Sunday is Message Day on the blog. Monday through Friday we look at contemporary events and day-to-day occurrences at the intersection of Life and the New Spirituality…but on Sunday, we reserve this space for a teaching derived from the material in Conversations with God
This week’s message: The Five Attitudes of God
When I was a child I had a deep fascination with God. What was He like, I wondered? Where did He live?
I know now that my ideas about God as a man living somewhere in the sky were the products of my childhood upbringing in a Roman Catholic family. I know that God is not limited to being a he or a she, but that God shows up in every form in which Life Itself displays itself. Still, I hold onto this idea that there are some attributes of God. I ask myself sometimes, if God chose to show up as a human being, what would that be like? What kind of personality would God have?
My questions about this were answered in the Conversations with God dialogue, in which I was given the Five Attitudes of God (CwG, Book 1, pg. 65-66).
In the moment of your total knowing (which moment could come upon you at any time), you, too, will feel as I do always, God said to me. And what way is that? I asked. Said God…
…totally joyful, loving, accepting, blessing and grateful.
This is, I found out later in the Dialogue, the way the soul always feels as well. That is because the soul of humans and the essence of God is one and the same thing. So our soul is always totally joyful, loving, accepting, blessing and grateful. The trick is to bring our body and our mind into alignment with that deep inner nature of our being.
The soul is always joyful because Joy is what the soul (and what God) IS. God IS that which we would call, for lack of a more technical or clinical description, pure joy. I am come to understand that God is pure energy, of course. The energy that we call Life Itself. But what does this energy feel like? That’s the question. And the answer is, pure joy. The energy feels like pure joy. Ultimate happiness. Or what some Eastern mystics have called bliss.
Because the soul is always in a state of bliss, or pure joy, it is always loving. As is God. God loving everything, because God is so excited with Itself! There is nothing that exists outside of God, nothing that is not God, and so, everything that God is happy about and excited about exists within God – and precisely because it does exist within God, God is happy about it!
Yes, you might say, but how can anyone be totally joyful all of the time? Look at the world around us.
The trick is to see the world as it is — as it really is — and not as it appears to be. (To learn more about this please read Communion with God, which outlines in wonderful detail the Ten Illusions of Humans.)
How it IS, rather than how it APPEARS to be, is how God sees the world, and so God is always totally joyful, and that causes God to be totally loving.
Because God is totally loving, God is totally accepting – for pure love is the rejection of nothing. Pure love is unconditional. In fact, all love in unconditional. Anything less than that is not love, but some counterfeit version of that.
Because love is unconditional, it accept everything. It does this by making no value judgments whatsoever. It does not call one thing good and another thing bad. A thing simply is. This is what CwG calls the Isness, and Isness has no goodness or badness to it.
Where we get into trouble in our lives is by attaching goodness or badness to a thing. We make value judgments, and those judgments create enormous difficulty for many reasons – not the least of which is that we keep changing them. One day we call a thing good and the next day we call the very same thing bad, depending on whether the thing we are judging serves our purposes or not.
Let me give you a simple example.
Rain.
One day we call rain good, the next day we call it bad. It all depends on whether it’s raining on our crop or raining on our parade.
Killing is another example. We think we have an absolute Right and an absolute Wrong around this, but the truth is, we can’t make up our mind until we know and understand what the killing is for. Killing in self-defense, as an example, may not be called good, but most people and societies agree that it is not bad. So we find a third word. It may be, we say, necessary.
That means it is required in order for us to do what it is we want to do.
It is because of this reasoning that we call all attack a defense. In this way, we can morally justify it. Yet what if nothing in the world had to be morally justified?
This is the State in which God lives. Because God does not feel the need to morally justify (or condemn) anything, God can be totally accepting. But how can God be in such a place? Easy. Since God is the All in All, nothing can hurt, damage or destroy God. And since nothing can hurt, damage or destroy God, God has no need to judge it. Therefore, in the experience of God, a thing simply is.
So, too, is it in the experience of Godliness.
