Spiritual Growth

The God I Know Chapter Ten

2010-02-17T10:06:00.001-07:00

THE GOD I KNOW

Chapter Ten

LEVELS OF LAW

The God I know has levels of communicating with us which meet the needs of our levels of progress. The law which governs each level covers us within that law. We are protected from seeing beyond the truths we are able to live so that we are not ever held accountable for sinning where we do not understand.

The TRUTH – ultimate truth, all truth, pure truth, truth free from opposition – is part of God’s being. They abide the law which encompasses every good and desirable thing. Their love for us guarantees a plan which allows us to grow toward the place where They are, at the rate we choose to grow. We are always covered by God’s mercy, grace and love. We are safe in God’s hands, regardless of the opposition by which Satan tries to damn us. Satan does not know the ways of God. He does not comprehend the power of God’s love. The purpose of mortality is that we might make choices between good and evil, in order to comprehend a fullness of truth. An environment in which opposition is constantly present makes that possible. Satan is part of that environment. He unknowingly serves God’s purposes.

There are many principles of truth which we must learn in order to be comfortable living with God. We cannot learn all of them at once. Each thing we do learn enlarges the scope of our comprehension of all truth, so that it becomes progressively easier for us to see the whole picture of truth as God sees it.

There are four clear-cut levels of law – levels of communication and perception – which God uses in teaching us truth. Any given principle of truth is comprehended with increased light as we progress through the experience of communicating with God on each of these four levels. We cannot comprehend the fullness of any of God’s truth until we are living that truth on the level where God abides. We cannot progress from one level to a higher level until God has performed the miracle of lifting the veil which protects us against seeing more than we are prepared for, and the miracle of endowing us with the change of heart which strengthens us to be ready for more. We can choose to change, and we can struggle to change. We can do a limited amount of “overcoming” within the boundaries of each law. But we cannot change ourselves with the quickening which is necessary in order to move into a new state of law. Only God can bestow that gift, and only God knows when we are truly ready to receive it. The God I know does not make any mistakes which would allow us to fail. Their timing is perfect. In harmony with our free choice, God opens the windows when our eyes can see; God plays the music when our ears can hear; God touches our hearts when our hearts can understand.

As we are miraculously lifted to be able to abide in each new level of law, the previous laws become not dead, but fulfilled in our lives. Jesus Christ did not come to destroy the law, but to fulfill it. That is what happens in each of our lives as we accept the endowments of Christ which lift us into higher laws. Lesser laws are fulfilled for us, which means that in our communications with others we can use information from any level of law which we comprehend, and we will have the wisdom to know how and where to use those facts. But the law cannot use us. We are not ever subject to live by any lesser law than the one we have been endowed by God to abide.

The four levels of law, communication, and perception are:

(1) The Law of Innocence, where God’s method of communication is symbolism, which we perceive as a mystery.

(2) The Law of Obedience and Sacrifice, where God’s method of communication is knowledge (thought), which we perceive in our minds.

(3) The Law of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, where God’s method of communication is feeling, perceived in our hearts.

(4) The Law of Consecration and Love, where God’s method of communication is to quicken us to an awareness of Being One with Them, which we perceive with our whole being – mind, heart, and soul.

When Christ, by the power of His love, has quickened us through these four states of being – from innocence through justification, through sanctification, through purification – we DO understand the Fullness of the Gospel of Jesus Christ and ARE One with Him.

On any given day in our mortality we can have experiences with principles of truth from any levels of law where our choices take us. If we are seeking God, we will have encounters with truths from higher laws than we are abiding, and we may have revelations of thought or feeling or being from higher laws. We will not fully understand these experiences, however, until we are abiding in the law of their origin. We do not learn all truth on one level and then move on to learn all truth on the next level. Rather, our growth is a process of evolving gradually through each separate truth, and coming to understand how that truth functions in each law. Because of the Lord’s personal knowledge of each of us, He will teach each of us differently, in the ways and at the times He knows we are receptive – always subject to our free choice to let Him teach us. Of course as we embrace light and truth, there is an automatic chain-reaction explosive effect, by which means the different truths begin to mushroom into harmoniously beautiful all-inclusive truths.

The Law of Innocence

On the first level of God’s law, truth is presented in symbolism. God’s word to us is given in symbolic representations: “the tree of knowledge of good and evil,” “The Tree of Life,” “the living water,” “the lake of fire and brimstone,” etc. As long as our understanding of God’s law remains on this level, we are in a state of innocence. God’s words are mysteries to us.

In this state of innocence we have an equal chance of accidentally doing something right as we do of accidentally doing something wrong. That is, we cannot choose between good and evil because we don’t know the difference. We are not aware that we have a carnal nature and a divine nature. Whatever circumstances of our heredity and environment are visible and tangible, we accept as the limits of our reality. Like children, we do what we feel like doing without consideration or consequences.

Our forms of worship on this level are ritualistic and paganistic. We impose our own superstitious meanings onto the word of God. We pay idolatrous or fearful homage to symbols – worshipping certain trees, or crosses, or sacred water, or fire, or lightning, or the sun or stars – sometimes in the name of Christ, sometimes in the name of other “dieties,” sometimes in the name of science, but always in blind ignorance.

Our faith in God on this level is blind faith – faith without questioning, faith without reasoning, and so faith without understanding. Consequently our faith is a passive force.

Innocence was the state of Adam ad Eve in the Garden of Eden, and it is our own state with respect to the laws of God until we use our free agency to choose to progress to a higher law. When we become uncomfortable in our own being with our limited amount of knowledge; when we become discontented with blind faith and symbolic worship; when we seek truth, when we ask questions – then we are lifted by the Lord to the next level of God’s law.

The Law of Obedience and Sacrifice
(Justification)

The next level of God’s law is Obedience and Sacrifice, sometimes called the Law of Works. Living in this law is an experience in gaining knowledge – by physical and mental effort, by trial and error, by experimentation, by questioning, thinking, reasoning, and by receiving inspiration and revelation.

We have made the choice to know what God’s symbolism means, and we are on an active search for knowledge. One of the first things we learn is that “the tree of knowledge of good and evil” is not a symbolic tree. It is a real happening! Our eyes are opened to the realization that we are facing opposition, and we can make choices about what we want to accept and what we want to reject. Because our self-preservation instinct is still strong, we will for a time perceive opposition as being only a force outside ourself which makes us uncomfortable. It takes considerable experience before we know that we are our own greatest opposition, that what is evil in us (our carnal nature) is contending with what is good in us (our divine nature).

The Law of Works takes over at this point, as we try to overcome our own tendency toward evil by being obedient to the commandments of God – as well as we understand them. We also become aware of our “conscience,” but instead of recognizing it as our divine nature and using it as a positive guideline, we tend to use it as a guilt mechanism.

We learn the principle of obedience and reward: if we set a goal and are obedient to the rules by which that goal is achieved, we will obtain the reward of arriving at the goal. Many good things are accomplished for ourselves and others by the “works” we are able to perform using this principle. We behave responsibly in comparison to our former childlike irresponsibility.

Our feelings on this level get in the way of our doing, so one of our methods of trying to overcome obstacles is to suppress our feelings. We do not have enough under-standing to separate our carnal feelings from our divine feelings, so whenever we consider our feelings of love, they are suppressed to a degree by our fear of our feelings of lust. Yet we know, in our minds, that love is one of the things necessary to a positive and happy existence.

Our intellects can find explanations for our behavior, and even methods to change behavior. Our minds can discover reasonable explanations for the symbolisms of God which previously were mysteries to us. “The tree of life” and the “living water” are translated to become the Love of God, and we experience this love, partially, in our love of nature, our sensitive response to the arts and sciences, our successful personal relationships, and our undeniable spiritual experiences with God. The “lake of fire and brimstone” becomes a real happening too, which is experienced in our struggle to free our divine aspirations from the evil in us which damns us frombeing what we want to be.

Under the principles of the Law of Works, we feel personally responsible for our own behavior. We are self-righteous and self-condemning. We are justified in taking the reward for our good behavior, and we are justified in punishing others for their bad behavior. We can live with the concept of “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.” As far as our own bad behavior is concerned, if we recognize it as being bad, we are wracked with guilt and weighed down by the burden of repentance – often manifested as depression. Our pride in our own works tells us that “repentance” means to overcome our wickedness by our own power. Our bout with opposition is a physical battle to willfully control ourself. It is something of an ego trip. To rely very much on God is looked upon as a sign of our own weakness. We resist God. We may draw near to Them with our lips, but our hearts are far from Them. We do not really worship God; we worship and glorify ourselves in the name of God. In fact we cannot perceive God to be more than our knowledge convinces us that we are. Consequently, God’s behavior in this law is to withdraw Their influence in direct proportion to our choice to worship ourselves. They make Themselves manifest to us or come to our aid only when we exercise our free will and call upon God in faith.

In this law though, it is very difficult for us to humble ourselves to the place where our faith allows God to intervene in our behalf. Our faith is manifest primarily by our doing. We measure faith by visible works. We have to prove that we have faith by our actual physical behavior, and we require God to prove His (Their) existence by His actual physical behavior. In order for us to believe that we had enough faith to move a mountain, a mountain would have to physically be transferred from one place to another place in a manner which we could see with our eyes and record with statistics. In this law we do not let God have much power which we ourselves do not have as either a provable fact or an attainable possibility. Our faith is not really in God, but in ourself, and so becomes a force which motivates us to work harder.

Our intellects are able to reason out intelligently a lot of things about God: If we are made in His image and we have bodies, parts and passions, then He must have a body, parts and passions too. If we were made male and female in His? image, then God might be male and female too. Our own experience and the evidence from others’ testimonies prove that He (She?) does answer prayers. Numerous written records give evidence that Jesus Christ did live and that He was a great teacher –
even that he was (well might have been) resurrected (what that means is open to conjecture). Statistics prove that what Jesus taught really works. Etc. God is a provable theory in our store of knowledge. They are not a living reality. Our pride
in our own knowledge, in our own obedience to law, and in our own works does not allow us to need God very much or to acknowledge God’s real power.

