EDITOR’S NOTE: I am excited to be able to use this space on the Internet as a place in which we can join together to ignite a worldwide exploration of some of the most revolutionary theological ideas to come along in a long time.

The ideas I intend to use this space for in the immediate future are the ideas found in GOD’S MESSAGE TO THE WORLD: You’ve Got Me All Wrong.  I believe this new book (published last October by Rainbow Ridge Books) places before our species some of the most important “What if” questions that could be contemplated by contemporary society.

The questions are important because they invite us to ponder some of the most self-damaging ideas about God ever embraced by our species.  For example…

One teaching about the Divine is that God sees us as imperfect because we have not been obedient — and that we cannot return home to God in this imperfect state.

There are those who go so far as to say that we were born imperfect because the first humans did not obey God.

Of the world’s three largest religions, two—Christianity and Judaism—have taught their followers across the centuries various doctrines declaring that all human souls are subject to death as a punishment for the “ancestral,” “inherited,” or “original” sin of the first humans.

Modern Judaism (as opposed to Jewish teachers in Talmudic times) rarely teaches of original sin any more, but much of modern Christianity does to this day.

As well, both Christianity and Judaism teach that human beings are now imperfect, regardless of whether they were born that way. Modern Jewish teaching stresses that this is because humans choose to sin later in life, not because they are born in sin, while much Christian teaching still holds that imperfection is the state of our soul upon entry into this world, and this inborn state is what creates an ongoing tendency in humans to sin throughout their lives.

Part of this idea is the notion, supported by some, known as traducianism, which declares that God created only one original soul—Adam (Eve was said to have been formed by God from Adam’s rib)—and that all other souls derive their basic qualities and tendencies from their parents, and the ancestors before them, through a process by which the qualities of the soul are passed down from one soul to the next, generation to generation.

How did the imperfection that some say is “inherited” originally arise? There are varying versions of the story, but, loosely, it is this:

The first humans, Adam and Eve, were given total freedom, with all of their earthly needs met, in the Garden of Eden. God asked only one thing of them: Do not eat of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. They did. Eve picked an apple and shared it with Adam. The rest, as they say, is history.

The two were driven out of paradise by an angry God, who is said to have cursed their children, their children’s children, and their children’s children’s children—yea, even unto the end of time. God cursed their entire progeny, it was said, with inherited imperfection and physical death—neither of which conditions were aspects of Adam and Eve’s reality in paradise.

Thus, imperfection and death became part of the very nature of being human.

Now comes The Great What If . . .

What if God never cursed anyone? What if no one is born in sin? And what if God has never seen, and does not now see, any human being as imperfect in any way?

Would it make a difference? Does it matter? In the overall scheme of things, would it have any significant impact in our planetary experience?

Yes. Of course it would. The first thing it would do is relieve people of any anxiety they may hold about death and about what, if anything, “bad” could happen to them after they leave their body.

Actually, humans wouldn’t have any worries about this at all if they had not been told of God’s requirement that only perfection is allowed in heaven. But most religions have made it very clear that this requirement is in place, and that there is no getting around it.

The Bible, for instance, tells us directly and unequivocally that God’s standard for allowing us to join God in heaven is perfection. The Bible also tells us, at Romans 3:23, that no human being can meet that standard. It says that “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.”

Yet even if we haven’t committed one sin in our entire life, there’s that bugaboo, traducianism. We’ve got our inherited imperfection to deal with.

And as we noted earlier, our beliefs tell us that God has no leeway here. The Law is the Law. The 23rd Psalm says, “Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life,” but that does not, presumably, apply after death. Then, mercy apparently has no place. God has no choice but to deny every imperfect soul immediate access to heaven—and since no soul exists in a state of perfection, that means, according to some doctrines, that all souls are initially denied access.

This doesn’t mean they never get into heaven, however. Wear told there is a place called Purgatory, where souls are said to be sent prior to entering heaven in order to be purified by having the blemish of their sins eradicated through a process of suffering in payment for them.

It should be made clear here that not all of the world’s religions teach of the need for the soul to suffer in order to compen- sate for offenses. Many teach of a God who admits us into heaven at once if we sincerely repent of our sins. But if we don’t . . . .

So the overall pronouncement is this: We are imperfect beings. We should stand before the throne of God in trem- bling and in shame, with the hope that our imperfections and transgressions will be forgiven. If we do not do what is necessary to purify our souls and return them to perfection, now or in the hereafter (such as by submitting to abject suffering in payment for our sins in Purgatory), we’re not getting back Home. It’s as simple as that.

