Editor’s Note: For the next several months this space will be used to explore, one-by-one, the messages, metaphysical principles, and spiritual meaning of the material found in the nearly 3,000 pages of the Conversations with God dialogues. This series of observations and interpretations is offered with my continuing disclaimer: I could be wrong about all of this.
CWG Explored/Installment #10: What if we ARE Divine?
In my last entry here I offered my idea of who and what the Self is. I said that I believe the Self is an aspect of Divinity, and Individuation of God. I believe we are all One with The Divine, not separate from, or other than, God in any way or at any level.
In this series installment I should like to explore the implications of that last statement.
If it is true (not if it is true that I believe it, but if what I believe is true), then many questions are raised. Why, if we are one with God, would we collectively create a world of such cruelty, violence, suffering, and dysfunction?
As well, when “bad things happen to good people” (sudden illness, long-term or life-threatening disease, financial catastrophe, relationship disaster, or other of the most challenging events in the lives of individuals), why can we not “fix” them with a wave of the hand? Why are we required (or do we require ourselves) to move through them to the very end, however horrific that end may be?
What gods would do this to themselves? And for what reason or purpose?
I have read the pages of the CWG cosmology repeatedly, scanning for answers to such questions, and I keep coming up with the same thing. The All-in-All, or the Collective (which is The Totality of All Beings and All Things that humans call “God”) requires and wants nothing in particular (since any experience It could want, It IS). Yet wanting nothing does not mean it desires nothing.
Wanting and Desiring are two different things. Being in “want” of something means you are without it. God is without nothing, because God is everything that God could possible wish to have or experience. Yet God could desire to experience more of what God already is and has. That is, God’s desire could be to expand endlessly the experience of Itself.
Now I know from CWG that words are the least reliable form of communication, but this is as close as I can come, using the awful limitation of human words, to describing and explaining Divinity.
My understanding is that Divinity is not specifically and deliberately creating “life as we know it” on this planet, but rather, desires its Endless Sentient Expressions to have complete freedom to create anything and everything they collectively and individually choose, that they may consciously or subconsciously know would or could facilitate their experience of exactly Who and What They Are. God has thus empowered every sentient being, one and all, to do so.
It has also been made clear to me that only in the folds and molds of who they imagine themselves NOT to be can a sentient being experience themselves as who they are.
Put simply (and, admittedly, simplistically), one cannot experience oneself as The Light unless and until one places oneself in the awareness of The Darkness. Without the Darkness, the Light is not. That is, it is not experience-able.
Thus, all things exist in the Universe (or, if you will, in the Realm of the Physical) in shapes, forms, sizes, and expressions that become “real” only in relation to other things. Fast and slow, big and small, up and down, here and there, before and after, now and then, good and evil, and all other expressions in the Universe have no meaning in a sentient being’s reality except in relationship to each other. They are defined not by what they are, but by what they are not.
This is why the Realm of the Physical is also referred to in the CWG cosmology as the Realm of the Relative (as opposed to the Realm of the Absolute, which is also called the Realm of the Spiritual).
All of the above is why Conversations with God says: “In the absence of that which you are not, that which you are is not.” Meaning, it is not experience-able. You can know it, but you cannot experience it.
At the level of Soul, all sentient beings understand this. Thus, in order to experience Who and What They Are, all sentient beings will call forward and co-create in their reality some aspect of who and what They Are Not, thus to produce a context within which what they Know of themselves may be transmogrified into what they Experience of themselves. they have shifted from Concept to Experience in their reality.
In this way, Divinity may Express and Experience Itself, and not simply Know Itself conceptually.
As I moved into a deeper and deeper understanding of this, it all brought up another, and what I thought to be a very significant and relevant, question: Was the suffering of Its creations the only way God could figure out how to experience Itself? Is this the best ‘system’ that Divinity could come up with?
Frankly, it didn’t seem very “Divinely Inspired” to me.
The answer I received when I posed this question is that suffering is not a required part of the process. Suffering is not necessary, no matter what physical conditions are presenting themselves. Conditions are conditions. Situations are situations. Circumstances are circumstances. Events are events. All of these are exterior phenomena. None of them have anything to do with what’s going on inside of oneself.
It is our interior decision with regard to an exterior condition that determines whether we “suffer” or not. Even the condition of physical or emotional pain is simply that: pain. What we call “suffering” is the result of our decision about it.
Suffering occurs when we decide that something that is happening should not be happening, that there is something “wrong” with the Universe, that something has gone awry in the scheme of things.
If we understand that everything is happening exactly in alignment with our Soul’s intention to express and experience some aspect of Who We Really Are, “suffering” disappears. We may not find what is occurring to be pleasant, but we can eliminate the experience of suffering—even though the exterior situation or circumstance (including actual pain) may not have changed. Suffering is, in essence, what we experience when we resist any condition, situation, or circumstance.
A woman in childbirth can offer a vivid example. Many women experience childbirth as pain-filled, but nevertheless absent abject suffering. Indeed, for many women, suffering is superseded by joy.
Joy in the midst of so much pain? Is that possible?
Yes, because the person in pain knows and understands, and profoundly agrees with, the reason for the pain, and the product of it. There, resistance is ended.
All true spiritual masters understand the same thing, regardless of the cause of the physical or emotional pain. Spiritual masters understand that they are giving birth to themselves, in the next grandest version of the greatest vision ever they held about Who They Are, in every moment.
Life is a continuing series of re-births, or recreations of the Self, at higher and grander levels of expression. This clarifies that ending resistance does not mean abandoning any effort to change a condition, situation, or circumstance. “Change” is not “resistance,” but simply working with what is “so” in a way which modifies or alters it to better suit and more accurately reflect our decision about Who We Are.
Yes, but does the whole process have to be painful?
No. The answer is, no. Even pain can be transmogrified and found to be but a sensation, an aspect of our physicality that we may find agreeable or not agreeable, acceptable or unacceptable, as we choose. Herein lies what may be one of the greatest secrets of life.
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