Most organized religions abide chiefly in the Law of Obedience, where teaching fear of punishment and hope of reward allows the leaders to keep control. Academia abides there too, being obedient to the laws of reason, proof and mind power.

The time may come when we find that intellectual knowledge is not enough for us, that even though our mind is packed with information, our heart is not content. Some of the symptoms of this yearning for more enlightenment are: We are lonely and feel alienated from God and from our fellowmen. We feel unloved and unlovable. We recognize that even when we are doing all we can do to repent of our sins, we cannot undo the sins nor repair the damage the sins have caused. We see that in spite of all our working and toiling and trying, we are not really any closer to God than when we came into the Law of Obedience and Sacrifice; we have just had enough experience to be wiser. We begin to ask different questions – “Am I really being obedient to all of God’s laws? What have I really sacrificed?”

We start to recognize that there is a difference between the LETTER of God’s law and the SPIRIT of that law. The taste of our lifestyle becomes stale and flat, as we realize that the things which we are able to accomplish by our obedience to the letter of the law and by virtue of our intelligent use of knowledge, are not the things that really matter in our relationship with God, or in our relationship with our neighbors, or in our relationship with our own self. We realize that our sacrifices have been only superficial – making monetary donations to charity; going to church instead of sleeping or playing; baking cookies for a sick neighbor; being late to the movie because we helped somebody in a stalled car. We have become wise and honest enough to admit that superficial sacrifices are not “the acceptable sacrifice,” because they are not really sacrifices at all. They are works with built-in rewards. We wonder how it would be possible to make an honest sacrifice.

The acceptable sacrifice is symbolically called “a broken heart and a contrite spirit.” The happenings which occur inside of us to make that symbolism alive with meaning are: (1) We dare acknowledge feelings to be an important reality, and we break down and sacrifice to God, in faith, the protective walls we have built around our heart as we struggled to overcome the world” by our own effort – so that our heart is open to RECEIVE the Lord. (2) We sacrifice our ego, by admitting there are things we cannot do, there are things about ourselves that we do not understand. We open our spirit to RECEIVE as a living reality the gift of the Holy Ghost, the first comforter.
(3) We acknowledge that God can do things we can’t do, and we ask God for help.

When we have made this acceptable sacrifice, we are born again, by the grace of God, into the next level of law, the Law of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the law of the heart, the law of the spirit. The law of mercy.

The Law of the Gospel of Jesus Christ
(Sanctification)

This is the law which Jesus Christ brought to the world. It is the law by which He fulfilled the Law of Moses. It is the law in which our old carnal nature can be made new in Christ. It is the place where Christ’s atoning sacrifice becomes a personalized reality. In this law we feel the relief of being freed from our sins and the peace of being forgiven of them. It is the law where we are able to understand our knowledge and so use it more beneficially. It is the law where we acknowledge that it is by GRACE we are saved, after all we can do.

On this level of law all our knowledge is translated into feeling and becomes alive in our awareness. The Lord, Himself, becomes our translator. The symbolic “Tree of Life, which our mind knows to be the Love of God, now becomes a feeling inside us. We partake of its fruit. We are able to feel God’s unconditional love for us. We become happily bewildered recipients of the grace of God.

Our knowledge convinces us that we are totally unworthy to be loved with such magnificent passion. Even though we have done all we can do, we have not done anything which could be remotely interpreted as having earned that love. It is an unmerited gift. As we begin to get accustomed to the warmth of bathing in the Lord’s love, we recognize another overwhelming feeling surging up inside s/. It is our love for the Lord. “We love Him because He first loved us!”

We are now able to use our knowledge freely, as a tool, rather than being bound by its limitations. We are free to understand that God, being perfect, could not love us with such perfect love unless we also had the potential to be perfect. Almost as soon as we are aware that we have sacrificed our ego (our proud carnal nature), the Lord of love performs in us the miracle of letting us see our divine nature as a possible reality. He gives us a new life for the old one. Our security in our knowledge is replaced with security in our goodness. This is a healing and comforting restoration. We begin to have experiences in which the goodness of our divine nature is a greater reality for us than the guilt and fear of our carnal nature. This greater understanding of ourself lets us look with hope to see the goodness in others. Our “works” become the works of Christ, motivated by unselfishness rather than hope of reward.

While in the state of innocence we do not feel accountable at all, and in the state of works we feel accountable only to ourselves, in the state of grace we feel totally accountable to God. We know God is greater than we are, and we know why. We stand in awe of Their power and beauty, not with a feeling of innocent fear, but with a feeling of knowledgeable gratitude. We feel God’s presence as a life-giving force inside us, and we rejoice in the grace which allows us to feel so blessed even while we are still behaving in the patterns of our fallen nature and know we are not “worthy” of such grace. The Lord then teaches us His definition of worthy – and suddenly we FEEL worthy; we feel of worth to the Lord, worth His Life!

The joy of feeling new and clean and good is so wonderful that for a time we become zealots crying to the world, “See! See! See what God can do!” Of course the miracle which has happened inside us is not visible to the world, so our cries are in vain. The world becomes our opposition. “Hell” is now experienced from outside ourself. We are at peace with God, but at war with the world. We are “in the world, but not of the world.”

Faith on this level of law is a very peaceful force. We are able to trust the Lord with all the inner burdens which had previously weighed us down with guilt and fear and worry and frustration and emotional instability. We have confidence in God’s power to help us, in Their willingness to help us, and in Their wisdom to help us in Their ways, even though we do not understand all Their ways. Our faith is truly in God. We feel God in us by means of the Second Comforter, Jesus Christ.

It is comfortable and peaceful to abide in the Law of Grace. Even though we may be persecuted by the world (people in lesser laws), we have a sure inner sanctuary with the Lord. In this place of peace the old wounds which have caused us to be defensive and hard-hearted are being healed by Him, at the same time He is helping us to honestly examine the heart of our spiritual self, thus revealing to us our divine nature.
Because the Lord has sanctified us with His love, we dare FEEL enough to acknowledge our own love-needs instead of suppressing them. We begin to know what love really is – having experienced the Love of God – and we are no longer ashamed or afraid of our needs to love and be loved.

We see and we understand and we feel the whole force of Satan’s wicked world fighting against love, and twisting every good thing into evil. And we find ourself once again with a broken heart. This time it is not because of our own pain we are troubled, but because of the pain and perversion in the whole world. We see how ineffectual are all man’s attempts to fight poverty, prejudice, corruption, ignorance, inequality, sickness and death. Our hearts convince us that only the Love of God which has healed us can also heal the agonized world. We yearn to be instruments through whom the love of Christ can flow as a blessing to others. And so by our own choice, we are born yet again into a new law, the Law of Love.

The Law of Consecration and Love
(Purification)

Jesus said, “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it: Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”

In the Law of Love all the laws of God are made plain and pure.

“Charity never faileth. But whether there be prophecies they shall fail, whether there be tongues they shall cease; whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away. Foe all things must fail. But Charity is the pure love of Christ, and it endureth forever; and whoso is found possessed of it at the last day, it shall be well with him. Wherefore, my beloved, pray unto the Father with all the energy of heart, that ye may be filled with this love, which He hath bestowed upon all who are true followers of his Son, Jesus Christ; that ye may become the sons and daughters of God; that when He shall appear we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is; that we may have this hope; that we may be purified even as He is pure.”

These are beautiful words, attributed to Paul in the Bible and/or Mormon in the Book of Mormon, testifying of the purification that occurs in the Law of Love. Everything which could precipitate confusion or opposition is done away, and everything which allows love to abide is quickened and made alive! “Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low; and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places plain,” are Isaiah’s symbolic ways of saying that opposition ceases when the Law of Love is fulfilled. Evil is replaced by good.

While all the other laws provide methods and ways for our becoming, the Law of Love provides the environment for our being all that it is possible for us to be. When we are purified by God to a full endowment in the Law of Love, we HAVE BECOME. We ARE the sons and daughters of God, true followers of Jesus Christ. We see Him as He is because we are like Him. The feelings which came alive in us in the Law of Grace are refined and purified into a sure place of righteousness. When we feel something is right, it is right. We know the truth, and we are free in the truth, because we are the truth. Our divine nature, our godliness, is our only reality, and in that goodness we stand with God against evil.

If this miracle of purification occurs in us while we are still mortals living in the environment of opposition, we do indeed become pilgrims in a strange land. We stand surely in our place with God on the side of righteousness, so the opposition cannot hurt us in an eternal sense. We have “endured to the end” – God being the beginning and the end.

However, our physical body is still very much in the world, and not being like the world, we will be subject to rejection and persecution, as was Christ in the world. God’s abiding love sustains us through whatever pain he world inflicts upon us.

In the Law of Love we are not accountable to anybody. We are One with God. We think, feel and move in complete harmony with Them. We worship God as Christ does – giving Them all the honor, all the power, all the glory, and acknowledging Them as Head of the Kingdom. At the same time we know and feel and are part of Their power and glory. We have consecrated our will and our Being to God, and we are quickened with the will and Being of God. We are in the Father-Mother, having given ourself to Them in love, even as the Father-Mother are in us, having given Themselves to us in love.

We do consecrate ourself to God – not in symbolic idolatry, nor blind obedience, nor fearful submission – but with full knowledge of all its implications, with clear understanding of its commitments and responsibilities, with the total freedom of having made an intelligent, heart-felt choice. We give God our will, our intelligence, our being, because we love Them with all our heart, mind and soul. That is all we have to give, and we give it for the only acceptable reason – Love. God gives us all that They have to give – Their glory, power, truth, beauty, light, joy – Their Love!

