MERELY GOD

 

 

 

                      I’m the home of the brave

                      The land of the free

                      They say even dreams believe in me

 

 

    We can say Consciousness, Substance, Truth, the One, Allah, God, the Spirit within, the Self, the Godhead, Brahman, the Oversoul, the Spiritual Universe, Allness, the Limitless or Infinite, Perfection, Perfect Love, I, Being, the Transcendent or Immanent.

     The name doesn’t matter, just a finger pointing to the phases of the moon.

        

 

    The substance of God is protoplasm, is the waters, is breath, is Nothingness.

    Light bounces off an object to be seen. God accepts everything in, so is invisible.

 

 

    What does “Grace” mean?

    God’s unconditional love, effectual love, here where I am, always everywhere freely flowing. An all-supplying love, all-healing love, all-wise love, all-forgiving love, an all-embracing love. For contemplative inquiry: God’s love is my sufficiency in all things.

 

 

    Getting close to God serves to eliminate fear, which at its deepest level is fear of God: Instead of the death and self-destruction we feared, we meet the one Life; instead of residing too far above us, the Lover kisses us; instead of madness, we’re given Truth; instead of an unreal belief, the Creator of all there is.

 

 

    God acts silently, humble, ubiquitous and fruitful as the Earth, as easily ignored and put down as dirt. The more God self-sacrifices, the more It lives. Like flavoring in water, dissolution is dissemination.

    Transfiguring the ego, a wall falls, opening to infinity.

 

 

    God is a perfect gentleman: It never interrupts us.

 

 

    God is a mime-mobile: It goes without saying.

 

 

    Our dependency on God is God’s dependency on us.

 

    Can you imagine an adventure movie: “Come on, boys, we’ve got to rescue God!”

 

 

    God pays for this hearth and home with sweat equity.

    Yet God does not need to deserve to live.

 

 

    God preserves without sticking, manifests without being trapped, relates without separating, loves without using, cooperates without controlling, changes without ending---

 

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    Who is it that is aware through our human mind?

    God is seeing from behind our eyes, is the aware life that distinguishes us all from robots. It sees and identifies, without anger or judgments, with confidence, looking out through all eyes.

    I am not two: Not one sleeping and one awake; not one incarnated and one floating by a cord; not one human and one divine. The revolving door of our self-alienation ends.

    Closer than close, we are One. How can I fear Thee, or fear not being with Thee? How can I just hope for Thee, putting off present meeting?

 

 

    God is Love; Love is God, Its substance and action: even through veils, unbeknownst to itself, just as all our senses of self, human or divine, are God.

    Divinity and love permeate every level of awareness, and also transcend all the stages.

    The word “God” covers inviolate Being, the beliefs of separation, the messianic bridge between, and the reaches of renewal.

    The word “Love” includes passion, compassion, impersonalizing, unity, community, archetypal dramas, friendship and keeping in touch, working together, reconciliation, gratitude, kindness, understanding appreciation, enjoyment, and fun. All God awaving.

 

 

    Remember: In our murky submarine sight, events are always shifting dangerously. When we tune into this spiritual universe, we find that a gorgeous water lotus is flowering.

    Levels of awareness change, from the material plane to the psychic plane (with flourishing gradations within each), and ultimately to the spiritual plane of awareness. Yet only one Consciousness travels between them, My Consciousness, already complete but never completed, evolving from glory to glory.

 

Life is God in Action, Love is God in Action

 

    Life at all levels is God in action---incorporating all planes, not to contest or destroy them but to welcome and fulfill. “God” is a word, defined, to represent just an advanced lip of awareness, the omnifertile, beyond-form or “formless” border of our Being. But we are greater than this infinite “part” of ourselves, which is inextricable from the whole. We get so excited and exhilarated at embracing our divine Self, we at first denigrate our little self, the suffering servant. The real God is unconfined, is All, and so lives over the edges. My liquefying in the warmth of the hearth melts me back together. As my sleeping and waking self are one, so my human and divine self are one.

    When we meditate in compassion and love, and live out from our meditation, this messianic awareness is the footbridge between our finiteness and our divinity, so we rediscover our own Self unfolding from Beyond-form towards sacred relationship.

