What does the past have to do with the future?
When you know about the past, you can better know about all your possible futures. You have come to Me asking how to make your life work better. It will be useful for you to know how you got to where you are to-day.
I would speak to you of power, and of strength—and the difference between the two. And I would chat with you about this Satan figure you have invented, how and why you invented him, and how you decided that your God was a “He,” and not a “She.”
I would speak to you of Who I Really Am, rather than who you have said I am in your mythologies. I would describe to you My Beingness in such a way that you will gladly replace the mythology with the cosmol-ogy—the true cosmology of the universe, and its rela-tionship to Me. I would have you know about life, how it works, and why it works the way it works. This chapter is about all those things.
When you know those things, then you can decide what you wish to discard of that which your race has created. For this third portion of our conversation, this third book, is about building a newer world, creating a new reality.
You have been living too long, My children, in a prison of your own devise. It is time to set yourself free.
You have imprisoned your five natural emotions, re-pressing them and turning them into very unnatural emotions, which have brought unhappiness, death, and destruction to your world.
The model of behavior for centuries on this planet has been: do not “indulge” your emotions. If you’re feeling grief, get over it; if you’re feeling angry, stuff it; if you’re feeling envious, be ashamed of it; if you’re feel-ing fear, rise above it; if you’re feeling love, control it, limit it, wait with it, run from it—do whatever you have to do to stop from expressing it, full out, right here, right now.
It is time to set yourself free.
In truth, you have imprisoned your Holy Self. And it is time to set your Self free.
I’m starting to get excited here. How do we start? Where do we begin?
In our brief study of how it all got to be this way, let us go back to the time when your society reorganized it-self. That is when men became the dominant species, and then decided it was inappropriate to display emo-tions—or in some cases to even have them.
What do You mean, “when society reorganized itself”? What are we talking about here?
In an earlier part of your history, you lived on this planet in a matriarchal society. Then there was a shift, and the patriarchy emerged. When you made that shift, you moved away from expressing your emotions. You labeled it “weak” to do so. It was during this period that males also invented the devil, and the masculine God.
Males invented the devil?
Yes. Satan was essentially a male invention. Ulti-mately, all of society went along with it, but the turning away from emotions, and the invention of an “Evil One,” was all part of a male rebellion against the matri-archy, a period during which women ruled over every-thing from their emotions. They held all governmental posts, all religious positions of power, all places of influ-ence in commerce, science, academia, healing.
What power did men have?
None. Men had to justify their existence, for they had very little importance beyond their ability to fertil-ize female eggs and move heavy objects. They were very much like worker ants and bees. They did the heavy physical labor, and made sure that children were produced and protected.
It took men hundreds of years to find and to create a larger place for themselves in the fabric of their society. Centuries passed before males were even allowed to participate in their clan’s affairs; to have a voice or a vote in community decisions. They weren’t considered by women to be intelligent enough to understand such matters.
Boy, it is difficult to imagine that any society would actually prohibit one whole class of people from even voting, based sim-ply on gender.
I like your sense of humor about this. I really do.
Shall I go on?
Please.
Centuries more passed before they could think of actually holding the positions of leadership for which they finally had the chance to vote. Other posts of influ-ence and power within their culture were similarly de-nied them.
When males finally obtained positions of authority within society, when they at last rose above their former place as baby-makers and virtual physical slaves, it is to their credit that they did not ever turn the tables on women, but have always ac-corded females the respect, power, and influence that all hu-mans deserve, regardless of gender.
There’s that humor again.
Oh, I’m sorry. Do I have the wrong planet?
Let’s get back to our narrative. But before we go on about the invention of “the devil,” let us talk a bit about power. Because this, of course, is what the invention of Satan was all about.
You’re going to make the point now that men have all the power in today’s society, right? Let me jump ahead of You and tell You why I think this happened.
You said that in the matriarchal period, men were very much like worker bees serving the queen bee. You said they did the difficult physical work, and made sure that children were produced and protected. And I felt like saying, “So what’s changed? That’s what they do now!” And I’ll bet that many men would probably say that not a great deal has changed—ex-cept that men have extracted a price for maintaining their “thankless role.” They do have more power.
