***AND GOD LAUGHED

The source of all misery and suffering is the illusion that we are separate from God. This illusion creates the fear that we will never get what we want or we will lose something we have and don’t want to lose. When this fear arises, it creates another illusion that if we don’t get what we want, we have done something wrong or we are in opposition to “God’s will”. This raises the question of what we really want.

The truth is we always get what is best for our journey back to our own divinity. This is what our soul/spirit wants and is otherwise known as destiny. Only a relatively few beings on this planet actually understand the true nature of divinity and how we manifest events, experiences and even our life to come back to it. What I really mean is that we create the illusion that we are separate from God (however you understand that term) and it is up to each one of us to see through the illusion.

When we are born, we are as connected to our divinity as most people are going to get in this lifetime. If you ever look into a newborn infant’s eyes, you can even see God. This is total innocence, total mindlessness. In other words, our ego has not yet formed and we have no idea what is coming. Our world is a blank slate and anything is possible. Then we begin to interact with our world and the illusion begins to form. We are programmed, experience fear, competing egos and learn to compete with and judge each other. In other words, as we learn more and more about the world, we lose our innocence. This is part of the ancient metaphor of being kicked out of the Garden of Eden. When we gain knowledge, we tend to begin to suffer.

God never leaves us, and is there at all times in the form of happiness and enlightenment. This concept of divinity lies underneath our intellect, our egos and our false beliefs about the world. In order to experience “oneness”, we have to turn away from our egos and intellect and feel our way back to the bliss of “oneness”. One of the difficulties that we have experienced with finding our way back to the “Garden” of the state of happiness is that our words fail us. It is an experience that everyone can have in their lifetime, but logic and recipes will not get us there. We need help, trust and faith to get there.

The problem goes deeper due to the fact that we have made the intellect the God of our society. People spend far more time scheming, intellectualizing, exercising mind control and practicing “the Secrets” which might be effective to create material things or “attract” what we want, but is totally useless in finding happiness or our divinity. As one observer remarked long ago, “our best thinking got us here.” Again, this is the lesson of the Garden of Eden, when we metaphorically ate of the fruit of knowledge, we created the illusion of right and wrong and duality in its basic form.

The way back to the Garden is a lot simpler than we think (pun intended). What we have to do is to practice seeing through the illusion of separation and duality. If you are reading this article you have taken the first step, in recognizing that this is possible. If you believe this is possible, then it is and you are on the path to oneness with your God/divinity. If you do not believe this, then you will continue to struggle and suffer. Good luck with that. So you have to believe to do it. We are just like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz going through all of her trials and struggle to get back to Kansas. In the end, she discovered that she had never left Kansas and it was all a dream. She woke from the dream when Glenda, the good witch, told her that all she had to do was to believe she could go back home, click her heels and repeat the mantra “there’s no place like home.”

We do not have to go on arduous and painful journeys to go back home. All we have to do is believe that we are there. The illusion will persist as long as we resist the belief that it is simply an illusion. When we believe that life is an illusion and everything we experience is to teach us that fact, we will be able to see through the illusion and experience our true nature and oneness with our divinity. We will no longer be victims, we will no longer hurt each other out of fear and delusion, and we can start living in the Garden again.

We are starting to wake up. I meet more and more people who are starting to truly grasp the notion that we are in a dream/illusion and we can create something else when we stop intellectualizing everything and start living with compassion and grace. It is not hard to be kind to others; it is not hard to have compassion to others. Even in these unsettled times, there is still more than enough to go around. We need to stop wanting to be like rich and famous, we need to start helping each other and share what we have. This is what our divinity is pushing us to do.

Hopefully we will all open our hearts and minds and stop having lists that must be fulfilled to become happy. When we make our happiness conditioned upon what we have, it is certain to never arrive. When we decide to be happy, no matter what, we can be happy. We need to stop planning for the future and start focusing on what we are doing right now. Are we happy? Are we helping others? Are we responding to each other with kindness and compassion or anger and fear? I am reminded that the quickest way to make God laugh is to make plans. Life is what happens when you planned for something else. So when God laughs, we should too.