Our relationships with one another in the Law of Love are so glorious that we cannot truly comprehend such joy here in mortality, except as the Lord performs in us the miracle of quickening us with an infinite experience in loving someone purely. When there is no lust, no opposition, no perversion in our love, relationships between people provide the ultimate experience of fulfillment and joy. When we are purified by God we will automatically abide the order of God. In the flawless design of the Law of Love, purified beings do not desire a sexual relationship with anyone except the husband or wife given to them by God. Therefore we are free to explore every other facet of one another’s personality without ever being trapped or damned by feelings of lust. We love freely and purely. We are able to give all of our uniqueness to another and receive all of his or her uniqueness and rejoice in the new creation of our togetherness. Everyone who is abiding the Law of Love has perfect hope for infinite eternal, total fulfillment, so there is no jealousy or competition.

Progress in the Law of Love is creating. We are – so we create. Once we have become like God, there is no place for us to go in the direction of becoming. When we have received all the glory of God, then we do something with it. Our energy (God’s energy in us combined with our own unique personal-intelligence energy) flows outward, responding, quickening, creating, blessing. In the Law of Love, faith is an assurance within us of our ability to create, to actually do the works of God. Faith becomes the moving force behind our actions and creations.

THE GOD I KNOW Chapter Nine

2009-12-13T14:38:00.000-07:00

THE GOD I KNOW

Chapter Nine

Knowing Good and Evil
(The Battle of Armageddon)

Before mortality, when we were living as beings of spirit, when our spiritual self was our only reality, our relationships with one another, and even with God, were comparatively sterile. All our experience was good, but our ability to appreciate its goodness was limited by our lack of real comprehension of anything else. Our Heavenly Father and Heavenly Mother and whatever other teachers were part of our circumstance, taught us principles of truth. They told us about good and evil, about light and darkness, about progress and degeneration. Our environment might be likened to that of the innocent young who are going to school where they are exposed to a broad curriculum. Each of us learned according to his unique intelligence. The things we are drawn to here in mortality – the areas of our special talents and particular interests – are probably the same areas we gravitated toward in our spiritual becoming.

There were some differences between our schooling there and our schooling here. There we learned about opposition and evil. Here we experience them. There we accepted on faith that evil exists. Here we accept on faith that God exists. There we lived under a law where we were part of only goodness, truth and beauty. We did not have to struggle with opposition. Our only struggle was to comprehend what we were experiencing; and that was the struggle which finally caused us to choose to progress into the dimension of mortality and live under a law where we could learn from our own experience to comprehend the difference between good and evil.

As mortals we don’t remember those details. But God’s gift of free agency does allow
us to make choices which help us truly comprehend what we learned of goodness in the spirit world. The fragile delicacy of a flower may be comprehended with new awe and joy, because we are aware that it can be destroyed. The poignant beauty of a song may reach our ears with new aliveness and new gratitude, because we have known the silence of pain and death. We may run into the fragrant wind, drinking it into our being with desperately glad abandon, because our own body has felt the sickness of immobility and our lungs have hurt for the breath of life. We learn to take nothing for granted. Fully comprehending the opposite of God’s light, we can choose to be alive in the holiness of God’s truth, finally comprehending who we are in relationship to God.

All influences which are part of our awareness may take on greater meaning for us; but the most important reason it is necessary for us to learn the difference between good and evil is so that we can understand each other and live together in peace and harmony. It is our perfection in human relations that counts the most in becoming like the Gods.

In the spirit world we were neither selfish nor unselfish. The absence of selfishness prevented us from hurting one another, but the absence of unselfishness prevented us from knowing one another deeply enough to comprehend a fullness of love. The most valuable result of our being good in mortality is that we know how someone else feels when he feels good. Likewise our experiences with pain and sorrow make it possible for us to empathize with another’s afflictions. Our experiences with sin acquaint us with the deep needs for forgiveness that other sinners feel. Our need to be understood finds a kinetic relationship with all people’s need to be understood.

As we learn to know ourselves better as a result of our successes and our mistakes, we also learn to know everybody better and to recognize ourself in others. Consequently there begins to be a foreseeable possibility of becoming of one heart and one mind with them.

As we love others in mortality, faced always with the opposition of lust, and continually hurt by it, we come to know what love really is. We have enough brief moments of soul-communion – in reality, in fantasy, or in vicarious observation – that our hearts are kindled with the yearning awareness of the possibilities in loving and being loved. Always the dream is shattered by someone’s carnality before it reaches fruition, and we reconcile ourselves to less and less of the envisioned perfect love. But our experience convinces us what love is not. And our spirit remembers what love IS.

The actual working plan of mortality is that our divine nature, our godliness, is hidden and suppressed by the costume of our carnal nature. Deep inside our heart is an urgent burning which insists ever more convincingly, as we respond to good and evil, that there is more to us than we can see. As we struggle to discover what it is – WHO we really are – the truths we learn free us to remember all of the goodness and beauty of our spirit, but in the new dimension of a physical body which has experienced both good and evil and has chosen between them. As the divine in us emerges,, it has the added power of godliness which has felt selfishness and unselfishness, which has distinguished between love and lust, which knows good and evil.

As we choose good unselfishness love, our feelings about others are softened with the remembrance of our own pain, and mellowed with the tenderness of our own longing. Then God can quicken us to love unconditionally, purely. We, freed from lust, are no longer instruments of opposition, but instruments of God’s peace. We have won the battle.

THE GOD I KNOW Chapter Eight

2009-11-13T16:50:00.000-07:00

THE GOD I KNOW

Chapter Eight

Free Agency and Prayer

It is against the law of free agency for the God I know to make our choices. They will not do it. Whenever we pray asking that God make a choice for us, the prayer is answered by allowing us to struggle until we can answer it for ourself. While God sees us as divine, They know we don’t see ourselves that way. They know the only way we will be able to see our divine natures is by using our free agency to choose what is carnal in us and what is divine – what we want to keep and what we want to discard. We can’t tap into God’s power with prayers which would rob us of our free agency or others of their free agency.

God will not answer the following type of prayer: “My school teacher and my Sunday School teacher are telling me two different things – which one should I believe?” or “I love both Richard and Tim -- which one should I marry?” or “Please make John under-stand me.”

These prayers would place on God the responsibility of making choices which determine the course of our lives. The purpose of mortality is to teach us the differences between good and evil. We learn those differences as we experience the consequences of our personal choices. If we could have learned the difference by simply asking God, there would have been no need for mortality.

At birth we are ignorant of both good and evil. Our environment introduces us to some of both, but does not necessarily differentiate accurately between truth and error, right and wrong. God’s gift of free agency gives us the right and the RESPONSIBILITY to be selective about what we accept and reject. If God chose for us, we would be robbed of the responsibility inherent in freedom. And we would not grow.

The only thing God can do, when we pray a prayer relinquishing our free agency, is let us struggle within ourself until we make a decision that is in harmony with our current knowledge. If most of our knowledge has to do with temporal, carnal understanding, we will be most comfortable making a choice that lets us abide the carnal laws upon which we are basing our decision. If our search for truth has drawn us into knowledge of divine wisdom, we will be more comfortable making a choice which allows us to abide those divine laws which we understand.

At any point of decision, if we make a carnal choice, we will be further away from God and from the truth of our divine nature. If we compromise two contradictory points of view so we can avoid changing, our knowledge will remain static. If we take a stand with our divine nature, God can confirm our choice as being harmonious with divine truth, and can endow us with a more sure knowledge of who we really are.

Choice and Change

Making a new choice will result in change, and changing is not easy.
Carnal man will try to avoid change until it is forced upon him, and then will resist it up to the point where accepting it becomes easier. Satan wins a lot of battles using these facts of carnal man’s laziness.

Divine man’s need, however, is to become – to be freed from the shackles that chain him to carnality – to grow and progress – to CHANGE from a lesser being to a greater being. The price he is required to pay for these changes is never too high, because with each new truth he embraces, he is freed to comprehend more truth. His decisions to change and his reasons for desiring change are continually based upon greater knowledge.

One of the most overwhelmingly humbling mysteries of the love of God is that it is God’s will for our divine will to be accomplished. In the infinite wisdom of God’s caring about each individual intelligence, God knows how to direct each of us to the fulfilling of his/her greatest potential. God knows what we need. The sooner we use our free agency to ask for help in ways They CAN help, the sooner we will reach our potential.

While it is fruitless for us to pray that God will make choices for us, it is vital to our becoming that we dare the possibility of change by choosing to pray prayers that will allow God to help us.

It is important to realize that if we don’t want to change, we will be left on our own. Satan will leave us alone because mortals are fallen and already in his domain. God will leave us alone because They honor our free agency. If we do want to change, if something inside us is not content with the status quo, we will certainly be subject to both forces.

Satan has no scruples about how he will influence us. He does not pay any attention to free agency. His methods are force and deceit. I’ve often wondered if Satan has our connections to God wire-tapped, because it seems that, if in our ignorance we pray prayers that ask God to ignore our free agency, Satan answers them with whatever response he sees as being potentially most destructive to our divine nature and most appealing to our carnal nature. We need to learn wisdom in how we pray and in how we listen for answers, so we will be able to discern whom our answers come from. Otherwise we may be deceived into thinking that good is evil and evil is good. Satan lets us imagine his answers are God’s answers. God continues to honor our freedom of choice, sincerely hoping that we will eventually be true to our divine nature and reach out in prayers which They can answer.

God can inspire us with answers to such prayers as: “Please help me understand more clearly Your concept of truth.” “What is the order of God?: How do you love me?” God can reinforce our divine self-confidence if we pray, “Help me to make this choice in harmony with Thy will.” “Please give me eyes that see, ears that hear and a heart that understands Your ways.” “Bless me with wisdom.” “Show me the way.”
Even when we are saying prayers which God can answer while still honoring our free agency, we may wonder whether the answers we receive come from God, or whether we are telling ourselves the answers we want to hear, or whether we are being deceived by Satan. These are valid concerns. God doesn’t often turn on flashing lights which announce “THIS IS GOD SPEAKING!” We must be alert to subtler forms of communication – a warmth in the heart, a surge of joy as an idea forms in our mind, a sensation of light flowing through us. If we believe that the Holy Ghost is our own divine nature, and if we are in tune with that spirit, we can trust that the answers which come from ourself are the same answers God would give. If we are principally in tune with our carnal nature, it is quite likely that we will be deceived both by Satan and by ourselves. Even in our prayers we will rationalize and blame, rather than taking responsibility for our own behavior.