Now if the huge number of people (we are talking billions here) who believe this is true altered their belief, fear, shame, and guilt would be lifted from the hearts of both innocent children and sad adults who carry as a burden their identity as being undeserving of reuniting with God in heaven.

And if the third question in the “what if ” above were to be embraced as humanity’s reality, the lack of self-worth that now sponsors so much of our species’ dysfunctional, self-defeating, and hurtful behaviors would at last be healed. It is clear that this would cause the largest number of those behaviors to disappear.

Now here is the news: God has been telling us from the very beginning, and it is becoming more clear to us every day, that humanity’s Ancient Cultural Story about God seeing us as imperfect, and therefore not allowing us back into heaven unless and until we have been purified, is plainly and simply inaccurate.

It is okay now to remove this ancient teaching from our current story, and to stop telling this to ourselves and to our children.

We are not born in sin, nor do we inherit sinful tendencies through a lineage of souls going back to a purported First Misbehaver. “Ancestral guilt” is a figment of our religious imagination. The story of Adam and Eve is a fiction as well.

God did not throw anyone out of paradise, and one look at the world around you will show you that human beings are still living in a paradise. They are despoiling it step-by-step, to be sure, but even with all of that, nothing compares to a sunrise or a sunset, to an eagle’s glide or a butterfly’s flutter, to the fragrance of a rose or the smell of the morning dew. There is nothing more stunning than the quiet beauty of an unexpected snowfall, or the noisy beauty of expected waves pounding upon a sandy shore. We watch both with awe, as well we should, for we are clear we are seeing something exceeding magnificence.

And that is just the beginning, just the top of a long list of treasures that this paradise called the earth will always hold, if we will but hold them as treasures, keeping them safe from disassembling and destruction.

The beauty of this world is enhanced beyond measure by the beauty of you. Nothing is imperfect about you. Nothing you have ever thought, nothing you have ever said, nothing you have ever done. It is all perfect, because it is all part of the process of your personal evolution—and, on a larger scale, of the evolution of the human species.

Even as all the “failed” experiments of all the scientists in all the laboratories across the globe are perfect, in that they are steps in the producing of an ultimately important and highly beneficial result . . . even as the mathematical miscalculations and spelling errors of all the children in all the schools of the world are perfect, in that they are steps in the producing of the highest scores . . . so, too are the “mistakes” of humanity as a whole seen as perfect in the eyes of God—steps in the evolutionary process of all life everywhere.

All that was ever thought or said or done by any and every human being—even the worst of it—has been the product of the innocence of a species so young, its members did not know any better; they did not understand how to get that for which they yearned, they did not comprehend how to escape or evade that which they wished to avoid.

This is difficult for many people to accept. The idea that fully grown humans have done these things, that some of us have acted in these ways, because of extreme immaturity, is challenging to our belief that surely, grown men and women know right from wrong, and don’t have to be told that killing others and destroying everything in their path is not the way to achieve their goals, whatever they may be.

We assert that people should know better because we like to think of humans as highly evolved. In fact, humanity has just emerged from its infancy.

In their book New World New Mind, Robert Ornstein and Paul Ehrlich placed this in perspective in one mind-boggling paragraph:

Suppose Earth’s history were charted on a single year’s calendar, with midnight January 1 representing the origin of Earth and midnight December 31 the present. Then each day of Earth’s “year” would represent 12 million years of actual history. On that scale, the first form of life, a simple bacterium, would arise sometime in February. More complex life forms, however, come much later; the first fishes appear around November 20. The dinosaurs arrive around December 10 and disappear on Christmas Day. The first of our ancestors recognizable as human would not show up until the afternoon of December 31. Homo sapiens—our species—would emerge at around 11:45 p.m. . . . and all that has happened in recorded history would occur in the final minute of the year.

As you can see, we are an astonishingly young species, and, not surprisingly, very immature.

And so, we have used violence to produce outcomes that we were sure justified its use (even if it meant death to millions of innocent men, women, and children).

And so, we have used domination—sometimes cruel, heartless domination—to generate results we were sure were desirable to experience (even if it subjected the entire population of a country or an area to ruthless suppression, persecution, and maltreatment).

And so, we have used self-interest—sometimes unmitigated, unbridled self-interest—to generate a level of sufficiency for ourselves that we were sure we deserved (even if millions of others had to go without, given the global economic model that we have empowered).

And so, we have used self-righteousness—sometimes appalling, execrable self-righteousness—to generate a sense of self-worth that we were sure we deserved (even as we told others that they were unworthy and were going to be condemned by God to hell).

