For the past 18 years, wherever I have gone, I have been besieged with questions about God and Life and the purpose and function of our existence on Earth. This has been understandable, of course, and not unexpected in the aftermath of the worldwide publication of Conversations with God, which attracted millions of readers in more than 35 languages.

Also understandably, I hear the same questions over and over again from different people in different places and times. So repetitive have been my exchanges that I realized recently that I can now recite them from memory. And that gave me an idea. Why not do exactly that? Why not produce a written summary of the questions I usually receive and the answers I have given, post it on the Internet, and then refer people to this resource if they wish to have a lasting record of the answers for future reference?

So here you are. I invite you to visit this corner of our global Internet newspaper’s front page often. I will post new material in this ongoing “Dialogue from Memory” on a regular basis here. And, of course, you will always be able to check into the Archive should you miss a particular posting. When we are finished here, I hope you will know a great deal more about what I have called The New Spirituality, based on the messages in Conversations with God. Welcome to…

CONVERSATIONS WITH HUMANITY

Installment #1

Q. Is there a God?
A.  Yes. The New Spirituality holds that there is a Central Essence, a Creative Force, a Dynamic Energy within the Universe that fills the role of what has been called by many names, including Adonai, Akshar, Allah, Brahman, Brahma, Deus, Divinity, Divine Mother, Ekankar, Elohim, God, Hari, Indra, Jehovah, Krishna, Lord, Mahesh, Manitou, Ormuzd, Parameshwar, Purush, Purushottam, Radha Soami, Ram, Rama, Theos, Thor, Varuna, Vishnu, Yahweh, among others.

Q. What is God? A “person”…a single, grander-than-grand Being? An “energy”? What, precisely, is God?
A. The more productive question is, “What is God not?” The answer to the first question is so sweeping, it would take all the pages of all the encyclopedias on the Internet to offer just a beginning description. Yet the answer to the second question can be given in one word: Nothing. There is nothing that God is not. For God is the Essential Essence that comprises everything—both seen and unseen—in existence.

This means that God is the All-In-All, the Alpha & the Omega, the Beginning & the End; the Up & the Down of it, the Big & the Small of It, the Fast and the Slow of It, the Here & the There of It, the Now & the Then of It. It means that nothing stands outside of God. That Which IS is God…and God is That Which IS.

Q. I find that sad, because if that’s true, then we no longer have a personal God…someone we can pray to, someone we can ask favors of, someone we can go to for help.
A. It would be sad if that were true, but Conversations with God tells us that the Sum Total of Everything has—as might be expected—unlimited intelligence and unlimited creative capacity. The Essential Essence may, therefore, form and shape Itself in an endless number of configurations. Indeed, physical life itself is nothing more than a collection of those configurations.

This means that God can—and will—reconfigure Itself in any form or shape that suits the believer. Divinity can therefore be thought of as your Spiritual Father, as a Sacred Mother, as a Best Friendship with God, or in any guise or image that best helps us to relate and communicate with it.

IN OUR NEXT INSTALLMENT: Since you say there is a God, what is God’s “job”? What is its function? What does God do and what does God not do?   

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Installment #2
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Q. Since you say there is a God, what is God’s “job”?
A. I can tell you what it is not. It is not to “grant us wishes.” Nor is it to watch us from afar, judge us by our actions, and reward or punish us after “death.”

Q. Okay, so what is God’s job?
God’s “job” (I prefer to refer to this as the basic function of the Essential Energy) is to empower Life in all of its physical forms and manifestations with the ability to create, impact, and direct their experience at a level commensurate with the Self Consciousness with which each of those manifestations has been imbued.

As it relates to humans, God’s “job” is to provide us with the ability to create our own reality. This includes our collective Exterior Events and our individual Inner Experience. To do this, we have been given the Tools of Creation. Specifically: Thought, Word, and Deed.

Q. So we get to experience whatever we want to experience?
The Collective known as Humanity does, yes — and our world as it now presents itself is evidence of that. It is the Cultural Story of humanity that produces the Exterior Events of humanity’s history and present adventure. If we want to change our collective Exteior Events, all we have to do is change our Cultural Story. That is, what we think of ourselves; what we tell ourselves about ourselves.

The Individuation of Divinity known as a single human being also gets to experience what it wishes to experience. Everything is what we say it is. There is no direct connection between the Exterior Events of Life being co-created by the lot of us and the Interior Experience of those events, which is individually created by every human being.

The process by which Exterior Events are transformed and translated into Interior Experience is explained in wonderful detail in the book When Everything Changes Change Everything. It involves the Mechanics of the Mind and the System of the Soul, and the ideal is to use both, in perfect balance. That is what spiritual masters do, and have always done.

The trick is to know what Life itself is all about. Then we know what it is that we are trying to do!

Q. What does that mean? What are you saying here?
I am saying that most people do not understand exactly what it is they are seeking to do. That is, they are not keenly aware of the purpose of their lives—or of Life Itself. They do not understand why we are even here upon the Earth. They do not know who they are, where they are, or why they are where they are. So most people are simply wading through the ocean of life, trying to make the best of it, trying to keep their head above water, trying with all their might to simply stay afloat. But they have no idea how they got in this situation, what the situation actually is, where they are trying to go, much less how to really get into the swim of things. So they experience themselves swimming upstream, as it were. Yet it doesn’t have to be this way.

Q. Oh, really? Then what way can it be?
Ah, yes. That will be our next installment.