We are entering a new stage of human spiritual evolution, a time when God - the one consciousness that is and fills the cosmos and everything in it - is finally understood to be what you and I are. Because unity means one not two, you and God must be the same substance. This simple yet profound theological advance, when lived as a personal and immediate experience, has huge implications. It is the shift behind the creation of a "New Human."
When we make God separate and external from our own self, we inadvertently distance our self from divinity. Rather than experience the unity that God is, this dualistic belief in "self and other" instead encourages fantasy-based beliefs and projections about the nature of the divine "other." We liken God to a father, mother, king friend judge, punisher, etc. To let God be what you are, on the other hand, is to experience the divine essence in its purest form, as your own essence.
Nor is God what you think and believe. To confine God with definitions and theological concepts constitutes yet another way we separate and distance from the divine. God is not somebody else, God is what you are and what everything is. Beliefs, projections, fantasies, ego, emotions, etc. are merely illusions of the mind that come between you and direct contact, ideas that trap you in an endless labyrinth of thought. You will not experience God there, though you may know have many thoughts and write vast tombs on theological subjects.
We discover our oneness with God only through direct experience. How? First we need to get over the idea that we are not God. Many western religions resist this personal experience of unity, fearing that the mystically-inclined individual will defy religious authority or steal its power: who needs religion when you have God?
Next, we need to silence thought, because thinking maintains this separation from God. Thinking creates duality - the split between what is and what we think about what is. Thinking invariably creates a lens through which we interpret reality. Instead of seeing a tree, we name and describe it, talk about it, and stop seeing it altogether. "If you've seen one redwood, you've seen them all," a famous president once said. This mindless aphorism is simply untrue.
So how do we experience our oneness with God? If we are of the same substance as God, then the most direct way to experience the divine is to experience our own nature directly and to realize that our being is God's Being and our consciousness is God's Consciousness. I am what God is. This does not include experiencing ideas and feelings, because both are constructed from thought forms creating more duality. Every emotion arises as a consequence of what you think is happening. Experiencing the substance of God means experiencing consciousness and being directly and without thought.
The New Thought movement views our thoughts as divine, too, and encourages us to use them in creating a new kind of world. There is much of value in this approach as long as ego doesn't start manipulating outcomes to serve its own grandiosity. In this new consciousness-without-thought, we discover that the world is already infinitely beautiful, precious, and complete just as it is - we make it ugly with out dissatisfaction and judgment. The mystics have been showing us this for eons. It's time to listen.
Now here's a suggestion that will help you make this shift into a consciousness beyond thought. People generally have incredible difficulty slowing, stopping, or releasing their thoughts. This is why meditation is frustrating for so many. But when you shift into sensory awareness, thinking stops by itself! Imagine, for example, that you are looking for faces in a random display of dots, or carefully painting trim, or standing on one foot on a balance beam. You can't think and perform any of these tasks. So if you want to experience God directly, intensify and focus your perception directly on the sensory experience of your own being or consciousness. Just stay there. The only thought that might be helpful in this exercise is to remember that you are now experiencing God!
This experiential shift from cognition to perception, from thinking to sensing, will lead to the next stage of human spiritual evolution because it allows us to experience God as the very source of our own consciousness, being, and behavior. More than that, we fill with divine energies that will transform us. Conscious Being changes our very structure and function right down to the molecular level. It will saturate, pervade, suffuse and remake you if your practice this kind of direct perception and if you let the new you happen. It is up to you. But remember, the key is to experience God as what you already are, an experience that will both transform and divinize you.
None of us can predict ahead of time what we will become as the New Human. We can't define it and then expect to be that, for any definition is just words and concepts. The New Human arises from who and what is already germinal in you. A further word of advice: don’t' try to figure this out and don't try to be something you "should" be, for all that will take you down the path to another persona. Similarly, don't compare yourself with anybody else, for comparisons often constitute subtle forms of violence and self-diminishment. Just be God's being as your own being and let God be God in you.
And it's not that we have to do some kind of heroic act to be the New Human; rather we have to be exactly what we are, and if each of us does that, we will change the world. It's not the big actions that will transform humanity but our way of being. As we become divine, we will change the world through:
• Our interactions with others - family, friends, acquaintances, animals, plants
• Our way of living - simpler, sustainable, gentler
• Our joy and passion in being alive and sharing life with others
• The choices we make in our everyday life
• The example we offer to others who will then be touched by it
A warning: Don't get inflated. You become God, yes, but not the one and only God, like some big king or superman. You are simply your version/expression of divinity, which is itself a source of infinite divine love and joy. Just feel into what God is as you.
By 2030, a third of the U.S. population will be elders. Consider what a spiritual force this New Human could be in the world! From my point of view as a mystical elder, this is the true work of aging, a work that will lead to a new kind of human and a new appreciation of the omnipresent divine world. Now we see the true purpose and work of conscious aging. Our new longevity offers each of us a chance to change the world for the better. Start now! This is how God works in the world now, through what you are, through that part of you that is already God. We change the world we live in, not by heroic acts (which often have unforeseen consequences) but who and what we are.
In sum, experiencing God directly as our own consciousness and being transforms the elder into the New Human and the world into a sacred place. You are the New Human, but you must engage this process of conscious transformation. Tune into on your own Conscious Being and activate the New Human in you. Watch it divinize your life. This work will initiate a continuing process of revelation, bringing us a new world where love will be the answer not because it should be but because it is. Many challenges are coming our way - personal, national, global. We must meet them in this new consciousness. This is the birth of the Divine One in each of us. Will you join me?
I end on a personal note. I have been exploring this transformation my whole life and sharing this vision has become my work - a gift of my Divine Being. I finally understand now that to make an impact in the world is not about manipulating the system to gain attention, notoriety, or big splashy changes, but about living an authentic life that matters, brings love and joy to others, and changes the way we live in the world. We are on a path back to Eden. This is Heaven on Earth. We are divine.
