Life is not a school?
No.
We are not here to learn lessons?
No.
Then why are we here?
To remember, and re-create, Who You Are. [...]
School is a place you go if there is something you do not know that you want to know. It is not a place you go if you already know a thing and simply want to experience your knowingness. [...]
You can know yourself to be generous, but unless you do something which displays generosity, you have nothing but a concept. You can know yourself to be kind, but unless you do someone a kindness, you have nothing but an idea about yourself.
It is your soul’s only desire to turn its grandest concept about itself into its greatest experience. Until concept becomes experience, all there is is speculation.
It is not God’s function to create, or uncreate, the circumstances or conditions of your life. God created you, in the image and likeness of God. You have created the rest, through the power God has given you. God created the process of life and life itself as you know it. Yet God gave you free choice, to do with life as you will.
In this sense, your will for you is God’s will for you.
You are living your life the way you are living your life, and I have no preference in the matter.
This is the grand illusion in which you have engaged: that God cares one way or the other what you do.
I do not care what you do, and that is hard for you to hear. Yet do you care what your children do when you send them out to play? Is it a matter of consequence to you whether they play tag, or hide and seek, or pretend? No, it is not, because you know they are perfectly safe. You have placed them in an environment which you consider friendly and very okay.
Of course, you will always hope that they do not hurt themselves. And if they do, you will be right there to help them, heal them, allow them to feel safe again, to be happy again, to go and play again another day. But whether they choose hide and seek or pretend will not matter to you the next day, either.
You will tell them, of course, which games are dangerous to play. But you cannot stop your children from doing dangerous things. Not always. Not forever. Not in every moment from now until death. It is the wise parent who knows this. Yet the parent never stops caring about the outcome. It is this dichotomy — not caring deeply about the process, but caring deeply about the result — that comes close to describing the dichotomy of God.
How can I see myself as great when I see all my foibles, all my mistakes — all my evil?
I tell you this: There is no evil!
I wish that could be true.
You are perfect, just as you are.
I wish that could be true, too.
It is true! A tree is no less perfect because it is a seedling. A tiny infant is no less perfect than a grown-up. It is perfection itself. Because it cannot do a thing, does not know a thing, that does not make it somehow less perfect.
A child makes mistakes. She stands. She toddles. She falls. She stands again, a bit wobbly, hanging on to her mommy’s leg. Does that make the child imperfect?
I tell you it is just the opposite! That child is perfection itself, wholly and completely adorable.
So, too, are you.
But the child hasn’t done anything wrong! The child hasn’t consciously disobeyed, hurt another, damaged herself.
The child doesn’t know right from wrong.
Precisely.
Neither do you.
But I do. I know that it is wrong to kill people, and that it is right to love them. I know that it is wrong to hurt and right to heal, to make things better. I know that it is wrong to take what is not mine, to use another, to be dishonest.
I could show you instances where each of those “wrongs” would be right.
You’re playing with me now.
Not at all. Merely being factual.
If you are saying there are exceptions to every rule, then I agree.
If there are exceptions to a rule, then it is not a rule.
Are you telling me that it is not wrong to kill, to hurt, to take from another?
That depends on what you are trying to do.
Okay, okay, I get it. But that doesn’t make these things good. Sometimes one has to do bad things to achieve a good end.
Which doesn’t make them “bad things” at all, then, does it? They are just means to an end.
Are you saying the end justifies the means?
What do you think?
No. Absolutely not.
So be it.
Don’t you see what you’re doing here? You’re making up the rules as you go along!
And don’t you see something else? That’s perfectly okay. It’s what you’re supposed to be doing!
All of life is a process of deciding Who You Are, and then experiencing that.
As you keep expanding your vision, you make up new rules to cover that! As you keep enlarging your idea about your Self, you create new do’s and don’ts, yeses and nos to encircle that. These are the boundaries that “hold in” something which cannot be held in.
You cannot hold in “you,” because you are as boundless as the Universe. Yet you can create a concept about your boundless self by imagining, and then accepting, boundaries.
In a sense, this is the only way you can know yourself as anything in particular. [...]
Do you see how you have created your ideas of “right” and “wrong” simply to define Who You Are?
Do you see that without these definitions — boundaries — you are nothing?
And do you see that, like Me, you keep changing the boundaries as you change your Ideas of Who You Are?
Events occur in the universe which no stretch of the imagination could claim you instigated or created.
