O most merciful Redeemer, friend and brother,
May I know Thee more clearly,
Love Thee more dearly,
Follow Thee more nearly.
– St. Richard of Chichester (1197-1253), From his deathbed prayer (1253)
If we hope to achieve some level of understanding of how the Godhead works in the world, we are going to have to find a way to see things more from God’s perspective. And doing that is going to take a lot more humility than we have yet mustered! So as we begin, we ought to pray for God’s help in better understanding God. St. Richard’s prayer, the end of which is above, was said in Latin by the then-Bishop of Chichester on his deathbed. Praying in gratitude affirmations puts the power of our own minds into our receipt of the gift, so now in beginning with you this effort to come to better know the genuine Godhead, I pray, “Dear God, I thank You that I know Thee more clearly, love Thee more dearly, follow Thee more nearly every day.” Amen. God’s Will be done.
Before we make our attempt to know God outside of all religions, let’s first reassure ourselves that we have the Godhead’s permission. There is so much fear-based superstition surrounding religions that the notion of trying to find and know God independently makes some people afraid. But Jesus urges us to ask questions and to seek the truth. And the plain fact is that God is real! And the God that we are coming to perceive as we study the greater reality is much nicer and more loving than the Christian God, who is frankly the fantastical relic of thousands of years of fear-based human ideas about gods. It has occurred to me that what we are learning now about God might be the genuine Godhead’s direct revelation, else otherwise why would so much new information be suddenly so easy to find?
Our quest to come to know God better is easier now because in recent decades there has been an explosion of new information about what really is going on. Insofar as we can determine, the bounty of evidence that we have come to take for granted began with a concerted attempt by elevated beings not in bodies to make their presence known to us; and that effort seems to have had its beginnings about two hundred years ago. We’ve got to stress the fact that none of this new information was available to the builders of any religion! And in making a fresh effort to understand God that is rooted in these modern facts, we are doing what we should have been doing all along. We are putting God first. One fact that is abundantly obvious to every researcher of the greater reality is that God is even much more involved in each separate moment of our existence than any religious person in human history has heretofore imagined!
We could not possibly know any of what follows if it were not by divine revelation. And here are some things that we now very strongly suspect are true:
- THE ONLY THING THAT EXISTS IS CONSCIOUSNESS. When the eminent physicist Max Planck discovered that consciousness underlies everything, he in fact began for all of us the process of finding the genuine God.
- THE GODHEAD IS A COLLECTIVE OF PERFECTED BEINGS. Oh, how I have fought this idea! But it fits with so much else that we have learned about how things work at the highest levels, and Thomas is telling me now to just get over my squeamishness. There is no One Big Guy on a Throne with a Long Beard and Thunderbolts, far away from us and looking down on us. There is instead an infinitely powerful Collective of what is actually Us Perfected. No wonder God knows us and loves us so well!
- WHAT WE EXPERIENCE AS REALITY IS IN THE NATURE OF SHARED THOUGHT. Our own thoughts feel ephemeral and private to us, but the Godhead’s “thoughts” are as solid and public as the hand in front of your face.
- MATTER, ENERGY, SPACE AND TIME ARE NOT OBJECTIVELY REAL. We can accept this fact about everything but time, since we can think about the universe (for example) as solid and gigantic when we know the thought of it has neither substance nor size. But without time, doesn’t
everything just happen at once? Doesn’t even a thought require time for you to think it? As difficult as this is for us to imagine, objective time simply is not real. Welcome to eternity! If something real exists in this moment, then it always has existed and it always will exist. And the only thing that exists right now is Mind. Your own mind is inextricably part of that one Mind, so you are eternal. By definition.
- OUR REALITY IS NEWLY CREATED IN EACH MICRO-INSTANT OF NON-TIME. Here is another notion that I have been fighting, but no other theory makes so much sense. Reality can best be understood as something like a filmstrip, which is a series of pictures in which tiny changes are made from picture to picture. When those pictures are run in quick series, we experience it as one continuous reality. And the same is true of the reality around us now! Each “picture” in this ongoing reality includes all of what we think of as the past, which means that our past can be freshly revised or augmented in each instant. And apparently our past is being created to be steadily more complex, as human beings become both more curious and better able to figure things out. The Godhead wants to stay ahead of us in order to preserve this illusion! I understand how impossible it seems to us for each instant to be freshly created with tiny changes for each of more than seven billion people, many trillions of animals and insects, and even many more trillions of galaxies, each containing no-number-is-big-enough stars which might carry planets that harbor their own versions of living things. But
apparently the Godhead does it easily, although if we understand what is going on we can spot God’s little fudges here and there. I’ll give you a few examples below.