Actually, most of the power.
Okay, most of the power. But the irony I see here is that both genders think they are handling the thankless tasks, while the other is having all the fun. Men resent the women who are attempting to take back some of their power, because men say they’ll be damned if they’ll do all that they do for the culture, and not at least have the power it takes to do it.
Women resent men keeping all the power, saying they’ll be damned if they’ll continue doing for the culture what they do, and still remain powerless.
You’ve analyzed it correctly. And both men and women are damned to repeat their own mistakes in an endless cycle of self-inflicted misery until one side or the other gets that life is not about power, but about strength. And until both see that it’s not about separa-tion, but unity. For it is in the unity that inner strength exists, and in the separation that it dissipates, leaving one feeling weak, and powerless—and hence, strug-gling for power.
I tell you this: Heal the rift between you, end the il-lusion of separation, and you shall be delivered back to the source of your inner strength. That is where you will find true power. The power to do anything. The power to be anything. The power to have anything. For the power to create is derived from the inner strength that is produced through unity.
This is true of the relationship between you and your God—just as it is remarkably true of the relation-ship between you and your fellow humans.
Stop thinking of yourself as separate, and all the true power that comes from the inner strength of unity is yours—as a worldwide society, and as an individual part of that whole-to wield as you wish.
Yet remember this:
Power comes from inner strength. Inner strength does not come from raw power. In this, most of the world has it backwards.
Power without inner strength is an illusion. Inner strength without unity is a lie. A lie that has not served the race, but that has nevertheless deeply embedded it-self into your race consciousness. For you think that in-ner strength comes from individuality and from separateness, and that is simply not so. Separation from God and from each other is the cause of all your dys-function and suffering. Still, separation continues to masquerade as strength, and your politics, your eco-nomics, and even your religions have perpetuated the lie.
This lie is the genesis of all wars and all the class struggles that lead to war; of all animosity between races and genders, and all the power struggles that lead to animosity; of all personal trials and tribulations, and all the internal struggles that lead to tribulations.
Still, you cling to the lie tenaciously, no matter where you’ve seen it lead you—even as it has led you to your own destruction.
Now I tell you this: Know the truth, and the truth shall set you free.
There is no separation. Not from each other, not from God, and not from anything that is.
This truth I will repeat over and over on these pages. This observation I will make again and again.
Act as if you were separate from nothing, and no one, and you will heal your world tomorrow.
This is the greatest secret of all time. It is the answer for which man has searched for millennia. It is the solu-tion for which he has worked, the revelation for which he has prayed.
Act as if you were separate from nothing, and you heal the world.
Understand that it is about power with, not power over.
Thank You. I got that. So, getting back, first it was females who had power over males, and now it is the other way around. And males invented the devil in order to wrest this power away from the female tribal or clan leaders?
Yes. They used fear, because fear was the only tool they had.
Again, not much has changed. Men do that to this day. Sometimes even before appeals to reason are tried, men use fear. Particularly if they are the bigger men; the stronger men. (Or the bigger or stronger nation.) Sometimes it seems actually ingrained in men. It seems cellular. Might is right. Strength is power.
Yes. This has been the way since the overturn of the matriarchy.
How did it get that way?
That’s what this short history is all about.
Then go on, please.
What men had to do to gain control during the ma-triarchal period was not to convince women that men ought to be given more power over their lives, but to convince other men.
Life was, after all, going smoothly, and there were worse ways men could have to get through the day than simply doing some physical work to make themselves valued, and then have sex. So it was not easy for men, who were powerless, to convince other powerless men to seek power. Until they discovered fear.
Fear was the one thing women hadn’t counted on.
It began, this fear, with seeds of doubt, sown by the most disgruntled among the males. These were usually the least “desirable” of the men; the unmuscled, the unadorned—and hence, those to whom women paid the least attention.
And I’ll bet that because this was so, their complaints were discounted as the ravings of rage born of sexual frustration.
