Part of the Change – Chapter 4

Your role as a spiritual helper. By Neale Donald Walsch.

“Water of life” – By Gil Dekel.

The fourth step in becoming a spiritual helper is to:

4. STOP SEPARATING OURSELVES FROM GOD

This step goes past recognizing that the OTHER person is “us” and raises the level of consciousness to an awareness that GOD is “us.” This awareness produces a new perception: There is no difference between the Will of God and the Will of You.

Did you hear that? Did you understand the implication of that?

Please don’t be offended by these questions. Every day I have to act as if I never heard that before. Every day I seek to bring myself to a new understanding of what all of that means. Sometimes I can hear something and “not hear it,” know what I mean? And sometimes I have to say the same thing over and over again to myself to stop it from going in one ear and out the other. I’ve heard some things so often it’s like I’ve never heard them at all. I have to really focus to bring myself to such tidbits as if they were brand new.

So sometimes I sound like I’m repeating myself, but that’s not always bad. ‘Cause it gives me a chance to hear the same thing over again, and hear it “brand new.” So let me ask you again, did you hear that?

What I SAID was…there is no difference between the Will of God and the Will of You.

The implication of that is enormous. Because if you see this and embrace this and accept this wholly, not merely intellectually, you will suddenly understand many things—not the least of which is that it is impossible to offend God. This does not mean that you will no longer ever feel regret for anything you do, but it does mean that you need no longer feel guilt. The difference here is enormous. Yet why would any of us feel regret if nothing we have done offends or contradicts or violates the Will of God?

We would feel regret if we observe that any of our thoughts, words, or actions creates an experience of ourselves as less than Who We Know Ourselves to Be. For it is the desire of all that lives to express Itself in its utmost form. Put simply, we seek to be and to experience Who We Really Are. And we know Who We Really Are. There is no secret about that. It is not a mystery to us. It is an inner knowing, a physical, cellular experience, that we cannot ignore.

Thus it is that—whether we have had religious instruction or not, whether we have been raised within a cultural expectation of morality or not, whether we have been given a specific list of do’s and don’t’s or not—we find ourselves “feeling bad” when we do things that we intuitively know are not representations of our Highest Self.

Regret vs. guilt: noticing the difference

The important thing is not to let that natural feeling of regret escalate to a feeling of guilt. CwG says that “guilt and fear are the only enemies of humanity,” and that is a statement of profound truth. Remember this always: Regret is the great healer. Guilt is the great wounder. This wound created by guilt is not merely psychological. It is physiological. It is cellular. I am saying that the cells of your body react when you violate your inner sense of Who You Really Are and do not or cannot forgive yourself. Indeed, this is what causes illness and death.

When a person no longer carries a single thought about herself being unforgiven, that person never again finds herself speaking a single word, or doing a single thing, that violates her own highest sense of Self. Self-forgiveness produces self-realization. Then that person is no longer sick, ever, and that person becomes immortal.

This is the secret of The Resurrection of the Christ—and it is the formula for the resurrection of the Christ in all of us. It has to do with a shift in consciousness, the raising of consciousness to a place a guiltlessness. This new awareness of our true self overcomes our personal identification with physicality and death. We become non-physicalized, and we live forever.

Indeed, we live forever under any circumstance, but in a state of elevated consciousness, we know it. If our consciousness is not elevated, we live forever and may not know it. We are among the walking dead. This is hell. This is the hell of which religion speaks. It is not the fire and brimstone of certain Scriptural interpretations, it is not the everlasting damnation of the forever condemned. Indeed, there is no pain involved at all. There is simply the emptiness, the utter vacuity, of a life without God. That is, a life without Union with the Divine. Yet even this condition is not eternal, but ends the very moment it is rejected and abandoned, the very instant it is not chosen.

One cannot experience union with that which one does not know exists. Because you are God—or, if you are more comfortable saying it this way, a part of God—you cannot experience what you do not create, and you cannot create what you cannot conceive, and you cannot conceive what you consider inconceivable. The cycle—and this is truly a vicious cycle—is complete.

