What is the true path to God? Is it through renunciation, as some yogis believe? And what of this thing called suffering? Is suffering and service the path to God as many ascetics say? Do we earn our way to heaven by “being good,” as so many religions teach? Or are we free to act as we wish, violate or ignore any rule, set aside any traditional teachings, dive into any self-indulgences, and thus find Nirvana, as many New Agers say? Which is it? Strict moral standards, or do-as-you-please? Which is it? Traditional values, or make-it-up-as-you-go-along? Which is it? The Ten Commandments, or the Seven Steps to Enlightenment?
You have a great need to have it be one way or the other, don’t you.. .Could it not be all of these?
I don’t know. I’m asking You.
I will answer you, then, as you can best under-stand—though I tell you now that your answer is within. I say this to all people who hear My words and seek My Truth.
Every heart which earnestly asks, Which is the path to God? is shown. Each is given a heartfelt Truth. Come to Me along the path of your heart, not through a journey of your mind. You will never find Me in your mind.
In order to truly know God, you have to be out of your mind.
Yet your question begs an answer, and I will not step aside from the thrust of your inquiry.
I will begin with a statement that will startle you—and perhaps offend the sensitivities of many people. There are no such things as the Ten Command-ments.
Oh, My God, there aren’t?
No, there are not. Who would I command? Myself? And why would such commandments be required? Whatever I want, is. N’est ce pas? How is it therefore necessary to command anyone?
And, if I did issue commandments, would they not be automatically kept? How could I wish something to be so so badly that I would command it—and then sit by and watch it not be so?
What kind of a king would do that? What kind of a ruler?
And yet I tell you this: I am neither a king nor a ruler. I am simply—and awesomely—the Creator. Yet the Creator does not rule, but merely creates, creates—and keeps on creating.
I have created you—blessed you—in the image and likeness of Me. And I have made certain promises and commitments to you. I have told you, in plain language, how it will be with you when you become as one with Me.
You are, as Moses was, an earnest seeker. Moses too, as do you now, stood before Me, begging for answers. “Oh, God of My Fathers,” he called. “God of my God, deign to show me. Give me a sign, that I may tell my people! How can we know that we are chosen?”
And I came to Moses, even as I have come to you now, with a divine covenant—an everlasting promise—a sure and certain commitment. “How can I be sure?” Moses asked plaintively. “Because I have told you so,” I said. “You have the Word of God.”
And the Word of God was not a commandment, but a covenant. These, then, are the.
You shall know that you have taken the path to God, and you shall know that you have found God, for there will be these signs, these indications, these changes in you:
1. You shall love God with all your heart, all your mind, all your soul. And there shall be no other God set before Me. No longer will you worship human love, or success, money, or power, nor any symbol thereof. You will set aside these things as a child sets aside toys. Not because they are unworthy, but because you have outgrown them.
And, you shall know you have taken the path to God because:
2. You shall not use the name of God in vain. Nor will you call upon Me for frivolous things. You will understand the power of words, and of thoughts, and you would not think of invoking the name of God in an unGodly manner. You shall not use My name in vain because you cannot. For My name—the Great “1 Am”—is never used in vain (that is, without result), nor can it ever be. And when you have found God, you shall know this.
And, I shall give you these other signs as well:
3. You shall remember to keep a day for Me, and you shall call it holy. This, so that you do not long stay in your illusion, but cause yourself to remember who and what you are. And then shall you soon call every day the Sabbath, and every moment holy.
4. You shall honor your mother and your fa-ther—and you will know you are the Son of God when you honor your Father/Mother God in all that you say or do or think. And even as you so honor the Mother/Father God, and your father and mother on Earth (for they have given you life), so, too, will you honor everyone.
5. You know you have found God when you observe that you will not murder (that is, willfully kill, without cause). For while you will understand that you cannot end another’s life in any event (all life is eternal), you will not choose to terminate any particular incarnation, nor change any life energy from one form to another, without the most sacred justification. Your new rever-ence for life will cause you to honor all life forms—in-cluding plants, trees and animals—and to impact them only when it is for the highest good.
And these other signs will I send you also, that you may know you are on the path:
6. You will not defile the purity of love with dishon-esty or deceit, for this is adulterous. I promise you, when you have found God, you shall not commit this adultery.
7. You will not take a thing that is not your own, nor cheat, nor connive, nor harm another to have any thing, for this would be to steal. I promise you, when you have found God, you shall not steal.
Nor shall you...
8. Say a thing that is not true, and thus bear false witness.
Nor shall you.