That is correct. Still, the disgruntled men had to use the only tool they had. So they sought to grow fear from the seeds of doubt. What if the women were wrong? they asked. What if their way of running the world wasn’t the best? What if it was, in fact, leading the whole society—all of the race—into sure and certain annihilation?
This is something many men could not imagine. Af-ter all, didn’t women have a direct line to the Goddess? Were they not, in fact, exact physical replicas of the Goddess? And was not the Goddess good?
The teaching was so powerful, so pervasive, that men had no choice but to invent a devil, a Satan, to counteract the unlimited goodness of the Great Mother imagined and worshipped by the people of the matriar-chy.
How did they manage to convince anyone that there was such a thing as an “evil one”?
The one thing all of their society understood was the theory of the “rotten apple.” Even the women saw and knew from their experience that some children simply turned out “bad,” no matter what they did. Especially, as everybody knew, the boy children, who just could not be controlled.
So a myth was created.
One day, the myth went, the Great Mother, the Goddess of Goddesses, brought forth a child who turned out to be not good. No matter what the Mother tried, the child would not be good. Finally, he struggled with his Mother for her very throne.
This was too much, even for a loving, forgiving Mother. The boy was banished forever—but continued to show up in clever disguises and clever costumes, sometimes even posing as the Great Mother herself.
This myth laid the basis for men to ask, “How do we know the Goddess we worship is a Goddess at all? It could be the bad child, now grown up and wanting to fool us.”
By this device, men got other men to worry, then to be angry that women weren’t taking their worries seri-ously, then to rebel.
The being you now call Satan was thus created. It was not difficult to create a myth about a “bad child,” and not difficult, either, to convince even the women of the clan of the possibility of the existence of such a crea-ture. It was also not difficult getting anyone to accept that the bad child was male. Weren’t males the inferior gender?
This device was used to set up a mythological prob-lem. If the “bad child” was male, if the “evil one” was masculine, who would there be to overpower him? Surely, not a feminine Goddess. For, said the men clev-erly, when it came to matters of wisdom and insight, of clarity and compassion, of planning and thinking, no one doubted feminine superiority. Yet in matters of brute strength, was not a male needed?
Previously in Goddess mythology, males were merely consorts—companions to the females, who acted as servants and fulfilled their robust desire for lust-ful celebration of their Goddess magnificence.
But now a male was needed who could do more; a male who could also protect the Goddess and defeat the enemy. This transformation did not occur over-night, but across many years. Gradually, very gradually, societies began seeing the male consort as also the male protector in their spiritual mythologies, for now that there was someone to protect the Goddess from, such a protector was clearly needed.
It was not a major leap from male as protector to male as equal partner, now standing alongside the God-dess. The male God was created, and, for a while, Gods and Goddesses ruled mythology together.
Then, again gradually, Gods were given larger roles. The need for protection, for strength, began to supplant the need for wisdom and love. A new kind of love was born in these mythologies. A love which protects with brute force. But it was a love which also covets what it protects; which was jealous of its Goddesses; which now did not simply serve their feminine lusts, but fought and died for them.
Myths began to emerge of Gods of enormous power, quarreling over, fighting for, Goddesses of un-speakable beauty. And so was born the jealous God.
This is fascinating.
Wait. We’re coming to the end, but there’s just a little more.
It wasn’t long before the jealousy of the Gods ex-tended not only to the Goddesses—but to all creations in all realms. We had better love Him, these jealous Gods demanded, and no other God-or else!
Since males were the most powerful species, and Gods were the most powerful of the males, there seemed little room for argument with this new mythology.
Stories of those who did argue, and lost, began to emerge. The God of wrath was born.
Soon, the whole idea of Deity was subverted. In-stead of being the source of all love, it became the source of all fear.
A model of love which was largely feminine-the endlessly tolerant love of a mother for a child, and yes, even of a woman for her not-too-bright, but, after all, useful man, was replaced by the jealous, wrathful love of a demanding, intolerant God who would brook no interference, allow no insouciance, ignore no offense.
The smile of the amused Goddess, experiencing limitless love and gently submitting to the laws of na-ture, was replaced by the stern countenance of the not-so-amused God, proclaiming power over the laws of nature, and forevermore limiting love.
