for Spiritual Seekers
 |
||
for Spiritual Seekers
|
||
Click on the BoomBox below to hear the multidimensional soundscapes of Visionary Music while reading this page
|
People who email me often ask me what my religion is. Some are sure I must be a Buddhist or a Mormon or a Sikh or a Christian or a Rosicrucian or a New Ager or... Since my near death experience, I see all religions as having the same meaning, the same purpose, so I am none of them, yet I embrace all of them. What church one goes to, what savior or guru one follows, what version of a holy book you choose to believe in or not, or whether you believe this whole thing is an accident, there is no God and dead is dead, are personal choices unique to this lifetime. They are all learning experiences for your Soul and you will experience different choices in various lifetimes. There are no consequences nor preferences given for those choices on the other side. We are all each other in one lifetime or another for the continuing education and development of our Soul (who we really are). A Soul goal would be to project a human being who doesn't lie, cheat, steal, abuse, torture, murder or try to control other human beings, but who, of his or her own free will, chooses to develop his or her potential to make this world a better place for all life as a spiritual path.
So all the arguing that goes on between religious factions around the world is a terrible waste of an opportunity to enjoy peacefully sharing our human lives on this beautiful planet working together to make life better for everyone instead of fighting over who is right. It even makes more sense, when so many groups claim to be the Chosen Ones, to say we are all chosen. We all have equal opportunity to let go of fear, awaken from the sleep state we think is reality and get to know one's self as a spiritual being having another human experience. If you can imagine the universe as an interdependent, interactive, dynamic, ecological system of which Humanity is an integral part, it is easier to see there is more to our lives than we have been lead to believe.
That common purpose of all religions is not to be #1 or right, but to help us understand why we're here, how we got here, if God exists, does life go on or is this all there is, do we see each other again? These are the most often asked questions by people who have written to me so I've decided to start this lesson with that in mind. Since I have an eclectic perspective, having studied most religions and philosophies, both old and new, as well as subatomic particle physics and astronomy, and have the added dimension of having a near death experience, which included a trip through the Hall of Knowledge, to relate it all to, if I have to be classified, it would be as a Mystic-- one who sees the world from a spiritual perspective. I make no claim to have all the answers, I just hope to open a few minds to the greater possibilities offered by an unlimited, nonrestrictive perspective of God.
I came across the site below while surfing for resources; it's a commentary on the writings of St. John of the Cross, which explains the challenge I'm undertaking by attempting to explain my experience of God and the after life in this continuing column. The site is no longer available, however, I have included some excerpts, and I urge you to read the whole book if you can find it.
The Metaphysics of Mysticism: The Mystical Philosophy of St. John of the Cross
A Commentary by Geoffrey K. Mondello
"Mystical Theology, properly understood, neither compromises nor invalidates its Rational and Dogmatic counterparts. Rather, it surpasses them in the way that the act of seeing surpasses the most definitive description of sight. The description itself remains true; it is entirely accurate inasmuch as words signify, and in signifying attempt to communicate, what is essentially an experience. But the disproportion between the experience itself and any description subsequent to it remains nearly irreconcilable. To one who is color-deficient (to carry the analogy a little further) and who has never seen the color purple, the most precise and detailed description of this absolutely unique chromatic phenomenon called purple, even when coupled with appeals to extrapolate from colors with which one is familiar, yields at best only a vague conception, and in the end brings that person no closer to the experience of the color itself. In short, we must come to terms with limitations inherent in language, especially descriptive language; limitations that are radiated in shared experiences outside of which the power of language reaches a cognitive terminus. No more can meaningfully be said. And this is precisely the plight of the mystic. And, therefore, that of mystical theology itself. "
"And yet the very nature of love itself is incapable of being adequately expressed. Words, however well chosen, and descriptions, however articulate and exhaustive, are found in the end to be profoundly impoverished. The essence remains ineffable, to be experienced immediately, intuitively. And so the analogy itself breaks down linguistically: our experience of God can only be analogized to our experience of love --- and our experience of love is essentially recalcitrant to language. The experience of God in mystical union, like the experience of love between the bride and the bridegroom, remains intuitive and essentially unavailable to language. The experiences are comparable because they share common intuitions, and while certain subjective states attendant upon, and, as it were, accidental to, such experiences may in fact be vaguely described, the intuitive affinity itself evidently derives from some source in itself spontaneous, ever-immediate, and self-creating.
