The Ten Illusions or also known as The Communion with God is a book written by Neale Donald Walsch. I retyped this book in 2004 and translated it into Indonesia. I gave this book to a publisher and asked them if they would like to publish it.
I received a no. So, should I be sorry? No, I was not. Time passes by. Now I publish this book into my blog.
Freedom is boundless. God is freedom. I give to you a freedom of mind.
What is the meaning of "wrong"? What is the meaning of "right"? We'll find out within this book.
I specially thank you to the author Neale Donald Walsch.
Monday, May 28, 2007
Introduction
Introduction
Welcome to this book.
I would like you to consider something extraordinary.
I would like you to consider the possibility that this book was created just for you
If you can accept that construction, I believe you are about to have one of the most powerful experiences of your life.
Now I would like you to consider something even more extraordinary.
I would like you to consider the possibility that this book was created for you by you.
If you can imagine a world in which nothing is happening to you, and everything is happening through you, you will have gotten the message that you intended to send to yourself here within seven sentences.
You can’t ask a book to deliver faster than that.
…
Welcome to this moment,
You are “well come” here, for this moment was designed by to bring you to the blessed experience you are about to have.
You have sought the answers to life’s most meaningful questions, and you have sought them repeatedly, earnestly, and sincerely, or you would not be here.
This search has been going on inside of you, whether you have made it a major part of your exterior life or not; it is what has caused you to pick up this book.
With your understanding of that, you have unraveled one of life’s biggest mysteries: why things happen the way they do.
All of this in fourteen sentences.
Welcome to this meeting with the Creator.
It is a meeting which you could not have avoided. All people meet with the Creator.
It is not a question of whether but of when.
People of earnestness, seeking truth, experience the meeting sooner rather than later. Honesty is a magnet. It attracts Life. And Life is just another word of God.
The person who honestly seeks, honestly receives. Life will not lie to itself.
That is how it has come to pass that you have arrived here, in front of these words. You have placed yourself here, and it has not been by accident. Carefully consider how you got here and you will see that.
Do you believe in the process of Divine Inspiration? I do. I believe in it for you, and I believe in it for me.
Some people don’t like it when another says that they’ve been inspired by God. As I see it, there are several reasons for this.
First, most people don’t think they have ever been inspired by God, at least not in the most immediate way—that is, through direct communication—and therefore anyone who makes such a claim is immediately suspect.
Second, claiming that God is one’s inspiration appears to be a bit arrogant, implying that the inspiration may not be argued with, nor found lacking in anyway, given it’s origin.
Third, many of those who have claimed Divine Inspiration have not been the easiest people to live with—witness Mozart, Rembrandt, Michelangelo, or any of a number popes, as well as countless others who have done some pretty crazy things in the name of God.
Finally, we have made those whom we do believe have been directly inspired by God into such holy men and women that we don’t quite know how to deal with them, or how to interact with them in a normal way. Simply put, as wonderful as they are, they can make us uncomfortable.
So we’re pretty skittish about this God-is-my-source thing. And, perhaps rightly, we should be. We don’t want to swallow whole everything that others tell us, simply because they claim to carry message from the Most High.
But how can we know for sure what is Divine Inspiration and what is not? How can we be certain who is speaking eternal truth?
Ah, that is the great question. But here is the great secret. We don’t have to know. All we have to know is our truth, not someone else’s. When we understand this, we understand everything. We understand that what others are saying doesn’t have to be the Truth; it only has to lead us to our own. And it will do that. It cannot help but do that, eventually. All things lead us to our innermost truth. That is their purpose.
Indeed, that is the purpose of Life itself.
Life is truth, revealing Itself to Itself.
God is Life, revealing Itself to Itself.
You could not stop this process if you wanted to. But you can speed it up.
That is what you doing here.
That is why you have brought yourself to this book.
This book does not claim to be The Truth. It is intended to guide you to your own innermost wisdom. It is not necessary for you to agree with its contents for it to do that. In fact, agreeing or not agreeing will be irrelevant. If you agree, it will be because you see this book your own wisdom. If you disagree, it will be because you do not see your own wisdom. In either case, you will have been led back to your own wisdom.
So thank yourself for this book, because it has already brought you back to clarity about one major point: The highest authority lies within you
This is so because each of us has direct connection to the Divine.
Each of us has the ability to access eternal wisdom. Indeed, I believe that God is inspiring all of us, all of the time. And while all of us have had this experience, some of us have chosen to call it something else:
Serendipity.
Coincidence.
Luck.
Accident.
Freak experience.
Chance encounter.
Perhaps even Divine Intervention.
We seem to be willing to acknowledge that God intervenes in our lives but unable to embrace the idea that God may actually directly inspire us to think, to write, to say, or to do a particular thing. That seems to be going too far.
I’m going to go too far.
I’m going to say that I believe God has inspired me to write this book and you to pick it up. Now let’s test this idea against some of the reasons you might have to be skittish about that.
First, I’m clear, as I have just said above, that all of us are being inspired by God all the time. It is not my thought that you and I are unique, or that God has bestowed upon us a singular power, or granted us some special dispensation allowing us to commune with the Divine. I believe that everyone is in a state of such continual communion, and that we may consciously experience this whenever we choose. Indeed, as I understand it, this is the promise of many of the world’s religion.
Second, I do not believe that because one is experiencing a moment of open contact with the Divine that one’s utterances, actions, or writings are rendered infallible. With all due respect to any religion or movement that claims its founder or its present leader to be infallible, I believe that it is possible for divinely inspired people to make errors. And I believe it, in fact, that they make them routinely. I do not, therefore, believe that every word of the Bible or Bhagavad-Gita or the Qur’an is literally true, that every utterance of the pope when speaking ex cathedra is correct, or that every action ever taken by Mother Teresa was right and perfect action for that moment in time. I do believe that Mother Teresa was divinely inspired, but being divinely inspired and being infallible are two different things.
Third, I can very difficult to live with (nobody knows this more than those who have lived with me), and while I do not claim imperfections for you, I do not think that my own imperfections disqualify me from receiving God’s help and direct guidance. In fact, I believe the opposite is true.
Finally, I don’t believe that I am in any danger of becoming “holy” to the point of making anyone uncomfortable. Actually, again the opposite may be true. If people are uncomfortable with me at all, it is probably because I am not holy enough. It is a challenge to walk my talk. I can write very inspiring things, I can say very inspiring things, but I sometimes catch myself doing these things that aren’t very inspiring.
I am on a path, and I have by no means reach my destinations. Nor, would it appear, am I even getting close. All that is really different between the me of now and the me of yesteryear is that now I have at least found the path. Yet for me that is a great advance. I’ve spent most of my life not even knowing where I was going, then wondering why I wasn’t getting here.
Now I know where I am going. I am going Home, back to the full awareness and experience of my communion with God. And nothing can stop me from getting there. God has promised. And I believe this promise, at last.
God has also shown the way. Actually, not the way, but a way. For God’s greatest truth is that there is not one way only but many ways Home. There are a thousand paths to God, and every one will get you there.
Indeed, all paths lead to God. This is because there is no other place to go.
This book talks about that. It talks about how to go Home. It discusses the experience of Oneness with the Divine, or what I call communion with God. It describes a path to that experience, a pathway through our illusions, to the Ultimate Reality.
This book speaks with one voice. I believe it to be the voice of God, the inspiration of God, the presence of God, moving through me, and through you. If I did not believe that God’s voice, God’s inspiration, and God’s presence could move through all of us. I would have to give up my faith that God could inspire all of the world’s religions.
I am not willing to do that. I believe that on this score, religions have it right: God does come into our lives, in real and present ways, and we don’t have to be saints or sages for it to happen.
I don’t need you to join me in this belief, nor to believe any of the words on these pages. Indeed, I would be happiest if you did not. Do not believe anything you find here.
Know.
Simply know.
Know if any of this truth. If it is, it will ring true—for you will have been reunited with your innermost wisdom. If it is not, you will know that, too—once again from having been reunited with your innermost wisdom. In either event, you will have benefited enormously, for you will have experienced, in that moment of reunification, your own communion with God.
And that was what you intended when you came here.
To these pages.
And to this planet.
Blessed be.
Neale Donald Walsch
Ashland, Oregon
July 2000
Welcome to this book.
I would like you to consider something extraordinary.
I would like you to consider the possibility that this book was created just for you
If you can accept that construction, I believe you are about to have one of the most powerful experiences of your life.
Now I would like you to consider something even more extraordinary.
I would like you to consider the possibility that this book was created for you by you.
If you can imagine a world in which nothing is happening to you, and everything is happening through you, you will have gotten the message that you intended to send to yourself here within seven sentences.
You can’t ask a book to deliver faster than that.
…
Welcome to this moment,
You are “well come” here, for this moment was designed by to bring you to the blessed experience you are about to have.
You have sought the answers to life’s most meaningful questions, and you have sought them repeatedly, earnestly, and sincerely, or you would not be here.
This search has been going on inside of you, whether you have made it a major part of your exterior life or not; it is what has caused you to pick up this book.
With your understanding of that, you have unraveled one of life’s biggest mysteries: why things happen the way they do.
All of this in fourteen sentences.
Welcome to this meeting with the Creator.
It is a meeting which you could not have avoided. All people meet with the Creator.
It is not a question of whether but of when.
People of earnestness, seeking truth, experience the meeting sooner rather than later. Honesty is a magnet. It attracts Life. And Life is just another word of God.
The person who honestly seeks, honestly receives. Life will not lie to itself.
That is how it has come to pass that you have arrived here, in front of these words. You have placed yourself here, and it has not been by accident. Carefully consider how you got here and you will see that.
Do you believe in the process of Divine Inspiration? I do. I believe in it for you, and I believe in it for me.
Some people don’t like it when another says that they’ve been inspired by God. As I see it, there are several reasons for this.
First, most people don’t think they have ever been inspired by God, at least not in the most immediate way—that is, through direct communication—and therefore anyone who makes such a claim is immediately suspect.
Second, claiming that God is one’s inspiration appears to be a bit arrogant, implying that the inspiration may not be argued with, nor found lacking in anyway, given it’s origin.
Third, many of those who have claimed Divine Inspiration have not been the easiest people to live with—witness Mozart, Rembrandt, Michelangelo, or any of a number popes, as well as countless others who have done some pretty crazy things in the name of God.
Finally, we have made those whom we do believe have been directly inspired by God into such holy men and women that we don’t quite know how to deal with them, or how to interact with them in a normal way. Simply put, as wonderful as they are, they can make us uncomfortable.
So we’re pretty skittish about this God-is-my-source thing. And, perhaps rightly, we should be. We don’t want to swallow whole everything that others tell us, simply because they claim to carry message from the Most High.
But how can we know for sure what is Divine Inspiration and what is not? How can we be certain who is speaking eternal truth?
Ah, that is the great question. But here is the great secret. We don’t have to know. All we have to know is our truth, not someone else’s. When we understand this, we understand everything. We understand that what others are saying doesn’t have to be the Truth; it only has to lead us to our own. And it will do that. It cannot help but do that, eventually. All things lead us to our innermost truth. That is their purpose.
Indeed, that is the purpose of Life itself.
Life is truth, revealing Itself to Itself.
God is Life, revealing Itself to Itself.
You could not stop this process if you wanted to. But you can speed it up.
That is what you doing here.
That is why you have brought yourself to this book.
