Every act is an act of self-definition

I had the Holy Experience today. I had it this morning. I am still having it as I write this.

The experience feels interestingly like a new beginning. So many things are changing in our world, and so many things are presenting themselves for change in my life. I experienced this morning that I want to change how I am. I wish to become more loving, more patient, more compassionate, more giving.

Yes, much, much more giving.

This is wonderful, this feeling of being willing to change and to become a larger version of myself than I am experiencing today. It is part of the continuing adventure, of the never-ending process, that is the expansion of my humanity and the evolution of my human soul.

Just when I think “the game is over,” it never is! This is what is so extraordinary about Life. Even after what we imagine to be our death, life is not over. It never is and it never will be.

I don’t know why I am feeling all this right now, why I am knowing this as part of my experience today more than usual, but I am. It just feels like a new energy is coursing through me. And that feels good. I thank God for it. I thank God for letting me get up today with such revitalized energy, even at my age. I am not a young man any more, but my heart feels young as ever.

I think that part of what is behind all of this may have to do with the fact that I had a memory in my sleeping/waking moments this morning that I once spent the entire weekend going over the “script” of my life, and I was remembering that. And when I say I was going over the script of my life, I mean literally, not figuratively.

I had the screenwriter, the producer/director, and the director of photography of Conversations with God: The Movie at my house for the three days some years ago, going over the first draft of the script for the film. They were asking me to describe, in some cases moment-by-moment, many of my most meaningful life experiences—and that can throw one into deep introspection, as you might imagine. It is also something you do not forget, because it is very rare that a person sits down for three days and summarizes his entire life.

I haven’t lived my life the way I would have liked to. Some of the choices I have made have been very hurtful to others, and I deeply regret that. Yet I see now, whenever I review the entirety of my life, that certain things had to happen exactly as they have happened in order for me to be here now, just as I am—and for the others in my life to be where they are as well.

I know that sounds like the perfect self-absolving philosophy, a wonderful thought system that allows one to escape regretting one’s past—and even to, in some ways, justify that past.

I promise you, this idea brings none of those benefits. And least, not for me. I will always regret certain choices and actions in my past. And I can never justify those choices based upon a thought that things needed to happen exactly the way they happened. Nor could I possibly “justify” making those same kinds of choices and decisions today.

Yet regret is not guilt, and that is what is important here. “Guilt” is about feeling that I did something “wrong,” while “regret” is about feeling that what I did is not something I would do again. For it is as poet Maya Angelou has said: “When we know better, we do better.”

And what is it that I “know better” now? I know myself better. I know better Who I Am—and who, in the future, I choose to be. You see, there is one thing I did not understand back there. In my past, I did not understand what I was doing here. On the earth, I mean.

Then Conversations with God set me straight. It said, “Every act is an act of self-definition.” It made it clear to me that I was not my body and that I was not my mind, and that I was not even my soul, but rather, all three combined. And that the reason this Triune Being that I am came into the Realm of Physicality was so that I might both Know and Experience Who I Really Am.

Conversations with God taught me that God and I are One; that I am God, godding; that the purpose of my life is to recreate my Self anew in the next grandest version of the greatest vision ever I held about Who I Am.

This is not a journey from nowhere to nowhere. This is a process. Life is a process. It is a process with purpose and meaning. It is a function of the Universe.

It is the Present Action of an Eternal Activity. I am not an infinitesimal spec of dust on the cosmic floor, unworthy to even be seen, much less celebrated. I am a big and important, and yes, an even glorious part of an Ever Ongoing Expression of Divinity.

Conversations with God also taught me that God forgives me completely and utterly for my “offenses” — which God sees as merely “mistakes,” “misunderstandings,” and simple “errors,” holding me in the cradle of Her love, embracing me in the warmth of His compassion and deep understanding, encouraging me now and giving me the strength to move forward with my purpose in this life: to know myself as Who I Really Am, and to experience that.

In this way, God experiences ITself…and it is the only way God can.