“Thou wilt show me the path of life:
in thy presence is fullness of joy;
at thy right hand there are
pleasures forevermore.”
—Psalm 16:11
I’ve searched for the path to God all my life— I know you have—
—and now I’ve found it and I can’t believe it. It feels like I’m sitting here, writing this to myself.
You are.
That does not seem like what a communication with God would feel like.
You want bells and whistles? I’ll see what I can arrange.
You know, don’t You, that there are those who will call this entire book a blasphemy. Especially if You keep showing up as such a wise guy.
Let Me explain something to you. You have this idea that God shows up in only one way in life. That’s a very dangerous idea.
It stops you from seeing God all over, If you think God looks only one way or sounds only one way or is only one way, you’re going to look right past Me night and day. You’ll spend your whole life looking for God and not finding Her. Because you’re looking for a Him. I use this as an example.
It has been said that if you don’t see God in the profane and the profound, you’re missing half the story. That is a great Truth.
God is in the sadness and the laughter, in the bitter and the sweet. There is a divine purpose behind every-thing—and therefore a divine presence in everything.
I once began writing a book called God is a Salami Sandwich.
That would have been a very good book. I gave you that inspiration. Why did you not write it?
It felt like blasphemy. Or at the very least, horribly irreverent.
You mean wonderfully irreverent! What gave you the idea that God is only “reverent”? God is the up and the down. The hot and the cold. The left and the right. The reverent and the irreverent!
Think you that God cannot laugh? Do you imagine that God does not enjoy a good joke? Is it your knowing that God is without humor? I tell you, God invented humor.
Must you speak in hushed tones when you speak to Me? Are slang words or tough language outside My ken? I tell you, you can speak to Me as you would speak with your best friend.
Do you think there is a word I have not heard? A sight I have not seen? A sound I do not know?
Is it your thought that I despise some of these, while I love the others? I tell you, I despise nothing. None of it is repulsive to Me. It is life, and life is the gift; the unspeakable treasure; the holy of holies.
I am life, for I am the stuff life is. Its every aspect has a divine purpose. Nothing exists—nothing—without a reason understood and approved by God.
How can this be? What of the evil which has been created by man?
You cannot create a thing—not a thought, an object, an event—no experience of any kind—which is outside of God’s plan. For God’s plan is for you to create anything—everything—whatever you want. In such freedom lies the experience of God being God—and this is the experience for which I created You. And life itself.
Evil is that which you call evil. Yet even that I love, for it is only through that which you call evil that you can know good; only through that which you call the work of the devil that you can know and do the work of God. I do not love hot more than I love cold, high more than low, left more than right. It is all relative. It is all part of what is.
I do not love “good” more than I love “bad.” Hitler went to heaven. When you understand this, you will understand God.
But I have been raised to believe that good and bad do exist; that right and wrong are opposed; that some things are not okay, not alright, not acceptable in the sight of God.
Everything is “acceptable” in the sight of God, for how can God not accept that which is? To reject a thing is to deny that it exists. To say that it is not okay is to say that it is not a part of Me—and that is impossible.
Yet hold to your beliefs, and stay true to your values, for these are the values of your parents, of your parents’ parents; of your friends and of your society. They form the structure of your life, and to lose them would be to unravel the fabric of your experience. Still, examine them one by One. Review them piece by piece. Do not dismantle the house, but look at each brick, and replace those which appear broken, which no longer support the structure.
Your ideas about right and wrong are just that—ideas. They are the thoughts which form the shape and create the substance of Who You Are. There would be only one reason to change any of these; only one purpose in making an alteration: if you are not happy with Who You Are.
Only you can know if you are happy. Only you can say of your life—”This is my creation (son), in which I am well pleased.”
If your values serve you, hold to them. Argue for them. Fight to defend them.
Yet seek to fight in a way which harms no one. Harm is not a necessary ingredient in healing.
You say “hold to your values” at the same time you say our values are all wrong. Help me with this.
I have not said your values are wrong. But neither are they right. They are simply judgments. Assessments. Decisions. For the most part, they are decisions made not by you, but by someone else. Your parents, perhaps. Your religion. Your teachers, historians, politicians.
Very few of the value judgments you have incorpo-rated into your truth are judgments you, yourself, have made based on your own experience. Yet experience is what you came here for—and out of your experience were you to create yourself. You have created yourself out of the experience of others.
If there were such a thing as sin, this would be it: to allow yourself to become what you are because of the experience of others. This is the “sin” you have commit-ted. All of you. You do not await your own experience, you accept the experience of others as gospel (literally), and then, when you encounter the actual experience for the first time, you overlay what you think you already know onto the encounter.