This book does not claim to be The Truth. It is intended to guide you to your own innermost wisdom. It is not necessary for you to agree with its contents for it to do that. In fact, agreeing or not agreeing will be irrelevant. If you agree, it will be because you see this book your own wisdom. If you disagree, it will be because you do not see your own wisdom. In either case, you will have been led back to your own wisdom.
So thank yourself for this book, because it has already brought you back to clarity about one major point: The highest authority lies within you
This is so because each of us has direct connection to the Divine.
Each of us has the ability to access eternal wisdom. Indeed, I believe that God is inspiring all of us, all of the time. And while all of us have had this experience, some of us have chosen to call it something else:
Serendipity.
Coincidence.
Luck.
Accident.
Freak experience.
Chance encounter.
Perhaps even Divine Intervention.
We seem to be willing to acknowledge that God intervenes in our lives but unable to embrace the idea that God may actually directly inspire us to think, to write, to say, or to do a particular thing. That seems to be going too far.
I’m going to go too far.
I’m going to say that I believe God has inspired me to write this book and you to pick it up. Now let’s test this idea against some of the reasons you might have to be skittish about that.
First, I’m clear, as I have just said above, that all of us are being inspired by God all the time. It is not my thought that you and I are unique, or that God has bestowed upon us a singular power, or granted us some special dispensation allowing us to commune with the Divine. I believe that everyone is in a state of such continual communion, and that we may consciously experience this whenever we choose. Indeed, as I understand it, this is the promise of many of the world’s religion.
Second, I do not believe that because one is experiencing a moment of open contact with the Divine that one’s utterances, actions, or writings are rendered infallible. With all due respect to any religion or movement that claims its founder or its present leader to be infallible, I believe that it is possible for divinely inspired people to make errors. And I believe it, in fact, that they make them routinely. I do not, therefore, believe that every word of the Bible or Bhagavad-Gita or the Qur’an is literally true, that every utterance of the pope when speaking ex cathedra is correct, or that every action ever taken by Mother Teresa was right and perfect action for that moment in time. I do believe that Mother Teresa was divinely inspired, but being divinely inspired and being infallible are two different things.
Third, I can very difficult to live with (nobody knows this more than those who have lived with me), and while I do not claim imperfections for you, I do not think that my own imperfections disqualify me from receiving God’s help and direct guidance. In fact, I believe the opposite is true.
Finally, I don’t believe that I am in any danger of becoming “holy” to the point of making anyone uncomfortable. Actually, again the opposite may be true. If people are uncomfortable with me at all, it is probably because I am not holy enough. It is a challenge to walk my talk. I can write very inspiring things, I can say very inspiring things, but I sometimes catch myself doing these things that aren’t very inspiring.
I am on a path, and I have by no means reach my destinations. Nor, would it appear, am I even getting close. All that is really different between the me of now and the me of yesteryear is that now I have at least found the path. Yet for me that is a great advance. I’ve spent most of my life not even knowing where I was going, then wondering why I wasn’t getting here.
Now I know where I am going. I am going Home, back to the full awareness and experience of my communion with God. And nothing can stop me from getting there. God has promised. And I believe this promise, at last.
God has also shown the way. Actually, not the way, but a way. For God’s greatest truth is that there is not one way only but many ways Home. There are a thousand paths to God, and every one will get you there.
Indeed, all paths lead to God. This is because there is no other place to go.
This book talks about that. It talks about how to go Home. It discusses the experience of Oneness with the Divine, or what I call communion with God. It describes a path to that experience, a pathway through our illusions, to the Ultimate Reality.
This book speaks with one voice. I believe it to be the voice of God, the inspiration of God, the presence of God, moving through me, and through you. If I did not believe that God’s voice, God’s inspiration, and God’s presence could move through all of us. I would have to give up my faith that God could inspire all of the world’s religions.
I am not willing to do that. I believe that on this score, religions have it right: God does come into our lives, in real and present ways, and we don’t have to be saints or sages for it to happen.
I don’t need you to join me in this belief, nor to believe any of the words on these pages. Indeed, I would be happiest if you did not. Do not believe anything you find here.
Know.
Simply know.
Know if any of this truth. If it is, it will ring true—for you will have been reunited with your innermost wisdom. If it is not, you will know that, too—once again from having been reunited with your innermost wisdom. In either event, you will have benefited enormously, for you will have experienced, in that moment of reunification, your own communion with God.
And that was what you intended when you came here.
To these pages.
And to this planet.
Blessed be.
Neale Donald Walsch
Ashland, Oregon
July 2000
Prelude
Prelude
God has spoken to you many times in many ways over many years, but seldom directly as this.
This time I speak to you as You, and that has occurred on only a handful of occasions in the whole year history.
Few humans have had the courage to hear Me in this way—as themselves. And fewer still have shared with others what they have heard. Those few who have listened, and shared, have changed the world.
Aesop, Confucius, Lao-tzu, Buddha, Muhammad, Moses, and Jesus was among them.
So, too, Chuang Tzu, Aristotle, Huang-po, Sahara, Mahavira, Krishnamurti.
Also, Paramahansa Yogananda, Ramana Maharshi, Kabir, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thich Nhat Hanh, the Dalai Lama, Elizabeth Clinton.
As well, Sri Aurobindo, Mother Teresa, Meher Baba, Mahatma Gandhi, Kahlil Gibran, Baha Allah, Ernest Holmes, Sai Baba.
Including Joan of Arc, Francis of Asisi, Joseph Smith … and more, others, not mentioned here. This list could go on. Yet, relative to the total number of humans who have inhabited your planet, the number is minuscule.
These few have been My messengers—for all have brought forward The Truth within their hearts, as best as they understood it, as purely as they knew how. And while they have each done so through imperfect filters, they have nonetheless brought to your awareness extraordinary wisdom, from which the whole human race has benefited.
What is amazing is how similar their insights have been. Offered at vastly different times and places, separated by legions and centuries, they might just as well have been speaking all at the same time, so tiny have been the variances between them, and so huge the commonalities.
Now its time to expand this list to include others, living today, as My latest messengers.
We will speak with one voice.
Unless we do not.
You will make that voice, even as you have always done. For in each Moment of Now, have you made your decisions, and announced it in action.
At the beginning, your thoughts are Mine, and Mine are yours. For at the beginning, it can be no other way. There is only one Source of That Which Is, and the Source is That Which Is.
All things emanate from that Source, then permeate the Isness all over, and reveal themselves as Individuations of the Whole.
The individual interpretations of the one message produce the miracle of Oneness in many forms.
This Oneness in many forms is what you call life.
Life is God, interpreted. That is, translated into many forms.
The first level of translation is from the unified non-physical to the individuated non-physical.
The second level of translation is from the individuated non-physical to the individuated physical.
The third level of translation is from the individuated physical into the unified physical.
The fourth level of translation is from the unified physical into the unified non-physical.
Then the cycle of Life is complete.
The continuing process of the translation of God produces endless variety within God’s unity. This is variety of the unity is what I have called “individuation.” It is the individual expression of that which is not separate but which can be individually expressed.
The purpose of individual expression is for Me to experience My Self as the whole, through the experiencing of My parts. And while the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, I can only experience this by knowing the sum.
And that is who you are.
You are the Sum of God.
I have told you this many times before, and many of you have heard this as the son of God. That, too, is correct. You are the sons, and daughters, of God. Yet it does not matter what labels or names you use, it adds up to the same thing: You are the Sum of God.
So, too, is everything around you. Everything that you see, and do not see. All That Is, All That Ever Was, and All That Ever Will Be. And all that I am, I am now.
I Am That I Am—as I have told you many times.
There is nothing that have I ever been that I have ceased to be. And there is nothing that I will ever be that I am not now. I cannot become anything that I now am not, nor can I fail to be anything that I once was.
This is as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.
I am coming to you now, in this day and time, as you begin another millennium, so that you may start a new thousand years in a new way: knowing Me at last, choosing Me first, and being Me always, all ways.
There is no mistake in the timing. I began these new revelations early in the last decade, continued My conversations with you throughout the last years of the century, and in the final moments of the last millennium reminded you how you may have a friendship with Me.
Now, in the first year of the new millennium, I speak to you with one voice, that we may experience communion.
Should you choose this experience of communion with God, you will finally know peace, and joy unbounded, love fully expressed, and full freedom.
Should you choose this truth, you will change the world.
Should you choose this reality, you will create it, and at last fully experience Who You Really Are.
It will be the hardest thing you have ever done, and the easiest thing you will ever do.
It will be the hardest thing you have ever done because you will have to deny who you think you are, and stop denying Me. It will be the easiest thing you will ever do because there will be nothing that you have to do.
All you have to do is be, and all you have to be is Me.
Even this will not be an act of will but a simple acknowledgement. It will not require an action, only an admission.
I have been seeking this admission forever. When you grant Me admission, you let Me into your life you admit that you and I are One. This is your ticket to heaven. It says: Admit One.
When I gain entrance into your heart, you gain entrance into heaven. And your heaven can be on Earth. Everything can truly be “on earth as it is in heaven” when the time of separation is over and the time of unification is at hand.
Unification with Me, and unification with all others, and with every living thing.
This is what I have come to tell you, once more, through the messengers of today. You will know them as My messengers because they will all be bringing the same message:
We Are All One
This is the only message that matters. It is the only message there is. Everything else in Life is a reflection of this message. Everything else sends it.
The fact that you have so far failed to receive it (you have heard it often, but you have failed to receive it) is what has caused every misery, every sorrow, every conflict, every heartache in your experience. It has caused every murder, every war, every rape and robbery, every assault and attack, mental, verbal, and physical. It has caused every illness and dis-ease, and every encounter with what you call “death.”
The idea that we are not One is an illusion.
Most people believe in God: They just don’t believe in a God who believes in them.
God does believe in them. And God loves them more than most of them know.
The idea that God turned stone-silent and stopped talking to the human race a long time ago is false.
The idea that God is angry with the human race and kicked it out of Paradise is false.
The idea that God has set Himself up as judge and jury and will be deciding whether members of the human race go to heaven or to hell is false.
God loves every human being who ever lived, lives now, or ever will live.
God’s desire is for every soul to return to God, and God cannot fail in having this desire fulfilled.
God is separate from nothing, and nothing is separate from God.
There is nothing that God needs, because God is everything there is.
This is the good news. Everything else is an illusion.
The human race has been living with an illusion for a long time. This is not because human race is stupid, but because the human race is very smart. Humans have understood intuitively that illusions have a purpose, and a very important one. Most humans have simply forgotten that they know this.
And they have forgotten that their forgetting is itself part of what they have forgotten—and therefore pare of the illusion.
Now it is time for humans to remember.
You are one of those who will lead the vanguard in this process. There is nothing surprising in this, given what has been going on in your life.
You have come to this book to remember The Illusions Of Humans, so that you may never again be caught up in them but achieve communion with God once more in the living of your life through the awareness of Ultimate Reality.
It is perfect that you have done so and it is, obviously, not happenstance.
You have come here so that you may know experientially that God resides within you, that you may have, whenever you wish, a meeting with the Creator.
The Creator may be experienced and found within you and all around you. But you must look past The Illusions of Humans. You must ignore them.
Here are The Ten Illusions. Get to know them well so that you will recognize them when you encounter them.
1. Need Exist
2. Failure Exist
3. Disunity Exist
4. Insufficiency Exist
5. Requirement Exist
6. Judgment Exist
7. Condemnation Exist
8. Conditionally Exist
9. Superiority Exist
10. Ignorance Exist
The first five of these are the Physical Illusions, having to do with life in your physical body. The second five are the Metaphysical Illusions, having to do with non-physical reality.