This is the God you worship today, and that’s how you got where you are now.
Amazing. Interesting and amazing. But what is the point of telling me all of this?
It’s important for you to know that you’ve made it all up. The idea that “might is right,” or that “power is strength,”
was born in your male-created theological myths.
The God of wrath and jealousy and anger was an imagining. Yet, something you imagined for so long, it became real. Some of you still consider it real today. Yet it has nothing to do with ultimate reality, or what’s really going on here.
And what is that?
What’s going on is that your soul yearns for the high-est experience of itself it can imagine. It came here for that purpose-to realize itself (that is, make itself real) in its experience.
Then it discovered pleasures of the flesh—not just sex, but all manner of pleasures—and as it indulged in these pleasures, it gradually forgot the pleasures of the spirit.
These, too, are pleasures—greater pleasures than the body could ever give you. But the soul forgot this.
Okay, now we’re getting away from all the history, and back into something You’ve touched on before in this dialogue. Could You go over this again?
Well, we’re not actually getting away from the his-tory. We’re tying everything in together. You see, it’s really quite simple. The purpose of your soul—its rea-son for coming to the body—is to be and express Who You Really Are. The soul yearns to do this; yearns to know itself and its own experience.
This yearning to know is life seeking to be. This is God, choosing to express. The God of your histories is not the God who really is. That is the point. Your soul is the tool through which I express and experience My-self.
Doesn’t that pretty much limit Your experience?
It does, unless it doesn’t. That’s up to you. You get to be the expression and the experience of Me at what-ever level you choose. There have been those who have chosen very grand expressions. There have been none higher than Jesus, the Christ—though there have been others who have been equally as high.
Christ is not the highest example? He is not God made Man?
Christ is the highest example. He is simply not the only example to reach that highest state. Christ is God made Man. He is simply not the only man made of God.
Every man is “God made Man.” You are Me, ex-pressing in your present form. Yet don’t worry about limiting Me; about how limited that makes Me. For I am not limited, and never have been. Do you think that you are the only form that I have chosen? Do you think you are the only creatures whom I’ve imbued with the Essence of Me?
I tell you, lam in every flower, every rainbow, every star in the heavens, and everything in and on every planet rotating around every star.
I am the whisper of the wind, the warmth of your sun, the incredible individuality and the extraordinary perfection of every snowflake.
I am the majesty in the soaring flight of eagles, and the innocence of the doe in the field; the courage of lions, the wisdom of the ancient ones.
And I am not limited to the modes of expression seen on your planet alone. You do not know Who I Am, but only think you do. Yet think not that Who I Am is limited to you, or that My Divine Essence—this most Holy Spirit—was given to you and you alone. That would bean arrogant thought, and a misinformed one.
My Beingness is in everything. Everything. The All-ness is My Expression. The Wholeness is My Nature. There is nothing that I Am Not, and something I Am Not cannot be.
My purpose in creating you, My blessed creatures, was so that I might have an experience of Myself as the Creator of My Own Experience.
Some people don’t understand. Help all of us to under-stand.
The one aspect of God that only a very special crea-ture could create was the aspect of Myself as The Crea-tor.
I am not the God of your mythologies, nor am I the Goddess. I am The Creator—That Which Creates. Yet I choose to Know Myself in My Own Experience. just as I know My perfection of design through a snowflake, My awesome beauty through a rose, so, too, do I know My creative power—through you.
To you I have given the ability to consciously create your experience, which is the ability I have.
Through you, I can know every aspect of Me. The perfection of the snowflake, the awesome beauty of the
rose, the courage of lions, the majesty of eagles, all re-sides in you. In you I have placed all of these things—and one thing more: the consciousness to be aware of it.
Thus have you become Self-conscious. And thus have you been given the greatest gift, for you have been aware of yourself being yourself—which is exactly what I Am.
I am Myself, aware of Myself being Myself.
This is what is meant by the statement, I Am That I Am.
You are that Part of Me which is the awareness, ex-perienced.
And what you are experiencing (and what I am ex-periencing through you) is Me, creating Me.