Yet you can break this cycle. All it takes is a change of perception. Consciousness can be elevated at any time that you want it to be. The very act of choosing to elevate consciousness causes it to be raised immediately, and the level to which it can continue to be raised is without limitation. The reason that Consciousness is elevated by the very act of seeking elevation is that what you seek you become, what you desire you create, and what you choose you experience. Ever it has been, ever it will always be.

In the moments after your death (that is, what you call “death” within the limited understanding of your earthly perceptions) you will experience what your consciousness calls forth—including a complete awareness of everything that your consciousness has previously called forth. You will go over these creations of consciousness one by one, moment by moment, reviewing in this way your entire life. This will all happen in an instant.

If your consciousness suggests that you then need to be punished for something you have done in your life, or for the way in which you have lived it, you may go ahead and punish yourself. The choice will be yours—as always. Yet even if you choose punishment, you will feel no pain, for your consciousness after death will have risen past the point where you can even conceive of such a thing. You will not be able to create it, because you will find it, quite literally, inconceivable, given who and what you are. Nevertheless, you will be able to understand that there was a time when you could conceive of pain, and so could others, and so you will watch on the movie screen of your mind the story of how you and others experienced pain, how you caused others to do so, and how they caused you to do so, and you will watch this as you would watch a movie, knowing that it is all totally unreal, simply a story having no basis in reality whatsoever, but a series of pictures and images flickering in two dimensions of a vastly multi-dimensional reality.

And because you will understand that even though pain—both emotional and physical—is impossible in the Realm of the Absolute, it can seem VERY real in the Realm of the Relative, you will do doubt determine, in order to grow as a spiritual being and move closer to experiencing your True Identity, never again to think, say, or do those things which created the illusion you are seeing on the screen.

The moment you do this, you will have made a choice to stop separating yourself from God. For the decision to stop creating the illusion of pain in the illusory world of our present experience is nothing more than a decision to act as if we and God are one—in which state suffering is impossible. It is Oneness that eliminates all suffering, and it is the consciousness of Oneness that makes the experience of Oneness possible. That moment can occur before death as well as after it. When it does, one moves toward Mastery in Living. With this movement, we render ourselves eligible to become a true Spiritual Helper on the earth, for we are no longer concerned with our own dramas, nor our own suffering, but with the dramas and suffering of others, to the degree that we actively seek to free them from it.

This is, in fact, all that the Buddha sought. It was the call of Moses to set his people free. It was the motive behind everything that Jesus did. It was the compassionate cry of Muhammad. Indeed, it has been the signature activity of every saint and sage, all of whom would become our Savior, rescuing us from the abyss of our own ignorance and illusions.

“Water of life” – By Gil Dekel.

Some practical ways to take Step Four

Taking this fourth step in becoming a spiritual helper is as simple as A-B-C.

A. Look deeply at what causes suffering. Most people think that pain and suffering go hand in hand. They do not need to, and when this link is broken the chains that bind us fall away.

B. Notice that when suffering ends, compassion begins. First, compassion for the self, then compassion for others. True compassion. The compassion that turns thoughts and feelings into action.

C. Allow true compassion to open the way to true Oneness with the Creator. This single shift in our way of relating to God can change the world over night.

Now let’s take a look at how you can do this.

Fascinatingly, there is not much reading that can be done on the subject of suffering that does not fall into either the Judeo-Christian or Buddhist thought system. If you are looking for “new thought” writing on suffering you may have to suffer through a long search… The Judeo-Christian thought around all of this seems to be that suffering is good, in a sense, because in the end it leads to our own perfection (tempering steel by fire, and all that), thus preparing us for heaven’s reward, which is an eternal life where suffering no longer exists.

The Buddha took a different approach, suggesting that suffering need not exist on earth, either. Yet he said that the cause of all suffering is desire, and that the solution was therefore to simply eliminate all desire, and here I disagree with him. So what is needed is a New Thought on this subject, embracing neither the Buddhist nor the Judeo-Christian tradition. If such a book is out there, I do not know what it is. I went to Amazon.com and typed “suffering” in the search engine and all I came up with were Christian or Buddhist writers, in the main, all coming from those aforementioned points of view.

Such is the dirth of new thought on this subject that I am half thinking about writing a book of my own on the subject, Forbidden Conversations About Suffering, or some such thing, because apparently this is one of those areas where points of view that are off the beaten path are simply not tolerated, and thus not widely expressed.

