opinions, judgments, and ideas have run directly contradictory to your own
experience, yet because you are loathe to make your teachers wrong
you convince yourself it must be your experience that is wrong.
The result is that you have betrayed your true truth about this subject-
with devastating results. You
have done the same thing with money. Every time in your life that you have
had lots and lots of money, you have felt great. You felt great receiving
it, and you felt great spending it. There was nothing bad about it,
nothing evil, nothing inherently "wrong." Yet you have so deeply ingrained
within you the teachings of others on this subject that you have
rejected your experience in favor of "truth." Having
adopted this "truth" as your own, you have formed thoughts around it-
thoughts which are creative. You have thus created a personal
reality around money which pushes it away from you- for why would you seek
to attract that which is not good? Amazingly,
you have created this same contradiction around
God. Everything your heart experiences about God tells you that God is
good. Everything your teachers teach you about God tells you God is bad.
Your heart tells you God is to be loved without fear. Your teachers tell
you God is to be feared, for He is a vengeful God. You are to live in fear
of God's wrath, they say. You are to tremble in His presence. Your whole
life through you are to fear the judgment of the Lord. For the Lord is
"just," you are told. And God knows, you will be in trouble when you
confront the terrible justice of the Lord. You are, therefore, to be
"obedient' to God's commands. Or else. Above
all, you are not to ask such logical questions as, "If God wanted strict
obedience to His Laws, why did He create the possibility of those Laws
being violated?" Ah, your teachers tell you- because God wanted you to
have "free choice." Yet what kind of choice is free when to choose one
thing over the other brings condemnation? How is "free will" free when it
is not your will, but someone else's, which must be done? Those who teach
you this would make a hypocrite of God. You
are told that God is forgiveness, and compassion- yet if you do not ask
for this forgiveness in the "right way," if you do not "come to God"
properly, your plea will not be heard, your cry will go unheeded.
Even this would not be so bad if there were only one proper way, but there
are as many "proper ways" being taught as there are teachers to teach
them. Most
of you, therefore, spend the bulk of your adult life searching for the
"right" way to worship, to obey, and to serve God. The irony of all
this is that I do not want your worship, I do not need your obedience, and
it is not necessary for you to serve Me. These
behaviors are the behaviors historically demanded of their subjects by
monarchs- usually ego-maniacal, insecure, tyrannical monarchs at that.
They're not Godly demands in any sense- and it seems remarkable that the
world hasn't by now concluded that the demands are counterfeit, having
nothing to do with the needs or desires of Deity. Deity
has no needs. All That Is is exactly that: all that is. It therefore
wants, or lacks, nothing- by definition. If
you choose to believe in a God who, somehow needs something- and
has such hurt feelings if He doesn't get it that He punishes those from
whom He expected to receive it- then you choose to believe in a God much
smaller than I. You truly are Children of a Lesser God.
No,
my children, please let Me
assure you again, through this writing, that I am without needs. I
require nothing. This
does not mean I am without desires. Desires and needs are
not the same thing (although many of you have made them so in your present
lifetime). Desire
is the beginning of all creation. It is first thought. It is a grand
feeling within the soul. It is God, choosing what next to create.
And
what is God's desire? I
desire first to know and experience Myself, in
all My glory- to know Who I Am. Before I invented you- and all the worlds
of the universe- it was impossible for Me to do so. Second,
I desire that you shall know and experience Who You Really
Are,
through the power I have given you to create and experience yourself in
whatever way you choose. Third,
I desire for the whole life process to be
an experience of constant joy, continuous creation, never-ending
expansion, and total fulfillment in each moment of now.
I
have established a perfect system whereby these desires may be realized.
They are being realized now- in this very moment. The only difference
between you and Me is that I know this.
In
the moment of your total knowing (which moment could come upon you at
anytime), you, too, will feel as I do always: totally joyful, loving,
accepting, blessing, and grateful. These
are the Five Attitudes of God, and before we are through with this
dialogue, I will show you how the application of these attitudes in your
life now can- and will- bring you to Godliness.
All
of this is a very long answer to a very short question.
Yes,
hold to your values- so long as you experience that they serve you. Yet
look to see whether the values you serve, with your thoughts,
words, and actions, bring to the space of your experience the highest and
best idea you ever had about you. Examine
your values one by one. Hold them up to the light of public scrutiny. If
you can tell the world who you are and what you believe without breaking
stride or hesitating, you are happy with yourself. There is no reason to
continue much further in this dialogue with Me, because you have created a
Self- and a Iife for the Self- which needs no improvement. You have
reached perfection. Put the book down. My life is not
perfect, nor is it close to being perfect. I am not perfect. I am, in
fact, a bundle of imperfections. I wish- sometimes I wish with all my
heart- that I could correct these imperfections; that I knew what causes
my behaviors, what sets up my downfalls, what keeps getting in my way.