This serves to underscore yet another dimension of the persistent problem with language. Descriptive language purports to convey to us, or to signify, some aspect of reality typically not immediately available to us; it serves, then, to mediate or to approximate the reality. But it is only able to do so by presupposing an entire spectrum of shared experience necessary to intelligibility in any particular universe of discourse. In this sense, language may be viewed as an expedient in lieu of direct experience. And yet we have found that the nature of the mystical experience is essentially intuitive, immediate, direct. It is, in short, an experience --- and any language endeavoring to describe this experience necessarily presupposes this experience as a condition to the intelligibility of the account it would render. Let us suppose an individual with a rare sensory dysfunction who has never experienced the sensation "hot". No matter what linguistic categories we invoke, from the cup of hot tea to the arcana of thermodynamics, our attempts to communicate this sensation to that individual will be in vain until he has shared that experience with us, and only in light of that experience will the word "hot," and all that attends our understanding of it, become intelligible, meaningful, to him. In other words, our admission into any meaningful universe of discourse presumes shared experiences upon which it is grounded. Apart from this essential condition, any description of mystical experience, however detailed and definitive, is necessarily emptied of intelligibility. Mystical union, then, or infused contemplation as it is often called, remains to be experienced, and when spoken of is only done so analogically. Coupled with the problem of absolute incommensurability deriving from any attempt to relate the finite to the Infinite, the created conditional to the Uncreated Absolute, the mystic who would attempt to relate his experience faces a redoubtable challenge indeed."
Nevertheless, she plunges in and begins with the concept of "God." Early humans thought of the sun as a god because it controlled day and night, and human beings were at its mercy. We pictured it as the god Ra racing across the sky in a horse drawn chariot. But there were also storms and lightning and winds and earthquakes and volcanoes and floods that frightened us into thinking we were victims of gods who were out to punish us. So early on, the punishing, judgmental concept of God was formed. Life was harsh-- "nasty, brutish and short," said Hobbes. The elements were against us, the animals all seemed to want us for lunch, food was difficult to get and hard to keep, survival was a struggle. God must really be angry at us to make us suffer so. We became the hunted and banded together for protection. Out of that need, leaders arose and among their problems were managing the growing populations that became dependent on them for security. It was a dog eat dog world and only the fittest survived, meaning the ones with power. There was no security once in power, however, because someone else was always ready to take it away. One way to quell the hungry hordes is to threaten them with destruction by a powerful and angry god if they don't obey. Weapons help too but mind control is the strongest weapon. And God became defined and deified to control the masses by fear.
Many gods proved too confusing and jealousy spread among them competing for favor among humans, according to those who told their stories. Instead of providing a sense of security, they set people at war against one another and rulers rose up proclaiming they were superior to these serendipitous gods and turned them into myths and legends, art and literature. The rulers took charge of dishing out punishment for not doing as we were arbitrarily ordered. In many early cultures, we were sacrificed to these angry gods to appease them or insure a good crop, held in fear by the god-priest/kings who claimed authority over our lives.
Remember in these Times, we thought the earth was flat and the stars formed a dome around us. As far as we knew, here (the spot we were standing on) was all there was. It's easy to look back now on the Egyptians, Greeks and Romans and see how we might have believed Ra controlled day and night or Zeus and his gang watched over us from Mt. Olympus, and were responsible for everything that befell us. There was nothing to contradict that scenario.