Some of the biggest contradictions we face are created because our lack of knowledge causes us to believe that we have to somehow reconcile what we have personally experienced of the truth of God with what we have been told is true by fallen men. We don’t have to do that. We do have the responsibility to separate the evil from the good, reject the evil and embrace the good. When we can see a principle of God’s truth clearly enough to freely choose it, God quickens us with a confirmation of rightness which allows us to stand in a sure place of truth where Satan (or misguided men) have no more power to deceive us in that principle.

2009-11-11T11:24:00.000-07:00

2009-11-09T10:03:00.000-07:00

THE GOD I KNOW Chapter Eight

2009-11-09T09:55:00.001-07:00

THE GOD I KNOW Chapter Seven

2009-10-26T19:27:00.000-06:00

The Purification of Passion

The God I know is a being of great passion. Their love for each other and for us is alive and warm and exciting. The passion which flames in Them draws to itself all good, all beauty, all light, all truth, all joy – from which perfect ingredients They create Love-Energy. Because They see US as good and beautiful, They hold OUR beauty to Them-selves. Our goodness is always the living, passionate reality for God. Our evil, or carnality, as far as God is concerned, is a theatrical mask. Our lives in mortality are a drama which They watch through the passion of Their own deeply-felt laughter and tears, as They live with us the playing out of our lives through the passion of our laughter and tears.

As mortals in this drama we experience passion two contradictory ways. On the one hand, we feel passion as the motivation for our loving, worshipful, creative or otherwise constructive actions; and on the other hand, we feel passion as the motivation for our hateful, jealous, angry, greedy or otherwise destructive actions. We learn passions, both good and bad, from our environment. Our divine nature (which is our only nature at birth) responds positively to our good experiences. Our carnal nature develops as we respond with pain to bad experiences. We learn to feel negative passions by being hurt, and we instinctively turn against the people who have hurt us, not being able to separate the people from the deeds. It takes the healing of God before we can feel deep inside the knowledge that we are against evil, not against people.

Until we receive that gift from God, we justify our carnal passions and reconcile ourselves to the oppositional turmoil of envy, anger, jealousy, competition, greed, pride, etc. All these negatively passionate feelings can be categorized as “lust” – lust for power, fame, selfish pleasures, riches, sexual stimulation, revenge, etc. Lust becomes the all-encompassing negative passion. It is the opposite of Love, which is the all-encompassing positive passion.

If we would have our passions purified, so that they are harmonious with God’s passions, we must begin by learning the difference between divine man and carnal man, the difference between unselfishness and selfishness, and the difference between love and lust – which technically are the same differences.

Our carnal natures are completely selfish. Self-preservation is the first law of carnal man. To surive at whatever cost is his dominant instinct. This drive puts everyone else in the world in competition with ME, “Number One.” At the same time nobody wants to survive alone. Carnal man lusts after erotic pleasure with the opposite sex. The drive for sexual gratification is close to the survival drive in its intensity. Since both drives in the carnal man are entirely selfish, he is always in competition for supremacy with those he pretends to “love.” Carnal man is not capable of pure love. His behavior towards others is always motivated by the greedy attitude, “What’s in it for me?” The big need in his awareness is to satisfy Number One with the greatest degree of thrill and excitement, at the expense of whoever is available.

The more we choose to be carnal, the more sure it is that selfishness will dominate our relationships with others, and the more sure it is that what we feel for them will be lust, not love. Our selfish carnal natures feel more secure when others are less secure. Carnality precipitates quarrels, violence, cruelty, abuse and ugliness in our relationships, because we use others to meet our own selfish ends. We do not comprehend love.

It is the nature of our divine self to desire to be a contributing part of God’s creations. Our divine energy naturally radiates out to others; our divine heart cares about others; our divine yearning is to share with others and find happiness with them.

It is in our divine nature that we find the ability to keep Christ’s injunction to love God, ourselves and our neighbors. God is the Source of the Energy which is Love. In order for this energy to remain pure, it must flow in an unbroken circle – from God to Christ, through Christ to us, through us back to God. If we break the circle (God and Christ will NOT break it) the love is no longer pure.

As John said, (I John 4:19) “We love God because He (They) first loved us.” We learn to love purely by RECEIVING Their love, by opening the door of our divine nature and letting it in.

Receiving God’s love for us is the first step in loving ourselves purely. As God’s love pours through us, we are quickened with a light which enables us to see ourselves reflected in God’s eyes – to see ourselves as God sees us. We are able to love this image of ourselves with pure love. As we return the love to God with our gratitude, the circle remains whole, the love remains pure.

In order to love others purely, we will always remember to glorify God as the Source of Love and the purifier of our passions. When the person we love does this, the circle of love remains unbroken and the love relationship remains holy and in order. If he or she does not glorify God, the circle is broken for that person, but remains whole for us as long as we do acknowledge God’s power in our love.

In our divine natures we are all good, but we are not all the same. As we learn to know our own unique goodness by honestly separating what we desire to be from what we desire to reject, we can also see what is good in other people that we would like to be part of. Our own goodness increases as we come to know others and embrace their goodness. When we love people, we offer them our goodness. If they receive it, their own goodness is increased by our love, and our goodness is increased by their love.

All the righteous passions which we experience are felt through our divine natures. While carnal man can experience only counterfeits of love, divine man is aware of and responsive to real love, the pure love which comes from God. Much of the passion which we experience in mortality is a part of this love.

Because we have come to define passion in terms of the pain we have experienced as a result of the lusts of others and our own lusts, part of our carnal inheritance is to fear passion. Religious leaders have used this fear as another whip to force us into their prescribed molds, and have taught for centuries that we must suppress our emotions and bridle our passions. But passion, by God’s definition and in Their behavior, is the moving force of love; so one of the consequences of our fearing passion is that we also fear to love with honest feeling. When we are thus stripped of feeling, there is no power left in love. It becomes a valueless pretense, better defined as “pity for the less fortunate, and idol-worship for the more successful.” By God’s definition pity and idol-worship have nothing to do with pure love. Those feelings motivate us to do good deeds for our own satisfaction – to have our feet licked by the pitiable or our heads patted by the enviable. They are carnal satisfactions, but they are not love.

Another consequence of denying ourselves the power of our own feelings by suppressing our passions is that we become blind to the power of God’s feelings, and we see God and “worship” God as we are (hard-hearted), and not as God is (open-hearted). This mistake allows us to justify the lusts in our own passion, because we judge God to be jealous, vengeful and cruel, as we are. The God I know does not have any of those attributes. They stand passionately against jealousy, vengeance and cruelty.

We find ourselves in an unhappy dilemma with regard to our passions. Shall we bridle them or let them run free?

We ARE cursed with the selfish passions of lust as part of our inheritance in the fallen world. But at the same time we ARE BLESSED with an inheritance from God which is just the opposite, the unselfish passions of pure love. We have built into us the capacity and the need to truly love and to be loved unconditionally.

Now the truth of the God I know is that They passionately want for us all the good things of the earth. They want us to be able to feel all the joy of righteous passion and none of the destruction of unrighteous passion. This can happen through the process of purifica-tion – and God, dear God, provided a Savior through whom our passions can be purified.

Jesus Christ, too, loves us with great passion. It is this passion which moved Him to give His life for us. His experience in the Garden of Gethsemane was the passion of loving us so much that He deliberately chose to feel all the pain mankind suffers as consequence of sin. Therefore, Christ knows us inside and out. When we are feeling our own pain, when we are torn apart by our own imperfections, He is not ignorant of what we are going through. He knows our pain and our passion. He felt it in Gethsemane and He feels it with us as we are experiencing it. He has the power to use His passions perfectly and if we turn to Him, He can heal us. When we reach out to Christ in repentance (godly sorrow for our sins), He touches our hearts with perfect empathy and we are made whole.

It works this way: when we feel a carnal passion such as hatred (or any other negative passion) some of its force is directed toward the person we hate, so that he may – or may not, if he is insensitive – feel the discomfort of our hostility; most of its force, however, remains inside us as a poison which insidiously distorts our perceptions and works against US. We hurt others with unkind and unreasonable behavior. The more people we hurt, the more we hate. All the energy of our passion is used up in destruction.

When we turn to Christ, His love in us opens our eyes and our hearts to a clearer understanding of our divine nature, and enables us to recognize that we truly do not hate any person. We hate something evil which we are feeling through their behavior, or perhaps through our own behavior -- bigotry maybe, or arrogance, or cruelty, or selfishness, or blindness, or jealousy. The truth is that we want to reject the negative things which are brought to our attention by the ugly behavior of others (or ourself), and we want to take into ourself the positive things which are brought to our awareness by the beautiful behavior we witness.

The miracle occurs when we see clearly that we truly want to stand against evil -- in ourself and others; and we truly want to embrace good – in ourself and others. By the power of Christ’s passionate love for us, we are quickened to greater awareness of our divine nature, so that we are able to feel the energy of our passion as a constructive power. Instead of hating ourself or others, our passion will be directed against hatred itself, which is an unembodied evil. When by the grace of God we can feel to separate ourself from the hatred, it becomes impossible for us to hurt anyone with it. We reject it with the same impersonal rejection we would feel if a drug to which we were allergic were offered to us. We would simply know that it was something we could not tolerate, and it would become extinct in our consideration. It would be dead to us.

As soon as hatred becomes dead, all the passion we would have expended in keeping it alive, is freed and can be used constructively. We do not destroy hatred or lust or jealousy, etc. as God does not destroy evil. But it becomes non-existent as a feeling inside of us. The passion we do feel is love. We will stand with love and with God against hatred (or any other evil) because our feelings inside are alive with good and constructive passions.

Christ purifies our passions by the act of experiencing our feelings with us, taking them into Himself and returning them to us free from perversion. Our passions which would destroy are cleansed by His passionate love, and transformed into passions which build, uplift, create and heal. This is the miracle of purification.

