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Sunday Message for February 25, 2007
It’s All God
The title of today’s talk is It’s
All God, which is the title of a book by Walter Starcke. Actually
if you knew and believed that
‘it’s all God’ you would have no reason to worry. In
the last chapter of Starcke’s book, in a chapter called After
the talk is the walk – the doing – he writes: Your
life would be dedicated to feeding your neighbor’s wholeness and your
own one-ness.
In your oneness you would be both the one who feeds and the fed. You
would not avoid the dark; you would not run away from difficulty; but you would
shine the light of Spirit on it. You would know that the ultimate responsibility
is not yours but is that of the Christ within you.
You would live effortlessly because you would welcome each experience – each
segment of the circle – knowing that you are not just one segment but
rather you are the whole circle. You would know that God is the only
power. You would know that God is the only presence. You would
know that you and everyone else is the Omnipresence, God.
THE TWO CHRISTIANITIES
So where did we get off the track and not living that
kind of life? It says in (1 Corinthians 1:19-20)
“For it is written, "I will destroy the wisdom
of the wise, and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart." Where is
the one who is wise?
Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish
the wisdom of the world?”
There was a dedicated, spiritual man who was a real advocate of the teachings
of Jesus the Christ. But, he refused to call himself a Christian. He
said that this was because most of the people and churches who claimed to be
Christians neither understood or followed the truths of Jesus’ life and
teaching.
Now, while we can probably agree with him to some extent – in implying
that his interpretation was the only right one, he had the same judgmental
attitude that he was criticizing in others. Any time we become exclusive,
we diminish the Christian message.
Throughout history their have been “two Christianities.” We
have to study and understand the teachings of Jesus from the left brain or
masculine state of consciousness. We have to approach it in a logical
or objective fashion. But we have to study and understand the teachings
of Jesus also from the right brain, the more feminine, feeling, intuitive or
subjective consciousness. Both of these viewpoints are important – even
though, at times, they seem to contradict one another.
And this was one of the major splits in the early church between the traditionalists
and the Gnostics. Politically, it made more sense to organize and control
the traditionalists and condemn the Gnostics, because the Gnostics believed
that the ultimate authority was within them.
And so the traditionalists created the churches, the rules, the dogma and the
creeds. But the Gnostic mystical thinking never really died out. It
permeated all the “New Age”
thinking. It was there in Christian Science, Religious Science, and Unity. It
is in the writings called The Course in Miracles and in Joel
Goldsmith’s Infinite Way writings.
But probably the most surprising area for Gnostic principles to appear has
been in the discoveries of quantum physics. By proving the existence
of realms beyond material existence the gap began to be closed between objective
fact and subjective fiction, between matter and spirit.
They proved scientifically that by observing something “here,” you
could affect something “there.” They brought to light the
age-old alchemist’s secret: Consciousness
transmutes form. Spiritual healing and mind over matter went
from superstition to scientific fact.
So besides getting rid of the separation between space and time, wave and particle,
energy and matter, spiritual and material, they are doing away with the basic
dualism of subject versus object. They have transcended all dualism and
showed us that when we combine the two Christianities we will create a richer
and more meaningful Christianity.
OUR INCLUSIVE SELVES
It says in (1 Corinthians 12:12-21)
“For just as the body is one and has many members,
and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ.
For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body and we were all made
to drink of one Spirit. Indeed, the body does not consist of one member but
of many. If the foot would say, "Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to
the body," that would not make it any less a part of the body. And if the ear
would say, "Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body,"
that would not make it any less a part of the body. If the whole body were
an eye, where would the hearing be? If the whole body were hearing, where would
the sense of smell be? But as it is, God arranged the members in the body,
each one of them, as he chose. If all were a single member, where would the
body be? As it is, there are many members, yet one body. The eye cannot say
to the hand, "I have no need of you," nor again the head to the feet, "I have
no need of you."
We are promised that one day we will realize that we are made in the image
of God. So we spend our whole lives searching for what that means. We
imagine that we will then understand that because God is infinite and all-inclusive,
so are we.
If I ask you who you are, or to describe yourself, more than likely you will
tell me about what you have seen in the mirror. It is difficult for us
to really be aware that we are microcosmic holograms of a macrocosmic infinite
inclusive “beingness.”
Infinity represents total inclusiveness.
Infinity can’t exist minus anything. So once we learn to think
and feel inclusively we will realize our oneness with infinity. Then,
we too, will no longer need to exist minus anything that we need or envision. We
can have it all.
Of course we have been told that there are things in ourselves that are not
nice, that we should exclude. Haven’t you heard that you should
eliminate fear, should shun doubt, should avoid getting angry, should not desire
anything, and should not be passionate?
That’s nothing but New Age foolishness! Because our true nature
is infinite, all aspects of our nature are forever included in our infinity,
and for a good reason.
When you are standing at the edge of a high cliff, I hope you have some fear. Fear
is God’s signal sent to protect his physical incarnation.
At times, we should all have doubts. Having healthy doubt spurs us to
seek the truth that will make us free.
We should even include anger in our make-up. Jesus was justifiably angry
when he chased the moneychangers out of the temple.