9. Covet your neighbor’s spouse, for why would you want your neighbor’s spouse when you know all others are your spouse?
10. Covet your neighbor’s goods, for why would you want your neighbor’s goods when you know that all goods can be yours, and all your goods belong to the world?
You will know that you have found the path to God when you see these signs. For I promise that no one who truly seeks God shall any longer do these things. It would be impossible to continue such behaviors.
These are your freedoms, not your restrictions. These are my commitments, not my commandments. For God does not order about what God has cre-ated—God merely tells God’s children: this is how you will know that you are coming home.
Moses asked in earnest—”How may I know? Give me a sign.” Moses asked the same question that you ask now. The same question all people everywhere have asked since time began. My answer is likewise eternal. But it has never been, and never will be, a command-ment. For who shall I command? And who shall I punish should My commandments not be kept?
There is only Me.
So I don’t have to keep the Ten Commandments in order to get to heaven.
There is no such thing as “getting to heaven.” There is only a knowing that you are already there. There is an accepting, an understanding, not a working for or a striving.
You cannot go to where you already are. To do that, you would have to leave where you are, and that would defeat the whole purpose of the journey.
The irony is that most people think they have to leave where they are to get to where they want to be. And so they leave heaven in order to get to heaven—and go through hell.
Enlightenment is understanding that there is no-where to go, nothing to do, and nobody you have to be except exactly who you’re being right now.
You are on a journey to nowhere.
Heaven—as you call it—is nowhere. Let’s just put some space between the w and the h in that word and you’ll see that heaven is now. . .here.
Everyone says that! Everyone says that! It’s driving me crazy! If “heaven is now here,” how come I don’t see that? Why don’t I feel that? And why is the world such a mess?
I understand your frustration. It’s almost as frustrat-ing trying to understand all this as it is trying to get someone to understand it.
Whoa! Wait a minute! Are you trying to say that God gets frustrated?
Who do you suppose invented frustration? And do you imagine that you can experience something I can-not?
I tell you this: every experience you have, I have. Do you not see lam experiencing my Self through you? What else do you suppose all this is for?
I could not know Myself were it not for You. I created you that I might know Who I Am.
Now I would not shatter all of your illusions about Me in one chapter—so I will tell you that in My most sublime form, which you call God, I do not experience frustration.
Whew! That’s better. You scared me there for a minute.
But that’s not because I can’t. It’s simply because I don’t choose to. You can make the same choice, by the way.
Well, frustrated or not, I still wonder how it can be that heaven is right here, and I don’t experience it.
You cannot experience what you don’t know. And you don’t know you are in “heaven” right now because you have not experienced it. You see, for you it is a vicious circle. You cannot—have not found a way yet to—experience what you do not know, and you do not know what you have not experienced.
What Enlightenment asks you to do is to know something you have not experienced and thus experi-ence it. Knowing opens the door to experience-and you imagine it is the other way around.
Actually, you know a great deal more than you have experienced. You simply don’t know that you know.
You know that there is a God, for instance. But you may not know that you know that. So you keep waiting around for the experience. And all the while you keep having it. Yet you are having it without knowing—which is like not having it at all.
Boy, we’re going around in circles here.
Yes, we are. And instead of going around in circles, perhaps we should be the circle itself. This doesn’t have to be a vicious circle. It can be a sublime one.
Is renunciation a part of the truly spiritual life?
Yes, because ultimately all Spirit renounces what is not real, and nothing in the life you lead is real, save your relationship with Me. Yet renunciation in the classic sense of sell-denial is not required.
A true Master does not “give up” something. A true Master simply sets it aside, as he would do with anything for which he no longer has any use.
There are those who say you must overcome your desires. I say you must simply change them. The first practice feels like a rigorous discipline, the second, a joyful exercise.
There are those who say that to know God you must overcome all earthly passions. Yet to understand and accept them is enough. What you resist persists. What you look at disappears.
Those who seek so earnestly to overcome all earthly passions often work at it so hard that it might be said, this has become their passion. They have a “passion for God”; a passion to know Him. But passion is passion, and to trade one for the other does not eliminate it.
Therefore, judge not that about which you feel passionate. Simply notice it, then see if it serves you, given who and what you wish to be.
Remember, you are constantly in the act of creating yourself. You are in every moment deciding who and what you are. You decide this largely through the choices you make regarding who and what you feel passionate about.
Often a person on what you call a spiritual path looks like he has renounced all earthly passion, all human desire. What he has done is understand it, see the illusion, and step aside from the passions that do not serve him—all the while loving the illusion for what it has brought to him: the chance to be wholly free.
Passion is the love of turning being into action. It fuels the engine of creation. It changes concepts to experience.