The early Egyptians stuck with the One Sun-God idea and made Pharaoh its representative on earth. The aspirant who survived a near death experience ritual in a closed sarcophagus was proclaimed wise enough to become Pharaoh. The idea that Pharaoh, as well as his entourage, would be reincarnated led us to build pyramids to reach the sun (God) so our bodies could be found and resurrected. We preserved our dead and left all kinds of trinkets and food around for our return. Perhaps when a few hundred thousand people are stuck out in the dessert and have nothing else to do, building a pyramid seems like a pretty good idea. Of course, the Jews didn't think so and wanted out so we decided we were chosen by God to be taken to the Promised Land and split. Moses had a near death experience and thought God chose him to lead his people. The Egyptian idea of resurrection was continued when we came up with the idea of the son of God coming to earth to save us by being horribly murdered by nonbelievers and resurrected. People were having near death experiences back in Biblical times too (did Jesus have one during his 40 days and nights in the desert where he wrestled with Satan?), they just interpreted them differently than we do these days. Back then they made us saints, now they think we're a little crazy. When you think back to those times, and the harshness and uncertainty of our lives, it's easy to see how the religious writers came up with the descriptions they did. It would be unusual today for someone to say God appeared to them as a burning bush or angels came down from the sky with blaring trumpets. Today we might say, "Wow! What a head rush!"
When you think about how our belief systems evolved, think about it terms of the Times. Our lives are shaped by what we believe about how the world works and by what we experience in our environment. Thousands of years ago our environment was very small, when you think of it in terms of the whole earth, which we didn't know existed then. We had no clue that we were part of a solar system which resides in one of a gazillion galaxies in a universe so vast as to be nearly incomprehensible. As we gain a better understanding of how the world works, our concept of God expands. We need Science to search for that knowledge.
Around the same time as all these religions were coming together and battling over who's right, we started thinking... about thinking. All the great thinkers who we still pay attention to today-- Aristotle, Plato, Socrates, Descartes, and many others, tried to define Thinking and Reality. They basically came up with Reason and Logic, and dismissed Intuition as too subjective. There must be rules to be followed. If A=B and B=C, then under all circumstances A=C. If you really want to know more about how our thinking has evolved, visit Adventures in Philosophy.
Religion isn't logical, therefore Science ruled when it came to explaining the physical universe. When Copernicus and Galileo came along and insisted the earth is not the center of the Universe because everything revolves around the sun, the Church was miffed because where did that leave God and the Chosen Ones? You know that the Pope just forgave Galileo for pointing that out a few years ago. However, wise as we were, we still thought the earth was a flat disk and planets revolving around the sun just didn't fit in.
During these times, there was constant warfare. Empire-building, as it turns out. Our lives were lived in constant fear of being raped, pillaged, plundered and sent into forced labor or to fight battles we knew nothing about. We died young, often in battle or of torture or starvation. We all prayed for someone to come along and save us from our miserable existence. News of a Messiah spreads quickly among people living in anguish and gives them hope that there is more to life than suffering followed by death. We didn't care about logic or what revolved around what, we wanted food and shelter and a chance to have a life.
Religious wars raged on during these same times. The Christians vs. the Muslims, the Muslims vs. the Jews, the Jews vs. the Christians, waging battle against the other in the name of God. We lived and died according to what we believed, and the same wars still go on today. I think by this time, it might be logical to say there is no one right way and it's time we stopped fighting about it and find ways to live with our different beliefs and cultures. Why just this year the Pope asked for forgiveness for the Church for killing hundreds of thousands of us during the Crusades and other religious wars. Could this be the beginning of reconciliation that will bring peace to the planet?
Note: If you need a refresher in ancient belief systems, here is an educational site that offers a course of study: World Civilizations to 1500.
Even Science and Religion are coming back together, bridging the gap left by not speaking to each other for so many centuries. Science has basically thrown up its hands at the edge of its knowledge and turned it over to Religion. At the macro level, science can take us back to a few milliseconds after the Big Bang but can go no further. At the micro, they are studying particles smaller than an atom, which itself has never been seen by the naked eye (and they insist they can't believe anything they can't see!). They are in the area of conjecture, hypotheses, and theories, and it is quite chaotic. They know there is something else and it apparently falls outside their sphere of inquiry.
Religion has been trying to explain that since the sun-god times and it's still a work in progress. Various churches, sects, religions have tried to put God in a box so we can understand our relationship to God and vice versa. There are the books, the holy books that purport to speak as God to his lost and frightened children to lead them through the darkness and into the light. Rules to live by to control our gluttony, greed and lust, and subject us to the rules of God's law. Now it is time for Reason and Intuition to come together to help us understand the Whole and our part in it.