THE GOD I KNOW Chapter Six

2009-10-26T19:25:00.000-06:00

The Ten Wisdom-Laden Counsels (Commandments?) of the God I Know

All of the laws of the God I know are laws of magnificent beauty and harmony. The God I know doesn’t command us to do anything. They give us wise counsel, which we have the freedom to use or reject. Since Moses came down off the mountain, however, his people started using the word commandment – and churches still use it as a means of judgment and control. The “Ten Commandments,” understood as God’s heart intended them, are words of grace and comfort.

Thou shalt have no other gods before me.

God’s meaning in this instruction is, “Nobody loves you as much as I do. Nobody in your mortal experience will be able to love you purely, because love has been perverted in the Fall. If you worship (depend on, trust, give your allegiance to) anyone except me, you will be hurt and disappointed. Nobody in the world will believe in your goodness as I do, nor see the beautiful person I see in you. I am the only one who can reveal your true self to you and bring you to peace and joy. Let me be your God, so I can do that for you.”

This law in our scriptures is preceded by a reminder of how God delivered the children of Israel from the Egyptians. Its implications, via man’s (Satan’s) perversions, indoctrinate us with the concept that: “God has used cruel and destructive powers to rescue us from the Egyptians – or the Romans or the slave-holders, or the Nazis, etc. If we don’t worship Him, He will turn on us with those same powers and destroy us. We must fear this jealous God.”

It is true that God is capable of performing what we call “miracles” (meaning we don’t know how they are accomplished). God has used unfathomable powers many times in the world’s history to keep a reasonable balance between good and evil, in order that we might have a fair chance. It is not true that God’s reason for coming to our rescue is so that They can be tyrants ruling over us or so that we will feel obligated to Them. Their reason is that They love us and want us to be free. Even as They perform miracles in our behalf, They give us the freedom to choose whether we will thank Them and acknow-ledge Their hand in our blessings, or ignore Them and take the glory to ourselves.

In this commandment the Lord is also saying, “Satan will tempt you as he did me, to worship the gods of his world – riches, fame and dictatorial power. He will promise them to you and he will deliver them to you, if you are willing to deny your divine nature and to embrace evil, lust, selfishness and carnality. Because I understand you, I know this choice will bring you pain and loneliness and grief. Let the power of my love protect you from the power of evil. Choose me to be your God.”

Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image.

God meant: “You are in the world experiencing opposition, separated from my physical presence. Sometimes in your loneliness and fear and lack of faith you will think to find comfort by making an image which you can see to worship. You will actually be searching for something to give you enough strength to continue your struggle. Anything you, a fallen mortal, can make for that purpose will be lifeless, empty and unable to give you what you need. The pure love of Christ is the only power which can help you. I, who am alive and caring and feeling, am the source of the love-energy which can quicken your inner being to be vibrantly alive and function with meaningful purpose. Do not waste your time with dead graven images. Come to me for life.”

Mortals have been made to feel: “God is very jealous. If you don’t worship Him and Him alone, He will punish you and your children and their children.” We know from experience that the sins of the parents are visited on the children. That is part of the fact of heredity and environment. It doesn’t happen because God is jealous or cruel. It happens because man is fallen and cannot prevent the passing on to his children of his own “idols.”

Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain.

God meant: “My ability to help you is determined by your sincere desire for my help.
If you do not freely choose me with your heart, the words of your mouth, when you call upon my name, are to no avail. If you use my name synonymously with or to describe anything which is opposite to what I truly AM, you are negating the power of love in your own life and defeating yourself. Call upon me in love, so that in my response I will be able to let you feel the power of my love for you.”

Man has added to this simple law his own idea that: “God will find you guilty of sin and will punish you for swearing. He is vindictive and will make you pay a price for defiling His name.” God does not intend to punish us for taking His name in vain. He does not need to defend it. Our use of it cannot change what He-She IS. But how we use it determines whether or not They can be a power in our lives. It is a plain fact of which God is aware, that when we do take God’s name in vain, we are freely choosing to reject Them, for which we will suffer the consequence of Them being unable to be part of us.
It is as true for those who “pray” thoughtlessly using God’s name, as for those who blaspheme the name of God, that they cannot be recipients of the strength of God which is part of those who use God’s name with love and joy and reverence.

Keep the Sabbath day holy.

God meant: “It is hard for me to be separated from all of you whom I love, and to watch you working and struggling against opposition. I realize that the curse of Adam is hard to bear. One day in seven I would like to lift that curse for you and let you rest in my peace. Let’s spend that day together communing in the spirit, singing praises and rejoicing in our love for one another. I need to know you remember me, and you need the strength with which I can sustain you. Our closeness on the Sabbath will abide through the week, enhancing the beauty of our daily communications and making every day more holy.”

Fallen man has perverted this loving invitation into a burden by misinterpreting it too. We are told: “You are bad if you don’t go to church on Sunday, and you are bad if on Sunday you . . . “ and there is a long list of things for us to be afraid of doing, and an equally long list of penalties if we break these man-made rules. People become so guilt-ridden because they can’t keep all these rules, that they ignore the Sabbath day entirely, or else become so busily self-righteous in keeping the letter of the man-made laws that they cannot keep the spirit of love which God offers. One vicious-circle result of man’s perversion of this law is that even in church meetings, which are supposedly held to worship God and commune with Them, a great deal of time is spent condemning us for our sins and exhorting us to keep men’s laws or be punished. This pulls us even further away from the love of God and from the peaceful feeling which should hallow the Sabbath.

Honor Thy Father and Thy Mother

God gave this law with a double meaning. It means: “Remember the Father and Mother of your spirits, who love you with perfect unconditional love . . . and . . . remember the father and mother of your physical bodies who, because they are fallen, love you imper-fectly, but who gave you opportunity for mortal existence. They were each necessary to your becoming YOU, and so are part of you. If you acknowledge them with gratitude, your days will be happier and more filled with love.”

Here in mortality none of us has perfect parents. Parent-child relationships run the gamut from very good to very bad. In good relationships honoring our parents comes naturally. However, often our parents are responsible for much of the opposition in our lives, and it is hard for us to honor them in the sense of approving of and sustaining their imperfect-tions. That isn’t what God is suggesting we do. God understands that love begets love, and that it takes a special endowment from the Lord for us to be able to feel honest love
for our parents unless we feel honest love from them. God is asking us to respect our earthly father and mother as important people in our lives and to honor their right to be themselves. God knows that if we feel good about our parents, it is easier to feel good about ourselves. If we try to see their divine natures we will be able to accept them as valuable people and to appreciate the many positive contributions they make in our lives.

Thou Shalt Not Kill

God is saying, “Life is a sacred gift. Each person has the right to the full measure of his life. No person has the right to cut off life.” The God I know is also saying that we do not have the right to intentionally hurt each other in any way, but that we should tenderly protect all that is good and beautiful. So often in the world we thoughtlessly crush the enthusiasm of a child, or break someone’s heart by our selfish carelessness.
God is saying it is wrong to kill another’s hope or his faith or his sensitive spirit. It is wrong to do anything which would cause another person to become defensive and build up protective walls which hide his divine beauty.

Thou Shalt Not Steal.
Thou Shalt Not Bear False Witness.
Thou Shalt Not Covet.

Put into the wording of the Law of Love, God is saying, “I give you all that I have because I love you, and it brings me joy. Do not take from each other, but give with love and you will be richer.
“I tell you only the truth, because I care about you and want you to trust me. Show each other that you care by telling the truth. This will engender trust, and trust will engender love and appreciation.
“I can see each one of you as a treasured and beautiful part of my experience. As I rejoice in your unique beauty, my life is enriched. Instead of coveting what is your neighbor’s, rejoice with him in it. This will bring you precious fulfillment.”

Since we became victims of the perversions which cause us to feel a need to compete with each other, many mortals have become ruthless in their “dog-eat-dog” tactics. Men have worded these laws defensively to protect us from each other’s carnal natures. If we were purified, we would automatically by nature be so concerned about one another’s comfort that these laws would be unnecessary. However, it is necessary under the Fall to have some deterrent to total selfishness. Because these laws are just, they have become part of the basis for those civil laws of men which are designed to protect our personal rights in the world.

Thou Shalt Not Commit Adultery.

God is really saying, “The ultimate love experience between a man and a woman is the holy of holies. It is the well-spring of life. It was, in your first experience with love, the power by which your Heavenly Father and Mother created your spiritual body. It is the power by which your earthly parents created your physical body. It is the power by which you may create bodies for other spirits of God. And it is the power by which it could be possible for you to create and people worlds of your own. Since in man-woman oneness is the key to continuance of life, inherent in this consummation is also the greatest responsibility in spiritual and physical relationships between men and women. Wherever you love, keeping this counsel will protect your love and will provide strength and power against evil. Outside of marriage, chastity will allow you to love freely with passionate response to the beauty of others and to their righteous needs. It will allow you to be of one heart and one mind with all whom you love. Within marriage, sexual fidelity will allow you to become bone of bone and flesh of flesh with one other person. That is the order of God. Love between a man and a woman is the most fragile of all powers, the most exquisitely beautiful, and the most easily twisted into opposition. Keep this sacred power pure by keeping its ultimate consummation in My order between husband and wife.”
God is telling us that Their own passionate love for us is, in us, a powerful force for good. Perverted by Satan to lust, it is a powerful force for evil. God is telling us that if we could refrain from adulterating the purity of love in any way, we would be free from lust and its evil consequences.

We have come to think of this “commandment” only in terms of committing sexual sin our of the order of marriage, and so we know it only as a restraining law. But to God, it has a much wider implication, a gloriously freeing concept. It encompasses Their desire that all love everywhere be allowed to be free from perversion, free from adulteration, free from having anything put into it that would make it less than perfect. It is a word of warning against hurting one another – but in a higher sense it is a word of hope in the possible reality of loving one another as God loves us – with peace and joy and perfect fulfillment, as we love in the order of God.

