“The Great Apes Are Wonderful Creatures . . . So Close But Yet So Far.”

 

“And so, Lord, You call forth the first human beings?”

Yes, the first inklings, forerunners, of man.  The great apes are wonderful creatures, full of intelligence, energy, and drive.  But it is frustrating to interact with them.  They are so close and yet so far from having full interactive personalities.  They have teleological urges but they are only effective, for the most part, at the biological level.  Their social life is rudimentary and their spiritual awareness is diffuse and inarticulate.  They lack a symbolic order.  They can’t project ideals beyond the sensual.  They can’t respond to Me either.

“But they evolved?”

The transition to early man is both slow and sudden.  Remember what the first two years of a child’s life is like, and (then) imagine each day to be a century.  In a sense, nothing is happening.  One day looks much like the last, and there is no single great leap forward.

So imagine My excitement when the first protohumans arrived.  At first, you couldn’t tell them from animals but I could see their potential.  They didn’t have language but their sounds and marks had representative purposes.  They could connect one thing to another, one thought to another.  They could remember their past and replay it in their minds.  They slowly developed a sense of the future.

Think in a different way.

“Lord, I have the feeling that you want me to read and think less, and to listen more and just write down your story.”

Don’t stop thinking, but think in a different way.  Don’t work so hard to figure everything out, to make it rational, to make it fit your categories.  Just listen and think through the implications of what I tell you.

“But, Lord, some of what I learn from You comes from worrying over what you say.”

Sometimes yes, but often no.  Sometimes your questioning just gets in the way.  The main point is to open your mind, to try to understand what I am saying on its own terms, and to see ways it might be true or understandable to you.

“Pray and I will tell you”

I started making a list of great spiritual leaders to pray about.  I thought the question would be, for example, What was God communicating to Martin Luther?  But, when I asked, I got a different answer.

Suppose you brought a guy in – say, Luther – and cut him up (dissected him, looked at the elements that make him up).  What would you find?

“Not just the single solitary individual, I suppose, but someone immersed in a tradition, institutions, and a culture.”

I act over the centuries in reference to individuals, but also movements, cultures, and the like.

“But only individuals receive communications.”

Just listen for the moment.  I interact with mankind, with the universe, in many different ways.  Do not assume that the only interaction is the same form of the interaction I have with you.  With some it is conversational, but with others it is by inspiration, by My spirit moving through them, infusing institutions and life-forms, cultures, cultural forms, art, music, dance, symbolism, ideational systems, thought forms …

So, looking at each cultural form, I should be able to figure out how it reflects You?”

The starting point is not the cultural forms and asking “What kind of God or transcendent order does that imply or suggest?” but start with Me and ask “What am I doing with that culture, individual, art, art form, or whatever.  What is it to Me?”  Pray and I will tell you.

“The Soul’s will is the will of God.”

 

 

I tried to step back to see what question my “soul” would ask. “How can I merge with You? I’m not sure if that’s the best way to put it, Lord: be at one with You, at rest with You, at one with Your will?”

The question is adequately formulated. The goal—one way to describe the goal—is to be at one with God, the God of All. At bottom, the Soul’s will is the will of God. The Soul is at one with God.

It is not that you and I are literally the same substance, the same particular. It is that we are “at one,” in perfect harmony, and not accidentally so. It is in the nature of what the Soul is, that it is at one with God. Remember that these metaphysical (philosophical) categories are crude and inadequate in the first place.

Back to your question: how can you become at one with God? Of course, the answer is that you already are—your Soul, that is. The task is to come to realize that this is so, to realize it not merely in theory, but in intuitive, felt understanding, in your emotions and feelings, and in practice.

“That’s the goal, Lord? It sounds simple. The one-ness is already inside. All we have to do is to bring our conscious selves along.”

That is right. It is the simplest thing in the world. And everyone, at some level and at some moments, knows it, at least glimpses it. But it is very difficult to actualize in practice. The empirical world—the world of desires and the senses—seems so real and is so powerful that is extremely difficult to redirect one’s energy.

And the empirical world is real, in its own way. The world is not an illusion, a mirage. If it is a mirage, it is one from which you can drink water. No, you must respect the empirical world while at the same time emancipating yourself from it, not letting yourself be identical with your interests in this world.

So the world of our experience (and desire) is quite real—it is the arena in which we live our lives and loves, joys and sorrows. In spite of that, we should not let ourselves be ensnared by it.

“It is at the heart of my Being.”

In spite of the voice, I wondered why, most of the time, God is irritatingly elusive. But I was told,

You see Me all the time.

I looked around and tried to see God, but nothing registered. Martin Buber talks about saying Thou to nature, and that was about as close as I could get. If God wants to be so coy, why does He bother to get our attention at all? How, I asked, could our response possibly matter to Him?

It is very important. It is at the heart of my being.

Human recognition is at the heart of God’s being? I found that intriguing, but it only heightened the paradox of an invisible God who wants to be seen.

 

Every revelation is limited in this way.

I was praying about Neale Donald Walsch’s Conversations with God.  Walsch quotes God as having told him, “You’ve the power and the ability right now to end world hunger this minute, to cure diseases this instant.”

Not right.

Walsch asks why God doesn’t put an end to suffering and reports being told, “I have put an end to it.  You simply refuse to use the tools I have given you with which to realize that.  You see, suffering has nothing to do with events, but with one’s reaction to them.”

No.

He asks, “why not eliminate the events?” and reports being told, “Unfortunately, I have no control over them.”

Overstated.

He reports God as explaining:  “Events are occurrences in time and space which you produce out of choice—and I will never interfere with choices.”

Too simple.

According to Walsch’s report, “Some events you produce willfully, and some events you draw to you—more or less unconsciously.  Some events—major natural disasters are among those you toss into this category—are written off to ‘fate.’  Yet even ‘fate’ can be an acronym for ‘from all thoughts everywhere.’  In other words, the consciousness of the planet.”

No.

I prayed about other things Walsch attributes to God.  For example, “Thoughts are put into action.  If enough people everywhere believe something must be done to help the environment, you will save the Earth.”

Yes.

And “So much damage (to the environment) has already been done, for so long.  This will take a major attitudinal shift.”

No.

And “There is not one among you who has not made a headache disappear, or a visit to the dentist less painful, through your decision about it.  A Master simply makes the same decision about larger things.”

Yes, sort of.

“Lord, you have corrected several of Walsch’s reports.  Is this an example of how prayers and revelation generally can go wrong?  Is that part of the lesson here?”

Yes, the listener always has concepts and beliefs through which the message must be funneled.  Every revelation is limited in this way.  That is one reason new revelations are always needed.

I didn’t pray about Walsch after that.  Whatever God was or wasn’t doing with him was between him and God.