If you did not do this, you might have a wholly different experience—one that might render your origi-nal teacher or source wrong. In most cases, you don’t want to make your parents, your schools, your religions, your traditions, your holy scriptures wrong—so you deny your own experience in favor of what you have been told to think.
Nowhere can this be more profoundly illustrated than in your treatment of human sexuality.
Everyone knows that the sexual experience can be the single most loving, most exciting, most powerful, most exhilarating, most renewing, most energizing, most affirming, most intimate, most uniting, most re-creative physical experience of which humans are ca-pable. Having discovered this experientially, you have chosen to accept instead the prior judgments, opinions, and ideas about sex promulgated by others—all of whom have a vested interest in how you think.
These opinions, judgments, and ideas have run directly contradictory to your own experience, yet be-cause you are loathe to make your teachers wrong, you convince yourself it must be your experience that is wrong. The result is that you have betrayed your true truth about this subject—with devastating results.
You have done the same thing with money. Every time in your life that you have had lots and lots of money, you have felt great. You felt great receiving it, and you felt great spending it. There was nothing bad about it, nothing evil, nothing inherently “wrong.” Yet you have so deeply ingrained within you the teachings of others on this subject that you have rejected your experience in favor of “truth.”
Having adopted this “truth” as your own, you have formed thoughts around it—thoughts which are crea-tive. You have thus created a personal reality around money which pushes it away from you—for why would you seek to attract that which is not good?
Amazingly, you have created this same contradiction around God. Everything your heart experiences about God tells you that God is good. Everything your teachers teach you about God tells you God is bad. Your heart tells you God is to be loved without fear. Your teachers tell you God is to be feared, for He is a vengeful God. You are to live in fear of God’s wrath, they say. You are to tremble in His presence. Your whole life through you are to fear the judgment of the Lord. For the Lord is “just,” you are told. And God knows, you will be in trouble when you confront the terrible justice of the Lord. You are, therefore, to be “obedient” to God’s commands. Or else.
Above all, you are not to ask such logical questions as, “if God wanted strict obedience to His Laws, why did He create the possibility of those Laws being violated?” Ah, your teachers tell you—because God wanted you to have “free choice.” Yet what kind of choice is free when to choose one thing over the other brings condemna-tion? How is “free will” free when it is not your will, but someone else’s, which must be done? Those who teach you this would make a hypocrite of God.
You are told that God is forgiveness, and compas-sion—yet if you do not ask for this forgiveness in the “right way,” if you do not “come to God” properly, your plea will not be heard, your cry will go unheeded. Even this would not be so bad if there were only one proper way, but there are as many “proper ways” being taught as there are teachers to teach them.
Most of you, therefore, spend the bulk of your adult life searching for the “right” way to worship, to obey, and to serve God. The irony of all this is that I do not want your worship, I do not need your obedience, and it is not necessary for you to serve Me.
These behaviors are the behaviors historically de-manded of their subjects by monarchs—usually ego-maniacal, insecure, tyrannical monarchs at that. They’re not Godly demands in any sense—and it seems remarkable that the world hasn’t by now concluded that the demands are counterfeit, having nothing to do with the needs or desires of Deity.
Deity has no needs. All That Is is exactly that: all that is. It therefore wants, or lacks, nothing—by definition.
If you choose to believe in a God who somehow needs something—and has such hurt feelings if He doesn’t get it that He punishes those from whom He expected to receive it—then you choose to believe in a God much smaller than I. You truly are Children of a Lesser God.
No, my children, please let Me assure you again, through this writing, that I am without needs. I require nothing.
This does not mean I am without desires. Desires and needs are not the same thing (although many of you have made them so in your present lifetime).
Desire is the beginning of all creation. It is first thought. It is a grand feeling within the soul. It is God, choosing what next to create.
And what is God’s desire?
I desire first to know and experience Myself, in all My glory—to know Who I Am. Before I invented you—and all the worlds of the universe—it was impossible for Me to do so.
Second, I desire that you shall know and experience Who You Really Are, through the power I have given you to create and experience yourself in whatever way you choose.
Third, I desire for the whole life process to be an experience of constant joy, continuous creation, never-ending expansion, and total fulfillment in each moment of now.
I have established a perfect system whereby these desires may be realized. They are being realized now—in this very moment. The only difference be-tween you and Me is that I know this.
In the moment of your total knowing (which mo-ment could come upon you at anytime), you, too, will feel as I do always: totally joyful, loving, accepting, blessing, and grateful.
These are the Five Attitudes of God, and before we are through with this dialogue, I will show you how the application of these attitudes in your life now can—and will—bring you to Godliness.
All of this is a very long answer to a very short question.
Yes, hold to your values-so long as you experience that they serve you. Yet look to see whether the values you serve, with your thoughts, words, and actions, bring to the space of your experience the highest and best idea you ever had about you.