These events are created by the combined consciousness of man. All of the world, co-creating together, produces these experiences. What each of you do, individually, is move through them, deciding what, if anything, they mean to you, and Who and What You Are in relationship to them.
Thus, you create collectively, and individually, the life and times you are experiencing, for the soul purpose of evolving.
[...]
Are you saying the world will always have problems? Are you saying that you actually want it that way?
I am saying that the world exists the way it exists — just as a snowflake exists the way it exists — quite by design. You have created it that way — just as you have created your life exactly as it is.
I want what you want. The day you really want an end to hunger, there will be no more hunger. I have given you all the resources with which to do that. You have all the tools with which to make that choice. You have not made it. Not because you cannot make it. The world could end world hunger tomorrow. You choose not to make it.
You claim that there are good reasons that 40,000 people a day must die of hunger. There are no good reasons. Yet at a time when you say you can do nothing to stop 40,000 people a day from dying of hunger, you bring 50,000 people a day into your world to begin a new life. And this you call love. This you call God’s plan. It is a plan which totally lacks logic or reason, to say nothing of compassion.
I am showing you in stark terms that the world exists the way it exists because you have chosen for it to. You are systematically destroying your own environment, then pointing to so-called natural disasters as evidence of God’s cruel hoax, or Nature’s harsh ways. You have played the hoax on yourself, and it is your ways which are cruel.
Nothing, nothing is more gentle than Nature. And nothing, nothing has been more cruel to Nature than man. Yet you step aside from all involvement in this; deny all responsibility. It is not your fault, you say, and in this you are right. It is not a question of fault, it is a matter of choice.
You can choose to end the destruction of your rainforests tomorrow. You can choose to stop depleting the protective layer hovering over your planet. You can choose to discontinue the ongoing onslaught of your earth’s ingenious ecosystem. You can seek to put the snowflake back together — or at least to halt its inexorable melting — but will you do it? You can similarly end all war tomorrow. Simply. Easily. All it takes — all it has ever taken — is for all of you to agree. Yet if you cannot all agree on something as basically simple as ending the killing of each other, how can you call upon the heavens with shaking fist to put your life in order?
I will do nothing for you that you will not do for your Self. That is the law and the prophets.
The world is in the condition it is in because of you, and the choices you have made — or failed to make.
(Not to decide is to decide.)
The Earth is in the shape it’s in because of you, and the choices you have made — or failed to make.
Your own life is the way it is because of you, and the choices you have made — or failed to make.
But I did not choose to get hit by that truck! I did not choose to get mugged by that robber, or raped by that maniac. People could say that. There are people in the world who could say that.
You are all at root cause for the conditions which exist which create in the robber the desire, or the perceived need, to steal. You have all created the consciousness which makes rape possible. It is when you see in yourself that which caused the crime that you begin, at last, to heal the condition from which it sprang.
Feed your hungry, give dignity to your poor. Grant opportunity to your less fortunate. End the prejudice which keeps masses huddled and angry, with little promise of a better tomorrow. Put away your pointless taboos and restrictions upon sexual energy — rather, help others to truly understand its wonder, and to channel it properly. Do these things and you will go a long way toward ending robbery and rape forever.
As for the so-called “accident” — the truck coming around the bend, the brick falling from the sky — learn to greet each such incident as a small part of a larger mosaic. You have come here to work out an individual plan for your own salvation. Yet salvation does not mean saving yourself from the snares of the devil. There is no such thing as the devil, and hell does not exist. You are saving yourself from the oblivion of non-realization.
You cannot lose in this battle. You cannot fail. Thus it is not a battle at all, but simply a process. Yet if you do not know this, you will see it as a constant struggle. You may even believe in the struggle long enough to create a whole religion around it. This religion will teach that struggle is the point of it all. This is a false teaching. It is in not struggling that the process proceeds. It is in surrendering that the victory is won.
In the beginning, that which Is is all there was, and there was nothing else. Yet All That Is could not know itself—because All That Is is all there was, and there was nothing else. And so, All That Is… was not. For in the absence of something else, All That Is, is not.
This is the great Is/Not Is to which mystics have referred from the beginning of time.
Now All That Is knew it was all there was—but this was not enough, for it could only know its utter magnificence conceptually, not experientially. Yet the experience of itself is that for which it longed, for it wanted to know what it felt like to be so magnificent. Still, this was impossible, because the very term “magnificent” is a relative term. All That Is could not know what it felt like to be magnificent unless that which is not showed up. In the absence of that which is not, that which IS, is not.