Getting back to those Times, language was just being developed, mostly in the form of symbols to which meanings were attached and conveyed to others. The first written language which could be read seemed like words from God to us because we had never seen words before. We were astonished and sure they must have come from God-- or the Devil. It was mainly monks who did the writing to keep it holy, but who's to say some of those guys didn't weird out, alone, up in those cold, drafty monasteries, high in the mountains, and add some not-so holy stuff? And it was as if these words were written in stone. Once written, words never change, even though our understanding of the Universe changes and those words no longer make sense in the present Times. The words don't change, but as our world view changes, our understanding of those same words broadens our perspective and sheds new light on old information.
Many people have written to me wondering if they had a near death experience because what I describe of my NDE is similar to an experience they had, but they weren't in a near death situation. What they had was a spiritual experience, of kundalini rising spontaneously without foreknowledge or effort on their part. Think back to the Times. Doesn't it make sense that people were having these experiences back in Biblical Times and, because of their narrow world view, were sure God had chosen them for specialness, and other people followed them and made them out to be more than they were? Even before that, the Egyptians, Greeks and Romans had stories about the underworld and the gods above. Where did you think they got those ideas 5,000 years ago?
Today people generally think those who have spiritual experiences are hallucinating or on drugs or just plain nuts; back then, we put people up on thrones and made them saints; in other times, we were burned at the stake. I'm not discounting any holy book or religious figure, I'm just saying that many people have glimpsed the higher realms and come back trying to describe the ineffable throughout history, and while there are many similarities, there are as many differences. So called Holy books were each written about one man's interpretation of his spiritual experiences as told to others, who told others, etc. until someone finally wrote it all down-- and we all know how stories can get distorted and embellished between one teller and the next. No doubt the scribes of Biblical Times had pure intent, wanted to help others know God, when they recorded the stories (passed on orally through generations first), which the church leaders then built into dogma and bent to their biases. Instead of fighting over which religion is God's favorite or whose people are Chosen or whether there is a God and all that, a good research project for skeptics would be to collect experiences from early times to today and develop a broader profile of "God" and "Heaven" to see if there isn't more to it than we've been led to believe by any one religion.
Through the ages, new information that changes the way we see the world has been slow to alter the concepts established by earlier written words. Many people hold the concept of God as a being that looks like a human being, only bigger, because it was written in the Bible that we were created in God's image so God must look like us. There's a lot of throwback to Mt. Olympus with Zeus sitting on his throne surrounded by his legions in the Biblical interpretations of Heaven and the Underworld. Descriptions are related to the warlike environment of the times where there is judgment and punishment for those who don't bow down and worship the Almighty. The Koran and the Mahabharata reflect our war like attitudes in our relationship with God. This attitude continued and perpetuated violence in God's name well past when it was common knowledge that we lived on only one of many planets that revolved around the sun, and our solar system was only one of many within a great Galaxy, which itself is only one of billions and billions of galaxies. This makes the Universe so vast that this narrow concept of God so many still hold on to just doesn't make sense anymore.
And so with all this knowledge we now have of the physical universe, where does that leave God?
An amazing tool for understanding reality is to look at the pictures, the video or CD of the Powers of Ten. It takes you up the powers from a couple of people on a blanket having a picnic in a park in Chicago to the farthest edges of the known Universe, and then back down through a human hand to the subatomic particle level. You can see all the levels of existence from the micro to the macro. It will really blow your mind! I first saw it in a Scientific American series of books 20 years ago, which you might still find in a library. Here are some sources I found on the web.
Secret Worlds: The Universe Within - java script of Powers of Ten
Powers of Ten (book) by Philip Morrison & Phylis Morrison
Powers of Ten: A Flipbook by Charles & Ray Eames
Powers of Ten Films of Charles & Ray Eames, Vol. 1 (VHS tape)
CosmicLight - these pictures from the Hubble Telescope will expand your view of the universe
My drawings and explanations of the Powers of Ten can be found in the chapter "As it is Above, So it is Below" in Sitting in the Lotus Blossom
To continue our quest for greater understanding of God, I offer some mind-stretching exercises.