This is one of the reasons that humanity has had such a difficult time ending its separation from God. We simply cannot understand why, if there is a God, he would allow or permit suffering—and we certainly can’t understand how, if we are all one with God, we would create and allow ourselves to suffer. It just doesn’t make sense, and so the only thing that does make sense is that we are NOT One with God—and that’s the thought that sticks. It has stuck now for quite some time, and it is the main impediment to our full understanding of God and to our complete embracing of a God who is not separate from us.

Suffering is manifestly evident all over the world. All of us have experienced it in our own lives, and all of us have seen it in the lives of others. Indeed, suffering seems to be the chief evidence that God and we are not One, because, to restate the essential question: If God and we are One, why would Him/Her/Us/We do this to ourselves?

That’s a good question—an amazingly “on point” question. It is a question that deserves an answer.

The answer.

Suffering is not something that God wants or needs. Let’s get that straight at the outset. Let’s also get clear that suffering is not something that earns us “points” or gathers us “credits” as we seek to somehow increase our worthiness to experience paradise.
Indeed, there is no virtue in suffering whatsoever.

None.

Period.

End of sentence.

So much for the Judeo-Christian ethic. Now, to the Buddhist question. Is the simple elimination of our desire the simple way to end our
suffering?

No.

Nice try, Gotama, but not quite it.

Desire, says CwG, is the primal energy that powers the Process of Creation. Desire is another word for Love, and if we eliminate desire, we eliminate love. I don’t think any of us want to create an I-don’t-give-a-damn-about-anything life. To desire something is not the same thing as to need it. The explanation of this in What God Wants is wonderful, and I hope you will all read it. An even longer “take” will be found in A Handbook to Higher Consciousness, a truly extraordinary, life-changing book by Ken Keyes, Jr.  So no, do not eliminate desire. Keep desire intact. Eliminate need. It is an illusion. To learn more about the Illusion of Need, read Communion with God.

Getting some exercise

Now do the following exercise:

Think of something that you fervently desire right now. Perhaps it’s a relationship that truly works.

Perhaps it’s a career that is really “you.” Perhaps it’s a new level of income that allows you to escape from your stress and worries. Maybe it’s all three. Pick one. Or pick something else, not on this list. Okay, now hold the thought of that desire strongly in your mind. Focus on it and place your attention on it. Close you eyes and do this, and when you have really

Good. Good job.

Now I want you to imagine a situation or circumstance in which you could be happy without that. Maybe you’re happy without it right now. Maybe you had a good day yesterday, or are looking forward to a good day tomorrow. At any rate, see if you can envision a “you” that is happy, even though there is something that you do not have that you are desiring. Can you envision that?

If you cannot—if you absolutely cannot envision or imagine being a happy person without the object or the experience of your desire, then you do not have a desire at all, but an addiction. You can always tell when you are caught in the throes of an addiction when the absence of something causes you to be unable to be happy. Make a list of your “addictions” right now, and see how long it is.

Now…if you can imagine yourself being a happy person even though you do not now have the object or the experience of your desires, you are in a very healthy place. You do not “need” that object or experience—and I believe that the elimination of need, not the elimination of desire, is the path to peace and the end of suffering.

More exercise

On a sheet of paper, make a list of five experiences or objects that you at one point in your life felt you really, really needed—but did not get. Can you think of anything in this category? Good. Write it down.

Now ask yourself, Have I had any happy moments—I mean really happy moments—since the time that I needed this thing and did not get it? If the answer comes up “no,” ask yourself, What would it take for me to be happy without this? Jot your response on the paper.
If the answer comes up “yes,” ask yourself, If I have been really happy in moments without this, why did I think I needed this so bad? Jot your response on the paper. Then ask, Is there something that I think I need today to be happy? Is it possible that I can be just as happy without this as I have been without the thing that I thought I needed in the past?

About suffering.

Pain is an experience. Suffering if your point of view about it. Pope John Paul II was said to have had many illnesses toward the end of his life, much pain. But according to those closest to him, he showed no signs of suffering. This was because, insiders say, of his attitude.