In this communication, each of these illusions will be explored in detail. You will see how each has been created, and you will see how each has affected your life. And before this communication is complete, you will also see how you can undo any effects of these illusions that you wish to undo.
Now, the first step in the process of any really open communication is that you must be willing to suspend your disbelief about what you are hearing. You will be asked to do that there. Please temporarily give up any previous notions you may have about God and Life. You may return to your previous ideas at anytime. It is not a question of abandoning them forever but of merely setting them aside for the moment to allow for the possibility that there may be something you do not know, the knowing of which could change everything.
Examine, for instance, your reaction to the idea that God is communicating with you right now.
In your past, you have found all sorts of reasons not to accept that you could have an actual conversation with God. I’m going to ask you to set those thoughts aside and assume that you are receiving this communication directly from Me.
To make it easier on you, I will speak of Myself in third person through much of this communication. I recognize that it may be a little unnerving for you to hear Me using the first person singular. And so, while I will do it once in a while (just to remind you who is bringing you this information), I will most of the time I speak of Myself as, simply God.
While your receiving a direct communication from the Deity may seem improbable to you at first, understand that you have come to this communication to remember, at last, Who You Really Are, and the illusions that you have created. Soon, you will deeply understand that you have actually caused this book to come to you. For now, simply hear Me when I tell you that in most of the moments of your life, you are living an illusion.
The Ten Illusions Of Humans are very big, very powerful illusions that you created during the earliest part of your experience on Earth. And you create hundreds of smaller ones every day. Because you believe them, you have created a cultural story that allows you to live these Illusions and thus make them real.
They are not really real, of course. Yet you have created an Alice in Wonderland world in which they seem very real, indeed. And like the Mad Hatter, you will deny that what is False is false, and what is Real is real.
You have, in fact, been doing this for a very long time.
A cultural story is a story that has been handed down from generation to generation, across centuries and millennia. It is story that you tell yourself about yourself.
Because your cultural Story is based on illusions, it produces myths rather than an understanding of reality.
The cultural story of Humans is that
1. God has an agenda. (Need Exists)
2. The outcome of life is in doubt. (Failure Exists)
3. You are separate from God. (Disunity Exists)
4. There is not enough. (Insufficiency Exists)
5. There is something you have to do. (Requirement Exists)
6. If you do not do it, you will be punished. (Judgment Exists)
7. The punishment is everlasting damnation. (Condemnation Exists)
8. Love is, therefore, conditional. (Conditionally Exists)
9. Knowing and meeting the conditions renders you superior. (Superiority Exists)
10. You do not know that these are illusions. (Ignorance Exists)
This cultural story has been so ingrained in you that you now live it fully and completely. This, you tell each other, “is just the way it is.”
You have been telling each other that now for many centuries. Indeed, for millennia after millennia. For so long, in fact, those myths have grown up around these illusions and stories. Some of the most prominent myths have been reduced to concepts, such as…
- Thy will be done.
- Survival of the fittest.
- To the victor go the spoils.
- You were born in Original Sin.
- The wages of sin are death.
- Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord.
- What you don’t know won’t hurt you.
- God only knows.
… and many others, equally destructive and non-serving.
Based on these illusions, stories, and myths—none of which has anything to do with Ultimate Reality—here is now many humans have come to think about Life:
“We are born into a hostile world, run by God who has things He wants us to do and things He wants us not to do. And will punish us with everlasting torture if we don’t get the two right.
“Our first experience in Life is separation from our mother, the Source of our Life. This creates the context for our entire reality, which we experience as one of separation form the Source of All Life.
“We are not only separate from all Life but from everything else in Life. Everything that exists, exists separate from us. And we are separate from everything else that exists. We do not want it this way, but this is the way it is. We wish it were otherwise, and indeed, we strive for it to be otherwise.
“We seek to experience Oneness again with all things, and especially with each other. We may not know why, exactly, yet it seems almost instinctual. It feels like the natural thing to do. The only problem is, there does not seem to be enough to satisfy us. No matter what the other thing is that we want, we cannot seem to get enough of it. We cannot get enough love, we cannot get enough time, we cannot get enough money. We cannot get enough of whatever it is we think we need in order to be happy and fulfilled. The moment we think that we have enough.
“Since there is ‘not enough’ of whatever it is we think we need to be happy, we must ‘do stuff’ to get as much as we can get. Things are required of us in exchange for everything, from God’s love to the natural bounty of Life. Simply ‘being alive’ is not enough. Therefore we, like all of Life, are not enough.
“Because just ‘being’ isn’t sufficient, the competition begins. If there’s not enough out there, we have to compete for what’s there.
“We have to compete for everything, including God.
“This competition is tough. It is about our very survival. In this contest, only the fittest survive. And to the victor go all the spoils. If we lose, we live a hell on Earth. And after we die, if we are losers in the competition for God, we experience hell again—this time forever.
“Death was actually created by God because our forebears made the wrong choices. Adam and Eve had everlasting life in the Garden of Eden. But then, Eve ate the fruit of the tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, and she and Adam were driven from the Garden by an angry God. This God sentenced them, and all their progeny forevermore, to death as the first punishment. Henceforth, life in the body would be limited, and no longer everlasting, and so would the stuff of Life.
“Yet God will give us back our everlasting life if we never again break His rules. God’s love is unconditional; it is only God’s rewards, which are not. God loves us even as he condemns us to everlasting damnation. It hurts Him more than it hurts us, because He really wants us to return home, but He can’t do anything about it if we misbehave. The choice is ours.
“The trick is, therefore, to not misbehave. We need to live a good life. We must strive to do so. In order to do so, we have to know the truth about what God wants and does not want from us. We cannot please God, and we cannot offending Him, if we do not know right from wrong. So we have to know the truth about that.
“The truth is simple to understand and easy to know. All we have to do is listen to the prophets, teachers, sages, and the source and founder of our religion. If there is more than one religion and, therefore, more than one source and founder, then we have to make sure to pick the right one. Picking the wrong one could result in us being a loser.
“When we pick the right one, we are superior, we are better than our peers, because we have the truth on our side. This state of being ‘better’ allows us to claim most of the prizes in the contest without actually contesting them. We get to declare ourselves the winners before the competition begins. It is out of this awareness that we give ourselves all the advantages, and write our ‘Rules of Life’ in such a way that certain others find it nearly impossible to win the really big prizes.
“We do not do this out of meanness but simply in order to ensure that victory is ours—as rightly it should be, since it is those of our religion, of our nationality, of our race, of our gender, of our political persuasion who know the truth, and therefore deserve to be winners.
“Because we deserve to win, we have a right to threaten others, to fight with them, even to kill them if necessary, in order to produce this result.
“There may be another way to live, another thing that God has in mind, another, larger truth, but if there is, we don’t know it. In fact, it is not clear whether we are even supposed to know it. It is possible that we are not supposed to even try to know it, much less to truly know and understand God. To try is presumptuous, and to declare that you have actually done so is blasphemous.
“God is the Unknown Knower, the Unmoved Mover, the Great Unseen. Therefore, we cannot know the truth that we are required to know in order to meet the conditions that we are required to meet in order to receive the love that we are required to receive in order to avoid the condemnation that we are seeking to avoid in order to have the everlasting life that we had before any of this started.
“Our ignorance is unfortunate, but should not be problematic. All we need do is take what we think we do know—our cultural story—on faith, and proceed accordingly. This we have tried to do, each according to his or her own beliefs, and thus we have produced the life that we are now living, and the reality on Earth that we are creating.”
This is how most of the human race has its constructed. You each have your minor variations, but this is, in essence, how you live your lives, justify your choices, and rationalize the outcomes.
Some of you do not accept all of this, yet all of you accept some of it. And you accept these statements as the operating reality not because they reflect your innermost wisdom but because someone else has told you that they are true.
At some level, you have had to make yourself believe them.
This is called make-believe.
Yet now it is time to move away from make-believe and toward what is real. This will not be easy, because Ultimate Reality will differ a great deal from what many people in your world are now agreeing is real. You will literally have to be “in this world, but not of it.”
And what would be the purpose of that if your life is going well? Nothing. There would be no purpose. If you are satisfied with your life and with the world as it is, there would be no reason for you to seek to shift your reality and to stop all this make-believe.
This message is for those who are not satisfied with the world as it is.
We shall now examine The Ten Illusions one by one. You will see how each illusion has caused you to create life on your planet as you are now living it.
You will notice that each illusion builds on the previous. Many sound very much alike. That is because they are alike. All of the illusions are simply variations on The First Illusion. They are grander distortions of the original distortion.
You will also notice that each new illusion was created to fix a flaw in the illusion just before. Finally, tired of fixing flaws, you simply decided that you did not understand any of it. Thus the final Illusion: Ignorance Exists.
This allowed you to shrug your shoulders and quit trying to solve the mystery.
But the evolving mind would not allow such a retreat for very long. In just a few short millennia—a very brief time, indeed, in the history of the Universe—you have come to the place where ignorance is no longer bliss.
You are about to climb out of primitive culture. You are about to make a quantum leap in your understandings. You are about to see through…THE TEN ILLUSIONS.
God has spoken to you many times in many ways over many years, but seldom directly as this.
This time I speak to you as You, and that has occurred on only a handful of occasions in the whole year history.
Few humans have had the courage to hear Me in this way—as themselves. And fewer still have shared with others what they have heard. Those few who have listened, and shared, have changed the world.
Aesop, Confucius, Lao-tzu, Buddha, Muhammad, Moses, and Jesus was among them.
So, too, Chuang Tzu, Aristotle, Huang-po, Sahara, Mahavira, Krishnamurti.
Also, Paramahansa Yogananda, Ramana Maharshi, Kabir, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thich Nhat Hanh, the Dalai Lama, Elizabeth Clinton.
As well, Sri Aurobindo, Mother Teresa, Meher Baba, Mahatma Gandhi, Kahlil Gibran, Baha Allah, Ernest Holmes, Sai Baba.
Including Joan of Arc, Francis of Asisi, Joseph Smith … and more, others, not mentioned here. This list could go on. Yet, relative to the total number of humans who have inhabited your planet, the number is minuscule.
These few have been My messengers—for all have brought forward The Truth within their hearts, as best as they understood it, as purely as they knew how. And while they have each done so through imperfect filters, they have nonetheless brought to your awareness extraordinary wisdom, from which the whole human race has benefited.
What is amazing is how similar their insights have been. Offered at vastly different times and places, separated by legions and centuries, they might just as well have been speaking all at the same time, so tiny have been the variances between them, and so huge the commonalities.
Now its time to expand this list to include others, living today, as My latest messengers.
We will speak with one voice.
Unless we do not.
You will make that voice, even as you have always done. For in each Moment of Now, have you made your decisions, and announced it in action.
At the beginning, your thoughts are Mine, and Mine are yours. For at the beginning, it can be no other way. There is only one Source of That Which Is, and the Source is That Which Is.
All things emanate from that Source, then permeate the Isness all over, and reveal themselves as Individuations of the Whole.
The individual interpretations of the one message produce the miracle of Oneness in many forms.
This Oneness in many forms is what you call life.
Life is God, interpreted. That is, translated into many forms.
The first level of translation is from the unified non-physical to the individuated non-physical.
The second level of translation is from the individuated non-physical to the individuated physical.
The third level of translation is from the individuated physical into the unified physical.
The fourth level of translation is from the unified physical into the unified non-physical.