Try to imagine "Infinity." It's impossible if we have no concepts to base it on. After you have the opportunity to see the Powers of Ten images, it will be easier to grasp, yet even with the images to look at, beyond a certain point, we can't rely on actual photographs of what the next level looks like so the images we see are what scientists or artists imagine it looks like.
At the Micro level, the smallest images we can capture using powerful electron microscopes are inside a molecule, but we "know" molecules are made up of smaller particles, atoms, even though no scientist has ever seen one. Beyond that, in this tiny unseen world, even smaller particles exist that fly around the nucleus of each atom at high speeds, and further inside the nucleus are infinitesimally smaller particles we've named quarks, hadrons, leptons and charms that go up/down, on/off, and are blue or strange. At this end of Infinity there is frantic, chaotic activity in empty space so vast that one particle rarely encounters another as it zips around. Out of this chaos, comes "life" in all its forms. This is God creating order out of chaos. And as it is below, so it is above...
The Macro level of Infinity is God, the Creator of the physical universe, to support that life. God is the Process-- an infinitesimally tiny particle becoming all it can be. The Big Bang continuing to explode! God is the cornucopia from which every thing spills out. We can "see" now only as far as the Hubble telescope can see where there is nothing but empty space populated by galaxies so far apart they can't "see" each other, but that is still infinitely far from all there is. The Powers of Ten speculate that there is no end to the physical universe. That there are more galaxies beyond the farthest galaxies and the space between them is infinitely vast, just as at the Micro where there are smaller particles within the empty space within subatomic particles, ad infinitum.
That is the image you need to develop to imagine Infinity-- there are no edges, no limits, no boundaries, no end. And there is also no beginning because God has always been, except in the sense that at some point God began manifesting a physical environment to eventually support biological life. Science calls this event the Big Bang; Religion, Creation. Just different words, basically meaning the same thing, neither completely correct.
This then is the meaning of God-- All That Is, Infinity from the Micro to the Macro. A single atom is to the Milky Way Galaxy as the Milky Way Galaxy is to God. The Powers of Ten is a tool to help you wrap your mind around this greater concept of God. This isn't the God of religions. Religions have tried to personalize God to help the unawakened consciousness fit it into their mind. The image of God as a great person who looks like a human being looks, only bigger, is easier to grasp and relate to given this limited understanding of Reality. The Son of God coming to Earth to die for our sins and open the door to Heaven is even easier to relate to— he was one of us. That could be as real to a suffering human as those who believed everything that happens is due to the whims and fancies of capricious god-beings in Ancient Rome and Greece.
So how does one fit the concept of God as All That Is into one's life so as to be meaningful? You can read more about the different dimensions or levels of existence in Sitting in the Lotus Blossom, but I'll touch on it here to give you my perspective.
Who we really are exists at a level that is basically light which emanates from God. At the Micro, we are three atoms. At the Macro, we are great Spiritual Beings, large masses of energy. Not infinite, but an enormous field of dynamic energy with fluid boundaries. In the middle, we are human beings. We, All That We Are, are part of God's life-building process. God is the potential and we take it where we want to go. The creative possibilities are infinite. Part of the Process involves a learning curve. Imagine what a great Spiritual Being would need to know about the laws of physics in order to, for example, create a stable galaxy in the physical dimension which would produce solar systems which could capture enough material to evolve into planets, perhaps one in a million of which might support biological life over time. You're probably going to make a lot of mistakes before you come up with a solar system with a planet like this one. And when you finally do produce a successful system, you need to learn all about biology and chemistry and meteorology and geology, etc., in order to manifest all the life forms necessary to make the planet habitable for higher forms of life to evolve. This is in contrast to the idea that "God" created everything in six days or the Earth hatched out of a great cosmic egg or came out of the belly of a dragon as some religions would have us believe.