The Pope had an idea about his discomforts that sustained him during his experience of them. His idea was that it was perfectly all right with him to have the conditions that beset him. When he left his body at the end of March, 2005 he offered the whole world an example of what it means to die with dignity. This does not mean that all people everywhere must accept their discomfort without complaint and allow themselves no respite, comfort, or withdrawal from the pain. Appropriate pain management and keeping oneself as comfortable as possible is obviously part of any humane end-of-life protocol. And sometimes a little complaining is good. A grumble here and a gripe there can do much to release pent up negative energy.

What it does mean is that it is very often possible to rise above our physical or emotional discomforts in more of our moments than not, experiencing them fully but without anxiety or undue suffering. Mothers giving birth can attest to this. In emotional situations in particular, suffering is the result of unmet expectations in nearly every case. The obvious and immediate solution to this is to simply move through life without expectations. Ah, easier said than done, you might say. But is it? When we look deeply at the cause of suffering, we see that in far more instances than we might have previously imagined we can eliminate suffering by simply changing our mind about what is going on.

If we really want to end our separation from God we can start here, at the experience called suffering. We can begin by understand-ing that God does not suffer, and God does not want us to suffer. You can depend on that. I promise you it is true.
Many people pray when they are suffering, and their prayer often sounds something like, “Please, God, bring an end to this suffering.” Such a prayer presumes that God is creating it. We imagine God to be separate from us, and we think that perhaps just the right word from us will convince God to stop the torture.

Of course, the wonder of this kind prayer is that, if we believe that just the right word from us will cause God to end our torture, our torture very often will end. Depending on the level of our belief, so will it be done to us. Yet it is not really being done TO us, it is being done THROUGH us. The mechanism is internal, not external—both in the producing of our suffering and in the ending of it.

The four E’s

The way out of suffering is never through denial of pain, but through acceptance of it. Embrace your pain fully, experience it completely, express your feelings about it honestly (“I wish it would stop,” “This feels like hell,” etc.), then expand your ideas about it imaginatively. Imagine that the pain is okay. Imagine that it is simply part of life, and that it is in resisting the pain that we suffer.

Embrace, experience, express, expand—that’s the pain formula.

“Thank you, God-in-me, for helping me to see this experience in a new way, for helping me to understand that this pain is pain and nothing else,” might be a new prayer.

Don’t be surprised if you have found a way to overcome suffering. And don’t be surprised if in doing so you have shortened the distance between yourself and God—and maybe even lost your sense of separation from God completely. For when you realize that you have found the way to put an end to your suffering, you will realize that you have become the Lord God of your being, sovereign in your own Kingdom.

More practical suggestions

Once you have looked deeply at what causes suffering, you will have looked deeply into the face of God, for you will see that what causes suffering is the creative force and source within you—and that is, in fact, what God is.

The experience union with God in this way can bring an immediate end to suffering, and when suffering ends you will notice that compassion begins. First, compassion for the self, then compassion for others. True compassion. The compassion that turns thoughts and feelings into action. Initially you will feel compassion for yourself, and all the suffering that you have gone through
needlessly. Then you will feel compassion for others and all the suffering they are going through needlessly right now. If only they knew, you will think. If only they understood. But they do not, you will observe, and so they suffer.

This will make you want to do everything you can to bring them succor and comfort and understanding—and once again, in this, you will feel the end of your separation from God. Indeed, you will feel God-like as you move through the world gently offering healing to others.

The wondrous part of this process is that you can undertake this portion of it out of order and produce the same result. In other words, you can reverse the order of A. and B. above. You can seek to end the suffering of others through bringing them greater understanding and, in so doing, deeply explore the cause of suffering and end your own.

The circle of life

Most of life’s processes are circular, as is Life Itself. Indeed, the main reason that most healers work to heal others is to heal themselves. This is true whether they know it or not. It is true because there is only one of us in the room. What we heal in ourselves, we heal in another; what we heal in another, we heal in ourselves. The effect is circular and unending. What leaves the front of you touches the back of you. What goes around, comes around.

You cannot heal something in yourself without it having a salutary effect on others. It is impossible. Similarly, you cannot heal something in another without it having a salutary effect on you. It is impossible. All healing is universal. Thus it has been written: when one person opens once again to God, all the heavens rejoice.