That's why I've come to You, I guess. I haven't been able to find the
answers on my own. I
am glad you came. I have always been here to help you. I am here now. You
don't have to find the answers on your own. You never had to. Yet it seems so ...
presumptuous ... to simply sit down and dialogue with You this way-
much less to imagine that You- God- are responding- I mean, this is
crazy. I
see. The authors of the Bible were all sane, but you are crazy.
The Bible writers were
witnesses to the life of Christ, an faithfully recorded what they heard
and saw. Correction.
Most of the New Testament writers never met or saw Jesus in their lives.
They lived many years after Jesus left the Earth. They wouldn't have known
Jesus of Nazareth if they walked into him on the street.
But... The
Bible writers were great believers and great historians. They took the
stories which had been passed down to them and to their friends by others-
elders- from elder to elder, until finally a written record was made.
And
not everything of the Bible authors was included in the final document.
Already
"churches" had sprung up around the teachings of Jesus- and, as happens
whenever and wherever people gather in groups around a powerful idea,
there were certain individuals within these churches, or enclaves, who
determined what parts of the Jesus Story were going to be told- and how.
This process of selecting and editing continued throughout the gathering,
writing, and publishing of the gospels, and the Bible. Even
several centuries after the original scriptures were committed to
writing, a High Council of the Church determined yet one more time which
doctrines and truths were to be included in the then-official Bible- and
which would be "unhealthy" or "premature" to reveal to the masses.
And
there have been other holy scriptures as well- each placed in writing in
moments of inspiration by otherwise ordinary men, none of whom were any
more crazy than you. Are you suggesting-
you're not suggesting, are you- that these writings might one day
become "holy scriptures"? My
child, everything in life is holy. By that measure, yes, these are
holy writings. But I will not quibble with you over words, because I know
what you mean. No,
I do not suggest that this manuscript will one day become holy scripture.
At least, not for several hundred years, or until the language becomes
out-moded. You
see, the problem is that the language here is too colloquial, too
conversational, too contemporary. People assume that if God were to talk
directly with you, God would not sound like the fella next door. There
should be some unifying, if not to say deifying, structure to the
language. Some dignity. Some sense of Godliness. As
I said earlier, that's part of the problem. People have a sense of God as
"showing up" in only one form. Anything which violates that form is seen
as blasphemy. As I said
earlier. As
you said earlier. But
let's drive to the heart of your question. Why do you think it's crazy for
you to be able to have a dialogue with God? Do you not believe in prayer?
Yes, but that's
different. Prayer for me has always been one-way. I ask, and God
remains immutable. God
has never answered a prayer? Oh yes, but never
verbally, you see. Oh, I've had all kinds of things happen
in my life that I was convinced were an answer- a very direct answer- to
prayer. But God has never spoken to me. I
see.
So this God in which you believe- this God can do anything- it just
cannot speak. Of course
God
can speak, if God wants to. It just doesn't seem probable that God
would want to speak to me. This
is the root of every problem you experience in your life- for you do not
consider yourself worthy enough to be spoken to by God.
Good
heavens, how can you ever expect to hear My voice if you don't imagine
yourself to be deserving enough to even be spoken
to? I
tell you this: I am performing a miracle right now. For not only am I
speaking to you, but to every person who has picked up this
book and is reading these words. To
each of them am I now speaking. I know who every one of them is. I know
now who will find their way to these words- and I know that (just as with
all My other communications) some will be able to hear- and some will be
able to only listen, but will hear nothing. Well, that brings up
another thing. I am already thinking of publishing this material even now,
as it's being written. Yes.
What's "wrong" with that? Can't it be argued
that I am creating this whole thing for profit? Doesn't that render the
whole thing suspect? Is
it your motive to write something so that you can make a lot of money?
No. That's not why I
started this. I began this dialogue on paper because my mind has been
plagued with questions for 30 years- questions I've been hungry-
starving to have answered. The idea that I would have all this made
into a book came later. From
Me. From You? Yes.
You don't think I was going to let you waste all these marvelous questions
and answers, do you? I hadn't thought about
that. At the outset, I just wanted the questions answered; the frustration
to end; the search to be over. Good.
So stop questioning your motives (you do it incessantly) and let's get
on with it. |
Contact: info@kulshreshtha.org |