The great Spiritual Being that we are may be quite powerful but when it comes to the planetary level, it's just too much detail so, in a sense, we give birth to Souls who become sort of the overseers of the development of self-sustaining life. It's our Soul's job to learn all about existing in the physical world, but the Soul is also a Spiritual Being and cannot interact in the physical world. So the Soul joins with a physical form... puts on a coat of skin. Limited to the physical senses of a body, the Soul can see, touch, hear, feel emotions and directly experience what it already knows about the laws that govern the physical dimension. This provides a feedback loop to increase the stability of the ecological system. As long as our Milky Way Galaxy maintains its integrity and our Sun continues to burn adequately, the Earth will continue to support life. It is a self-perpetuating system. We manifest ourselves in many forms as part of the Process.
So you might say that God is the potential for everything, Spirits created the galactic systems, Souls developed the ecosystem, and Human Beings maintain their home planet. We are Spiritual Beings having Human Being experiences for our Soul's development and, in turn, our Spirit's development. God, All That Is, is the Source of all of this.
The God of Religion is actually the Spirit, not God-- All That Is, but even the Spirit is difficult for the average consciousness to grasp. Human consciousness is in closer touch with the Soul level than the Spirit, but many people can't grasp that either. It's easier to relate to a Jesus or a Mohammed or a Buddha or a Moses because of their human qualities than to unseeable energy forms. And easier to imagine Heaven and Hell as physical places than Infinity, which seems to be a big nothing. I'd guess that at the Soul level, we are closer to understanding that we come from Spirit, but still have trouble grasping the concept that God-- All That Is, is even beyond that. So, as humans, we shouldn't feel bad if we don't get it.
This doesn't at all trivialize the role or significance of Human Beings in the scheme of things. We are the culmination of eons of a Divine Process of Manifestation. The Masons call God, The Great Architect of the Universe, and believe themselves to be God's earthly builders— the engineers, the architects, the contractors who create skyscrapers, bridges, dams, roads, the infrastructure of civilization. It is Human Beings who have the ability to create a world that supports its population. Everything is in process and we are all part of the process of the One Becoming Many Becoming One. Our human lifetimes are an important part of the whole process.
When we live our lives with God-Consciousness, with a joyful, spiritual wisdom, it's like a butterfly emerging from a cocoon, it's like breaking the chains that bind us. We experience freedom from fear— fears of death, judgment, punishment, retribution, suffering, pain, condemnation, loss of self, separation from loved ones, eternal damnation. We are secure in knowing, that life is a continually changing, ongoing process in which we are free to explore every dimension of God on our journey through Eternity. Being a human being is just one story in our eternal history.
There are a lot of different understandings about who and what God is, and there are a lot of different ways of saying the same thing, and then some people understand one way, and others don't get it until they hear it explained another way. That's why we have so many different religions today, each slightly to extremely different from the next, mostly caused by breakaways from other religions— either because they were too harsh or to permissive or some fanatic insisted his interpretation was right and everyone else was wrong. Look how many different interpretations of the Bible there are. It's all pieces to a puzzle.
In some cases, a small group of people with different ideas join together to avoid persecution and break away to form their own belief system, which is often a blend of one or more other belief systems. Such was the case with the Sikhs who became a blend of Hindu and Muslim, rejecting some ideas of each and continuing others with a few of their own thrown in. Who's to judge which is right and which is wrong?
This is all the process of the evolution of Religion, which freaks Religion out because it wants to maintain the status quo. But bridging the gap between Religion and Science is changing all that and that calls for an expanded concept of God to make greater sense of the Whole.
I feel the more information we have about how the universe works, the easier it is to conceptualize things that are beyond our normal understanding. It gives us a broader frame of reference to help us make sense out of it and fit into our thinking processes so we begin to see it in our Mind's Eye.
Sometimes when you hear a concept explained many different ways, the whole picture suddenly emerges. It's hard to see the picture when you're in the frame, you need to step back and take a wider view. This is how our minds synthesize knowledge. We suddenly get an Aha! or the light goes on, and we say, of course, I knew that, I just never heard it explained that way before! Now we've taken a leap in consciousness and will find it easier to grasp other higher concepts that have eluded us.
So don't just take my word for it, I'm not asking anyone to believe what I'm writing is anything but the ramblings of my mind. I'm just putting it out there as I see it through my life and death experiences and hoping others will think about it, and add it to their growing knowledge and continue seeking Wisdom. If you want to see how easy it is to change your mind with new information, check out these illusions.