Knowing, as you do now, that the processes of life are circular and reversible, here is something practical that you can do right now to end your separation from God. End the separation from God of another.

When you do this you end their suffering. Or, you can end their suffering and you do this. Ending suffering ends separation, which ends suffering, which ends separation, which ends suffering. Compassion naturally arises out of such a cycle, and it is ours but to notice it, and then express it with everyone whose lives we touch. Compassion is the beginning of healing. Compassion is the medicine for suffering. Awareness is the healing, but compassion is the medication. Only when compassion is present in the moment of suffering can awareness arrive.

So notice that when suffering ends, compassion begins, and that when compassion begins, suffering ends. The circle presents itself again.

Some final practical ideas

Part C of Step 4 is to allow true compassion to open the way to true Oneness with the Creator. This single shift in our way of relating to God can change the world over night.

Yet one more time we see the circle in evidence. Compassion opens the way to Oneness with the Creator, which opens the way to understanding the causes of suffering, which opens the way to compassion, which opens the way to Oneness with the Creator. And once again we notice that the circle may be entered at any point. It is not necessary (nor is it even possible) to “start at the beginning,” for where is the beginning of a circle?

So we see that Oneness with the Creator may be achieved without starting with an exploration of the causes of suffering. It may be achieved by simply starting with compassion for others, whether we understand the causes of suffering or not. Or it may occur as a stand-alone, profound experience, stimulated by whatever (perhaps during a moment of meditation, or while making love, or when simply contemplating an orange—all points made elliptically by the film Zen Noir.)

Part C here suggests, then, that you do whatever you can to achieve and experience Oneness with the Creator. There are many, many avenues and approaches here. For millions of people, meditation is one of them. Conversations with God suggests that we meditate fifteen minutes in the morning and fifteen minutes in the evening every day.

Many people shy away from meditation as a practice because they may have been frustrated in early attempts to do this, or because they simply do not feel they know how, and don’t know where to begin. Recently I received an email from a woman named Kimberly who sent me a wonderful poem that she wrote about her connection with God after reading CwG. She then asked me if I had any suggestions on how she should approach her “inner self.”

Below is the email I sent back to Kimberly. I did not intend for it to be, but it turns out that this is a wonderful little treatise on the art of meditation. If I had sat myself down to write an “article about meditation” I do not think I could have produced such clarity. However, when our intention is purely to seek to assist another, I believe we open access to enormous wisdom. Here is the email that resulted…

My dear Kimberly…

First, thank you for sending the poem. It is a wonderful expression of your feelings and your inner truth after reading the CwG material, and it was a very special gift to receive from you. As to your request for individual guidance on how you might approach your inner self, I believe that you have done so with your poetry. This is one of many ways that our higher Self speaks to us,
and I do hope that you will continue to put pen to paper in this way whenever you feel inspired to do so. A collection of such verses may one day serve humanity.

To prepare for such inspirations, I want to make the already predictable suggestion (so predictable, in fact, that you may already be doing this) that you practice quiet, sitting meditation at least twice a day. Please do this for at least 15 minutes each morning and 15 minutes each evening. Try, if it is possible, to set a standard time when you will do this. Then try to keep to that time. Yet if you cannot keep such a schedule, know that any time will do, so long as it is at least twice a day, early and late.

Find a place where you can be absolutely private and alone. It works for me to be naked, because that removes for me any sense of “closed-offedness” from the universe, if that makes any sense to you. So I sit naked, but that is not a requirement, Kimberly. It is just something that helps me to achieve a state of mind. If sitting without any clothing on in any way produces discomfort in you, or creates a state of mind which is not totally open and joyful and at peace, then wrap yourself in something loose and flowing. But try to not dress is something that binds or constricts in any way, making you conscious of something other than your holy self.

