The Only Thing That Matters (16 page)

It might help you to think of this as degrees of purity. Imagine placing food coloring, one drop at a time, into a large pitcher of the purest water from the clearest mountain stream. Because a drop of food coloring has been placed into the water does not mean that the pitcher does not contain mountain water; it means that the mountain water is now not quite pure. The more drops of coloring you place in the water, the less pure the water that fills the pitcher will be—but it will still and always be mountain water.

The more Thoughts you hold that are limited to the Mind's Experience rather than including the Soul's Awareness, the less pure will be the energy that fills your being. Yet that energy will still and always be the Essence of the Divine.

Or think of a mirror in a frame that has been slightly twisted to produce a distorted reflection, as in a carnival fun house. The image is distorted to the degree that the reflecting surface has been warped, but the being in the mirror is still, and will always be,
you
. Your image can be distorted, but it cannot be anything
but
your image,
distorted
.

Now let's see if we can come up with an example that places this concept “on the ground” in everyday life. Once again, let's use a common experience.

Fear.

All fear (and that which derives from it, such as anger, hatred, and violence) is a distorted form of love.

That's an important statement, and you should read it again.

If you think about it, you will realize that if a person loved nothing, that person would be totally free of fear, anger, hatred, or violence, because there would be no
need
for such emotions to arise—nor the actions that proceed from them.

Exploring this further, we see that fear, anger, hatred, and violence are expressions of the
loss
, or the
anticipated
loss, of something which is loved. Or, of
never having to begin with
something which is loved.

If there is no love of anything, there is no sense of loss or deprivation, and therefore no negative emotion of any kind attached to the absence of anything. Do you see this?

Because humans, in their limited perspective, misunderstand how to express their love, they behave in ways that appear to be the opposite of love—but which are, in fact, distorted
wailings
of love.

All expressions of anger and fear, hatred and violence are distorted wailings of Love. Remember that. For the rest of your life, remember that.

The person who grasps this, grasps at the edges of Divinity.

Where Divinity expresses, forgiveness is never necessary, for it is rendered pointless in the presence of absolute understanding—which is, of course, what Divinity
is
.

This was the whole point of the biblical story of Jesus forgiving the thief on the cross next to him.

Jesus, in his absolute understanding, recognized that the thief acted out of his love for something when he stole and simply expressed that love in a distorted form.

And, of course, there was no place other than heaven for the thief to go to in any case. Precisely because God perfectly understands everyone and everything, God has no need to create a place of eternal damnation, indescribable suffering, unspeakable torment, and unending torture.
Heaven is all there is
, and that paradise includes life on Earth.

If we do not experience life on Earth as a paradise, it is because we have not yet understood the true purpose of Life Itself, or how to manifest it in and through our daily lives. Yet evolution is the process by which all sentient beings come to that understanding, and evolution will not be denied.

Evolution's extraordinary insight is that the worst crimes and behaviors of humans will never be forgiven by God.

Never.

Not because God refuses to forgive, but because
absolution is not necessary
, since all human action is based, at its root, in love, however confused, mistaken, or distorted its expression.

As
Conversations with God
puts it: No one does anything inappropriate, given their model of the world.

The healing message of that dialogue is simple: Evolution is not a sin, and God does not punish confusion.

17
Putting It All Together

“G
OD MAY NOT PUNISH CONFUSION
, but God does punish disobedience. It is one thing to say you just didn't know, but it is another thing to be told, outright, what is so and then completely ignore it.”

You may have heard those words before. They spell out the fundamental principle, the foundational basis, of most of the world's major religions. If you've read this far in this book and embraced its ideas, you are in deep trouble, these belief systems tell you. They tell you that God and Life are not One, but that God
created
Life, and Man as a part of Life in God's Image and Likeness, but that—image and likeness or not—Man cannot become God, and must not attempt to
be
God, lest Man commit the greatest sin, for which condemnation to eternal damnation
is
, absolutely and without a doubt, the punishment.

This, these belief systems teach us, was the great sin of Satan—and it is the sin that Satan is trying to get
us
to commit, so that we will join him in perdition. Satan is doing this, apparently, to get
back
at God for sending
him
to that awful place. Satan wants to “rob” God of His Souls by claiming them as Satan's own, so that he can punish God for himself having been punished.

You may have heard commentaries such as this regarding the doctrines of some organized religions before, but it may be useful now to look beneath the dogma to what generated the idea of Right and Wrong/Good and Evil in those doctrines in the first place.

The dogma surrounding “sin” is based on the theological doctrine of Separation. That doctrine
must be held firmly in place
or the construct of “sin” dissolves.

Religions understand this. That is why many religions teach that God is “over there” and Man is “over here,” and never the two shall meet, except on Judgment Day, when—even though you are not supposed to try to be God—you will, in fact, be judged on how much
like
God you have behaved.

Humans are told to be
like
God, but that they have to do so without
being
God. They are told that they are made in the image and likeness of God, but they do not have the abilities of God. So they are consigned to failure before they begin in this business of being as much like God as they can be.

Still, God will forgive them for their failures if they will try. But if they do
not
try, or if they try but fail miserably and in the worst possible way, God will judge them, condemn them, and punish them to everlasting torture and pain.

This is human theology—most of it—in a nutshell. There are variations on the theme, but that is the gist of it.

There's no point in going any further with this. Hundreds of other books have been written on the subject. But now, consider this: If separation from God is
not
the Ultimate Reality, if God's revealed
identity
as That-Which-Created-Life, But-Which-Is-‘Other-Than'-Life is
not the true state of things
, then the basis of most human theologies is faulty; their doctrines crumble.

Should humanity choose to lay aside the Doctrine of Separation, life on Earth could be lived according to a New Theology, in a new way: not as an attempt to
get back to God in heaven
, but to
get back to creating heaven on Earth;
not as an effort to make sure we are not excluded from God's Kingdom, but as an effort to make sure that God's Kingdom is not excluded from
us
—and to make sure that this whole
place
(called Earth) is treated as
part
of that Kingdom.

Ironically, this would be achieved by us being as much like God as we can be. So, here is the Supreme Irony: First we are told that Satan was punished for thinking that he was Divine, then we are told that we were made “in the image and likeness of God” and that
we
will be punished if we do
not
behave in Godly fashion.

The theology of our ancestors has us coming and going, and the human species is now facing a future-creating choice: Old Theology or New Theology; Yesterday's God or Tomorrow's God.

The second choice offers Life's most tantalizing enticement ever: to live the life you were
designed
to live, to experience your Self in your truest form, to express the Essence of Who You Really Are in the next grandest way.

This is not something that is outside the capability of humans. “Regular people” just like you have done this. Remember, what is being talked about here is expressing Divinity in the next grandest way, and that is an ongoing, expanding process.

The good news is that even expressing a tiny
portion
of Divinity can change one's life so dramatically that struggle and suffering, anxiety and worry, fear and anger, grief and misery can be removed from one's daily encounters forever.