The Only Thing That Matters (15 page)

In the end you will find that the fastest path will also be the most joyous path—precisely because answering the biggest challenge produces the biggest reward. And it is a function of life to place a challenge before you. Not difficulty, mind you. Simply challenge. The word “challenge” is not synonymous with the word “struggle.” The first need not produce the second.

Indeed, here is a dictionary definition that you might find interesting:
Challenge:
“A query as to the truth of something, often with an implicit invitation for proof.”

So the challenges in your life are not meant to be struggles, they are meant to be
questions.
And the highest challenge asks the biggest question: What is the truth of who you are? What is the proof?

Every thought you embrace, every word you speak, every action you take is your answer. It is your Truth About Yourself,
and your proof of it
.

16
Eliminating Life's Complexity

N
OW THERE IS SOMETHING VERY IMPORTANT
you must know and understand, or this part of your exploration could become very discouraging.

An old human view and a traditional religious view (explored in the book
What God Wants
) is that God's desire is for suffering to be used by human beings to better themselves and to purify their soul. Suffering is good. It earns credits, or points, in God's mind, especially if it's endured silently, and maybe even “offered up” to God.

Suffering is a necessary part of human growth and learning and is, more importantly, a means by which people may be redeemed in the eyes of God.

Indeed, one whole religion is built on this belief, asserting that all beings have been saved by the suffering of one being, who died for the sins of the rest. This one being paid the “debt” said to be owed to God for humanity's weakness and wickedness.

According to this doctrine, God has been hurt by the weakness and wickedness of humanity and, in order to set things straight,
someone has to suffer.
Otherwise, God and humanity could not be reconciled. Thus, suffering was established as a redemptive experience.

With regard to the suffering of human beings due to “natural” causes, it's not to be shortened by death under any circumstances that are not also “natural.” The suffering of animals may be mercifully ended before “natural” death, but not the suffering of people. It's God and God alone who determines when human suffering shall end.

One result of this teaching: Human beings have endured unimaginable suffering over extended periods in order to do God's will and not incur God's wrath in the afterlife. Millions of people feel that even if a person is very, very old and is suffering very, very much—lingering on the verge of death but not dying, experiencing interminable pain instead—that person must endure whatever life is bringing them.

Humanity has actually created civil law declaring that people have no right to end their own suffering, nor may they assist others in ending theirs. However anguishing it may be, however otherwise hopeless a life may have become, the suffering must go on.

This is, the orthodox view tells us,
what God wants
.

Now, in what some like to think of as an enlightened age, many people (but by no means all) have rejected these notions. However, a large number have replaced them with
new
thoughts that are not much better, suggesting that humanity's innate desire to experience Divinity can only be satisfied by
suffering through
what humanity experiences to be the opposite of Divinity.

In fact, after reading the item near the closing of the previous chapter
right here
, one could imagine a person becoming quite angry, saying: “Are you telling me that if God wants to experience the Divine Quality called ‘patience,' I have to suffer through everything that creates that opportunity? Are you saying that I have to keep suffering
all
the difficult and trying conditions in my life simply so that God can
know Itself?
Excuse me, but
no thanks!
”

So before you go too far down that road, this Official Notice please; this note from the Front Office:

G
OD IS NOT ASKING YOU TO BE A
S
URROGATE
S
UFFERER.

That is very important to hold in Consciousness, lest you find yourself embracing the notion that you are experiencing struggling and suffering
as a response to God's desire
to experience Divinity.

If you experience struggle and suffering it is not because you have responded to God's desire, but because you have forgotten it.

God's Greatest Desire is to experience Divinity in its Fullest Form. That Fullest Form does not include struggle and suffering. You are not required to experience negativity in any form in order for God to experience Divinity in every form.

The emotions that produce struggle and suffering are products of the human Mind. God does not label any condition “bad,” or become “aggravated” or “offended” or “frustrated” because a particular circumstance has arisen.

God understands that everything arising is an invitation for Divinity to express itself at its next highest level.

You may understand this, too, at a theoretical level, yet even though you are a Divine being, you are not all that God is, and so of course it is understandable that while God does not experience suffering, you may.

A drop of the ocean is water, for sure, but it is not The Ocean. Yet compared to a submolecular particle, a drop of water might as well
be
The Ocean—such is its relative size and power as it rolls through a sub-molecular particle field. And as the drop of water is to the ocean, so are you to God. This means that you have Divine Power proportionate to your size. And
that
means that you possess Divine Power
proportionate to your problems
.

This may be the most important information you will ever receive.

The problems that each of us face every day, considered within the entire Contextual Field in which God exists, are surely minuscule. Indeed, within that context they are not “problems” at all, but merely “conditions.” Yet for every one of us our biggest problems feel, understandably (and appropriately), very large. They are, after all, being encountered by
us;
they are not being encountered by God.

Or are they …?

What if it were God who
was
encountering these conditions,
through
us?

If God lives in us, that would be true. And God
does
live within us, so it
is
true.

The message here is that we are larger than we think—and our problems are smaller in relationship to us than we imagine. Mystics and sages have said for ages that life never sends us a problem too large for us to handle. They are right. And
groups
of us, working together, have enough power to overcome every problem that groups of us have created. All we have to do is
decide to
.

And so in our own personal space, and in the environment collectively created by the lot of us, we are, in a sense, Deities, even as a drop of water is an “ocean” in the space of a submolecular particle.

The immense power that is yours has to do with the tools you have been given with which to create the experiences of your life. With these tools, you can end suffering in your personal life forever and eliminate struggle from your encounters.

These tools are shared in Part Three of this book, where we look at how The Only Thing That Matters may be applied in a practical way every day.

For now, allow yourself to know that your Soul experiences all of Life's Moments entirely different from the way your Mind experiences them. So you will not find these powerful tools in your Mind's array of resources.

At least, not at first. Not until you have trained your Mind to include your Soul in your consideration of everything that is happening around you. Then your Mind can utilize these tools in the face of any exterior circumstance, past or present, that invites your next demonstration of Divinity.

Now once again let it be said that moving into such a demonstration is not required. You do not have to do this. It is not demanded of you.

You can choose for the expression and the experiencing of Divinity to be the purpose of any given Moment in your life, or not, as you wish. Nothing “bad” will happen to you at the end of your present life on Earth if you do not. The choice is entirely yours. Many of the planet's theologies describe this choice as Free Will.

There is a reason that nothing bad will happen to you if you do not choose to express Divinity in your life—a reason that most of Earth's theologies reject. The reason is that you cannot
fail
to express Divinity, no matter
what
you do.

Now remember when you were invited here to have patience? Please exercise patience once again. We are venturing further into this spiritual complexity now because understanding this can help you eliminate much of the complexity of human life.

Having said that, be advised that what you are about to read
may be the single most difficult concept about Life and God that humanity has ever been invited to embrace
.

The only way that a human being could fail to express Divinity would be for a human thought, word, or action to be other than Divine, and
such a thing is impossible.
It is life's Great Impossibility.

In physical life there are
forms
of Divinity—some complete, some incomplete; some pure, some distorted—but there is no such thing as an
absence
of Divinity.

For there to be an absolute absence of Divinity, life on Earth would have to be separate from, or “other than,” That Which Is Divine. Yet physical life is
not
separate from The Divine, nor can it be, since it is, in its entirety, an expression
of
The Divine.

God therefore sees nothing that is not Divine—even if it appears in distorted form. In physical life, which is experienced in relative terms, there is no such thing as an absence of Divinity—but there are degrees of It.