In God’s eyes, when a man and a woman take the vows of marriage, they are making a covenant to build together, by the complete joining of their energies, the perfect atmosphere (home) for the off-spring of their love. To God marriage is the ultimate relationship of creativity and responsibility, because it includes the life-renewing cycle. Therefore, until a man and woman are willing to make a commitment to one another which accepts all the responsibilities inherent in creating life, they do not have the right to unite sexually.

In the fallen world our best hope for giving our children an inheritance of security, love and happiness is in the context of marriage, with God as the acknowledged source of power.

TheGod I know understands that as we choose to keep sexual relations exclusive to marriage, all our relationships will have better possibility for fulfillment. The ultimate love experience between two people who are not married is the sharing of their unique intelligences and personalities. Their gift to one another is added light. If they err by lusting after one another’s bodies, they are caught in an insatiable trap where fulfillment is impossible and growth is damned. They miss knowing each other altogether and so are robbed of the light, love and joy with which their relationship could be radiantly alive.

If we could live the law “Thou shalt not commit adultery” as God understands it, we would have the freedom of loving each individual person in our lives with passionate closeness, as God loves us. We would be alive in love instead of afraid in lust. And we would also be eligible for the ultimate joy of complete fulfillment with one other person in holy marriage.

THE GOD I KNOW Chapter Five

2009-10-26T19:18:00.000-06:00

THE CONFLICT: DIVINE versus CARNAL

Even though Adam and Eve forgot their divine natures when they fell into mortality, God did not forget their divine natures. In fact, the God I know always and only sees us as divine. They see us as the beautiful, perfect individuals They created. Of course They recognize that we are living in a fallen state and that the reality of our existence is one of total opposition, but They see our carnal natures (the people we have become through heredity and environment) as part of the fallen world, not as part of us. They are aware of each of us as two separate people, the carnal and the divine; but in Their dealings with us, no matter how badly we behave, They continue to believe in the divine. Even though
our relationship with God is primarily carnal until we become aware of our own divinity, God’s relationship with us is always divine.

If we in our carnal weakness commit a sin, we may feel guilty and unworthy to ask God for anything, because we fear that God must surely be angry with us for sinning. The opposite is true. Rather than anger, God feels concern and empathy. They know that the reason for our sin is the curse of our carnality. They know we will sooner or later suffer painful consequences as a result of sinning, and They want to provide help, not punishment. They want to reinforce our divine self-image, so we will choose to let that be the reality which governs our behavior.

God understood all this in the planning stage of the world’s creation. They foresaw that we would need a way to transcend the evil inherent in mortality. They provided a Savior to fill that need. As has already been pointed out, Jesus Christ’s innate nature is to love, and His chosen purpose is to save us from evil. He is One with our Heavenly parents in that purpose – so much One that Christ can be included in the royal pronoun “They.”

In the beginning God the Father-Mother gave God the Son power over Satan in order to save God the Holy Ghost, and include us in Their Oneness.

Christ loves us so much that He voluntarily lived in mortality Himself, so that He could relate to our carnal feelings. He, by the power of His godliness, overcame the world. His suffering in Gethsemane was the passion of loving us so much that He felt the pain we feel when we sin. He died on the cross to cover those sins for us, so that we could be free from the pain of our own carnality if we accept His sacrifice. When we sin, God and Christ, instead of seeing our carnal nature which committed the crime, see our divine nature which is innocent of any crime. If we will let Him, if we will repent and turn to Him with knowledge that what we have done is against our divine desire, Christ can heal us from our guilt by letting us see ourselves at that moment as God sees us – free from sin, cleansed by His blood. He loves us that much. We worry about God forgiving us, when in truth God has not ever seen us as evil. God knows that what we need is to forgive ourselves. They know that nothing except the awareness of Their love can create in us that perfect peace which allows our divine nature to forgive our carnal nature. God wants us to feel that love. They are constantly pouring it out to us, hoping we will receive it.

While our reality in God’s eyes is our divine nature, we have to face the fact that our carnal natures are our own reality and Satan’s reality. Satan cannot see our divine natures. Everything he has to do with us relates only to our fallen natures, and so while most of the things he says are “true” in the sense of being the facts of the world we live in, they are opposite to God’s truth. Our carnal natures would do evil things. Our divine natures would not. Satan tries to reconcile us with our wickedness. God wants to assist us in believing in our own goodness. We are in the middle making the choices. We do have the free agency to decide whether we will be carnal or divine.

Unconditional Love and Free Agency

The God I know always loves us with unconditional love. That means that Their love is not dependent upon our behavior, but is an invariable constant. God is perfect. Their love is perfect. It is Their nature to love us and They are unchangeable in that nature. Nothing we can do, either good or bad, has any power to change God or to change the fact that the love They feel for each of us is a reality for Them. It is not always a reality for us because we do not always feel it. If it is our true desire to feel the love of God, we will be drawn by Them into the knowledge of the laws They live by, and into a renewing of our divine natures, so that it is possible for us to abide those laws.

The one law which God abides, and which we also abide because it is a fact of our existence, is the law of free agency. We do have to assume the responsibility of being free agents. That means that to be able to blame anyone except ourselves for the choices we make is a temporary comfort. Sooner or later the law of free agency demands that we acknowledge our own responsibility in the choosing of what we do, what we think, what we desire, who we become. Free agency requires that we decide which laws we will be obedient to, the carnal or the divine.

In mortality we were born into and do live in the presence of opposition under a carnal law, and it is our fallen nature to be obedient to laws which are contrary to God’s nature. These laws are sometimes called “survival instincts.” We are motivated to obey them by selfishness rather than by love. For this reason “natural (or fallen) man is an enemy to God.” Natural men are enemies to each other too. If we want to be friends with God and with each other, we have to be willing to live by the laws which are in harmony with God’s nature and with our own divine natures.

Because God knows we are facing opposition in the world, They especially want us to feel Their sustaining love and protection, and They try to give us the kind of help we need in every situation. As soon as mankind fell to the place where we were not in God’s presence and so could not always feel Their love, God came to our aid by offering us some concrete information about how we could feel Their love if we choose to. They gave us Heaven’s laws.

God does not require that we be obedient to these laws, but the law of free agency requires that we be obedient to our own eternal intelligence, our own “will.” If we go through the motions of being obedient to God against our own will, we are breaking the law of free agency and turning ourselves over to the manipulation of forces outside ourselves. The law God abides does not allow Them to manipulate us. It allows Them to open, when we knock of our own free will; to answer, when we ask of our own free will; and to help us find the good things which we of our own free will are seeking. The rules by which Satan functions are opposite to this. He is very anxious to manipulate us away from our true desires of heart and to force us to conform to his desires. It is his desire and function to corrupt God’s laws of love. When men believe Satan’s perversions, they
become the instruments of fighting against God.

How We Lost the True God

It is men, under the influential opposition of Satan, who have imposed on God negative attributes which make us fear “Him.” It is fallen man who has turned God’s offerings of truth and love into rigid laws with strict penalties. Ever since the fall of Adam, God’s communications to mankind have been added upon, taken away from, perverted and changed by the lies of Satan and the “wisdom of men,” until they are almost unrecognizable as far as what God really would say, and almost unusable because of the glaring contradictions. The people who are responsible for confusing us about the Word of God are often the so-called “believers” – the zealous church leaders, who demand to be able to measure our righteousness in order to be able to make a compensatory judgment of our wickedness. They take the beautiful, freeing, comforting gift of love offered by God – the spirit of the law – and break it up into separate little rigid cubicles of fear – the letter of the law. So in addition to facing the built-in opposition imposed by the carnal law, mankind is faced with the necessity of separating the truth of God’s divine laws from the world’s less-than-truth interpretations of them. Until we do this, we will either remain blind to the contradictions in what is called God’s law, and will worship a being who is less than God; or we will see the contradictions and be unable to worship at all a God of such confusion.

All the information God has offered us is perfect truth. When seen from God’s infinite perspective there are no contradictions in that truth. All of it fits harmoniously into God’s whole vast picture. Fallen man, with his very limited vision, had taken the eternal truths of the God I know and altered them to fit into the tiny little picture of his own fallen world.

To start with, man has changed the definitions of God’s words. For example, God’s definition of the word commandment would be “loving counsel which is in harmony with ultimate truth.: Man’s definition of commandment – “an authoritative order” – implies force, and immediately gives a false image of God. It makes God appear to be demanding and vindictive, which qualities are completely our of character for Them. It makes us feel forced into obedience or else condemned by guilt – both miserable options. God would not do that to us.

God wants us to be free. They have offered us Their Truth, ultimate truth, with no motivation except pure love, with no desire except to help us, with no strings attached. We are free to accept it or reject it. But we are not free to change it. Whenever we change it, dilute it, pervert it, corrupt it, misinterpret it, or otherwise misunderstand it, we limit our freedom and our power, by believing God to be less than They are.

Everything we believe which limits our free agency and which prevents us from seeing God clearly, also limits our ability to see our own divine natures and to be better, happier people.

The God I Know Chapter Four

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ADAM AND EVE – THE FALL

After the God I know, by love, had spiritually created the earth and all of us to inhabit it, They began the creation of the earth physically, still using the power of love. Each of us made our own unique contribution to that creation. Whatever scientific theories of the creation of the earth are still standing as truth when the whole of God’s truth is revealed, will be in complete harmony with the natural laws of God’s love. Each of us will recognize our own personality and part in the things of the earth which we love.

In the most all-consuming expression of love possible, God created a physical body for Adam, the first mortal man. Our of the same seed that formed Adam came Eve, his helpmeet – both formed in the image of God – man and woman. “It is not good for man to be alone” for the same reasons that God is not alone, but is two. Both masculine and feminine love-energy are needed for creation, and Adam and Eve’s calling was to create. Their covenant with God was that in their earth existence they would be the original parents of the human race, that they would, by the energy of their love for each other, create physical bodies for some of God’s spirit children to inhabit; and would pass on to their children the potential to do the same. They began the chain of mortal existence to which all of us are heirs.