When I meditate, I sometimes sit outside, if it is nice and warm, allowing the morning sun to bake down upon me, or the stars to sparkle above me. Inside, I sit by a window and let the dawn sun pour in and the night sky enclose me. There is no “right way” to do quiet sitting meditation. (Indeed, there is no “right way” to do anything.) One may sit in a comfortable chair, or on the floor, or upright in bed, for that matter. Choose what works for you. I sit on the floor, usually with no back rest but occasionally against a
wall or something, because floor sitting keeps me more “present” in the space. If I am too completely comfortable, as in an overstuffed chair or on the bed, I tend to doze off or fade away from the moment. When I am sitting on the floor, or outside on the grass, this rarely occurs. I am totally mentally “present.”

Once sitting, I begin by paying attention to my breathing, closing my eyes and simply listening to myself inhaling and exhaling. I am in blackness and I pay attention only to what I am hearing. When I have “united”—that’s the only word I can find that fits here—with the rhythm of my breath, I begin to expand my attention to what my “inner eye” is seeing. Usually at that point this is nothing but darkness. If I am seeing images—that is, “thinking thoughts” of something and seeing that before me, I work to fade those thoughts out, like a “fade to black” on the movie screen. I turn my mind to blankness. Focusing my inner eye, I peer deeply into this darkness. I am looking for nothing in particular. I am simply peering deeply, allowing myself to search for nothing.

Soon, in my experience, what appears to be a small, flickering blue “flame” or burst of blue light pierces the darkness. I find that if I begin thinking about this cognitively—that is, defining it, describing it to myself, trying to give it shape and form or make it “mean” something—it disappears immediately. The only way that I can “make it come back” is to pay it no mind. I have to work hard to turn my mind off and just be with the moment and the experience, without judging it, defining it, or trying to make something happen or figure it out or understand it from my logic center. It is rather like making love. Then, too, for the experience to be mystical and magical, I must turn my mind off and just be with the moment and the experience, without judging it, defining it, or trying to make something happen or figure it out or understand it from my logic center.

Meditation is making love to the universe. It is uniting with God. It is uniting with Self. It is not to be understood, created, or defined. One does not understand God, one simple experiences God. One does not create God, God simply is. One does not define God, God defines one. God IS the definer and the defined. God is the definition itself. Insert the word Self wherever the word God appears in the above paragraph and the meaning remains the same.

Now, back to the dancing blue flame. Once you take your mind off it, all the while keeping your focus ON it, without expectation or thought of any kind, the flickering light may reappear. The trick is to keep your mind (that is, your THOUGHT PROCESS) off it, all the while keeping your focus (that is, your UNDIVIDED ATTENTION) on it.

Can you imagine this dichotomy? This means paying attention to what you are not paying attention to. It is very much like day dreaming. It is like when you are sitting in broad daylight, in the middle of some place of great activity, and you are paying attention to nothing at all, or to everything all at once. You are expecting nothing and requiring nothing and noticing nothing in particular, but you are so FOCUSED on the “nothing” and the “everything” that someone finally has to snap you out of it (perhaps by literally snapping their fingers), saying, “Hey! Are you DAY DREAMING????”

Usually, one day dreams with one’s eyes open. Meditation is “day dreaming with your eyes closed.” That’s as close as I can come to explaining my experience. Now the dancing blue flame has reappeared. Simply experience it and do not try to define it, measure it, or explain it to yourself in any way. Just….fall into it. The flame will appear to come toward you. It will become larger in your inner field of vision. This is not the flame moving toward you at all, but YOU moving into, and inside of, the experience of it.

If you are lucky you will experience TOTAL IMMERSION in this light before your mind starts telling you about it and talking to you about it. If you have even one instant of this mindless immersion, you will have experienced bliss. This is the bliss of total knowing, total experiencing of the Self as One, with all of it, with everything, with the Only Thing There Is. You cannot “try” for this bliss. If you see the blue flame and begin to anticipate this bliss, the flame will disappear instantly, in my experience. Anticipation and/or expectation ends the experience. That is because the experience is happening RIGHT NOW, and anticipation or expectation
PLACES IT INTO THE FUTURE, WHERE YOU ARE NOT.

Hence, the flame seems to “go away.” It is not the light that has gone away, it is you. You have removed yourself from the moment of Now by placing your thought into what you call the Future. This has the same effect on your inner third eye as closing your outer eyes has on your experience of the physical world around you. You quite literally shut it out.