For now, we only know that the evidence is strong that these five statements are some version of true. And wonderfully, they help us explain so much! Here are three quick examples to ponder:
The Godhead Can be Both Powerful and Personal
I have always been a skeptic. I don’t want just comforting answers that make no sense! When I was a child, I would hear people talk glowingly about a “personal God,” and I knew even then that One God on a Throne in Heaven could not possibly be a personal God for each of us individually. If it were not for my experiences of light, I likely would have ended up an atheist. But the genuine Godhead turns out to be a gigantic Collective of thousands of Perfected Beings whose minds are in such perfect harmony that together they make one infinitely powerful Mind. There also are billions of beings who have grown past their need to incarnate and are furthering their ongoing spiritual growth by serving humanity. Each of us has at least one spirit guide, and for all we know each guide works with a preferred aspect of the Godhead. Jesus is an aspect of the Godhead with whom many of our guides are in contact. That seems to be roughly how it actually works. And that makes sense. Even to me!
Reality is Infinitely Scalable
There are many very important questions that materialist scientists never will answer. But the Godhead, in staying always just ahead of us, is able to keep scientists happily busy trying! Here are three such scientifically insoluble and highly scalable puzzles out of very many:
- How did the universe begin? Our ancestors ten thousand years ago (or even just a hundred years ago) had little interest in
figuring out the history of the universe. Then in 1920 someone was inspired to propose what became known as the Big Bang. Of course, going back to something the size of a single atom that explodes to become the universe still doesn’t tell us where that first speck came from or what caused that amazing explosion, but no doubt the Godhead will eventually build in answers to those questions that will “always” have been there.
- How did life begin? The simplest explanation is that life is a property of consciousness, but scientists aren’t yet ready to accept the idea that consciousness is primary. To indulge them, the Godhead may well soon come up with a life-creating process to be found by scientists that “always” has existed but was just “overlooked.”
- What is beyond the universe? Neanderthals needed only this solar system. We, however, need a gigantic and ever-expanding universe so we never will find a disturbing edge and have to fret about what might be beyond that. So we have precisely the limitless universe that we need! And there is some evidence that the process of creating ever more galaxies to stay ahead of us still goes on.
A Lot of Odd Glitches Are Now More Understandable
A reality that is remade freshly in each instant can remain stable while it is being tailored on an ongoing basis to the Godhead’s needs and to our own. For example, here are just three of what are many impossible-seeming facts that represent what amount to God’s short-cuts in creating our past and present earth-reality. When it becomes necessary to fill them in with more details to keep us busy, we can only assume that will happen:
- Cosmological constants. We are told that there are 26 values that must remain within tiny tolerances or the universe will either implode or blow apart. They must remain “constant,” but in fact some of them keep minutely adjusting!
- Punctuated equilibrium. There are many “missing links” in the histories of each of the 8.7 million species of plants and animals living on earth. Species will remain stable for thousands or millions of years, and then they will be replaced by new species almost at once and without anything like a sufficiently long transitional period of Darwinian natural selection.
- About ninety percent of modern species came into existence within the last two hundred thousand years. When God established modern people, God almost simultaneously set the stage for us with all the other modern animals and plants. For this to have happened on its own, so
recently and so quickly, is so unlikely that just thinking about it can make your eyes cross.
God is real! And God loves us! There is nothing else that matters beside that single perfect truth. God has always been minutely involved with us, but so respectfully that spotting God’s precise role is difficult. Let’s see now what we can discover about God’s involvement from God’s perspective….
Thanks be to Thee, my Lord Jesus Christ,
For all the benefits Thou hast given me,
For all the pains and insults Thou hast borne for me.
– St. Richard of Chichester (1197-1253), From his deathbed prayer (1253)
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