© Diane Goble 2000
Thanks to Gibran for sending the following quote from Conversations With God. Maybe Neale Donald Walsh can interpret information from his conversations with "God" better than I can, but we are pretty much saying the same thing.
"I want to tell you, My dearest children, that this matter of Who You Are, and Who You Choose To Be, is of great importance. Not only because it sets the tone of your experience, but because it creates the nature of Mine.
All of your life you have been told that God created you. I come now to tell you this: You are creating God. That is a massive rearrangement of your understanding, I know, and yet it is a necessary one if you are to go about the true work for which you came.
This is holy work We are up to, you and I. This is sacred ground We walk.
This is the Path.
In every moment God expressed Himself in, as, and through you. You are always at choice as to how God will be created now, and She/He will never take that choice from you, nor will She punish you for making the "wrong" choice. Yet you are not without guidance in these matters, nor will you ever be. Built into you is an internal guidance system that shows you the way home. This is the voice that speaks to you always of your highest choice, that places before you your grandest vision. All you need do is heed that voice, and not abandon the vision.
Throughout your history I have sent you teachers. During every day and time have My messengers bought you glad tidings of great joy. Holy scriptures have been written, and holy lives have been lived, that you might know of this eternal truth: You and I are One.
Now again I send you scriptures - you are reading one of them now. Now again I send you messengers, seeking to bring you the Word of God.
Will you listen to these words? Will you hear these messengers? Will you become one of them?
That is the great question. That is the grand invitation. That is the glorious decision. The world awaits your announcement. And you make that announcement with your life, lived.
The human race has no chance to lift itself from its own lowest thoughts until you lift yourself to your own highest ideas.
Those ideas, expressed through you, as you, create the template, set the stage, serve as a model for the next level of human experience.
You are the life and the way. The world will follow you. You are not at choice in this matter. It is the only matter in which you have no free choice. It is simply the Way It Is. Your world will follow your idea about yourself. Ever it has been, ever it will be. First comes your thought about yourself, then follows the outer world of physical manifestation.
What you think, you create. What you create, you become. What you become, you express. What you express, you experience. What you experience, you are. What you are, you think. The circle is complete.
The holy work in which you are engaged has really just begun, for now, at last, you understand what you are doing.
It is you who have caused yourself to know this, you who have caused yourself to care. And you do care now, more that ever before, about Who You Really Are. For now, at last, you see the whole picture. Who you are, I am.
You are defining God.
I have sent you - a blessed part of Me - into physical form that I might know Myself experientially as all that I know Myself to be conceptually. Life exists as a tool for God to turn concept into experience. It exists for you to do the same. For you are God, doing this. I choose to re-create Myself anew in every single moment.
I choose to experience the grandest version of the greatest vision ever I had about Who I Am. I have created you, so that you might re-create Me. This is Our holy work. This is Our greatest joy. This is Our very reason for being."
One of our Soul's challenges is to meld harmoniously with a physical form. The difficulty is in balancing the animalistic nature of the physical form with the altruistic nature of the spiritual being. The animal nature craves sex, power, competition, things. The spiritual nature is creativity, harmony, compassion, peace, and, the greatest of all, love. This is the religious battle that goes on within each of us as we learn to live with ourselves and each other in this challenging physical environment we find ourselves lucky enough to be in.
Ancient peoples struggled as much trying to understand God as we do today. When physical forms on this planet evolved sufficiently enough to be able to carry out the work of a Soul desiring to project itself into the physical dimension, the process of ensouling human beings began. We were only the spark that awakened consciousness in early Man. Human beings were forced to survive in a hostile environment and to band together to fight off threats to their survival. We were afraid of everything, none of it made sense, everything was a potential threat. We were more animal than human. Through projecting many short lifetimes, we learned and we became strong and we met the challenges Nature put in front of us, and we survived as a species. Each human learning experience contributes to our Soul growth and the Soul learns to bond more closely with its human form to further awaken the next human being it projects.