Then the cycle of Life is complete.
The continuing process of the translation of God produces endless variety within God’s unity. This is variety of the unity is what I have called “individuation.” It is the individual expression of that which is not separate but which can be individually expressed.
The purpose of individual expression is for Me to experience My Self as the whole, through the experiencing of My parts. And while the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, I can only experience this by knowing the sum.
And that is who you are.
You are the Sum of God.
I have told you this many times before, and many of you have heard this as the son of God. That, too, is correct. You are the sons, and daughters, of God. Yet it does not matter what labels or names you use, it adds up to the same thing: You are the Sum of God.
So, too, is everything around you. Everything that you see, and do not see. All That Is, All That Ever Was, and All That Ever Will Be. And all that I am, I am now.
I Am That I Am—as I have told you many times.
There is nothing that have I ever been that I have ceased to be. And there is nothing that I will ever be that I am not now. I cannot become anything that I now am not, nor can I fail to be anything that I once was.
This is as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.
I am coming to you now, in this day and time, as you begin another millennium, so that you may start a new thousand years in a new way: knowing Me at last, choosing Me first, and being Me always, all ways.
There is no mistake in the timing. I began these new revelations early in the last decade, continued My conversations with you throughout the last years of the century, and in the final moments of the last millennium reminded you how you may have a friendship with Me.
Now, in the first year of the new millennium, I speak to you with one voice, that we may experience communion.
Should you choose this experience of communion with God, you will finally know peace, and joy unbounded, love fully expressed, and full freedom.
Should you choose this truth, you will change the world.
Should you choose this reality, you will create it, and at last fully experience Who You Really Are.
It will be the hardest thing you have ever done, and the easiest thing you will ever do.
It will be the hardest thing you have ever done because you will have to deny who you think you are, and stop denying Me. It will be the easiest thing you will ever do because there will be nothing that you have to do.
All you have to do is be, and all you have to be is Me.
Even this will not be an act of will but a simple acknowledgement. It will not require an action, only an admission.
I have been seeking this admission forever. When you grant Me admission, you let Me into your life you admit that you and I are One. This is your ticket to heaven. It says: Admit One.
When I gain entrance into your heart, you gain entrance into heaven. And your heaven can be on Earth. Everything can truly be “on earth as it is in heaven” when the time of separation is over and the time of unification is at hand.
Unification with Me, and unification with all others, and with every living thing.
This is what I have come to tell you, once more, through the messengers of today. You will know them as My messengers because they will all be bringing the same message:
We Are All One
This is the only message that matters. It is the only message there is. Everything else in Life is a reflection of this message. Everything else sends it.
The fact that you have so far failed to receive it (you have heard it often, but you have failed to receive it) is what has caused every misery, every sorrow, every conflict, every heartache in your experience. It has caused every murder, every war, every rape and robbery, every assault and attack, mental, verbal, and physical. It has caused every illness and dis-ease, and every encounter with what you call “death.”
The idea that we are not One is an illusion.
Most people believe in God: They just don’t believe in a God who believes in them.
God does believe in them. And God loves them more than most of them know.
The idea that God turned stone-silent and stopped talking to the human race a long time ago is false.
The idea that God is angry with the human race and kicked it out of Paradise is false.
The idea that God has set Himself up as judge and jury and will be deciding whether members of the human race go to heaven or to hell is false.
God loves every human being who ever lived, lives now, or ever will live.
God’s desire is for every soul to return to God, and God cannot fail in having this desire fulfilled.
God is separate from nothing, and nothing is separate from God.
There is nothing that God needs, because God is everything there is.
This is the good news. Everything else is an illusion.
The human race has been living with an illusion for a long time. This is not because human race is stupid, but because the human race is very smart. Humans have understood intuitively that illusions have a purpose, and a very important one. Most humans have simply forgotten that they know this.
And they have forgotten that their forgetting is itself part of what they have forgotten—and therefore pare of the illusion.
Now it is time for humans to remember.
You are one of those who will lead the vanguard in this process. There is nothing surprising in this, given what has been going on in your life.
You have come to this book to remember The Illusions Of Humans, so that you may never again be caught up in them but achieve communion with God once more in the living of your life through the awareness of Ultimate Reality.
It is perfect that you have done so and it is, obviously, not happenstance.
You have come here so that you may know experientially that God resides within you, that you may have, whenever you wish, a meeting with the Creator.
The Creator may be experienced and found within you and all around you. But you must look past The Illusions of Humans. You must ignore them.
Here are The Ten Illusions. Get to know them well so that you will recognize them when you encounter them.
1. Need Exist
2. Failure Exist
3. Disunity Exist
4. Insufficiency Exist
5. Requirement Exist
6. Judgment Exist
7. Condemnation Exist
8. Conditionally Exist
9. Superiority Exist
10. Ignorance Exist
The first five of these are the Physical Illusions, having to do with life in your physical body. The second five are the Metaphysical Illusions, having to do with non-physical reality.
In this communication, each of these illusions will be explored in detail. You will see how each has been created, and you will see how each has affected your life. And before this communication is complete, you will also see how you can undo any effects of these illusions that you wish to undo.
Now, the first step in the process of any really open communication is that you must be willing to suspend your disbelief about what you are hearing. You will be asked to do that there. Please temporarily give up any previous notions you may have about God and Life. You may return to your previous ideas at anytime. It is not a question of abandoning them forever but of merely setting them aside for the moment to allow for the possibility that there may be something you do not know, the knowing of which could change everything.
Examine, for instance, your reaction to the idea that God is communicating with you right now.
In your past, you have found all sorts of reasons not to accept that you could have an actual conversation with God. I’m going to ask you to set those thoughts aside and assume that you are receiving this communication directly from Me.
To make it easier on you, I will speak of Myself in third person through much of this communication. I recognize that it may be a little unnerving for you to hear Me using the first person singular. And so, while I will do it once in a while (just to remind you who is bringing you this information), I will most of the time I speak of Myself as, simply God.
While your receiving a direct communication from the Deity may seem improbable to you at first, understand that you have come to this communication to remember, at last, Who You Really Are, and the illusions that you have created. Soon, you will deeply understand that you have actually caused this book to come to you. For now, simply hear Me when I tell you that in most of the moments of your life, you are living an illusion.
The Ten Illusions Of Humans are very big, very powerful illusions that you created during the earliest part of your experience on Earth. And you create hundreds of smaller ones every day. Because you believe them, you have created a cultural story that allows you to live these Illusions and thus make them real.
They are not really real, of course. Yet you have created an Alice in Wonderland world in which they seem very real, indeed. And like the Mad Hatter, you will deny that what is False is false, and what is Real is real.
You have, in fact, been doing this for a very long time.
A cultural story is a story that has been handed down from generation to generation, across centuries and millennia. It is story that you tell yourself about yourself.
Because your cultural Story is based on illusions, it produces myths rather than an understanding of reality.
The cultural story of Humans is that
1. God has an agenda. (Need Exists)
2. The outcome of life is in doubt. (Failure Exists)
3. You are separate from God. (Disunity Exists)
4. There is not enough. (Insufficiency Exists)
5. There is something you have to do. (Requirement Exists)
6. If you do not do it, you will be punished. (Judgment Exists)
7. The punishment is everlasting damnation. (Condemnation Exists)
8. Love is, therefore, conditional. (Conditionally Exists)
9. Knowing and meeting the conditions renders you superior. (Superiority Exists)
10. You do not know that these are illusions. (Ignorance Exists)
This cultural story has been so ingrained in you that you now live it fully and completely. This, you tell each other, “is just the way it is.”
You have been telling each other that now for many centuries. Indeed, for millennia after millennia. For so long, in fact, those myths have grown up around these illusions and stories. Some of the most prominent myths have been reduced to concepts, such as…
- Thy will be done.
- Survival of the fittest.
- To the victor go the spoils.
- You were born in Original Sin.
- The wages of sin are death.
- Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord.
- What you don’t know won’t hurt you.
- God only knows.
… and many others, equally destructive and non-serving.
Based on these illusions, stories, and myths—none of which has anything to do with Ultimate Reality—here is now many humans have come to think about Life:
“We are born into a hostile world, run by God who has things He wants us to do and things He wants us not to do. And will punish us with everlasting torture if we don’t get the two right.
“Our first experience in Life is separation from our mother, the Source of our Life. This creates the context for our entire reality, which we experience as one of separation form the Source of All Life.
“We are not only separate from all Life but from everything else in Life. Everything that exists, exists separate from us. And we are separate from everything else that exists. We do not want it this way, but this is the way it is. We wish it were otherwise, and indeed, we strive for it to be otherwise.
“We seek to experience Oneness again with all things, and especially with each other. We may not know why, exactly, yet it seems almost instinctual. It feels like the natural thing to do. The only problem is, there does not seem to be enough to satisfy us. No matter what the other thing is that we want, we cannot seem to get enough of it. We cannot get enough love, we cannot get enough time, we cannot get enough money. We cannot get enough of whatever it is we think we need in order to be happy and fulfilled. The moment we think that we have enough.
“Since there is ‘not enough’ of whatever it is we think we need to be happy, we must ‘do stuff’ to get as much as we can get. Things are required of us in exchange for everything, from God’s love to the natural bounty of Life. Simply ‘being alive’ is not enough. Therefore we, like all of Life, are not enough.
“Because just ‘being’ isn’t sufficient, the competition begins. If there’s not enough out there, we have to compete for what’s there.
“We have to compete for everything, including God.
“This competition is tough. It is about our very survival. In this contest, only the fittest survive. And to the victor go all the spoils. If we lose, we live a hell on Earth. And after we die, if we are losers in the competition for God, we experience hell again—this time forever.
“Death was actually created by God because our forebears made the wrong choices. Adam and Eve had everlasting life in the Garden of Eden. But then, Eve ate the fruit of the tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, and she and Adam were driven from the Garden by an angry God. This God sentenced them, and all their progeny forevermore, to death as the first punishment. Henceforth, life in the body would be limited, and no longer everlasting, and so would the stuff of Life.
“Yet God will give us back our everlasting life if we never again break His rules. God’s love is unconditional; it is only God’s rewards, which are not. God loves us even as he condemns us to everlasting damnation. It hurts Him more than it hurts us, because He really wants us to return home, but He can’t do anything about it if we misbehave. The choice is ours.
“The trick is, therefore, to not misbehave. We need to live a good life. We must strive to do so. In order to do so, we have to know the truth about what God wants and does not want from us. We cannot please God, and we cannot offending Him, if we do not know right from wrong. So we have to know the truth about that.
“The truth is simple to understand and easy to know. All we have to do is listen to the prophets, teachers, sages, and the source and founder of our religion. If there is more than one religion and, therefore, more than one source and founder, then we have to make sure to pick the right one. Picking the wrong one could result in us being a loser.
“When we pick the right one, we are superior, we are better than our peers, because we have the truth on our side. This state of being ‘better’ allows us to claim most of the prizes in the contest without actually contesting them. We get to declare ourselves the winners before the competition begins. It is out of this awareness that we give ourselves all the advantages, and write our ‘Rules of Life’ in such a way that certain others find it nearly impossible to win the really big prizes.
“We do not do this out of meanness but simply in order to ensure that victory is ours—as rightly it should be, since it is those of our religion, of our nationality, of our race, of our gender, of our political persuasion who know the truth, and therefore deserve to be winners.
“Because we deserve to win, we have a right to threaten others, to fight with them, even to kill them if necessary, in order to produce this result.
