Gazing in the Mirror

November 9 - God is NOT Out There

The sun symbolizes the Divine
Intelligence; the empty vastness
of space symbolizes the Divine
All-Possibility and also the Divine
Immutability; a bird symbolizes
the soul; a tree symbolizes the
grades of being; and water
symbolizes knowledge and rain
revelation.
~ Osman Bakar, Tawhid and Science

Spirituality is natural goodness.
God is not a person; God is a
presence personified in us.
Spirituality is not a thing; it is
the atmosphere of God's Presence,
goodness, truth and beauty.
~ Ernest Holmes

Just because the only place we can access something that can be called a Divine Intelligence is deep within our own core self does not make that less real. Yes, it is true that we can't prove It's existence to anyone else but that is the way it is supposed to be. We are each to discover for our own self our Creator buried deep within this physical incarnation that we are. Certainly by the time one reaches adulthood they have experienced at least one significant death in their close circle of acquaintances. We all know the finality of a loved one's leaving us permanently – they don't come back – not in any way that we can "prove". But sometimes they do come back in ways that we can be convinced personally that we are not mistaken in believing that is so. This certainly happened for me with my mother's passing recently. There was no doubt in my mind that she lingered among us for at least a while. That is not at all uncommon for a spirit shortly after passing

My in-laws taught me so much during their dying time. My Father in Law forced me to connect with him through the One Mind when it was no longer possible to reach him in the conventional way while he was yet living and breathing, was still in physical incarnation. After he left that body I could still "sense" his presence. That was the "gift". At first what I sensed was his elation at being free from a body that had become a hindrance. He was soaring everywhere present at once. He had a brain tumor and so, as was his request, we sent his body to Washington University School of Medicine. We did inform his doctors that he was on his way there because they had yearned deeply to cut into his brain and see what was going on in there but we would not let them while he yet lived. One day my oldest son was playing with a male doll that he was using to construct monsters and the doll was at that point "headless". I don't remember the words exactly but I knew that the doctors had taken my Father in Law's head and my Father in Law was being humorous and irreverent about it.

My in-laws had a wonderful marriage built on partnership. When my Father in Law was diagnosed with a brain tumor, my Mother in Law went into high gear to "save" his life. I had read up on this specific kind of tumor and I knew it was notorious for re-occurring after treatment. When my Father in Law was declared "free" of it and told that the treatment had been successful, my in-laws "celebrated" by announcing it in Christmas messages to friends and families (and understandably within my own heart I was cringing). Sure enough the tumor did reoccur – and it was a huge blow to any confidence and optimism that my in-laws had that the whole thing was over and done with. My Father in Law never recovered from that disappointment. My Mother in Law was then ALSO diagnosed with a kind of cancer – a bone cancer called multiple myeloma. My Father in Law did not have enough mental capacity at that point to actually come to her defense in the same manner that she had come to his aid as a patient's advocate. This reality sadly destroyed their otherwise beautiful companionship.

I don't think my Mother in Law really believed that my Father in Law could possibly die first. They had made ALL their retirement plans based upon her certainty that he would outlive her. For awhile as their caretakers we had one crisis after another while they both yet lived, they seemed to be racing each other to see who could cross over death's doorway first. In our hearts we always knew that my Mother in Law could survive losing him better than he could have survived losing her and that is what actually happened – my Father in Law died first. Even so I felt him lingering, felt his soul lingering in their log cabin for a couple of weeks afterwards. She told me that she would awaken in the morning and see him standing at their bedroom window. I was also aware of the moment when the spirit of my Father in Law's grandfather came into their log cabin home to visit. I was eventually to discover that the grandfather had actually been on the way to being reincarnated in a local baby boy just days after my awareness of that presence passing through in greeting. This was proven to me by timing and by the uncommon name this couple gave to the baby boy when they had been expecting to deliver a baby girl – the same name of this grandfather which my oldest son also bears as his own name.

Later on my Father in Law began to come to my Mother in Law in dreams. He was once again in that vitality of his peak age and in that form that she had been so crazily in love with. My Mother in Law would tell me about these dreams and they did heal all of the damage that their having simultaneously faced the challenges of cancer had wrought on their relationship. When she died her soul immediately shot right out of the cabin, so anxious was she to rejoin loved ones that had gone ahead of her. She came back though to bring me "messages" through intuitive friends and these were unmistakably her personality. Consciousness does endure. My family watched the Robin Williams movie What Dreams May Come recently. This continuity is the meaningful message in that movie's story. Consciousness does not end with the reality of a physical transition which we know here in Life as Death.

While a "God" aware of us is "mentioned" in that movie the focus is really on the survival of the individual consciousness and the fact that "real love" does truly exist and reincarnation happens. The movie makes clear that the body form is not really all that important but that what is "inside" of us is what truly matters. In that movie, Williams' children present him with very loving forms that have no resemblance the selves he knew in their family life when they were the children that died in a tragic car accident. Yet the forms that they present to him are always relevant to his own thoughts. God is a thought that we have as human beings and yet we are also to some degree wholly God's eternal consciousness individualized. Just like the forms aren't relevant in Williams' movie, I do believe that how we interpret "what" that core self is really isn't all that important either but I do know that it is always highly personal. Have you met your own expression of "God" as God as you yet ?

~ perspective

I believe in eternal consciousness
which becomes incarnated in a
particular time and place as the
human beings that we know
ourselves "as" during these
incarnations.
I know that I am more than
this body and that there is
"something" within me that is
Divine and which is "of God" and
that something is God expressing
Its Presence as me.
What we believe about what
we will find after our physical
transition is what we will find
at least initially until we
remember the truth of our
infinite natures.
I am guided by an infinite
Intelligence that inspires me
to greatness.
The Divine Intelligence "scatters
the moon beams across the
waves and holds the forces of
nature in it's grasp" – thanks
Ernest Holmes for the beauty
of such language !