When we look back over known history and include all the ancient stories, whether they were myths or reality-based, we can see there have been mass awakenings of consciousness that are easily recognized in retrospect. Some involved a single geographic area and people, like the Egyptian Empire; others a large geographic area and many different people, like the European Renaissance. These were times when creativity flourished; times when the Soul was able to synthesize its nature with that of human beings. These were also times when ideas about God were discussed and argued and from which dogma emerged. We took ourselves from being at the mercy of Nature, to praying to Nature to save us. From believing that God was the sun to believing that God is our Heavenly Father.
The goal of the Soul is not to finally be able to project a perfect human specimen as if earth were a laboratory and God would then grant some prize or preferred position. It is simply to experience life on this planet in a variety of human forms in a variety of situations to learn as much as we can about being in the physical world, which a Soul can't do without a physical body. Soul sees the world through our eyes, experiences the world through our physical senses. For this opportunity, the human being is given the free will to be in control it's own life experience. Whatever we do in our life, our Soul experiences and learns from. We are Souls attending Earth University.
People are always asking me Why do we forget that we are spiritual beings when we are born? When human beings are first born, our first years are occupied with learning to operate our bodies and make sense out of the world we are born into. If an adult tells us this is a table and that is chair then that is what we believe it is. We're conditioned to believe what we're told the world is and come to believe it as if it were completely true in our later years, even if our early experiences contradict that reality. Children who have "imaginary" friends are not mentally ill. They see what adults tell them they cannot see. They "see dead people," they see angels, they see into the spiritual dimension. No wonder humans grow up not knowing what to believe. As young children, our connection to our Soul is still open. If not before, by age 7 or 8 the connection is usually closed; in some cases severed, often by very self-righteous adults. We do remember, it is life that teaches us to forget.
Awakenings are really rememberings because our Soul already knows everything. It is a challenge to each human being to remember that we are Souls having human experiences-- awakening to our higher consciousness. All the struggle falls away... all the suffering, the grief, the anger, the mistrust. All the fear dissolves when we recognize ourselves as spiritual beings come here to experience the joy of being animated in the physical world.
An evolution of consciousness is the central motive of terrestrial existence.
~Sri Aurobindo
When we are dying, we begin to see it again. Those who die over a period of time have visitors from the spiritual world. Deceased loved ones. Angels. They begin their life review in their dreams as they drift back and forth from the spiritual to the physical world. They find themselves spending more time in the spiritual realms and are confused when they come back into their body and physical surroundings. They feel like they exist in a dream state and every once in a while, they wake up. Some remember before their body dies that this life was only temporary and now it is time to return home. Some don't believe it even after they leave their body behind and have to be convinced because the spiritual world is so similar to the physical world. And after we remember, we say-- next life, I'm going to remember sooner because if I had known then what I know now, I would have lived my life differently... with more love and compassion.
Those who come into this life remembering and don't forget as adults, who are encouraged by the adults around them to express who they are, are often responsible for awakening many others during that life. Jesus, Mohammed, Buddha. There have been many and there will be continue to be others who will, by the way they live their lives, be mentors for many others to awaken to God-consciousness. What human beings create or destroy on this planet is going to be up to the human beings who are alive at the time. A Global Awakening to God-Consciousness will insure that human beings will survive and prosper and populate at least this edge of the Galaxy.
The End is not near-- get a life!
© Diane Goble 2001-2002
Disclaimer: The information contained in Lessons Beyond the Veil are solely from the Soul of Diane Goble. It is offered as food for thought, grist for the mill, for those on their spiritual path, not to create controversy nor imply any disrespect to anyone's beliefs or religion. This is merely a stop along your path to drink from the well and then be on your way. The author only asks that students keep an open mind and discern the truth for themselves. If it doesn't feel right, then dismiss it and continue seeking elsewhere, this is not your path. If it resonates with your beliefs, you are welcome to continue the journey and explore the mysteries through these lessons on your search for your own Truth. It is my intention to open your mind and get you to re-examine your belief system, not to tell you what to believe nor to dissuade you from your religion. What you read here may expand your consciousness and strengthen your beliefs or you may chose to dismiss it and remain unconscious. The goal of a human being is to achieve higher consciousness, a connection to our divine nature, during one of our human lifetimes. If you choose this lifetime, these Lessons are a step along your path of spiritual development.