“There may be another way to live, another thing that God has in mind, another, larger truth, but if there is, we don’t know it. In fact, it is not clear whether we are even supposed to know it. It is possible that we are not supposed to even try to know it, much less to truly know and understand God. To try is presumptuous, and to declare that you have actually done so is blasphemous.
“God is the Unknown Knower, the Unmoved Mover, the Great Unseen. Therefore, we cannot know the truth that we are required to know in order to meet the conditions that we are required to meet in order to receive the love that we are required to receive in order to avoid the condemnation that we are seeking to avoid in order to have the everlasting life that we had before any of this started.
“Our ignorance is unfortunate, but should not be problematic. All we need do is take what we think we do know—our cultural story—on faith, and proceed accordingly. This we have tried to do, each according to his or her own beliefs, and thus we have produced the life that we are now living, and the reality on Earth that we are creating.”
This is how most of the human race has its constructed. You each have your minor variations, but this is, in essence, how you live your lives, justify your choices, and rationalize the outcomes.
Some of you do not accept all of this, yet all of you accept some of it. And you accept these statements as the operating reality not because they reflect your innermost wisdom but because someone else has told you that they are true.
At some level, you have had to make yourself believe them.
This is called make-believe.
Yet now it is time to move away from make-believe and toward what is real. This will not be easy, because Ultimate Reality will differ a great deal from what many people in your world are now agreeing is real. You will literally have to be “in this world, but not of it.”
And what would be the purpose of that if your life is going well? Nothing. There would be no purpose. If you are satisfied with your life and with the world as it is, there would be no reason for you to seek to shift your reality and to stop all this make-believe.
This message is for those who are not satisfied with the world as it is.
We shall now examine The Ten Illusions one by one. You will see how each illusion has caused you to create life on your planet as you are now living it.
You will notice that each illusion builds on the previous. Many sound very much alike. That is because they are alike. All of the illusions are simply variations on The First Illusion. They are grander distortions of the original distortion.
You will also notice that each new illusion was created to fix a flaw in the illusion just before. Finally, tired of fixing flaws, you simply decided that you did not understand any of it. Thus the final Illusion: Ignorance Exists.
This allowed you to shrug your shoulders and quit trying to solve the mystery.
But the evolving mind would not allow such a retreat for very long. In just a few short millennia—a very brief time, indeed, in the history of the Universe—you have come to the place where ignorance is no longer bliss.
You are about to climb out of primitive culture. You are about to make a quantum leap in your understandings. You are about to see through…THE TEN ILLUSIONS.
The Illusion of Need
1. The Illusion of Need
The First Illusion is:
NEED EXIST
This is not only the First Illusion, but the grandest. On this illusion are all other illusions based.
Everything that you currently experience in life, everything that you feel moment to moment, is rooted in this idea, and your thoughts about it.
Need is non-existent in the Universe. One needs something only if one requires a particular result. The Universe does not require particular result. The Universe is the result.
Need is likewise non-existent in the mind of God. God would need something only if God required a particular result. God does not require any particular result. God is that which produces all results.
If good need something to produce a result, where would God get it? There is nothing that exists outside of God.
You may better grasp this idea if you use the word “Life” in place of the word “God.” The two words are interchangeable, so you will not alter the meaning; you will merely increase your understanding.
Nothing that is, is not Life. If Life needed something to produce a result, where would Life get it? There is nothing that exists outside of Life. Life is All That Is, All That Was, and All That Will Ever Be.
God needs nothing to occur except that which is occurring.
Life needs nothing to occur except that which is occurring.
The Universe needs nothing to occur except that which is occurring.
This is the nature of things. This how it is, not the way you imagined it.
In your imagination you have created the idea of Need out of your experience that you need things in order to survive. Yet suppose that you didn’t care whether you lived or died. Then what would you need.
Nothing at all.
And suppose that it was impossible for you not to live. Then what would you need?
Nothing at all.
Now here is the truth about you: It is impossible for you not to survive. You cannot fail to live. It is not a question of whether you live but how. That is, that is, what form will you take? What will your experience be?
I tell you this: You need nothing to survive. Your survival is guaranteed. I gave you everlasting life, and I never took it away from you.
Hearing this, you may say yes, but survival is one thing, and happiness is another. You may imagine that you need something in order to survive happily—that you can be happy only under certain conditions. This is not true, but you have believed it to be true. And because belief produces experience, you have experience life in this way, and have thus imagined a God who must experience Life in this way as well. Yet this is no more true for God than it is for you. The only difference is, God knows this.
When you know this, you will be as God. You will have mastered life, and your whole reality will change.
Now here is a great secret: Happiness is not created as a result of certain conditions. Certain conditions are created as a result of happiness.
That is such an important statement that it bears repeating.
Happiness is not created as a result of certain conditions. Certain conditions are created as a result of happiness.
This statement holds true for every other state of being as well.
Love is not created as a result of certain conditions. Certain conditions are created as a result of love.
Compassion is not created as a result of certain conditions. Certain conditions are created as a result of compassion.
Abundance is not created as a result of certain conditions. Certain conditions are created as a result of abundance.
Substitute any state of being you can imagine or devise. It will still hold true that Beingness precedes experience, and produces it.
Because you have not understood this, you have imagined certain things must occur in order for you to be happy—and you also imagine a God for whom the same is true.
Yet if God is First Cause, what can occur that God did not cause in the first place? And if God is all-powerful, what can occur that God does not choose to occur?
Is it possible for something to occur that God cannot stop? And if God is choosing not stop it, is the occurrence itself not something which God is choosing?
Of course it is.
Yet why would God choose things to occur that would make God unhappy? The answer is an answer that you cannot accept.
Nothing makes God unhappy.
You cannot believe this because it would require you to believe in a God without need or judgment, and you cannot imagine such a God is that you cannot imagine such a human. You do not believe that you can live that way—and you cannot imagine a God who is greater than you.
When you come to understand that you can live that way, then you will know all there is to know about God.
You will know that your second assessment was right. God is not greater than you. How can God be? For God is That Which Is You, and you are That Which Is God. Yet you are greater than you think you are.
Masters knows this. There are Masters walking your planet right now who know this. These Masters come from many traditions, religions, and cultures, yet they all have one thing in common.
Nothing makes Masters unhappy.
In the early days of your primitive culture, most humans were not in this place of mastery. They only desire was to avoid unhappiness, or pain. Their awareness was too limited for them to understand that pain did not have to produce unhappiness, and so their life strategy was built around what later came to be described as The Pleasure Principle. They moved toward what brought them pleasure and moved away from what deprived them of pleasure (or caused pain).
Thus, The First Illusion, the idea that Need Exists, was born. It was what could be called the first mistake.
Need does not exist. It is a fiction. In reality, you need nothing to be happy. Happiness is a state of mind.
This is not something that early humans were capable of grasping. And because they felt that they needed certain things in order to be happy, they assumed that the same must be true of all life. Included in that assumption was that part of Life which they came to understand as a Greater Power—a power that succeeding generations have conceptualized as a living being referred to by a variety of names, among them Allah, Yahweh, Jehovah and God
It was not difficult for early humans to conceive of a power greater than themselves. Indeed, it was necessary. An explanation was needed for things that happened that were totally out of control.
The mistake here was not in assuming that there was such a thing as God (the combined power and the combined energy of All That Is), but in assuming that this Total Power and Complete Energy could need anything at all; that God was, in some way, dependent on something or someone else to be happy or satisfied, complete or fulfilled.
This was like saying that The Fullness was not full, that it needed something to make it full. It was a contradiction in terms—but they could not see this. Many still do not see it today.
From this creation of a dependent God, people produced a cultural story in which God has an agenda. In other words, there are things God wants and needs to occur, and ways in which they must occur, in order for God to be happy.
Humans have reduced this cultural story to a myth that has crystallized as: Thy Will be done.
Your idea that I had a Will forced you to then try to figure out what My Will was. This exercise quickly made it clear that there was no universal agreement among your species on this point. And if not everyone knew, or agreed on, what God’s Will was, not everyone could possibly be doing God’s Will.
The cleverest among you used this rationale to explain why some people’s lives seemed to work better than others. But then you forced a new question: How could it be possible for God’s Will not to be done if God was God?
Clearly, there was a flaw in that First Illusion. This should have revealed the idea of Need as false. But humans knew at some very deep level that they could not give up the Illusion, or something very vital would come to an end.
They were right. But they made a mistake. Instead of seeing the Illusion as an Illusion, and using it for the purpose for which it was intended, they thought they had to fix its flaw.
Thus, it was to fix the flaw in the First Illusion that The Second Illusion was created.
The First Illusion is:
NEED EXIST
This is not only the First Illusion, but the grandest. On this illusion are all other illusions based.
Everything that you currently experience in life, everything that you feel moment to moment, is rooted in this idea, and your thoughts about it.
Need is non-existent in the Universe. One needs something only if one requires a particular result. The Universe does not require particular result. The Universe is the result.
Need is likewise non-existent in the mind of God. God would need something only if God required a particular result. God does not require any particular result. God is that which produces all results.
If good need something to produce a result, where would God get it? There is nothing that exists outside of God.
You may better grasp this idea if you use the word “Life” in place of the word “God.” The two words are interchangeable, so you will not alter the meaning; you will merely increase your understanding.
Nothing that is, is not Life. If Life needed something to produce a result, where would Life get it? There is nothing that exists outside of Life. Life is All That Is, All That Was, and All That Will Ever Be.
God needs nothing to occur except that which is occurring.
Life needs nothing to occur except that which is occurring.
The Universe needs nothing to occur except that which is occurring.
This is the nature of things. This how it is, not the way you imagined it.
In your imagination you have created the idea of Need out of your experience that you need things in order to survive. Yet suppose that you didn’t care whether you lived or died. Then what would you need.
Nothing at all.
And suppose that it was impossible for you not to live. Then what would you need?
Nothing at all.
Now here is the truth about you: It is impossible for you not to survive. You cannot fail to live. It is not a question of whether you live but how. That is, that is, what form will you take? What will your experience be?
I tell you this: You need nothing to survive. Your survival is guaranteed. I gave you everlasting life, and I never took it away from you.
Hearing this, you may say yes, but survival is one thing, and happiness is another. You may imagine that you need something in order to survive happily—that you can be happy only under certain conditions. This is not true, but you have believed it to be true. And because belief produces experience, you have experience life in this way, and have thus imagined a God who must experience Life in this way as well. Yet this is no more true for God than it is for you. The only difference is, God knows this.
When you know this, you will be as God. You will have mastered life, and your whole reality will change.
Now here is a great secret: Happiness is not created as a result of certain conditions. Certain conditions are created as a result of happiness.
That is such an important statement that it bears repeating.
Happiness is not created as a result of certain conditions. Certain conditions are created as a result of happiness.
This statement holds true for every other state of being as well.
Love is not created as a result of certain conditions. Certain conditions are created as a result of love.
Compassion is not created as a result of certain conditions. Certain conditions are created as a result of compassion.
Abundance is not created as a result of certain conditions. Certain conditions are created as a result of abundance.
Substitute any state of being you can imagine or devise. It will still hold true that Beingness precedes experience, and produces it.
Because you have not understood this, you have imagined certain things must occur in order for you to be happy—and you also imagine a God for whom the same is true.
Yet if God is First Cause, what can occur that God did not cause in the first place? And if God is all-powerful, what can occur that God does not choose to occur?