These childish, almost infantile, behaviors are seen by God as the uncontrolled and irrational tantrums of an unenlightened species, a breed of sentient beings in the primitive, primeval, primordial stages of its maturational process.

Put simply, The Divine perfectly well understands the nature of what it is to be human.

Even as we understand how a three-year-old could knock over the milk reaching anxiously for the chocolate cake because it wants the cake so badly, so does God understand completely how we could act as some of us have acted, reaching for what we have wanted so badly.

Even the wanting of some things, in and of itself, could be considered “wrong” by judgmental humans, just as a child’s wanting more cake than his little sister might be considered “wrong.” In our human value system, he shouldn’t want more than everyone else. And he certainly would be considered “wrong” for trying to get it by bullying his way to it. Yet the wise parent understands the not-yet-mature desire of the older brother, and does not send him to his room for the remainder of his childhood.

God sees us just as we see our children: in the process of maturing, but nonetheless whole, complete, and perfect just as we are right now. There is nothing we have to be, nothing we have to say, and nothing we have to do to gain the love of our Creator, who adores us even as we misbehave. There are no credentials we must acquire in order to be qualified to return to heaven. Our credential is our existence. Nothing more is needed.

That message is important enough to be repeated.

There are no credentials
 we must acquire in order 
to be qualified to return to heaven. Our credential is our existence. Nothing more is needed.

Again, this is hard to believe and difficult to accept by a race of beings conditioned to imagine that perfect justice requires con- demnation and punishment—including, in some cases, death.

You must remember that human beings are of such infantile comprehension that they will claim that the killing of people by the state is the way to teach people that killing people is bad.

You must remember that human beings are of such infantile comprehension that they will claim that the use of weapons of mass destruction in a preemptive strike by one country is the way to teach another country that to have weapons of mass destruction is bad.

You must remember that human beings are of such infantile comprehension that they will claim that strict adherence to a religion that teaches intolerance of any other religion is the way to teach the world that intolerance is bad.

A God of Unconditional Love is utterly incomprehensible to a species that has still not learned to love itself enough to stop destroying itself.

We cannot believe that God would forgive us for that which we cannot forgive each other.

It is nonetheless true that even if we have done what we, or others, consider to be truly horrible things during our time on the earth . . . even then, God will welcome us back Home.

There are a number of very good reasons that this will be true, and we’ll be examining them in the chapters just ahead as we continue to explore humanity’s misunderstandings about God. For now, please read this, given to us by Jesus.

I know that you are probably very familiar with this tale, but please read it anyway.

A certain man had two sons. And the younger of them said to his father, “Father, give me the portion of goods that falls to me.” So he divided among both of his sons their inheritance.

Not many days after, the younger son gathered all his things together, journeyed to a far country, and there wasted his possessions with prodigal liv- ing. But when he had spent all, there arose a severe famine in that land, and he began to be in want.

Then he went and found work with a citizen of that country, and the man sent him into the fields to feed swine. And he would gladly have filled his stomach with the pods that the swine ate, but no one gave him anything.

Then he came to himself, thinking: “How many of my father’s hired servants have bread enough and to spare, and I perish with hunger! I will arise and go to my father, and will say to him, ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you, and I am no longer worthy to be called your son. Make me like one of your hired servants.”

And he arose and went to his father. But when he was still a great way off, his father saw him and had compassion, and ran and fell on his neck and kissed him. And the son said to him, “Father, I have sinned against heaven and in your sight, and am no longer worthy to be called your son.”

But the father said to his servants, “Bring out the best robe and put it on him, and put a ring on his hand and sandals on his feet. And bring the fat- ted calf here and kill it, and let us eat and be merry; for this son of mine was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.” And they began to be merry.

Now the father’s older son was in the field, work- ing. And as he came and drew near to the house, he heard music and dancing. So he called one of the servants and asked what these things meant.

And the servant said to him, “Your brother has come home, and because he was safe and sound, your father has killed the fatted calf.”

But the second son was angry and would not go in. Therefore his father came out and pleaded with him. So the second son answered and said to his father, “Lo, these many years I have been serving you; I never transgressed your commandment at any time; and yet you never gave me even a young goat, that I might make merry with my friends. But as soon as this son of yours came, who has devoured your liveli- hood with harlots, you killed the fatted calf for him.”

And his father said to him, “Son, you are always with me, and all that I have is yours. It was right that we should make merry and be glad, for your brother was dead and is alive again, and was lost and is found.”