When we make God separate and external from our own self, we inadvertently distance our self from divinity. Rather than experience the unity that God is, this dualistic belief in "self and other" instead encourages fantasy-based beliefs and projections about the nature of the divine "other." We liken God to a father, mother, king friend judge, punisher, etc. To let God be what you are, on the other hand, is to experience the divine essence in its purest form, as your own essence.
Nor is God what you think and believe. To confine God with definitions and theological concepts constitutes yet another way we separate and distance from the divine. God is not somebody else, God is what you are and what everything is. Beliefs, projections, fantasies, ego, emotions, etc. are merely illusions of the mind that come between you and direct contact, ideas that trap you in an endless labyrinth of thought. You will not experience God there, though you may know have many thoughts and write vast tombs on theological subjects.
We discover our oneness with God only through direct experience. How? First we need to get over the idea that we are not God. Many western religions resist this personal experience of unity, fearing that the mystically-inclined individual will defy religious authority or steal its power: who needs religion when you have God?
Next, we need to silence thought, because thinking maintains this separation from God. Thinking creates duality - the split between what is and what we think about what is. Thinking invariably creates a lens through which we interpret reality. Instead of seeing a tree, we name and describe it, talk about it, and stop seeing it altogether. "If you've seen one redwood, you've seen them all," a famous president once said. This mindless aphorism is simply untrue.
So how do we experience our oneness with God? If we are of the same substance as God, then the most direct way to experience the divine is to experience our own nature directly and to realize that our being is God's Being and our consciousness is God's Consciousness. I am what God is. This does not include experiencing ideas and feelings, because both are constructed from thought forms creating more duality. Every emotion arises as a consequence of what you think is happening. Experiencing the substance of God means experiencing consciousness and being directly and without thought.
The New Thought movement views our thoughts as divine, too, and encourages us to use them in creating a new kind of world. There is much of value in this approach as long as ego doesn't start manipulating outcomes to serve its own grandiosity. In this new consciousness-without-thought, we discover that the world is already infinitely beautiful, precious, and complete just as it is - we make it ugly with out dissatisfaction and judgment. The mystics have been showing us this for eons. It's time to listen.
Now here's a suggestion that will help you make this shift into a consciousness beyond thought. People generally have incredible difficulty slowing, stopping, or releasing their thoughts. This is why meditation is frustrating for so many. But when you shift into sensory awareness, thinking stops by itself! Imagine, for example, that you are looking for faces in a random display of dots, or carefully painting trim, or standing on one foot on a balance beam. You can't think and perform any of these tasks. So if you want to experience God directly, intensify and focus your perception directly on the sensory experience of your own being or consciousness. Just stay there. The only thought that might be helpful in this exercise is to remember that you are now experiencing God!
This experiential shift from cognition to perception, from thinking to sensing, will lead to the next stage of human spiritual evolution because it allows us to experience God as the very source of our own consciousness, being, and behavior. More than that, we fill with divine energies that will transform us. Conscious Being changes our very structure and function right down to the molecular level. It will saturate, pervade, suffuse and remake you if your practice this kind of direct perception and if you let the new you happen. It is up to you. But remember, the key is to experience God as what you already are, an experience that will both transform and divinize you.
None of us can predict ahead of time what we will become as the New Human. We can't define it and then expect to be that, for any definition is just words and concepts. The New Human arises from who and what is already germinal in you. A further word of advice: don’t' try to figure this out and don't try to be something you "should" be, for all that will take you down the path to another persona. Similarly, don't compare yourself with anybody else, for comparisons often constitute subtle forms of violence and self-diminishment. Just be God's being as your own being and let God be God in you.
And it's not that we have to do some kind of heroic act to be the New Human; rather we have to be exactly what we are, and if each of us does that, we will change the world. It's not the big actions that will transform humanity but our way of being. As we become divine, we will change the world through:
• Our interactions with others - family, friends, acquaintances, animals, plants
• Our way of living - simpler, sustainable, gentler
• Our joy and passion in being alive and sharing life with others
• The choices we make in our everyday life
• The example we offer to others who will then be touched by it
A warning: Don't get inflated. You become God, yes, but not the one and only God, like some big king or superman. You are simply your version/expression of divinity, which is itself a source of infinite divine love and joy. Just feel into what God is as you.
By 2030, a third of the U.S. population will be elders. Consider what a spiritual force this New Human could be in the world! From my point of view as a mystical elder, this is the true work of aging, a work that will lead to a new kind of human and a new appreciation of the omnipresent divine world. Now we see the true purpose and work of conscious aging. Our new longevity offers each of us a chance to change the world for the better. Start now! This is how God works in the world now, through what you are, through that part of you that is already God. We change the world we live in, not by heroic acts (which often have unforeseen consequences) but who and what we are.
In sum, experiencing God directly as our own consciousness and being transforms the elder into the New Human and the world into a sacred place. You are the New Human, but you must engage this process of conscious transformation. Tune into on your own Conscious Being and activate the New Human in you. Watch it divinize your life. This work will initiate a continuing process of revelation, bringing us a new world where love will be the answer not because it should be but because it is. Many challenges are coming our way - personal, national, global. We must meet them in this new consciousness. This is the birth of the Divine One in each of us. Will you join me?
I end on a personal note. I have been exploring this transformation my whole life and sharing this vision has become my work - a gift of my Divine Being. I finally understand now that to make an impact in the world is not about manipulating the system to gain attention, notoriety, or big splashy changes, but about living an authentic life that matters, brings love and joy to others, and changes the way we live in the world. We are on a path back to Eden. This is Heaven on Earth. We are divine.