Is it possible for something to occur that God cannot stop? And if God is choosing not stop it, is the occurrence itself not something which God is choosing?
Of course it is.
Yet why would God choose things to occur that would make God unhappy? The answer is an answer that you cannot accept.
Nothing makes God unhappy.
You cannot believe this because it would require you to believe in a God without need or judgment, and you cannot imagine such a God is that you cannot imagine such a human. You do not believe that you can live that way—and you cannot imagine a God who is greater than you.
When you come to understand that you can live that way, then you will know all there is to know about God.
You will know that your second assessment was right. God is not greater than you. How can God be? For God is That Which Is You, and you are That Which Is God. Yet you are greater than you think you are.
Masters knows this. There are Masters walking your planet right now who know this. These Masters come from many traditions, religions, and cultures, yet they all have one thing in common.
Nothing makes Masters unhappy.
In the early days of your primitive culture, most humans were not in this place of mastery. They only desire was to avoid unhappiness, or pain. Their awareness was too limited for them to understand that pain did not have to produce unhappiness, and so their life strategy was built around what later came to be described as The Pleasure Principle. They moved toward what brought them pleasure and moved away from what deprived them of pleasure (or caused pain).
Thus, The First Illusion, the idea that Need Exists, was born. It was what could be called the first mistake.
Need does not exist. It is a fiction. In reality, you need nothing to be happy. Happiness is a state of mind.
This is not something that early humans were capable of grasping. And because they felt that they needed certain things in order to be happy, they assumed that the same must be true of all life. Included in that assumption was that part of Life which they came to understand as a Greater Power—a power that succeeding generations have conceptualized as a living being referred to by a variety of names, among them Allah, Yahweh, Jehovah and God
It was not difficult for early humans to conceive of a power greater than themselves. Indeed, it was necessary. An explanation was needed for things that happened that were totally out of control.
The mistake here was not in assuming that there was such a thing as God (the combined power and the combined energy of All That Is), but in assuming that this Total Power and Complete Energy could need anything at all; that God was, in some way, dependent on something or someone else to be happy or satisfied, complete or fulfilled.
This was like saying that The Fullness was not full, that it needed something to make it full. It was a contradiction in terms—but they could not see this. Many still do not see it today.
From this creation of a dependent God, people produced a cultural story in which God has an agenda. In other words, there are things God wants and needs to occur, and ways in which they must occur, in order for God to be happy.
Humans have reduced this cultural story to a myth that has crystallized as: Thy Will be done.
Your idea that I had a Will forced you to then try to figure out what My Will was. This exercise quickly made it clear that there was no universal agreement among your species on this point. And if not everyone knew, or agreed on, what God’s Will was, not everyone could possibly be doing God’s Will.
The cleverest among you used this rationale to explain why some people’s lives seemed to work better than others. But then you forced a new question: How could it be possible for God’s Will not to be done if God was God?
Clearly, there was a flaw in that First Illusion. This should have revealed the idea of Need as false. But humans knew at some very deep level that they could not give up the Illusion, or something very vital would come to an end.
They were right. But they made a mistake. Instead of seeing the Illusion as an Illusion, and using it for the purpose for which it was intended, they thought they had to fix its flaw.
Thus, it was to fix the flaw in the First Illusion that The Second Illusion was created.
The Illusion of Failure
2. The Illusion of Failure
The Second Illusion is:
FAILURE EXISTS
The idea that God’s Will (assuming that God has one) could not be done runs counter to everything you thought you knew about God—namely, that God is all-powerful, ever-present, the Supreme Being, the Creator—but it is one that you nevertheless enthusiastically embraced.
This produced the highly improbable but very powerful illusion that God can fail. God can desire something but not get it. God can wish for something but not receive it. God can need something but not to have it.
In short, God’s Will can be thwarted.
This illusion was quite a stretch, for even the limited perceptions of the human mind could spot the contradiction. Yet your species has a rich imagination and can stretch credibility to the limit with the amazing ease. You have not only imagined a God with needs, you have imagined a God who can fail to have His needs met.
How have you done this? Once again, through the use of projection. Your have projected yourself upon God.
Once again, an ability or quality of being which you have ascribed to God has been derived directly from your own experience. Since you noticed that you could fail to obtain all the things that you imagine you need to be happy, you have declared that the same is true of God.
From this illusion you have created a cultural story which teaches that the outcome of life is in doubt.
It could work out, or it could not. It might be okay, and it might not. It will all be fine in the end—unless it isn’t.
Adding doubt to the mix—doubt that God could meet His needs (assuming I had any)—produced your first encounter with fear.
Prior to contriving this story of A God who could not always get His way, you had no fear. There was nothing to fear. God was in charge, God was All Power, All Wonder and Glory, and all was right with the world. What could go wrong?
But then came the idea that God could want something and actually not get it. God could want all of His children return to Him in heaven, but His children themselves, by their own actions, could prevent this.
Yet this idea, too, strained credibility, and again the human mind saw the contradiction. How could God’s creation thwart the Creator if the Creator and the creations were one? How could the outcome of life be in doubt if the One producing the outcome of and the One experiencing it were the same?
Clearly, there was a flaw in The Second Illusion. This should have revealed the idea of Failure to be false, but humans knew at some very deep level that they could not give up the Illusion, or something very vital would come to an end.
Again, they were right. But again, they made a mistake. Instead of seeing the Illusion as an Illusion, and using it for the purpose it was intended, they thought they had to fix the flaw.
It was to fix the flaw in The Second Illusion that The Third Illusion was created.
The Second Illusion is:
FAILURE EXISTS
The idea that God’s Will (assuming that God has one) could not be done runs counter to everything you thought you knew about God—namely, that God is all-powerful, ever-present, the Supreme Being, the Creator—but it is one that you nevertheless enthusiastically embraced.
This produced the highly improbable but very powerful illusion that God can fail. God can desire something but not get it. God can wish for something but not receive it. God can need something but not to have it.
In short, God’s Will can be thwarted.
This illusion was quite a stretch, for even the limited perceptions of the human mind could spot the contradiction. Yet your species has a rich imagination and can stretch credibility to the limit with the amazing ease. You have not only imagined a God with needs, you have imagined a God who can fail to have His needs met.
How have you done this? Once again, through the use of projection. Your have projected yourself upon God.
Once again, an ability or quality of being which you have ascribed to God has been derived directly from your own experience. Since you noticed that you could fail to obtain all the things that you imagine you need to be happy, you have declared that the same is true of God.
From this illusion you have created a cultural story which teaches that the outcome of life is in doubt.
It could work out, or it could not. It might be okay, and it might not. It will all be fine in the end—unless it isn’t.
Adding doubt to the mix—doubt that God could meet His needs (assuming I had any)—produced your first encounter with fear.
Prior to contriving this story of A God who could not always get His way, you had no fear. There was nothing to fear. God was in charge, God was All Power, All Wonder and Glory, and all was right with the world. What could go wrong?
But then came the idea that God could want something and actually not get it. God could want all of His children return to Him in heaven, but His children themselves, by their own actions, could prevent this.
Yet this idea, too, strained credibility, and again the human mind saw the contradiction. How could God’s creation thwart the Creator if the Creator and the creations were one? How could the outcome of life be in doubt if the One producing the outcome of and the One experiencing it were the same?
Clearly, there was a flaw in The Second Illusion. This should have revealed the idea of Failure to be false, but humans knew at some very deep level that they could not give up the Illusion, or something very vital would come to an end.
Again, they were right. But again, they made a mistake. Instead of seeing the Illusion as an Illusion, and using it for the purpose it was intended, they thought they had to fix the flaw.
It was to fix the flaw in The Second Illusion that The Third Illusion was created.
The Illusion of Disunity
3. The Illusion of Disunity
The Third Illusion is:
DISUNITY EXISTS
The only escape from the conundrum of The Second Illusion was to create a third: The Creator and the creations were not all one.
This required the human mind to conceive of the possibility of the impossible—that That Which Is One is not One; that That Which Is Unified is really separate.
This is the Illusion of Disunity—the idea that separation exists.
Your species reasoned that if creations were separate from the Creator, and if the Creator allowed the creations to do whatever they pleased, it would then be possible for the creations to do something that the Creator did not want them to do. Under these circumstances, the Will of the Creator could be thwarted. God could want something but not get it.
Disunity produces the possibility of failure, and Failure is only possible if Need exists. One illusion depends upon another.
The first three illusions are the most crucial. So important are these illusions, so key are they in supporting the rest, that separate cultural stories were assigned to them in order to explain them, and to assure that they would be explained, clearly and often.
Each of your cultures created its own special story, but all of them made the same basic points, each in their own way. One of the most famous is the story of Adam and Eve.
It is said that the first man and the first woman were created by God and lived happily in the Garden of Eden, or Paradise. There they enjoyed eternal life and communion with the Divine.
In exchange for this gift of Life idyllic, God is said to have required only one thing. Do not, He commanded, eat of the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.
According to this legend, Eve ate the fruit anyway. She disobeyed orders. But it was not entirely her fault. She was tempted by a serpent, who in reality was a being you have called Satan, or the Devil.
And just who is this Devil? He is, one story has it, an angel gone bad, a creation of God who dared to want to be as great as his Creator. This, the story says, is the ultimate offense, the supreme blasphemy. All creations should honor the Creator and never seek to be as great, or greater.
In this particular version of the main cultural story you have deviated from your normal pattern by ascribing to Me certain qualities that are not reflected in human experience.
Human creators actually want their offspring to strive to be as great, if not greater, than they. It is the greatest pleasure of all healthy parents to see their children reach, and exceed, their own station in life and to surpass their own achievement.
God, on the other hand, was said to be dishonored by this, and deeply offended. Satan, the fallen angel, was cast away, separated from flock, shunned, damned, and suddenly there were two powers in Ultimate Reality, God and Satan; and two places from which they operated, heaven and hell.
It was Satan’s desire, according to the story that developed, to tempt humans to disobey the Will of God. God and Satan were now in competition for man’s soul. And, fascinatingly, this was a competition that God could lose.
All of this proved that I was not an all-powerful God after all … or that I was all-powerful, but didn’t want to use my power, because I wanted to give Satan a fair chance. Or, that it wasn’t about giving Satan a fair chance, it was about giving human beings free will. Except that if you exercised your free will in a way I did not approve of, I would hand you over you to Satan, who would torture you for eternity.
Such are the convoluted stories that have grown into religious doctrine on your planet.
In the story of Adam and Eve, many people believed I punished the first man and the first woman for Eve’s eating of the forbidden fruit by casting them out of the Garden of Eden.
And (if you can believe this), I punished every other man and woman who ever lived after that, burdening them with the first humans’ guilt, and sentencing them to also be separate from Me throughout their lives on earth.
Through this and other equally colorful stories, the first three illusions were conveyed in a dramatic fashion that children, in particular, would not soon forget. So successful were these stories in injecting fear into the hearts of children that they were repeated over and over to each new generation. Thus the first three illusions were deeply imbedded in the human psyche.
1. God has an agenda. (Need Exists)
2. The outcome of life is in doubt. (Failure Exists)
3. You are separate from God. (Disunity Exists)
While the idea that Need and Failure exists is crucial to the rest of the Illusions, the idea that Disunity Exists has the most impact on human affairs.
The impact of The Third Illusion is felt by the human race to this day.
If your thought about The Third Illusion is that it is true, you shall have one experience of life.
If your thought is that it is not true, but is, in fact, an illusion, you shall have another.
These two experiences will be dramatically different.