To me, this is the single most important story in the Bible. It says everything important that Jesus wanted us to know about God. But Jesus knew that people rarely understood, much less embraced, really deep truths if heard only once. So he made his same point again and again, saying things like . . .

What man among you, having an hundred sheep, if he lose one of them, doth not leave the ninety and nine in the wilderness, and go after that which is lost, until he find it?

And when he cometh home, he calleth together his friends and neighbors, saying unto them, “Rejoice with me; for I have found my sheep which was lost!”

Does this include the worst of us? The “black sheep” of our human family?

Yes.

And so, we can rest easy. We will not be abandoned because we became lost, and we will not be rejected when we finally return Home, no matter what we may have done while we were away.

Parables and stories are one way of getting an idea across. Poetry is another. It bypasses the mind and seeps right into the heart. I have placed the following poem in other books of mine, and I am placing it in this book again, because—like the parable above—a message wondrously crafted cannot be heard too often.

I am blessed to be married to the American poet, Em Claire. This is her offering:

LONG AT SEA

I left Home so long ago now

that I would not recognize my own face.

I constructed the Boat of my Life

and I set out
into the open sea,

waving to all who knew

that the seas would give me

everything I could handle,

and everything I could not—


and yet they waved,

and I set out

into the open sea


in the Boat of My Life:


built from Soul, crafted by Heart.


And with great innocence I pushed off


into the open sea

and have been away from my Home


so long now that I would not recognize my own face—

but I know that Home,

Home


remembers me.

(From the book and CD Home Remembers Me,
available at www.EmClairePoet.com)

===========================================

(The entirety of the exceptional text of GOD’S MESSAGE TO THE WORLD: You’ve Got Me All Wrong brings our species theological constructions that truly challenge the world’s thinking about God. Five full chapters of this book may be sampled here: www.godsmessagetotheworld.info)

EDITOR’S NOTE: I am excited to be able to use this space on the Internet as a place in which we can join together to ignite a worldwide exploration of some of the most revolutionary theological ideas to come along in a long time.

The ideas I intend to use this space for in the immediate future are the ideas found in GOD’S MESSAGE TO THE WORLD: You’ve Got Me All Wrong.  I believe this new book (published last October by Rainbow Ridge Books) places before our species some of the most important “What if” questions that could be contemplated by contemporary society.

The questions are important because they invite us to ponder some of the most self-damaging ideas about God ever embraced by our species.  For example…

One teaching about the Divine is that God demands obedience.

We also note that the vast majority of those who believe in God believe that God is judging, condemning, and punishing when God’s demands are not met.

But now comes The Great What If . . .

What if God demands nothing, judges nothing, and punishes nothing?

Would it make a difference? Does it matter? In the overall scheme of things, would it have any significant impact in our planetary experience?

Yes. More violence, more brutality, more killing, and more outright war has been committed in the name of God than under any other banner. If the entire world believed that God demands nothing, judges nothings, and punishes nothing, the spiritual basis for much of the righteousness that underlies, justifies, and motivates humanity’s most egregious and self-damaging behaviors would evaporate.

Further, if judgment and punishment were now said to be not part of God’s Kingdom, the foundation of humanity’s entire legal system would be shaken to the core, with many of the laws in many of our countries having to be rewritten or repealed.

As well, if we embraced the notion that God demands and commands nothing, many of our cultural norms, customs, and prohibitions would be stripped of their moral authority, and would likewise eventually have to be abandoned for lack of any premise or basis.

Nowhere is this better illustrated than in the case of same-gender marriage. Even as restrictions against marriages outside of a person’s faith or race were one day held as being “against God’s Law”—but are now seen as perfectly acceptable expressions of love (except in some communities and cultures, where it still is not)—so, too, will gay marriage one day become widely embraced as entirely appropriate between people who deeply love each other. This will occur when the entirety of humanity abandons all notions that an expression of true love that strays from past societal norms somehow breaks God’s commandments.

If there are no commandments from God, then we can no longer kill, no longer punish, no longer judge, oppress, harm, restrict, limit, or damage others in the name of the Lord. This would wipe out an entire mountain of vindication for a huge catalogue of human cruelties and atrocities.

The question is, would it also remove from humanity’s experience a moral compass upon which our species has depended? What would our new moral compass be?

Perhaps it is time for us to acknowledge that God has been telling us from the very beginning, and it is becoming more clear to us every day, that humanity’s Ancient Cultural Story about a God who is demanding and commanding is plainly and simply inaccurate.

