“There was a Self, timeless, without reflection, at peace.”

“Lord, I don’t understand what existed at the Beginning.  It sounds as if you are describing Your own birth as well as the birth of the universe.  What were You before the explosion of Creation?  A pregnant nothingness?”

A passable description.  There was a Self, timeless, without reflection, still and at peace, like calm waters, lucid, not nothing, but not something either.  The universe contains many things, not just somethings and nothings.

What kind of Nothingness can explode into Being?  Ah, I thought, maybe a Nothingness that is not just nothing, but is the Plenum of Potentiality for All Things.  Perhaps the possibility of all things cannot fail to spill over into some actuality.

I could not settle any of these questions in my own mind.  All I could do was to continue to ask questions.  “Lord, what was there before?  What motivates the act of creation?”

I received the following words and images which I recorded in my notes.

“A feeling of loneliness, of searching, reaching—not yet a Person.  Expanding into the great emptiness of Nothing, which is ‘infinitely empty’ far beyond (far more empty than) empty spaces.  ‘Who am I?  What am I?  Am I an I?  What is an I?’  A chaotic feeling of the infinite rushing at the edges.”

“Lord, why did eternity ‘shatter’ in this way?  Did the still, self-sufficient stuff explode?”

I received the sense:  “Brittle, crystalline, too perfect, static, isolated, removed, alone, bored, incomplete.  The eternal already had the potential to be a Person but could not do so without creating time.”

And I also got the feeling that God desperately wants to be understood.

 

“It Leaves Out the Most Interesting Part of the Story.”

“Lord, is the theory of evolution correct?”

It is not a bad theory.  It is a short-hand that works, but it leaves out the most interesting part of the story.  It is like behavioral psychology in this respect.

While Pavlov’s dog salivating tells you something about animal and human behavior, seeing people solely through the lens of stimulus-and-response conditioning leaves out what is really interesting about them.  Similarly, the theory of evolution is okay as far as it goes, but leaves out the best part of the story.

He Got Most of it Right

The brash display at the front of the bookstore announced Conversations with God—the first of three volumes in which God tells all … to somebody else!  I thought I was the one anointed to carry God’s message.  What’s going on here?

Before my own experience, I would not have thought for a minute that the author, Neale Donald Walsch, actually heard from God.  But, if God spoke to me, He could surely speak to someone else.  In fact, He had told me that He communicates with people all the time.  Walsch also reports God as saying, “I talk to everyone.  All the time.  The question is not to whom do I talk, but who listens.”  Just what I had been told.

Has God appointed two messengers?  With different messages?  Or is this guy not on the up and up?  I have to admit I was skeptical.  My own prayers were herky-jerky and the voice I heard spoke in my own casual vernacular.  Walsch’s conversations are reported in polished prose.  That looked rigged.

Nor was I impressed with what Walsch reports having been told.  It sounded like pop Buddhism—feel-good stuff that sells books but is unlikely to be God’s authentic word.  Wasn’t Walsch just a charlatan?

When I asked, I didn’t like the answer.

The book of prayers [Conversations with God] is nice enough, but it will be dismissed by most as an oddity, not a revelation—even though he got most of it right—but I couldn’t write the blurb!

 

 

 

 

I am the Innermost Being of Man and of Matter

Later I learned that there are some interpretations of quantum mechanics that use the notion of a universal consciousness to explain how an electron in one part of the universe can be in perfect synch with an electron in another part of the universe without any physical interaction between them.  I was not aware of that at the time, but I had just read about dark matter and dark energy, “dark” because they cannot be seen but only inferred from gravitational and other effects.  The mass of these previously unsuspected components are now thought to far exceed the total visible mass in the universe.

Yes, you should look into those.  Think of it—most of what is in the universe is unnoticed.  It is inferred from gross phenomena, but it is inferred as force.  Think of the human body.  It is moved by the mind.  How?  Where is the mind?  The mind is throughout the body.  Its actions are registered, but it is not noticed.  I am not noticed.  But in fact I am seen everywhere, and I am in the innermost being of man and in the innermost being of matter.  Do not have contempt for matter.  It is not the inert stuff of certain old theories.  It is vital and alive and a part of Me.  The interaction of mind and matter is part of Me, and I am the vehicle through which it takes place.

 

I Am the Point of Interaction Between Man and the World.

I read about the great scientific debate of the eighteenth century:  is space absolute or relative?  Today, the standard view is that science and religion are opposites.  But it was his theology that led Newton to regard space, “the sensorium of God,” as absolute; and a different theology that led Leibniz to uphold relativity, two hundred years before Einstein.

“Lord, what does this reading have to do with my assignment?”

The history of science is My story.

“Do you mean the history of the physical world?”

No, the history of man’s efforts to understand the world is the history of man’s relation to Me.

“Then You are the world?”

No, I am the point of interaction between man and the world.

Evil is a Power of Its Own.

As for Satan, that is the symbolism for the evil that is loose in the world. I do not “inflict” it on people. It is just part of the structure of reality. “Satan” represents the fact that there is (an actual) force for evil. That evil is a power of its own, a temptation, and fault-line in human nature, not just the accidental byproduct of (natural) human desires unrestrained.

 

 

Pure being is not an abstraction but a living force.

To the philosophers and theologians, feelings, along with other affects, are weaknesses.  So God is regarded as passionless, so passionless that it is difficult to see how He can love.  St. Anselm puzzles over how a passionless God can be com-passionate.  His solution is that “we experience the effect of compassion, but Thou dost not experience the feeling.”  You can see the logical puzzle: we experience God’s love, but God feels no love for us.  For the philosophers, even to speak of a personal God is at best a metaphor or analogy.  But, in my experience, God is not a metaphor.  He is a Person to whom we can pray, who can give us guidance about our lives.  However, I was told,

They have some aspects of Me right.

“What do they have right?”

They understand that I am pure Being, Being unto itself.  They understand My metaphysical essence.  They do not understand My dynamic existence, a force …

“A Person?”

… yes, and a Person.  They use these categories in a way that makes them mutually exclusive, but they are not.  Pure Being is not an abstraction but a living force, focused personally.  Do not avoid metaphysics, but always listen to Me or you will go on the wrong track.

The Consequences of Actions Are What They Are

Like a slick lawyer, I shifted my line of questioning.  “Lord, are You saying that, if someone really believed that he or she could do something, like jumping over the moon, they could do it even if it violated the laws of nature?”

No, even I operate under the constraint of physical laws.  This talk about what other physical laws I might have decreed is wrong-headed.  The consequences of actions are what they are—I don’t make them up.  The relations of matter and energy, the speed of light, etc., are fixed.  In that sense, there are no other possible worlds.  Every world would have these same relations of act to consequence.

 

Read Chapter 114

A Proper Appreciation of Yourself Opens Your Heart.

An ego rush always broke my connection with God.  So I tried to keep a cold watch on this ego of mine.

When I was still in Washington, D.C., a matter came up about which I needed the assistance of an eminent intellectual with whom I had a limited acquaintance.  He was completely forthcoming, and I felt flattered by his response.

“Lord, how should I take this?  Is it wrong for me to feel flattered?”

No, it is not.  This is joy, the joy of being yourself, which is proper to (appropriate for) human beings.  I want you to be happy, to feel the fullness of your own being, its bounty.  I blessed you with certain gifts.  Of course, you recognize them as gifts, as benefits, as talents.  That is okay.  It is not the same as ego.

Ego is destructive, separatist, defiant of My will, self-satisfied and self-lustful.  A proper appreciation of yourself opens your heart, binds you to Me, to those you love.