Currently, nearly everyone on your planet believes The Illusion of Disunity to be real. As a result, people feel separate from God and separate from each other.
The feeling of separation from Me makes it extremely difficult for people to relate to Me in any meaningful way. They either misunderstand Me, or fear Me, or they beg for My help—or they deny Me altogether.
In so doing, humans have missed a glorious opportunity to use the most powerful force in the Universe. They have subjected themselves to lives over which they imagine they have no control, under conditions they think they cannot change, producing experiences and outcomes they believe they cannot escape.
They live lives of quiet desperation, offering up their pain, suffering it gladly, believing that their silent bravery will earn them sufficient favor to get into heaven, where they will receive their reward.
There are many reasons that suffering without undue complaining may be good for the soul, but ensuring one’s reward in heaven is not one of them. Courage is its own reward, and there can never be a good reason to cause other people suffering—which is what complaining does.
The Master, therefore, never complains, and so, limits the suffering outside of himself—and inside as well. Yet, the Master does not refrain from complaining in order to limit suffering, but because the Master does not interpret the experience of pain as suffering, but simply as pain.
Pain is an experience. Suffering is a judgment which is made about that experience. The judgment of many is that the pain they are experiencing is not okay, and should not be occurring. Yet the degree to which pain is accepted as perfect is the degree to which suffering in life may be eliminated. It is through this understanding that Masters overcome all suffering, although they may not escape all pain.
Even people who have not achieved mastery have experienced the difference between pain and suffering. An example of this might be having badly aching tooth pulled. It hurts to have the tooth pulled, but it is very welcome pain.
Their feeling of separation from Me prevents humans from using Me, calling upon Me, having friendship with Me, harnessing the full potential of My creative and healing power, either to end suffering, or for any other purpose.
Their feeling of separation from each other allows humans to do all manner of things to each other that they would never do to themselves. By failing to see that they are doing these things to themselves, they produce and reproduce un-welcome results in their daily lives and in their planetary experience.
It has been said that the human race is facing the same problems that it has faced since the dawn of recorded history—and this is true, but to a lesser degree all the time. Greed, violence, jealousy, and other behaviors that you do not believe benefit anyone are still displayed by members of your species, although now by the minority. This is a sign of your evolution.
Yet efforts in your society are directed not nearly so much at seeking to change these behaviors as seeking to punish them. It is thought that punishing them will correct them. Some people are still not understanding that until they correct the conditions in society which create and invite unwanted behaviors, they will correct nothing.
A truly object analysis proves this, yet many people ignore that proof and continue trying to solve society’s problems with the same energy that created them. They seek to end killing with killing, to end violence with violence, to quell anger with anger. In doing all of this, they fail to see their hypocrisy, and thus embody it.
Recognizing the first three Illusions as illusions would stop everyone from denying the Oneness of all Life and threatening to destroy all life on your planet.
Many humans continue to see themselves as separate from each other, from all other living things, and from God. They see that they are destroying themselves, yet they claim not to understand how they are doing it. Surely, they say, it is not through their individual actions. They cannot see the connection between their individual decisions and choices and the world at large.
These are the beliefs of many, and, if you wish to see them changed, it is up to you who truly understand Cause and Effect to change them. For your fellow humans believe that it is having no negative effect on The Whole to cut down hundreds of thousand of trees each week so that they can have their Sunday paper.
It is having no negative effect on The Whole to pump impurities of every sort into the atmosphere so that they can have their lifestyles unchanged.
It is having no negative effect on The Whole to use fossil fuels rather than solar-powered energy.
It is having no negative effect on The Whole to smoke cigarettes, or eat red meat at every meal, or consume large quantities of alcohol, and they’re tired of people telling them that it is.
It is having no negative effect, they say, and they’re tired of people telling them that it is.
Individual human behaviors, they tell themselves, are not having such a negative effect on The Whole that they could actually cause The Whole to collapse. That would only be possible if there was nothing that was separate—if, in effect, The Whole was doing all of this to itself. And that is silly. The Third Illusion is true. We are separate.
Still, the separate actions of all the separate beings who are not one with each other, and not one with all of Life, seem, in fact, to have a very real effect on Life itself. Now, at last, more and more humans are beginning to acknowledge this as they develop from primitive cultural thinking into a more evolved society.
This is because of the work that you, and others like you, are doing. For you have raised your voice. You have sounded the alarm. You have joined the effort to awaken each other, each in your own way, some quietly and individually, some in groups.
In days gone by, there were not nearly as many of you ready and able to awaken the others. And so the mass of people lived deep within the illusions, and were puzzled. Why should the fact that they are separate from each other create a problem? How is it that anything other than communal living—one for all, and all for one—could not be made to work without struggle?
These are the questions humans began to ask.
Clearly, there was a flaw in the Third Illusion. This should have revealed the idea of Disunity as false, but humans knew at some very deep level that they could not give up the Illusion, or something very vital would come to an end.
Again, they were right. But again, they made a mistake. Instead of seeing the Illusion as an illusion, and using it for the purpose for which it was intended, they thought they had to fix the flaw.
It was to fix the flaw in The Third Illusion that The Fourth Illusion was created.
The Third Illusion is:
DISUNITY EXISTS
The only escape from the conundrum of The Second Illusion was to create a third: The Creator and the creations were not all one.
This required the human mind to conceive of the possibility of the impossible—that That Which Is One is not One; that That Which Is Unified is really separate.
This is the Illusion of Disunity—the idea that separation exists.
Your species reasoned that if creations were separate from the Creator, and if the Creator allowed the creations to do whatever they pleased, it would then be possible for the creations to do something that the Creator did not want them to do. Under these circumstances, the Will of the Creator could be thwarted. God could want something but not get it.
Disunity produces the possibility of failure, and Failure is only possible if Need exists. One illusion depends upon another.
The first three illusions are the most crucial. So important are these illusions, so key are they in supporting the rest, that separate cultural stories were assigned to them in order to explain them, and to assure that they would be explained, clearly and often.
Each of your cultures created its own special story, but all of them made the same basic points, each in their own way. One of the most famous is the story of Adam and Eve.
It is said that the first man and the first woman were created by God and lived happily in the Garden of Eden, or Paradise. There they enjoyed eternal life and communion with the Divine.
In exchange for this gift of Life idyllic, God is said to have required only one thing. Do not, He commanded, eat of the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.
According to this legend, Eve ate the fruit anyway. She disobeyed orders. But it was not entirely her fault. She was tempted by a serpent, who in reality was a being you have called Satan, or the Devil.
And just who is this Devil? He is, one story has it, an angel gone bad, a creation of God who dared to want to be as great as his Creator. This, the story says, is the ultimate offense, the supreme blasphemy. All creations should honor the Creator and never seek to be as great, or greater.
In this particular version of the main cultural story you have deviated from your normal pattern by ascribing to Me certain qualities that are not reflected in human experience.
Human creators actually want their offspring to strive to be as great, if not greater, than they. It is the greatest pleasure of all healthy parents to see their children reach, and exceed, their own station in life and to surpass their own achievement.
God, on the other hand, was said to be dishonored by this, and deeply offended. Satan, the fallen angel, was cast away, separated from flock, shunned, damned, and suddenly there were two powers in Ultimate Reality, God and Satan; and two places from which they operated, heaven and hell.
It was Satan’s desire, according to the story that developed, to tempt humans to disobey the Will of God. God and Satan were now in competition for man’s soul. And, fascinatingly, this was a competition that God could lose.
All of this proved that I was not an all-powerful God after all … or that I was all-powerful, but didn’t want to use my power, because I wanted to give Satan a fair chance. Or, that it wasn’t about giving Satan a fair chance, it was about giving human beings free will. Except that if you exercised your free will in a way I did not approve of, I would hand you over you to Satan, who would torture you for eternity.
Such are the convoluted stories that have grown into religious doctrine on your planet.
In the story of Adam and Eve, many people believed I punished the first man and the first woman for Eve’s eating of the forbidden fruit by casting them out of the Garden of Eden.
And (if you can believe this), I punished every other man and woman who ever lived after that, burdening them with the first humans’ guilt, and sentencing them to also be separate from Me throughout their lives on earth.
Through this and other equally colorful stories, the first three illusions were conveyed in a dramatic fashion that children, in particular, would not soon forget. So successful were these stories in injecting fear into the hearts of children that they were repeated over and over to each new generation. Thus the first three illusions were deeply imbedded in the human psyche.
1. God has an agenda. (Need Exists)
2. The outcome of life is in doubt. (Failure Exists)
3. You are separate from God. (Disunity Exists)
While the idea that Need and Failure exists is crucial to the rest of the Illusions, the idea that Disunity Exists has the most impact on human affairs.
The impact of The Third Illusion is felt by the human race to this day.
If your thought about The Third Illusion is that it is true, you shall have one experience of life.
If your thought is that it is not true, but is, in fact, an illusion, you shall have another.
These two experiences will be dramatically different.
Currently, nearly everyone on your planet believes The Illusion of Disunity to be real. As a result, people feel separate from God and separate from each other.
The feeling of separation from Me makes it extremely difficult for people to relate to Me in any meaningful way. They either misunderstand Me, or fear Me, or they beg for My help—or they deny Me altogether.
In so doing, humans have missed a glorious opportunity to use the most powerful force in the Universe. They have subjected themselves to lives over which they imagine they have no control, under conditions they think they cannot change, producing experiences and outcomes they believe they cannot escape.
They live lives of quiet desperation, offering up their pain, suffering it gladly, believing that their silent bravery will earn them sufficient favor to get into heaven, where they will receive their reward.
There are many reasons that suffering without undue complaining may be good for the soul, but ensuring one’s reward in heaven is not one of them. Courage is its own reward, and there can never be a good reason to cause other people suffering—which is what complaining does.
The Master, therefore, never complains, and so, limits the suffering outside of himself—and inside as well. Yet, the Master does not refrain from complaining in order to limit suffering, but because the Master does not interpret the experience of pain as suffering, but simply as pain.
Pain is an experience. Suffering is a judgment which is made about that experience. The judgment of many is that the pain they are experiencing is not okay, and should not be occurring. Yet the degree to which pain is accepted as perfect is the degree to which suffering in life may be eliminated. It is through this understanding that Masters overcome all suffering, although they may not escape all pain.
Even people who have not achieved mastery have experienced the difference between pain and suffering. An example of this might be having badly aching tooth pulled. It hurts to have the tooth pulled, but it is very welcome pain.
Their feeling of separation from Me prevents humans from using Me, calling upon Me, having friendship with Me, harnessing the full potential of My creative and healing power, either to end suffering, or for any other purpose.
Their feeling of separation from each other allows humans to do all manner of things to each other that they would never do to themselves. By failing to see that they are doing these things to themselves, they produce and reproduce un-welcome results in their daily lives and in their planetary experience.
It has been said that the human race is facing the same problems that it has faced since the dawn of recorded history—and this is true, but to a lesser degree all the time. Greed, violence, jealousy, and other behaviors that you do not believe benefit anyone are still displayed by members of your species, although now by the minority. This is a sign of your evolution.
Yet efforts in your society are directed not nearly so much at seeking to change these behaviors as seeking to punish them. It is thought that punishing them will correct them. Some people are still not understanding that until they correct the conditions in society which create and invite unwanted behaviors, they will correct nothing.
A truly object analysis proves this, yet many people ignore that proof and continue trying to solve society’s problems with the same energy that created them. They seek to end killing with killing, to end violence with violence, to quell anger with anger. In doing all of this, they fail to see their hypocrisy, and thus embody it.