It is okay now to remove this ancient teaching from our current story, and to stop telling this to ourselves and to our children.

God demands and commands nothing. This is because God has no reason to demand or command anything. And this is because God needs nothing.

God “needs” no experience—emotional, physical, or spiritual—since God is the source of every experience God could have. How can the source of something need that thing? How can the Source of Everything need anything? And if the Source of Everything needs nothing, why would It command anything?

It is not as if some behavior of ours, such as obeying God, could cause God to have an experience that God could not have without us exhibiting that behavior. To put this another way, God is not dependent upon us for God’s nonexistent needs to be met.

There is no reason, then, to believe in a God who is so displeased in the absence of a particular behavior that we will be punished horribly and eternally.

God is Love, and this love knows neither condition nor limitation. It is not based on receiving anything back, and it is not withheld because God is angry to the point of everlasting condemnation, for the simple reason that God is never angry to the point of everlasting condemnation (or ever angry at all).

There are those who say that God demands or commands things not because God needs something, but because we need something. Specifically, we need instructions, directions, requirements, and commandments in order to stop ourselves from running amok, and to help us make our lives work.

This viewpoint holds that without commandments and directions, we wouldn’t know how to behave—or be willing or able to behave in ways that serve our continued survival—because of our very nature.

It is said by some that it is “human nature” to behave irresponsibly and uncontrollably, selfishly and even violently, and that it is only God’s requirements and restrictions—and the threat of God’s punishment if we don’t heed them—that keeps us from being totally self-centered, self-serving, and self-destructive.

Following suit, punishment has become the rationale for all civil laws and government regulations restricting and governing the behavior of people, from stoplights and speed limits that must be obeyed, to product labeling rules that must be followed, to sanitary standards that must be maintained, to workplace regulations that must be followed.

Without these and other behavioral rules being imposed, the conventional wisdom goes, everybody would do as they pleased, no one would be protected, and people everywhere would be the victim of those who are careless or unscrupulous.

Yet are humans incapable of being self-regulating?

The answer is no.

All humans have the innate ability to govern their own behaviors and to adjust them to the degree that they harm no one, while producing maximum positive results for each individual and maximum benefit for the collective. All we have to do is determine to use that innate ability. Ironically, what ignites the desire to do so is the absence of rules and regulations . . . from God or anyone else.

God understands this. That is why the ultimate gift God has given humanity is free will. Freedom is the fundamental nature of divinity. And God knows that humanity will always act in humanity’s best interests, once those best interests are made clear.

If you want a wonderful example of this, watch people as they whiz around the traffic circle at the Arc de Triomphe in Paris—where there are no lane markings, no traffic lights, no signs showing who goes first or where, and no police officer to direct the endless and rapid flow of vehicles.

Thousands of people make their way around that monument every day in a hectic mish-mash of interweaving iron on tires—and they do not have to be forced by any law or regulation to yield the right-of-way, stop before smashing into others, or go when others have stopped. They do so automatically.

When you know what it is you’re trying to do, the preferable and beneficial action to take becomes instantly obvious and very clear to you. That’s why there are fewer traffic accidents on that circle than there are on the Champs‑Élysées a hundred feet away, where traffic lights abound, lanes are clearly marked, and the way to proceed is guided by rules and regulations.

Humanity on a global scale cannot become clear about its own best interests until humanity on a global scale is clear about what it is trying to do. And this is where we have fallen short. We have not moved to total clarity and mutual agreement on what it is we are “up to” here during our time upon the earth. Once we do, our behaviors will self-modify and self-regulate in ways that will produce maximum effectiveness.

A species that is highly evolved is one that has reached a collective understanding about what is in its highest and best interest, based on a mutually held awareness of what it is seeking to achieve and to experience.

Because we are not at that stage in the development and evolution of humanity, the pressing question today becomes: What could get us there?

The answer is: A letting go of our Ancient Cultural Story about who we are and why we are alive; about the purpose and process of life; about the nature and desire of God.

God told us in The New Revelations that in order to get to that place, we will need to have the courage to take five huge steps:

Step 1: Acknowledge that some of our old beliefs about God and about life are no longer working.

Step 2: Acknowledge that there is something we do not understand about God and about Life, the understanding of which will change everything.

Step 3: Be willing for a new understanding of God and Life to now be brought forth, an understanding that could produce a new way of life on this planet.

Step 4: Be courageous enough to explore and examine this new understanding, and, if it aligns with our inner truth and knowing, to enlarge our belief system to include it.