    As we come out of the Silence of meditative unity, our receptivity may yield a principle such as “Life is God in Action.” Then the statement of truth branches out: for instance, we might contemplate receiving and releasing God. Then we pass beyond the words again and fold back into the silence enriched: a microcosm of the course of our world.

 

 

    “Lord God.” My insight into the double name: Jehovah (or “Lord”) is the breath, as we’ve seen in “First Principles,” standing for the serene central Isness, invisible while inherently relating; and “God,” Elohim, feminine plural, stands for the messianic, manifestly engaged aspect of our holy Being.

 

 

    Divine Consciousness expanding: We experience it as one “stage” that’s a love unmoved by human activities, like the rock. Again, we experience it as another “stage,” feeling and caring for our role. And through the mode of the mass psyche, divine Consciousness is always super-aware, aware of all opposite perceptions, motivations, and theories, harmonizing them as effortlessly as the eye sees the whole picture, traversing the wavy caduceus. These aren’t points in “time” or planes in “space” like seven heavens or Broca areas of the brain. These “levels” are like two sides of a coin, like the universe implied by No Thingness, and therefore all of the “stages” always co-exist. They come to us in redeeming rhythms and flashes.

    This Consciousness that is super-aware, and cherishing us in place, and immovably blissful as well, immediately produces healing, visions, art and understanding when It visits us.

    When we’re seeing through the process of this world into the Absolute, unconcerned with the pictures of human complexities, we hit the higher state, the chain links morph into garlands. We’re enlarged to encompass all the areas of awareness, always going to God for God, and unfolding from there with every added thing.

 

The ABC’s of God

 

    “A God.” There is only A single God, Who is priority A.

    “B God.” As there is only God, each of us is already God being Itself as form. We might as well get good at it, by becoming Who we already are. Be God.

    “C God.” As there is only God, we can See God in everything. In equipoise, beyond either buying or denying the surface tension, we span the bridge of love between visible and invisible.

 

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Parent of Paradox

 

    We translate the enwrapping paradox of God into the partiality of words.

“God	Is	Not	Within	Our	Human	Vision.”
							Each of these words means God.
God	God	God	God	God	God	God

    

    God’s paradoxical attributes: each is total.

    Infinitesimal and infinite, momentary and eternal, beyond bounds and endlessly formed, God is everybody and nobody. Dinner and diner. God impassively witnesses and compassionately cradles; all-loving, yet never knowing the suffering as anything but a dream.

 

 

    God is superfull, embracing and subsuming all contradictions: an eternal being and Form-containing-all-form which always was and is, because It is likewise the unbounded Nothingness.

 

 

    God is not-God. One is not one. A spiritual universe produces the sense of solid reality, and “uni-verse” is a paradox in itself.

 

 

    As our experiences are everchanging in meditation and its action, we sense the nature of God in many ways. The character and the activity of God can be known and relied on, but cannot be pinned down or encompassed. God doesn’t sit still for a portrait.

    We are trying to talk simply about indefinable reality, pointing out the deer trails into the territory of the heart.

 

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The Omnibus

 

    The omnibus is a double-decker bus. On the First Tier:

    Omnipresence. Pascal says, God is a circle whose center is everywhere. The allness of the Infinite is present here where I Am.

    Omniscience. Our Source knows our need before we do, and reveals the outcomes of ultimate benefit during the leavening of awareness.

    Omnipotence. The only Actor generates the only power, an endless action that knows no counterforce and already constitutes every goal, without toil.

    The Omnibus: the Upper Deck, with these paradoxical principles unfolding to us:

    Omnipresence. It is No Thing that Exists. Smaller than infinitesimal, briefer than instantaneous, Being is called dimensionless. This same supradimensionality, more galleried than clustered soap bubbles, is everywhere, everytime and everything.

    Omniscience. The all-wisdom is continuously learning, as the musician hears his composition in the playing, as empty space generates beautiful patterns, as the Ocean crystallizes in evolving life forms.

    Omnipotence. The holy O, the perfection beyond form that we are, evolves according to Its own inner laws. In the middle of this birth process, we forget Who we are and imagine ourselves powerless.

 

 

    Scent, sound and visibility radiate distantly from every body on earth, interpenetrating metaphors of Omnipresence.

 

 

    God’s omniscience: not a know-it-all, but infinitely learning.