If we truly want the experience of what it is to be Godly, we will begin by removing our judgments from everything. Now this will be difficult for us to do as long as we are living inside of the Ten Illusions of Humans. The only way to escape our judgments is to escape our illusions. Communion with God gives us the entire process by which we may do this. That’s what makes it such a powerful book.
Once we become (as God is) totally accepting, we move to the next level of Godliness, which is to become totally blessing. This is where God resides all of the time. God not only accepts what ‘is’ in every single moment, God blesses it.
To bless something means to give it your best energy. Your highest thought. Your grandest wish. You send a thing good energy when you bless it — and this is something physical that you are doing, not merely something conceptual or philosophical.
Life energy can be moved around, manipulated, and we do this all the time with our thoughts. We also do it with our words and actions. Thought, word and action are the Three Tools of Creation (CwG, Book 1). With these devices we create, and co-create with others, our individual and collective experience. We are literally producing the world around us.
That is why The New Revelations says that all behavior begins with beliefs — and that it is beliefs we must change if we really want to change the world (a point we are making in this blog in our series on global violence)
Interestingly, no one who says they want to change the world — neither international political leaders nor worldwide religious leaders — talk very much in these terms. Political leaders don’t talk about beliefs at all, and religious leaders talk in terms of other people changing their beliefs, but insist that they, themselves, have all the right beliefs. Then they deny that this is precisely what causes the world to be such a dangerous place.
Now the true Master blesses all of this, she does not condemn it. And in so doing, the true Master transforms it, for the impact of his blessing energy shifts the energy of the condition itself. That is why blessing, and never condemning, is the greatest spiritual secret. It is why all Masters have said, each in their own way and their own words, judge not, and neither condemn. For that which you judge, judges you, and that which you condemn, condemns you, and that which you bless, blesses you.
Finally, God is always totally grateful, for thankfulness is the experience of God recognizing Itself. To recognize means to re-cognize, that is, to know again. When God knows Itself again (which God does in every single golden moment of Now), God once again becomes joyful – and the glorious Cycle of Life which is Life Itself continues, as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end.
These are the Five Attitudes of God, and they are the five attributes of the human soul. When we allow these characteristics to fill our minds and our hearts, we become Godly. Our whole lives change, as do the lives of those around us. For life around us cannot help but change when we fill it with God Stuff. And Joy, Love, Acceptance, Blessing, and Gratitude is God Stuff indeed.
The wonderful thing about these Five Attitudes of Godliness is not only that one produces and creates another, but that they can be run in reverse. That is, one start with Gratitude just as easily as one can start with Joy. Either way, if the feeling is fully expressed the first domino falls, and all the rest follow.
I have tried to overlay these Five Attitudes of God on my daily life. For me it is sometimes easier to begin with Gratitude. Sometimes when I first wake up, or during my day when I encounter some very unwelcome news or moment, it is hard for me to ‘get into Joy.’ I just cant go there, no matter how much I try. But Gratitude for me has been a real key.
I can move into Gratitude, even for moments or events that I do not particularly welcome, because I know that all things lead to my highest good. Nothing that happens in my life happens without good purpose. Everything is perfect, and when I can ‘see the perfection’ (as CWG invites me to do), I see the hand of God, and I know that there is a higher reason and that all things are good and that everything is bringing me to my highest expression of Who I Really Am.
Think of it as a scientist does in his laboratory. There is nothing that happens in that laboratory that is not a success, not a good outcome. Even so-called bad outcomes are good outcomes, in that they lead the scientist closer to the truth and to the outcome that is desired.
We are all Celestial Scientists, creating something utterly magnificent in the laboratory called Life. We are creating our Selves. And there is no way we can wrongly do that. Nor is there any way that we cannot ultimately get to where we wish to go – which is back to total union with All That Is. That is, back home to God.
When we know this, when we deeply believe it and completely embrace it, we find the grace to move through our lives – and any moment in our lives – with joy, love, acceptance, blessings, and gratitude. And when we do that, we change our lives and change the lives of those whose lives we touch. And in this, we truly change the world.
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