I am in the continual act of creating Myself.
Does that mean God is not a constant? Does that mean You do not know what You’re going to be in the next moment?
How can I know? You haven’t decided yet!
Let me get this straight. I am deciding all this?
Yes. You are Me choosing to be Me.
You are Me, choosing to be What I Am—and choos-ing what I am going to be.
All of you, collectively, are creating that. You are do-ing it on an individual basis, as each of you decides Who You Are, and experiences that, and you are doing it collectively, as the co-creative collective being that you are.
I Am the collective experience of the lot of you!
And You really don’t know who You are going to be in the next moment?
I was being lighthearted a moment ago. Of course I know. I already know all of your decisions, so I know Who I Am, Who I Have Always Been, and Who I Will Always Be.
How can You know what I am going to choose to be, do, and have in the next moment, much less what the whole human race is going to choose?
Simple. You’ve already done the choosing. Every-thing you’re ever going to be, do, or have, you’ve al-ready done. You’re doing it right now!
Do you see? There is no such thing as time.
This, too, we have discussed before.
It is worth reviewing here.
Yes. Tell me again how this works.
Past, present, and future are concepts you have constructed, realities you have invented, in order to create a context within which to frame your present ex-perience. Otherwise, all of your (Our) experiences would be overlapping.
They actually are overlapping—that is, happening at the same “time”—you simply don’t know this. You’ve placed yourself in a perception shell that blocks out the Total Reality.
I’ve explained this in detail in Book 2. It might be good for you to re-read that material, in order to place what’s being said here into context.
The point I am making here is that everything is hap-pening at once. Everything. So yes, I do know what I’m
“going to be,” what I “am,” and what I “was.” I know this always. That is, all ways.
And so, you see, there is no way you can surprise Me.
Your story—the whole worldly drama—was cre-ated so that you could know Who You Are in your own experience. It’s also been designed to help you forget Who You Are, so that you might remember Who You Are once again, and create it.
Because I can’t create who I am if I am already experiencing who I am. I can’t create being six feet tall if I am already six feet tall. I’d have to be less than six feet tall—or at least think that I am.
Exactly. You understand it perfectly. And since it is the greatest desire of the soul (God) to experience Itself as The Creator, and since everything has already been created, We had no choice other than to find a way to forget all about Our creation.
I am amazed that we found a way. Trying to “forget” that we are all One, and that the One of us which we are is God, must be like trying to forget that a pink elephant is in the room. How could we be so mesmerized?
Well, you’ve just touched on the secret reason for all of physical life. It is life in the physical which has so mes-merized you—and rightly so, because it is, after all, an extraordinary adventure!
What We used here to help Us forget is what some of you would call the Pleasure Principle.
The highest nature of all pleasure is that aspect of pleasure which causes you to create Who You Really Are in your experience right here, right now—and to re-create, and re-create, and re-create again Who You Are at the next highest level of magnificence. That is the highest pleasure of God.
The lower nature of all pleasure is that part of pleas-ure which causes you to forget Who You Really Are. Do not condemn the lower nature, for without it, you could not experience the higher.
It’s almost as if the pleasures of the flesh at first cause us to forget Who We Are, then become the very avenue through which we remember!
There you have it. You’ve just said it. And the use of physical pleasure as an avenue to remembering Who You Are is achieved by raising up, through the body, the basic energy of all life.
This is the energy which you sometimes call “sexual energy,” and it is raised up along the inner column of your being, until it reaches the area you call the Third Eye. This is the area just behind the forehead between and slightly above the eyes. As you raise the energy, you cause it to course all through your body. It is like an in-ner orgasm.
How is this done? How do you do that?
You “think it up.” I mean that, just as I said it. You lit-erally “think it up” the inner pathway of what you have called your “chakras.” Once the life energy is raised up repeatedly, one acquires a taste for this experience, just as one acquires a hunger for sex.
The experience of the energy being raised is very sublime. It quickly becomes the experience most de-sired. Yet you never completely lose your hunger for the lowering of the energy—for the basic passions—nor ought you try. For the higher cannot exist without the lower in your experience-as I have pointed out to you many times. Once you get to the higher, you must go back to the lower, in order to experience again the pleasure of moving to the higher.