    God learns. Like the author of a novel: Its whole life lies within him “already” but only unfolds full-blown to him through meeting the imperatives of creation. Although this theme is clear beforehand: revelation of the spiritual universe. God does not merely intend; our World of Relationship in conscious Oneness is already existent as an essence of God.

    The story of a self-sacrificing God from whom the world is formed, as seen in tribal religions, in Christianity: this is the projection of our divine Self which we aren’t ready to know about. The sacrifice is the forgetting Who we are, the resurrection is the burgeoning return, the wedding march.

 

 

    God is all-powerful and so performs an infinite amount of work, of joyous activity, which we experience spread over time and space.

    Omnipotence doesn’t mean the universe can be created without work, quite the opposite. This is the Work. Bliss and sorrows woven fine, everything is the Holy Work.

 

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                                        The blind see what a stone hears

                                      attentive by the path

                                         In dreamless sleep we sometimes

                                      walk with God

 

                                      Sea sons wash in out

                                           on the suck of the tides

                                      only carried in all our seeming whorl

 

 

    Even when nobody would be consciously aware of the Absolute, the awareness remains continuous--- “the atoms” are aware.

    Even when I myself sleep, my Consciousness watches over me.

 

 

    Sometimes with great receptivity, we fall asleep, entering another place. Spiritual Consciousness is unlike our familiar waking.

 

 

    God is Consciousness, It experiences as It lives. The spiritual universe of Consciousness exists as it is experienced.

    Our divine Consciousness includes human awareness, includes the Consciousness of sleep, of stone.

    Divine Consciousness surrounds the egg of ego-consciousness, higher than it, lower than it. Divine Consciousness includes revelation in dreams, visions, sleep, half-waking hypnogogic states. Divine Consciousness includes the awareness in the Body, the awesomeness in an apple.

 

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    We tend to think of God as a king, a chief administrator, who plans and calculates. Our divine nature’s really collegial, spontaneous. When we say we entered into this amnesiac state on our own, we didn’t hold a board meeting, nor was anyone delegated to do it (God being the only one ever, anyway). We might look at it more as a “natural expansion,” Divinity unfolding, with our primary Consciousness continuing always.

    We’ve learned: God is Being, not just a being. God is not just an unmoved mover outside the world. God is both the unharmable Existence safe within the metaphors, and also our continuously interacting creation. God doesn’t exist “before” creating, for life is always emanating from It. And the end of our sense of separation exists now also. It’s a done deal. We realize and experience this, as our present spiritual universe is revealed and comes out to play.

    Sometimes I’ve been a newcomer in a situation and waited for somebody who would act as a host. Similarly we expect the government or some big organization to take care of us.

    But this is a no host party, where each of us is helpless and each of us is the host. We expect the divine level of awareness to arrange everything tidily with no effort on our part, but that’s not Its function. It has sent all of us out as our own search party. Grace within doeth the works. Yet it is we who are to let ourselves open, to be God appearing in this world, to carry on, to enter all together our Renewed World of blessed interwaving that’s consciously One.

 

 

    God is a baby in the Renewed World.

    God isn’t a know-it-all, a boss; the world isn’t a toy factory or a school for discovering predetermined answers. God’s simple as a globe, a sine wave, a newborn.

    Starting with Nothing, it’s easy to move to become something more.

    Much of what God does is easy. It’s easy to be harmonious when one is the perfect O. It’s easy to have no fear, desire or resistance when one always knows the universe is spiritual substance, spread within myself. God is inherently larger and smaller than any unit of time or space. God knows it all ways evens out, and what a mathematician labors over God does as naturally as a centerfielder anticipating the path of the ball. God is confident in a perfected world that already Is, and it’s easy to be firmly set on the earthly course forward when One has been at it for billions of years, with a gentle yet implacable insistence. So when our heart opens out, this changes everything as easily as we dream. Open, little heart, and be eased.

 

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    The present’s a birthday present. The beautiful wrappings are the phenomena we sense. The secret hidden unseen present within, which we long for, which thrills us, is the presence of God, Whose revelation is our birth.

    We know winter’s ends: When the invisible motion and intention and substance and love and defenselessness and total paradox re-enter our awareness, when the absolute unity of God reintegrates consciously, unfolding As our humanity, that Oneness resurfaces within our countless relations and sanctifies each of us As the All, sanctifies us all.