In my own experience, Kimberly, this experience of bliss comes but once every thousand moments of meditation. Having known it once is both a blessing and, in a sense, a curse, because I am forever wishing for it again. Still, there are times when I can retreat from the wishing, remove myself from the hope, desert my desires, reject my expectations, and place myself totally in the moment, utterly without anticipation of anything in particular. This is the mental state I seek to achieve. It is not easy, but it is possible. And if I achieve it, I have achieved mindlessness. Nirvana. Bliss.

Now, a moment ago I referred to the experience of making love. I did this for a reason. This can be a wonderful training for those who find it difficult to undertake the journey to mindlessness in quiet meditation. If you have an intimate partner, you may find that the experience of sexual union is an extraordinary opportunity to experience the beginnings of the journey to bliss, or mindless
oneness. In your sexual encounter you must retreat from the wishing, remove yourself from any hope, desert any desires, reject any expectations, avoid or ignore any unconscious comparisons, and place yourself totally in the moment, utterly without anticipation of anything in particular. It is not easy, but it is possible. If you achieve it, you will have achieved mindless oneness. This is nirvana. This is bliss.

Then, knowing that such a state is possible, your next step on the journey is to achieve this state not through physical union with another, but through metaphysical union with the Self. This same bliss may be experienced in silent meditation. Having experience this identical state of bliss, you will come to know the REASON that the experience of bliss through physical union with another is identical to the bliss experienced through union with the Self…

There IS no one BUT the Self. There IS no “other.”

Totally loving, non-expecting, non-desiring, non-needing sexual union with another confirms this. Totally loving, non-expecting, non-desiring, non-needing metaphysical union with the Self confirms this also.

Hugs…. Neale.

There are other ways to come to know the Creator, and to end our separation with God. In addition to meditation there are physical disciplines, regimens and trainings that can get us in touch with our true nature, such as yoga, Dahn Hak, and others. Studying is another way to end your separation from God. Many people have done so after reading the Conversations with God books. There are, of course, thousands of books on this subject. For a basic understanding of the world’s present theologies and what they tell us, read just about any book by Huston Smith and/or Karen Armstrong, among them…

The World’s Religions: Our Great Wisdom Traditions, by Huston Smith
A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, by Karen Armstrong
The Battle for God, by Karen Armstrong

Here are some other titles you may find helpful as you expand beyond traditional perameters:

How to Know God: The Soul’s Journey into the Mystery of Mysteries, by Deepak Chopra.
The Seat of the Soul, by Gary Zukav
Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah, by Richard Bach.

And, of course, if you have not already read it: What God Wants: A Compelling Answer to Humanity’s Biggest Question, by Neale Donald Walsch.

The last word on Step Four

The Hindu religion teaches that there are four paths to God. These are, loosely…

• The Path of the Intellect (thinking things through and getting there through a mental process)
• The Path of Service (finding the true self through selflessness, in giving to others)
• The Path of Devotion (praying and honoring through sacred ritual and deep, heartfelt love and dedication to the Divine)
• The Path of Discipline (rigorous and often ritualized physical routines that use the body to,
  ironically, cause our sense of ourselves AS the body to fall away)

No path is more “direct” than any other path; none is more “correct” or effective. Indeed, most people find God by walking some combination of these paths—although there is often an emphasis on one path or another, given a person’s individual proclivities.

Do whatever you can to end your sense of separation from God. Look into a baby’s eyes. Smell a bouquet of lilacs. Swim naked in the ocean along a roaring beach at midnight. Eat anything juicy. Or simply breathe. Breathe in the wonderful air around you. Go outside and get some fresh stuff. Better yet, leave the city and head for the hills and breathe in the air there. Stand by a waterfall and breathe in the air.

Bury your face in the shoulder of someone you love. Breathe in the love. Feel the essence of that person, and of you, and of the oneness, the closeness, you feel. Tell me then that there is no God. Tell me you feel separate from God and from Life. I don’t think you will be able to. I don’t think so.

* End of chapter 4 *

Copyright © 2005 Neale Donald Walsch. Published here by Gil Dekel with Neale’s permission. 31 December 2016.

Published in 2005 by Spiritual Legacies, Ashland, OR, USA. All rights reserved.