God had at least two reasons for allowing us to experience mortality – both motivated by Their love for us. One was so we could obtain a physical body which could, in a later love-gift from God, be resurrected and perfected. The second reason was to expose us to the infinitely vital experience of comparison, so that we would be sensitively aware of ourselves and our surroundings. As spirits living with God in an atmosphere of pure love, we were free to be, but we didn’t comprehend our freedom; we lived in beauty, not comprehending that beauty; we accepted truth as part of our reality, but we didn’t comprehend truth; we lived in light, not knowing what light was.

We became mortals to be exposed to the opposites of godliness, so that we would know by our own experience the difference between good and evil, and then because we had personally lived through making the choices which proved what the difference is, we would be able to appreciate that difference. Only in that way could we internalize freedom, beauty, truth, light, and most importantly the Love of God, thereby becoming in the actual awareness of our being the person our intelligence had yearned to be.

We obtained our physical bodies through the power of God’s love. However, since God is only good, there necessarily needs to be another influence to provide the opposition. As God is the source of all good, the source of all evil is Satan. Satan is the opposite of God in his attributes. Where God is Light, he is darkness; where God is Beauty, he is ugliness; where God is Truth, he is deceit; where God is Peace and Hope, he is fear and despair. There is one vital way in which they are not equally opposite. The power of God, which is generated by Pure Love, is infinitely stronger than the power of evil, which is generated by hate. God will always be ultimately victorious in the lives of those who choose God. Satan is subject to the will of God; he cannot have power in any place where God does not allow it.

It is God’s will (at the point where it becomes our choice) for us to experience mortality. Satan, the influence of evil, is in the earth for God’s purpose, which is that WE might become as the Gods, knowing good and evil.

In order for Adam and Eve, and subsequently all of us, to be in a state where we could be exposed to evil, it was necessary for us to fall from the presence of God, where there is no evil. We had to willingly, by our own free choice, submit ourselves to a lesser law than God lives by, and a less comfortable state of being than that to which we were accustomed. But at the same time we knew we were also submitting to a more advanced state of being in relation to our eternal progress.

Partaking of the “forbidden fruit” was the act which changed Adam and Eve’s state of being from innocently divine to innocently carnal. All the rest of us inherited through them our carnal natures. The evil part of “the tree of knowledge of good and evil” was the power and influence of Satan. The “apple” was Satan’s perversion of pure love. When God allowed the presence of evil into the Garden of Eden, They knew Satan’s purpose would be to pervert and corrupt love, to lie about it, to make it appear to be less than it is – and They knew Satan would succeed in that purpose. As soon as Adam and Eve believed Satan’s lies, they had partaken of the “fruit” and fallen into carnal law.

“Fall” is literally the correct term for what happened in the change from the law of love to the carnal law. God stayed where They were in the law of love. Their physical presence could not be experienced by Adam and Eve. Adam and Eve (men and women) fell below God through veils which blanked out memory of their life with God, silenced the harmonies of Heaven, and blinded their understanding. Adam (men) fell below Eve (women) through one last veil, which further cut off his spiritual connection with God and allowed him to compete for survival.

This fall precipitated circumstances which have come to be known as “the curse of Adam.” (To Adam: In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread till thou return unto the ground. To Eve: In sorrow thou shalt bring forth children, and thy desire shall be to thy husband and he shall rule over thee. Gen. 3:15-19) God has erroneously been named as the author of this curse. The God I know, though, is not in the business of cursing. Their function is to bless. Rather, the “curse” was a natural consequence of living in an environment where evil exists.

The Perversion of Love

As soon as they fell into this carnal relationship, Adam and Eve were suddenly faced with some enormous challenges, which they didn’t even recognize as dangerous. They had never been lied to before, so had never had to consider whether or not something they heard was a lie, nor to face the consequences of believing a lie. Whatever Satan said to them, they innocently believed. By the time they had had enough experience to know what a lie is, it was too late. Love had already been perverted for all of mankind.

We cannot be sure what words Satan used, but we can be sure of the effect which they had, because we live with it every day. His lies convinced mankind (1) to fear God and worship a false god, (2) that man is basically evil, (3) that to compete with each other instead of loving each other is necessary.

He started by lying about God. As Adam and Eve began to experience the pain and loneliness and confusion of being estranged from God, Satan told them that God was punishing them for their wickedness. This one lie, which Adam and Eve believed, precipitated two disastrous results. First, they began to fear God. Just as it is true that perfect love casts our fear, it is true that fear casts out perfect love. Love and fear cannot abide together. As long as we fear God, we cannot truly love God nor really believe that God loves us. Secondly, Adam and Eve’s image of God became grossly distorted. As soon as they feared that God’s love was conditioned on their behavior, they began to be defensive. Then it was easy for Satan to convince them that his own destructive attributes of cruelty, jealousy and vengeance were the attributes of God. As this deceit has become magnified through the centuries – chiefly by religious leaders who gain converts through the fear concept – God has become an enormous contradiction for mankind. While we are drown to Them by the true concepts that still exist about Their nature, we are damned from reaching Them by accepting the false concepts forced on us through Satan’s lies. The being we try to worship is half god and half devil.

The next great perversion of love which Satan imposed on Adam and Eve was to make them question themselves and their own goodness. His first tactic was to make them feel ashamed by telling them they were naked. They experienced extreme discomfort as a result of this scornful accusation, and their reaction was to cover themselves, or hide. The only damage done in clothing their physical bodies was that “clothes” became a source of competition and pride. The real damage was done when Adam and Eve put a covering over their “naked” personalities and hid the divine in themselves with a façade of pretense. All of us have fallen heir to those feelings of guilt and self-condemnation which cause us to disbelieve in our own goodness. The lie that mankind is basically evil has grown into destructive proportions, as mortals have clothed their beautiful, free, god-like spirits with self-doubt, self-condemnation, self-hate, self-pity; and then to prevent the world from seeing their insecurity, with a steel façade of pride. We don’t know ourselves to be part of God, and therefore good, so we can’t love ourselves with pure feelings of self-acceptance. We see ourselves in comparison to other fallen mortals, and can only love ourselves with the false defense of trying to prove that we are better than somebody else, or hate ourselves because we don’t measure up to someone else.

So the groundwork was laid for Satan’s third enormous perversion of love, which resulted in mortals never being able to love each other purely. Adam and Eve in their divine natures were perfectly compatible and complementary. They were able to love each other freely and without inhibition, because they saw each other as good or “godly.” After they began putting up self-protection barriers, Satan played upon, encouraged and exaggerated the characteristics which by this time were forming their carnal or fallen natures, so that man and woman, rather than reinforcing one another, began to oppose one another. Satan became the third party who manipulated Adam and Eve against each other. He planted in Adam’s thinking the idea that Eve didn’t really love him, that she was only using him – and persuaded Eve that Adam didn’t love her because he thought she was inferior to him. He planted the seeds, which we have inherited, for men’s suspicion of and subjugation of women, as well as the seeds for men’s competition against and threat to each other. He nurtured the feelings of women’s rivalry with other women, and encouraged women’s mistrust of men.

Because the energy of love which can be created between a man and his wife in an ultimate relationship is the fulfillment most to be desired, Satan took advantage of this natural drawing power as he perverted man-woman relationships with the carnal feelings of lust, jealousy, guilt, hate, etc. These perversions of love exploded into all the murders, wars, lusts, cruelty, sadism, ugliness, etc. that have plagued the world ever since.

So “Adam fell that man might be.” The Fall was in fact a fall from Love, the highest order of law, to competition, its total opposite. It was a fall from good to evil, from life to death. Adam and Eve did surely die when they forgot how to love purely.

THE GOD I KNOW CHAPTER THREE

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CHAPTER THREE

WHAT IS THE PURE LOVE OF CHRIST?

The Pure Love of Christ is the POWER OF GOD. It is the energy of creation, the force which moves all things in the infinity of space in orderly pattern.

It is a power which mortal man in the history of our earth has not come to understand as a reality which can be defined or measured. Consequently it is not part of scientific thought or procedure. Nevertheless, it is the most valuable ingredient in every individual life.

The Pure Love of Christ is responsible for all positive and good things of which we are aware. It is the source of LIGHT -- the power which allows us to see, with our minds and hearts as well as with our eyes. All things we perceive in our minds as progressive knowledge which show us a better way -- all things we feel in our hearts which comfort us, heal our pain or bless us with peace, are part of that Love.

It is the source of TRUTH. Everything discovered by anyone in the world's history which has proved to be good for mankind has been inspired by that Love, as also every truth that ever will bless mankind in any degree.

It is the source of BEAUTY. Each lovely thing is created by God's Love, and wherever our senses respond with a surge of gladness, it is that Love in us communing with its counterpart. Whatever we see, or hear, or taste, or smell, or touch, or think, or feel, or do, that lifts our spirits with rejoicing, is part of Christ's Pure Love.

It is the source of HOPE -- the force that drives us beyond pain and grief and despair to belief in the reality of our dreams for happiness. It is the assurance in our beings of life over death.

In our own personal everyday experience it is the Pure Love of Christ that inspires within us the desire to do good - and then becomes the energy to do it. It moves us to protect others from being hurt and to share with them whatever is comforting.

This Power of God is responsible for all the beauty and joy -- the Love -- we know in our relationships with one another. It allows us to see the goodness in each other and to forgive the less than good. It provides the miracle by which we are blessed to believe in another mortal's divine nature and to love that personality with purity. It is the source of whatever true love we experience -- either giving or receiving. All feelings which are mutually sacred between two people are part of that love. The mystery which locks two strangers' eyes in a shimmering look of breathless recognition, which holds two hearts suspended together in timeless wonder, which vibrates a magical holiness as hands touch or lips meet, is the Pure Love of Christ. It is the essence of home and belonging. It is the eteral sealing together.

Every person born into the world has within him what has been called "the light of Christ." More accurately this could be described as the Pure Love of Christ. It is that energy within us which is good and which automatically responds to good. It is the power which allows any of us to have a positive, constructive self-image and to be in harmony with our SELF. It is the power which enables us to love EACH OTHER with unconditional love in harmoniously fulfilling relationships. And it is the power by which we know and love GOD and become One with God.