Examine your values one by one. Hold them up to the light of public scrutiny. If you can tell the world who you are and what you believe without breaking stride or hesitating, you are happy with yourself. There is no reason to continue much further in this dialogue with Me, because you have created a Self—and a life for the Self—which needs no improvement. You have reached perfection. Put the book down.
My life is not perfect, nor is it close to being perfect. I am not perfect. I am, in fact, a bundle of imperfections. I wish—sometimes I wish with all my heart—that I could correct these imperfections; that I knew what causes my behaviors, what sets up my downfalls, what keeps getting in my way. That’s why I’ve come to You, I guess. I haven’t been able to find the answers on my own.
I am glad you came. I have always been here to help you. I am here now. You don’t have to find the answers on your own. You never had to.
Yet it seems so.. .presumptuous. . .to simply sit down and dialogue with You this way—much less to imagine that You—God—are responding—I mean, this is crazy.
I see. The authors of the Bible were all sane, but you are crazy.
The Bible writers were witnesses to the life of Christ, and faithfully recorded what they heard and saw.
Correction. Most of the New Testament writers never met or saw Jesus in their lives. They lived many years after Jesus left the Earth. They wouldn’t have known Jesus of Nazareth if they walked into him on the street.
But...
The Bible writers were great believers and great historians. They took the stories which had been passed down to them and to their friends by others— elders—from elder to elder, until finally a written record was made.
And not everything of the Bible authors was included in the final document.
Already “churches” had sprung up around the teachings of Jesus—and, as happens whenever and wherever people gather in groups around a powerful idea, there were certain individuals within these churches, or enclaves, who determined what parts of the Jesus Story were going to be told—and how. This process of selecting and editing continued throughout the gathering, writing, and publishing of the gospels, and the Bible.
Even several centuries after the original scriptures were committed to writing, a High Council of the Church determined yet one more time which doctrines and truths were to be included in the then-official Bible—and which would be “unhealthy” or “prema-ture” to reveal to the masses.
And there have been other holy scriptures as well—each placed in writing in moments of inspiration by otherwise ordinary men, none of whom were any more crazy than you.
Are you suggesting—you’re not suggesting, are you—that these writings might one day become “holy scriptures”?
My child, everything in life is holy. By that measure, yes, these are holy writings. But I will not quibble with you over words, because I know what you mean.
No, I do not suggest that this manuscript will one day become holy scripture. At least, not for several hundred years, or until the language becomes out-moded.
You see, the problem is that the language here is too colloquial, too conversational, too contemporary. People assume that if God were to talk directly with you, God would not sound like the fella next door. There should be some unifying, if not to say deifying, structure to the language. Some dignity. Some sense of Godliness.
As I said earlier, that’s part of the problem. People have a sense of God as “showing up” in only one form. Anything which violates that form is seen as blasphemy.
As I said earlier.
As you said earlier.
But let’s drive to the heart of your question. Why do you think it’s crazy for you to be able to have a dialogue with God? Do you not believe in prayer?
Yes, but that’s different. Prayer for me has always been one-way. I ask, and God remains immutable.
God has never answered a prayer?
Oh yes, but never verbally, you see. Oh, I’ve had all kinds of things happen in my life that I was convinced were an answer—a very direct answer—to prayer. But God has never spoken to me.
I see. So this God in which you believe—this God can do anything—It just cannot speak.
Of course God can speak, if God wants to. It just doesn’t seem probable that God would want to speak to me.
This is the root of every problem you experience in your life-for you do not consider yourself worthy enough to be spoken to by God.
Good heavens, how can you ever expect to hear My voice if you don’t imagine yourself to be deserving enough to even be spoken to?
I tell you this: I am performing a miracle right now. For not only am I speaking to you, but to every person who has picked up this book and is reading these words.
To each of them am I now speaking. I know who every one of them is. I know now who will find their way to these words—and I know that (just as with all My other communications) some will be able to hear—and some will be able to only listen, but will hear nothing.
Well, that brings up another thing. I am already thinking of publishing this material even now, as it’s being written.
Yes. What’s “wrong” with that?
Can’t it be argued that I am creating this whole thing for profit? Doesn’t that render the whole thing suspect?
Is it your motive to write something so that you can make a lot of money?
No. That’s not why I started this. I began this dialogue on paper because my mind has been plagued with questions for 30 years—questions I’ve been hungry—stawing to have answered. The idea that I would have all this made into a book came later.
From Me.
From You?
Yes. You don’t think I was going to let you waste all these marvelous questions and answers, do you?
I hadn’t thought about that. At the outset, I just wanted the questions answered; the frustration to end; the search to be over.
Good. So stop questioning your motives (you do it incessantly) and let’s get on with it.