Though our experience of God changes throughout our lives, God itself is changeless. Although our understanding of God varies from culture to culture, evolving over time, the ‘substance’ of what God is never varies, and never evolves. Therefore, it is we who evolve, not God. And since we are a part of God – the point of the spear if you will – we don’t really change either. Our essence does not change. Only our awareness of God advances. Our consciousness of what God is and what it isn’t – expands toward totality.
God can only be experienced, not understood. God is that which is beyond understanding, so our comprehension of God doesn’t change. Yet our awareness of it does become fuller based on the quality of our experiences of its love. Thus, the quality of our consciousness changes. It deepens. Awareness doesn’t expand in a quantitative sense, but it’s enriched.
Since God is all-encompassing, we’re always enveloped by its omnipresent nature. This means we’re already all we can ever be. But since our minds are infinitely powerful, we can convince ourselves that we’re less than. We can believe we’re in the process of becoming and thus perceive ourselves as inadequate, inferior, as less than. This is, in reality, a betrayal of our true nature, of God itself. Yet it’s not a sin. It doesn’t obviate our innocence. It only hides it from ourselves.
When we see ourselves as insufficient, it appears as though we need to get something from ‘outside’ ourselves in order to become fulfilled. We push our Godlike nature out of awareness, and dream ourselves as inferior beings who’ve irreversibly undone our blameless nature. In this way, we dream up the world of sin, for which the price is suffering. Yet this is all illusion (false perception) and delusion (false belief) based on the fear we’re not enough and that we therefore do not have enough. We need only acknowledge – and accept – that we are that which we already are. Our consciousness then broadens and deepens in a qualitative sense.
How is this accomplished? At this stage in the development of our awareness, we do this by giving love through action. Thus, although we need ultimately do nothing but change our minds about the nature of ourselves and what we really are, and thus about the nature of reality, here and now, in this world, embodied in these dreamt selves, we take action to attain a new experience. The experience substitutes for our understanding, since God cannot be understood, but can only be known through experience. The experience is the deeper awareness.
The action of love is some kind of gift of what we have or service of what we are. It is imparting our money or possessions. It is giving of our time, our talent, and our energy. This action is given on faith without any guarantee that it will yield a new experience and a new awareness. It is made on faith (trust) since it yields experience and not understanding. Understanding is trying to have an experience before we’re ready for it, before we actually have the experience, before we’ve made the gift of love through our action. The action must precede the experience on faith and without knowledge of the deeper awareness because we’ve convinced ourselves that we are in a state of inadequacy, and thus see ourselves as fallen, as sinful and as suffering. These may be untrue states, yet we’ve hypnotized ourselves through our powerful minds, which have induced beliefs and then perceptions, that we are inferior, evil beings. Thus, only the new action of love – given continuously without exception and expectation of return – reverses the old belief in lack and allows in the belief that we are part of the infinite. Since the infinite has no parts but must, by its nature, be without boundaries and thus without limits, we are infinite ourselves. Then, we know with a knowing which surpasses mere understanding. Love is limitless, and it is only by loving that we complete the proof that we are infinite as well.
© 2024 by Michael C. Just