Do you understand this?
I think so. Keep going.
Alright. The one thing that All That Is knew is that there was nothing else. And so It could, and would, never know Itself from a reference point outside of Itself. Such a point did not exist. Only one reference point existed, and that was the single place within.[...]
Still, the All of Everything chose to know Itself experientially.
This energy—this pure, unseen, unheard, unobserved, and therefore unknown-by-anyone-else energy—chose to experience Itself as the utter magnificence It was. In order to do this, It realized It would have to use a reference point within.
It reasoned, quite correctly, that any portion of Itself would necessarily have to be less than the whole, and that if It thus simply divided Itself into portions, each portion, being less than the whole, could look back on the rest of Itself and see magnificence.
And so All That Is divided Itself—becoming, in one glorious moment, that which is this, and that which is that. For the first time, this and that existed, quite apart from each other. And still, both existed simultaneously. As did all that was neither.
Thus, three elements suddenly existed: that which is here. That which is there. And that which is neither here nor there—but which must exist for here and there to exist.
Now in creating that which is “here” and that which is “there,” God made it possible for God to know Itself. In the moment of this great explosion from within, God created relativity—the greatest gift God ever gave to Itself. Thus, relationship is the greatest gift God ever gave to you.
From the No-Thing thus sprang the Everything—a spiritual event entirely consistent, incidentally, with what your scientists call The Big Bang theory. As the elements of all raced forth, time was created, for a thing was first here, then it was there—and the period it took to get from here to there was measurable. [...]
A true understanding of time allows you to live much more peacefully within your reality of relativity, where time is experienced as a movement, a flow, rather than a constant.
It is you who are moving, not time. Time has no movement. There is only One Moment.
[...] Your science has already proven this mathematically. Formulas have been written showing that if you get into a spaceship and fly far enough fast enough, you could swing back around toward the Earth and watch yourself taking off.
This demonstrates that Time is not a movement but a field through which you move — in this case on Spaceship Earth. You say it takes 365 “days” to make a year. Yet what is a “day”? You’ve decided — quite arbitrarily, I might add — that a “day” is the “time” it takes your Spaceship to make one complete revolution on its axis.
How do you know it’s made such a spin? (You can’t feel it moving!) You’ve chosen a reference point in the heavens — the Sun. You say it takes a full “day” for the portion of the Spaceship you are on to face the Sun, turn away from the Sun, then face the Sun again.
You’ve divided this “day” into 24 “hours” — again quite arbitrarily. You could just as easily have said “10” or “73”!
Then you divided each “hour” into “minutes.” You said each hourly unit contained 60 smaller units, called “minutes” — and that each of those contained 60 tiny units, called “seconds.”
One day you noticed that the Earth was not only spinning, it was also flying! You saw that it was moving through space around the sun.
You carefully calculated that it took 365 revolutions of the Earth for the Earth itself to revolve around the sun. This number of Earth spins you called a “year.”
Things got kind of messy when you decided that you wanted to divide up a “year” into units smaller than a “year” but larger than a “day.”
You created the “week” and the “month,” and you managed to get the same number of months in every year, but not the same number of days in every month.
You couldn’t find a way to divide an odd number of days (365) by an even number of months (12), so you just decided that some months contained more days than others!
You felt you had to stay with twelve as the yearly sub-divider because that was the number of Lunar Cycles you observed your moon moving through during a “year.” In order to reconcile these three spatial events — revolutions around the sun, spins of the Earth on its axis, and moon cycles — you simply adjusted the number of “days” in each “month.”
Even this device didn’t solve all the problems because your earlier inventions kept creating a “build up” of “time” which you didn’t know what to do with. So you also decided that every so often one year would have to have a whole day more! You called this Leap Year, and joked about it, but you actually live by such a construction — and then you call My explanation of time “unbelievable”!
You’ve just as arbitrarily created “decades” and “centuries” (based, interestingly, on 10′s, not 12′s) to further measure the passage of “time” — but all along what you’ve really been doing is merely devising a way to measure movements through space.
Thus we see that it is not time which “passes,” but objects which pass through, and move around in, a static field which you call space. “Time” is simply your way of counting movements!
In rendering the universe as a divided version of Itself, God produced, from pure energy, all that now exists — both seen and unseen. In other words, not only was the physical universe thus created, but the metaphysical universe as well. The part of God which forms the second half of the Am/Not Am equation also exploded into an infinite number of units smaller than the whole.