This is the sacred rhythm of all life. You do this not only by moving the energy around inside your body. You also do this by moving around the larger energy in-side the Body of God.
You incarnate as lower forms, then evolve into higher states of consciousness. You are simply raising the energy in the Body of God. You are that energy. And when you arrive at the highest state, you experience it fully, then you decide what next you choose to experi-ence, and where in the Realm of Relativity you choose to go in order to experience it.
You may wish to again experience yourself becom-ing your Self—it is a grand experience, indeed—and so you may start all over again on the Cosmic Wheel.
Is this the same as the “karmic wheel”?
No. There is no such thing as a “karmic wheel.” Not the way you have imagined it. Many of you have imag-ined that you are on, not a wheel, but a treadmill, in which you are working off the debts of past actions, and trying valiantly not to incur any new ones. This is what some of you have called “the karmic wheel.” It is not so very different from a few of your Western theologies, for in both paradigms you are seen as an unworthy sin-ner, seeking to gain the purity to move on to the next spiritual level.
The experience which I have described here, on the other hand, I am calling the Cosmic Wheel, because there is nothing of unworthiness, debt-repayment, punishment, or “purification.” The Cosmic Wheel sim-ply describes the ultimate reality, or what you might call the cosmology of the universe.
It is the cycle of life, or what I sometimes term The Process. It is a picture phrase describing the no-beginning-and-no-end nature of things; the continually connected path to and from the all of everything, on which the soul joyfully journeys throughout eternity.
It is the sacred rhythm of all life, by which you move the Energy of God.
Wow, I’ve never had that all explained to me so simply! I don’t think I’ve ever understood all this so clearly.
Well, clarity is what you brought yourself here to ex-perience. That was the purpose of this dialogue. So I am glad you are achieving that.
In truth, there is no “lower” or “higher” place on the Cos-mic Wheel. How can there be? It’s a wheel, not a ladder.
That is excellent. That is an excellent imagery and an excellent understanding. Therefore, condemn not that which you call the lower, basic, animal instincts of man, yet bless them, honoring them as the path through which, and by which, you find your way back home.
This would relieve a lot of people of a lot of guilt around sex.
It is why I have said, play, play, play with sex—and with all of life!
Mix what you call the sacred with the sacrilegious, for until you see your altars as the ultimate place for love, and your bedrooms as the ultimate place for wor-ship, you see nothing at all.
You think “sex” is separate from God? I tell you this: I am in your bedroom every night!
So go ahead! Mix what you call the profane and the profound—so that you can see that there is no differ-ence, and experience All as One. Then when you con-tinue to evolve, you will not see yourself as letting go of sex, but simply enjoying it at a higher level. For all of life is S.E.X.—Synergistic Energy eXchange.
And if you understand this about sex, you will un-derstand this about everything in life. Even the end of life—what you call “death.” At the moment of your death, you will not see yourself as letting go of life, but simply enjoying it at a higher level.
When at last you see that there is no separation in God’s World—that is, nothing which is not God—then, at last, will you let go of this invention of man which you have called Satan.
If Satan exists, he exists as every thought you ever had of separation from Me. You cannot be separate from Me, for I Am All That Is.
Men invented the devil to scare people into doing what they wanted, under the threat of separation from God if they did not. Condemnation, being hurled into the everlasting fires of hell, was the ultimate scare tactic. Yet now you need be afraid no more. For nothing can, or ever will, separate you from Me.
You and I are One. We cannot be anything else if I Am What I Am: All That Is.
Why then would I condemn Myself? And how would I do it? How could I separate Myself from Myself when My Self is All There Is, and there is nothing else?
My purpose is to evolve, not to condemn; to grow, not to die; to experience, not to fail to experience. My purpose is to Be, not to cease to Be.
I have no way to separate Myself from you—or any-thing else. “Hell” is simply not knowing this. “Salvation” is knowing and understanding it completely. You are now saved. You needn’t worry about what’s going to happen to you “after death” anymore.