THE GOD I KNOW - CHAPTER TWO

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LOVE AND THE HOLY TRINITY
The Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost

There are actually many Gods, all of whom reign or function by the energy of the pure love which they generate as they create life. There is one God who created the world we linve in, who spiritually embodied us and so became the Father and Mother of our spirits. In mortal terminology we call that God, "God the Father";
"Father-Mother God" would be a more accurate terminology.

Jesus Christ, in the lineage of Gods, is of our generation. God our Father-Mother is His Father-Mother too. As God contemplated the mortal experience in a fallen world, which They knew would be necessary to our progress, They also knew we would need a Savior -- one who would love enough to redeem mankind from sin. So God's first creation was that Savior. They reached into the infinity of space where all intelligences wait, and found communion with one who had the inherent capacity to love that much, who wanted to love that much, who chose by his own free agency to love that much. And then God created a spiritual body for that intelligence to inhabit. So came into being God's first-born, Jesus Christ. This Son was thereafter included as part of all His Father's and Mother's works.

Christ's reason to be is to make possible, through love, the success of God's plan for us. He has been called our intermediary, our advocate, our intercessor, the Way. He is the Way because He stands as the passage through whom we of His generation FEEL the love of God, and through whom we, by our acceptance of His atoning sacrifice, return our love to God. In honor to this beloved Son, God calls Their love, as it comes through Christ to us, "The Pure Love of Christ." In honor to Him we call Him "God, the Son."

The third member of the holy trinity, the Holy Ghost, is all the rest of us -- all of humankind. As God perceived a need for each new thin in our world, They reached again into the sea of intelligences and encompassed the unique ONE whose capacity could and desire would fill that need. So came into being spiritually each of us -- because the unique contribution each of us could give and wanted to give was necessary to the whole of God's plan. God had two reasons for choosing every one of us to be born into Their family.

The first reason YOU became part of them was that in the
magnificent perception of Their Love, They sensed your desire
to become more than an intelligence -- YOUR NEED FOR THEM.

The second reason was that THEY NEEDED YOU. The love with
They reached out to find you yearned for the thing you are
and could not be fulfilled without you. If you love so small
a thing as a violet nestled in the woods against a gnarled root
you may have been the one God needed to help create such a lovely
thing, or to appreciate it and find joy in it with Them after it
had been created. The ability to rejoice in beauty is equally
as important a part of the beauty's existence as the ability
to create it. Also, because you are able to love, God needed
you to make Their love perfect. So you were conceived and born,
becoming part of Their family, part of Them, part of the Godhead.

Now, in mortality, where we walk by faith, blinded to our experience as spirits living with God, we have been made aware that there is a Holy Ghost and that it is "a personage of spirit." But we do not know WHO that spirit is until we struggle with opposition long enough to recognize our own personal spirit, our Divine Nature, by accepting the atonement of Christ and receiving His love, so that the carnal man is dead in us. We then can know our place with God, know God's love for us, know our love for God and Christ, and know our reason for being, which is part of God's reason for being.

Through the experience of being born of Christ it is possible to know that the Holy Ghost is one's own spirit, one's own godliness. It is possible to feel one's reality as the third member of the Holy Trinity. God loves each of us that much! They include us as part of Themself. Their love for us stands -- eternally. When we acknowledge Their existence by receiving that love, we also acknowledge our own eternal existence as part of Them, and RECEIVE the gift of the Holy Ghost -- the knowledge of our true SELF.

THE GOD I KNOW

2009-06-09T11:42:00.004-06:00

PRELUDE

We each create our own God --
using what we glean from those
we trust . . . our parents at first,
then maybe the preachers at church
or the refs at ballgames.
Teachers, or controversial books,
may churn up disturbing questions,
screen and TV idols impress.

At some point our relationship
with deity (God-or-not) becomes
a personal responsibility. Living along,
aware or unaware, blind or seeing,
we pick and choose what works for us,
pattern our worship to suit our lifestyle,
create a God we find useful.

For some people God feeds fear
and strokes ego; they perform
to avoid punishment or reap reward.
Others decide there is no soul, no hereafter,
turn worship to their comfort zones --
money, power, sex, drugs, sports, crime . . .
or perhaps science, the brain, nature.
Following tradition, many worship
a cross, agony, suffering. Some
discover unconditional love,
and worship a gracious God.

We each create our own God.

The book which follows describes the God I have created using the tools that have come into my path and the insights I have received from the "ether." Choosing to
worship this God has brought me peace, joy, and most importantly, pure love.
I offer it to you with the hope that it will bless your life.

CHAPTER ONE

THE GOD I KNOW

All good and comforting things that have ever been thought or said or written about God are true of the God I know. Everything we believe about Him that makes us want to be near Him, that causes us to worship Him with love and joy, is true. He is all good things we desire Him to be. He is a perfect mystery, whom we can adore from afar; or He is a living personage who can reach out and hold us in His arms -- because He wants to be, and has the power to be, whatever each of us needs Him to be as a positive influence in our lives. The Energy of Love which emanates from Him fills the whole universe, and it dwells in our individual hearts to the degree that we recognize and receive it.

There is more to understand about the God I know than has ever been plainly written. He has a wife. She is so much a part of Him in all the ways of Love, that while they are two people, a man and a woman, they need only one name, God. It is because they are together that Love is, that beauty is, that truth is, that goodness is, that WE are. We have a Mother in Heaven as well as a Father in Heaven.

God created mankind in His own image, male and female. Mortal men look like God-Man in form and stature; mortal women look like God-Woman. Whatever we perceive in one another to be beautiful is part of the image of God. If we could look upon Them with our physical eyes, God-Man would appear as the embodiment of perfect magnifi-cent manliness, and His wife, God-Woman would appear to be the most beautiful and radiant of women.

The reality of God for me is that God the Man and God the Woman are One God, because They are necessary to each other's finishing and to each other's ability to create. The power of both combine to become the ultimate Power-of-God. God-Man embodies masculine love-energy, which is unique in its capacities and qualities. God-Woman embodies feminine love-energy, which is also unique in its own components, especially as it differs from male energy. Both energies are holy and mighty and awesome in their power. But the ultimate omnipotence which is God, results as the two entities of God-energy come together in the harmoniously eloquent explosion of the consummation of their Love -- as Thought, Feeling and Being become One. Life is created when the two elements of godly love become one love. Life -- in all the abundant fullness and limitless possibility of aliveness. Infinite Life. Eternal, ever-expanding, gloriously fulfilling, joyously increasindg -- LIFE.

All the infinitely mighty and infinitely delicate creations which are the handiwork of God result from the fusion of God-Man energy with God-Woman energy. The God I know has made known to me that my spiritual being is a creation of that Oneness. The intelligence which I am and which, like God, has no beginning or end, but is co-eternal with Him, would have remained only an unembodied intelligence wandering through space, were it not for the love of my Heavenly Father and Mother, who chose to recognize me, sensed my yearning to become, and included me in Their Love. That knowledge is a revelation, not a remembered event. But there is in my present con-
sciousness a sure awareness that God is both Mother and Father. The spiritual experiences through which God has responded to my need bear witness to me of the nature of God. I know that the ultimate Godly Man-Woman love relationship encompasses in oneness all positive energy and becomes the Creator, the God I worship.

Hereafter in this writing the word "God" will be understood to mean both Father and Mother in Heaven. To enhance this concept, plural pronouns will be used. God is Love -- the pure fulfillment of two beings who become One.

The most important thing to know about God in order to develop a personal relationship with Them is that each of us is a desired product of Their perfect Oneness, and each was, in his creation, a perfect product. We were created because of love, by love and we are loved. This creation occured before mortality. Although it is forgotten in our conscious minds, it is alive in our deepest hearts. Its reality is the positive energy within us and the source of all goodness we perceive or bring to pass. It is our hope for immortality and it is a valid hope. God has a reason for being. We are part of that reason. God has a plan. We, by our own choice, are part of that plan. Here, now, in mortality we are living out one well-planned phase of our relationship with God.

We need to know that mortality is temporary, that it is a uniquely important experience in our eternal pattern, and that it is necessary to our becoming all that we desire to become. If we can put mortality into perspective, all its contradictions fall away. Knowing God brings mortality into clear perspective.

It is most comforting to know that because They created us, God knows and loves each one of us as a separate individual whose unique personality gives birth to a unique love relationship with Them. The truths by which God would govern us are universal, but when applied are also individual to each separate need. God's "commandments" include EACH of us at the same time they include ALL of us. God does not consider suggesting we do anything that would not ultimately bring us happiness or make us better, and They do not ask us to do anthing except to protect us from hurting ourselves or each other.

The God I know is kind and loving and generous. One of Their purely unselfish attributes is that Their joy is valuable to Them because it is shared with us. They offer Their glory, Their power, Their kingdom, Their life, to all who desire Them. By Their own choice They put Themself in the position of needing us as recipients of Their goodness. They exist to Love us.

Infinite Dance Book 6 - Psalms

2009-03-05T14:28:00.001-07:00

Infinite Dance Book 6 - Psalms

Publish at Scribd or explore others: eBooks Religion & Spiritual feminism Mormon

Infinite Dance - Book of Revelations

2008-08-04T17:16:00.001-06:00

InfiniteDance-Bk5-Revelations - Upload a Document to Scribd

Infinite Dance - Book IV

2008-04-08T10:07:00.000-06:00

Infinite Dance - Book III

2008-04-08T10:06:00.000-06:00

Infinite Dance - Book II

2008-04-08T10:05:00.000-06:00

Welcome - Infinite Dance: Book I

2008-04-06T21:09:00.002-06:00

Welcome to my Blog!

Below is the first book of my version of the Christian Scriptures. I will be publishing the subsequent books in this work as I get them converted to this format.

If you would like to download the PDF file, you can get it from the Scribd.com website by clicking on the Scribd logo.

Enjoy!

Infinite Dance - Book I

2008-04-06T21:08:00.001-06:00