Passion is the fire that drives us to express who we really are. Never deny passion, for that is to deny Who You Are and Who You Truly Want to Be.
The renunciate never denies passion—the renunci-ate simply denies attachmentto results. Passion is a love of doing. Doing is being, experienced. Yet what is often created as part of doing? Expectation.
To live your life without expectation—without the need for specific results—that is freedom. That is God-liness. That is how I live.
You are not attached to results?
Absolutely not. My joy is in the creating, not in the aftermath. Renunciation is not a decision to deny ac-tion. Renunciation is a decision to deny a need for a particular result. There is a vast difference.
Could you explain what You mean by the statement, “Pas-sion is the love of turning being into action”?
Beingness is the highest state of existence. It is the purest essence. It is the “now-not now,” the “all-not all,” the “always-never” aspect of God.
Pure being is pure God-ing.
Yet it has never been enough for us to simply be. We have always yearned to experience What We Are—and that requires a whole other aspect of divinity, called doing.
Let us say that you are, at the core of your wonderful Self, that aspect of divinity called love. (This is, by the way, the Truth of you.)
Now it is one thing to be love—and quite another thing to do something loving. The soul longs to do something about what it is, in order that it might know itself in its own experience. So it will seek to realize its highest idea through action.
This urge to do this is called passion. Kill passion and you kill God. Passion is God wanting to say “hi.”
But, you see, once God (or God-in-you) does that loving thing, God has realized Itself, and needs nothing more.
Man, on the other hand, often feels he needs a return on his investment. If we’re going to love some-body, fine—but we’d better get some love back. That sort of thing.
This is not passion. This is expectation.
This is the greatest source of man’s unhappiness. It is what separates man from God.
The renunciate seeks to end this separation through the experience some Eastern mystics have called samadhi. That is, oneness and union with God; a meld-ing with and melting into divinity.
The renunciate therefore renounces results—but never, ever renounces passion. Indeed, the Master knows intuitively that passion is the path. It is the way to Self realization.
Even in earthly terms it can be fairly said that if you have a passion for nothing, you have no life at all.
You have said that “what you resist persists, and what you look at disappears.” Can You explain that?
You cannot resist something to which you grant no reality. The act of resisting a thing is the act of granting it life. When you resist an energy, you place it there. The more you resist, the more you make it real—what-ever it is you are resisting.
What you open your eyes and look at disappears. That is, it ceases to hold its illusory form.
If you look at something—truly look at it—you will see right through it, and right through any illusion it holds for you, leaving nothing but ultimate reality in your sight. In the face of ultimate reality your puny illusion has no power. It cannot long hold you in its weakening grip. You see the truth of it, and the truth sets you free.
But what if you don’t want the thing you are looking at to disappear?
You should always want it to! There is nothing in your reality to hold onto. Yet if you do choose the illusion of your life over ultimate reality, you may simply recreate it—just as you created it to begin with. In this way you may have in your life what you choose to have and eliminate from your life what you no longer wish to experience.
Yet never resist anything. If you think that by your resistance you will eliminate it, think again. You only plant it more firmly in place. Have I not told you all thought is creative?
Even a thought that says I don’t want something?
If you don’t want it, why think about it? Don’t give it a second thought. Yet if you must think about it—that is, if you cannot not think about it—then do not resist. Rather, look at whatever it is directly—accept the reality as your creation—then choose to keep it or not, as you wish.
What would dictate that choice?
Who and What you think you Are. And Who and What you choose to Be.
This dictates all choice—every choice you have made in your life. And ever will make.
And so the life of a renunciate is an incorrect path?
That is not a truth. The word “renunciate” holds such wrongful meaning. In truth, you cannot renounce anything—because what you resist persists. The true renunciate does not renounce, but simply chooses differently. This is an act of moving toward something, not away from something.
You cannot move away from something, because it will chase you all over hell and back. Therefore resist not temptation—but simply turn from it. Turn toward Me and away from anything unlike Me.
Yet know this: there is no such thing as an incorrect path—for on this journey you cannot “not get” where you are going.
It is simply a matter of speed—merely a question of when you will get there—yet even that is an illusion, for there is no “when,” neither is there a “before” or “after.” There is only now; an eternal moment of always in which you are experiencing yourself.
Then what is the point? If there is no way not to “get there,” what is the point of life? Why should we worry at all about anything we do?
Well, of course, you shouldn’t. But you would do well to be observant. Simply notice who and what you are being, doing, and having, and see whether it serves you.
The point of life is not to get anywhere—it is to notice that you are, and have always been, already there. You are, always and forever, in the moment of pure creation. The point of life is therefore to create—who and what you are, and then to experience that.