Step 5: Choose to live our lives as a demonstration of our highest and grandest beliefs, rather than as a denial of them.

A huge shift in humanity’s thinking—perhaps the biggest invitation ever issued by life to life—would be the accepting, embracing, and adopting of the following spiritually revolutionary statement:

Nothing can occur in all the Universe that violates the Will of God.

Everything in human theology, virtually every tenet of every religion on the face of the earth, is rooted and built on exactly the opposite thought. God’s will can be violated, our religions say. This is the foundation of every religious doctrine of judgment, condemnation, and punishment.

Yet the violation of God’s will is utterly impossible unless there is something more powerful than God in the universe—something that can override God’s will. But nothing of the sort exists, for God is the All In All, the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End, the Sum Total of Everything.

If, therefore, something is happening, it is happening because God has not stopped it from happening. And if God has not stopped something from happening, how can it be said that it is happening against God’s will?

Those who say that God allows God’s will to be thwarted, and that, therefore, it is possible for people to violate the will of God, have rendered themselves blind to a simple logic: If God allows something, then it is not against God’s will.

You could not lift your little finger if God did not want you to. Everything that happens, therefore, happens because God allows it to, or it wouldn’t and couldn’t be happening.

The theological question thus becomes not whether God allows—and therefore wills—what is happening to be happening, but why God would allow it.

The answer is that God’s greatest desire is for that fundamental aspect of divinity that we just spoke of—freedom—to be expressed in every moment by every manifestation of divinity. And since God cannot be hurt or damaged in any way by anything at all, God has no reason to place restrictions on the freedom of any of God’s creations or creatures.

God also has no reason to judge, condemn, and punish anyone who uses that freedom. Indeed, to do so would be to change the definition of freedom itself, so that it would then mean: “The ability to do as you are told, or suffer the consequences.”

Yet this is not what freedom means. That is not freedom at all.

Freedom is Love demonstrated; it is Love in action. Restriction of any kind is not Love in action, because restriction is limitation, and Love knows no such thing.

Total Love and Absolute Freedom are synonymous, and produce the theological concept known as free will.

God has given all of God’s creatures this gift so that God could give Itself the gift of totally experiencing the wonder and the glory of what It Is. Yet free will is obviously not free will if the use of it in a particular way produces indescribable and everlasting torture in the fires of hell. Such a response to the use of God’s greatest gift to humanity would make a mockery of both the gift and The Giver.

As well, free will means nothing in an environment in which there are no choices. If God is to experience Its full wonder and glory, that which is not considered fully wondrous or glorious in human terms must exist alongside of that which is, so to produce a context within which wonder and glory itself may be not simply known, but expressed and experienced. Thus, the physical universe has been created as a Contextual Field within which choices become possible.

Another way of saying this is that the Contextual Field that is our universe exists in the way that it does because in the absence of That Which Is Not, That Which Is is not.

That is, it cannot be experienced.

In the absence of Darkness, Light cannot be experienced. In the absence of Small, Big cannot be experienced. In the absence of There, Here cannot be experienced. In the absence of Slow, Fast cannot be experienced. Nothing can be experienced in the absence of a contrasting element. It can be known theoretically, but it cannot be expressed experientially.

Therefore has God created a universe in which divinity has what appear to be exact opposites, or dualities, but are not.

Using an example from our physical reality, we often label things as either “hot” or “cold.” These appear to be opposite ends of a polarity, but they are not. They are degrees of the same thing—called temperature. There is no “duality” in temperature, there is only One Thing, variously expressed.

In much the same way, all manifestations of life are expressions demonstrating degrees, or variations, of the single thing called divinity.

And thus has God invited divinity’s human individuations to judge not, and neither condemn, that which seems to oppose them, but to see it as simply another aspect of the Self, providing an opportunity to be a light unto the darkness, that they might know Who They Really Are—and that all those whose lives they touch might know who they really are as well, by the light of this example.

One’s free will choosing of any thought, word, or deed need not be, therefore, a demonstration of one’s obedience, but may be an acceptance of one’s invitation from God to step into the highest demonstration of one’s best idea about oneself. With this understanding, what may have been considered one’s burden may become one’s joy.

Life becomes an experience of exaltation when one realizes, finally and at last, that neither fear nor obedience are required by God.

(The entirety of the exceptional text of GOD’S MESSAGE TO THE WORLD: You’ve Got Me All Wrong brings our species theological constructions that truly challenge the world’s thinking about God. Five full chapters of this book may be sampled here: www.godsmessagetotheworld.info)