If anything, we should increase our passion. Kill passion, and you deal
a deathblow to your creativity.
Passion is energy, and until we passionately desire to experience God, we never
will.
So, instead of trying to get rid of or exclude those sometimes disturbing human
feelings, we should honor our wholeness by including them in order to see what
they are telling us. It is all God. Nothing happens by accident.
Our feelings are signals, and it is a mistake to ignore them until their purposes
are revealed. Once revealed, their energies can be redirected if they
turn out to be inappropriate.
Resist not evil. Rather than eliminate – replace. Once we
stop trying to eliminate undesirable attitudes, and instead replace them with
desirable attitudes, we discover that we never have had a problem with what
we feel.
We had a problem with how we used or are being used “by” what we
feel.
Jesus was plenty angry when he chased the moneychangers out of the temple,
but he used his anger and wasn’t used by it. After expressing the
anger that was included in his infinite nature, he let it go. It had
served its purpose, (Luke 23:34) “forgive them; for they do not know what they
are doing.”
BEYOND THE BEYOND
There is an Oriental saying, “To one who has
arrived, the way is foreign.” This means that once you have
arrived, you will see that all you went through had little to do with your
getting there.
It isn’t that everything from the past is valueless or unnecessary at
its place and time in the evolutionary process, but old concepts take on new
meanings after they have served their purpose. We can go beyond old automatic,
and perhaps obsolete, meanings and therefore go beyond our old lives.
We can go beyond faith. Many of the greats in science, art, and society
have claimed that life is meaningless without a faith in God. Faith is
not something you think or feel. It is something you do that can take
you from finite limitation into infinite possibility.
Faith is not an invisible servant that is there to do our bidding on call. Faith
is something we must do – something we must do that empowers us.
Scripture tells us, (Matthew 17:20) "If you have faith the size
of a mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, "Move from here to there,'
and it will move; and nothing will be impossible for you." However, when you discover what faith is,
you will find that misguided faith can also cause mountains to fall on you
as well. Whatever you have faith in, you create – good or bad.
When you consciously know how and why faith works, superstition is replaced
by knowledge and you go beyond having faith into being faith-full (Matthew
17:20) "and nothing will be impossible for you."
We can go beyond reason. It has been stated that the universe was created
out of chaos. This threatens us because something within human nature
does not want to let go of reason. Reason requires a logical explanation
for creation, for God, and for religion. But in the final analysis, the
Spirit of creation is experiential and not logical
It takes a leap of faith to experience God. It will take a leap of faith
to live at this time – a time at which we have to come to terms with
chaos. We have to sense an order behind the chaos of life that is beyond
reason, and when we do, perhaps for the first time, we will be able to experience
that it is all God.
We can go beyond infinity. We hear mystics talk of entering the silence. It
is not that the silence is a thoughtless state where the mind is obliterated.
It is a state where the mind is consciously aware of a presence – a sense
of Spirit or God – and yet there are no thoughts that define it. The
silence is a conscious experience of “no-thing-ness.”
Contemplating the infinite nature of Omnipresence, Omniscience, and Omnipotence
can help you arrive at a state of no-thing-ness. That is because being
infinite; infinity is beyond any one thing. If you experience the infinite
nature of God or yourself, you enter a silence that transcends all things,
a soul silence where it is all God.
We can go beyond prayer. Until you have gone beyond prayer, you most
likely think of prayer as something one does. When we think or say prayers,
we are taking an objective approach. To go beyond praying is to “be” prayer. In
order to do that, you have to transcend
conscious thought by merging with the process. You have to
see yourself as “being prayed” rather than as praying.
We can go beyond church.
The old third-dimensional time and space definition of church was a physical
one built on exclusive membership, exclusive authority, exclusive theologies,
and exclusive participation. That approach will no longer dominate the
spiritual scene. Church will be where the message, the person, the race,
the sex, the man of earth, or the man of God within each individual will be
united inclusively by growing together, experiencing together, and sharing
together.
We can go beyond God. As we go beyond old concepts, realize that the
most frightening, important, and necessary one to go beyond is our old concept
of God. If you analyze the twelve steps of AA, each step equates with
a stage of spiritual evolution. They lead us to an awareness of the presence
of an all-inclusive being or beingness.
You might say that consciousness has been on its own Twelve-Step program. The
evolution of consciousness aims at giving us the ability to comprehend union
with God. But as long as we conceive of ourselves as having an identity
other than being one with God, a subtle addiction to duality still remains
and a thirteenth step is needed.
We need to go beyond being an instrument for God or of doing God’s will. As
long as we think in terms of doing God’s will, as though it is or could
be other than our own wills, there are still
“two,” something that needs to be united with something else.
As long as we think of achieving union with God, we have yet to see that right
now we are already God appearing as us. Right
this minute, we are all that God is. When we experience that,
we will have taken the Thirteenth Step.
So there is no way you can possibly go beyond words and thoughts unless you
have become consciously aware that it is all God.
SCRIPTURE: 1 Corinthians 1:19-20; 1 Corinthians 12:12-21; Luke 23:34; Matthew 17:20
REFERENCES: It’s All God Walter Starcke
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Last updated February 25, 2007