Recognizing the first three Illusions as illusions would stop everyone from denying the Oneness of all Life and threatening to destroy all life on your planet.
Many humans continue to see themselves as separate from each other, from all other living things, and from God. They see that they are destroying themselves, yet they claim not to understand how they are doing it. Surely, they say, it is not through their individual actions. They cannot see the connection between their individual decisions and choices and the world at large.
These are the beliefs of many, and, if you wish to see them changed, it is up to you who truly understand Cause and Effect to change them. For your fellow humans believe that it is having no negative effect on The Whole to cut down hundreds of thousand of trees each week so that they can have their Sunday paper.
It is having no negative effect on The Whole to pump impurities of every sort into the atmosphere so that they can have their lifestyles unchanged.
It is having no negative effect on The Whole to use fossil fuels rather than solar-powered energy.
It is having no negative effect on The Whole to smoke cigarettes, or eat red meat at every meal, or consume large quantities of alcohol, and they’re tired of people telling them that it is.
It is having no negative effect, they say, and they’re tired of people telling them that it is.
Individual human behaviors, they tell themselves, are not having such a negative effect on The Whole that they could actually cause The Whole to collapse. That would only be possible if there was nothing that was separate—if, in effect, The Whole was doing all of this to itself. And that is silly. The Third Illusion is true. We are separate.
Still, the separate actions of all the separate beings who are not one with each other, and not one with all of Life, seem, in fact, to have a very real effect on Life itself. Now, at last, more and more humans are beginning to acknowledge this as they develop from primitive cultural thinking into a more evolved society.
This is because of the work that you, and others like you, are doing. For you have raised your voice. You have sounded the alarm. You have joined the effort to awaken each other, each in your own way, some quietly and individually, some in groups.
In days gone by, there were not nearly as many of you ready and able to awaken the others. And so the mass of people lived deep within the illusions, and were puzzled. Why should the fact that they are separate from each other create a problem? How is it that anything other than communal living—one for all, and all for one—could not be made to work without struggle?
These are the questions humans began to ask.
Clearly, there was a flaw in the Third Illusion. This should have revealed the idea of Disunity as false, but humans knew at some very deep level that they could not give up the Illusion, or something very vital would come to an end.
Again, they were right. But again, they made a mistake. Instead of seeing the Illusion as an illusion, and using it for the purpose for which it was intended, they thought they had to fix the flaw.
It was to fix the flaw in The Third Illusion that The Fourth Illusion was created.
The illusion of Insufficiency
4. The illusion of Insufficiency
This is The Fourth Illusion:
INSUFFICIENCY EXIST
It arises out of The Third Illusion, for without the idea of Disunity, the idea of Insufficiency is insupportable. If there is only One Thing, and that One Thing Is All That Is, there can be no insufficiency of any kind, because that One Thing is everything, and thus …
It is sufficient unto Itself.
This is a statement of the nature of God.
This is not, however, the experience of humans, because humans imagine themselves to be separate from God, and separate from each other as well. Yet no human is separate from God, since God is Everything that is. Therefore humans are not, and cannot be, separate from each other.
This is a statement of the nature of humans.
It would be inaccurate to conclude that the idea of Disunity was a “bad idea,” that it did not serve your purpose. Indeed, the idea of separation was a blessed idea, allowing The Whole to understand that it was the sum of its parts, and even greater still. The illusion serves your purpose magnificently when you use the illusion as a tool to create experience.
When you forget that separation is an illusion, you imagine that it is real state of things. The illusion no longer creates experience, it becomes experience.
It is like feigning anger to make someone else more solicitous, and then actually becoming angry. Or feigning interest in someone in order to make someone else jealous, only to find that the illusion of interest has become very real indeed…
The device becomes the experience.
By this process you have come to actually believe that you are separate; that Disunity is possible in the unified field you call the universe.
Now, I have described the Third Illusion as the most powerful Illusion, and that it is true. It has had enormous impact on your day-to-day experience. Most significantly, your belief in separation has led to your idea that there is “not enough.”
When there was only One Thing, and you knew that you were that One Thing, there was never question of there not being enough. There was always enough of you. But when you decided that there was more than One Thing, then (and only then) could it appear that there was not enough of the other thing.
This “other thing” that you think there is, is the stuff of Life. Yet you are Life, and that which Life is—which is God, Itself.
Still, as long you imagine that you are separate from God, you will imagine that you are something other what God is—which is Life itself. You may think that you are that which lives, but you will not imagine yourself to Life Itself.
This separation of Itself from Itself is what you have called the casting out from the Garden of Eden. Suddenly, where once there was eternal life, now there is death. Suddenly, where once there was abundance, now there is not enough.
Suddenly, it seems that there are many aspects of life competing for Life itself. This is impossible in Ultimate Reality, but not in your imagination. You can imagine that you are in competition—with the birds, with the bees, with every other living thing and all other human beings.
You can create a nightmare in which all that supports your life seems to limit it. Thus, you will actually attempt to subdue that which supports you.
You were told to have dominion, but you have decided that this means domination. So you have actually begun a war with nature, and with the natural order of things.
You have used science and technology to twist and turn and manipulate nature so that it bends to your will. You are slowly destroying nature as it naturally is in attempt to experience yourself as you already naturally are.
You already what you seek to be—eternal, unlimited, and one with all—yet you do not remember this. And so, you seek to subdue Life in order that you may have more abundant Life. And you do not even see what you are doing.
Life becomes the single common denominator. Everyone wants Life, and the things that support Life. And, because you think there is more than one of you, you are afraid that there may not be enough Life to go around.
Out of this fear you produce your next imagined reality: death.
A life that you ought to be eternal (until you imagined that you were separate, it never occurred to you that you would not always “be”) now seems to have a beginning and an end.
This is the Illusion of Insufficiency played out at the highest level.
The experience of your life beginning and ending is really nothing more than the onset and the dissolution of your idea of yourself as “separate.” At a conscious level, you may not know this. At a higher level this is always clear.
It is at this higher level that you seek to end the experience of separation, to remind yourself that this is an illusion you have created.
Though I have told you may times, it is a good time now to discuss once more why you have created it.
You have created the Illusion of Disunity in order to experience the reality of Oneness. Only when you are outside the reality you can experience it. When you are apart of The Whole, you cannot experience yourself as The Whole, because there is nothing else. And, in the absence of that which you are not, that which you are, is not.
In the absence of cold, hot is not. In the absence of tall, short is not. If everything is short, then nothing is short, because “short” does not exist as something that can be known. It may exist as a concept, but it is not a concept that you can directly experience. It can only be an idea, never your experienced reality.
Similarly, in the absence of Disunity, unity is not.
If everything is experienced as unified, then nothing can be experienced as unified, because “unity” does not exist as discrete experience. It is not something that can be known. It may exist as a concept, but it is not a concept that you can directly experience. It can only be an idea, never your experienced reality.
In this context, you cannot know yourself as Who You Really Are.
Yet it is our wish to know ourselves as Who We Really Are. Thus, we must first create the experience of Who We Are Not. Since we cannot create this experience in Ultimate Reality, we must do so through illusion.
In this way, we can rejoice in what is really so, and know it. In this way, we can experience Who We Really Are.
The All Of It.
The One And Only
We are The Collective, The Single Reality In Multiple Form—having taken Multiple Form that we might notice and experience the glory of our Single Reality.
This is a simple explanation of the purpose of relativity, which I have given you many times in our ongoing dialog. It is repeated here so that you may understand it thoroughly, so that you may awaken from your dream.
…
Until you awaken from your dream, the Illusion of Disunity from Life will create a perceived need to survive. Before separation, you never questioned your survival. Only when you stepped away from Life (Me), and imagined yourself as separate, did Life Itself become that of which there was “not enough.” You began to make decisions about what you felt you had to do to survive—to have more life.
This became your primary goal, your new basic instinct. You even began to think that the reason you coupled with others was to guarantee your survival as a species. You lost sight of the fact that you coupled in response to the only real instinct, which is love.
You have called your new basic instinct The Survival Instinct, based on your idea that you might not survive. This idea is false, for your survival is guaranteed forever, and even forevermore. Yet you do not remember this, and so do not think there is enough Life, given that there are so many aspects of life competing for it.
And, indeed, that is how you see it. You imagine that you are in competition with all other “stuff of Life” for Life Itself. You are competing with your very self for more of your self. Your belief in Insufficiency has even led you to conclude that there is not enough God.
Not only is there enough Life (which you translate into a belief in death), and not only is there not enough of stuff of Life (which you translate into a belief in lack), there is not even enough of That Which Created Life (which you translate into a belief in a limited God).
Because all of these things are limited, you must compete for them. And you are destroying your planet and yourselves because of this belief.
You are even destroying yourselves in competitions for God, which you call religions. You have been killing yourselves, sometimes seeking to annihilate entire civilizations, in your insane competition for God.
You do not admit that you are doing these things, because to admit it would be to acknowledge that there may be something inaccurate about the way you view life and the world—and particularly about the way you view God—and this you have not been able to do.
Such an admission would require enormous humility, and humility is not presently a large part of your planet’s philosophy or theology.
Your theologies, in particular, have been most arrogant, assuming and proclaiming to have all the answers—leaving no questions and entertaining no doubts.
Yet something about these belief is not working. The idea that there is not—not enough God, not enough of the stuff of Life, not enough Life Itself—has led to more than simple competition. It has led to brutal repression, to suppression, and to massive depression. Religions have repressed frank and honest inquiry, governments have suppressed dissent, and millions of people live, as a result, in both economic and psychological depression. All of this has come out of idea that Insufficiency Exists—for sufficiency would solve all of this.
If you thought that there was enough to go around, there would be no more self-destructive behaviors, no more fighting over resources, no more squabbling over God.
But there is not enough. About this you are clear.
Still, if there is not enough, how does one get enough? How can survival be assured without killing and squabbling?
Clearly, there was a flaw in The Fourth Illusion. This should have revealed the idea of Insufficiency as false, but humans knew at some very deep level that they could not give up the Illusion, or something very vital would come to and end.
Again, they were right. But again, they made mistake. Instead of seeing the Illusion as illusion, and using it for the purpose for which it was intended, they thought they had to fix the flaw.
It was to fix the flaw in The Fourth Illusion that The Fifth Illusion was created.
This is The Fourth Illusion:
INSUFFICIENCY EXIST
It arises out of The Third Illusion, for without the idea of Disunity, the idea of Insufficiency is insupportable. If there is only One Thing, and that One Thing Is All That Is, there can be no insufficiency of any kind, because that One Thing is everything, and thus …
It is sufficient unto Itself.
This is a statement of the nature of God.
This is not, however, the experience of humans, because humans imagine themselves to be separate from God, and separate from each other as well. Yet no human is separate from God, since God is Everything that is. Therefore humans are not, and cannot be, separate from each other.
This is a statement of the nature of humans.
It would be inaccurate to conclude that the idea of Disunity was a “bad idea,” that it did not serve your purpose. Indeed, the idea of separation was a blessed idea, allowing The Whole to understand that it was the sum of its parts, and even greater still. The illusion serves your purpose magnificently when you use the illusion as a tool to create experience.
When you forget that separation is an illusion, you imagine that it is real state of things. The illusion no longer creates experience, it becomes experience.
It is like feigning anger to make someone else more solicitous, and then actually becoming angry. Or feigning interest in someone in order to make someone else jealous, only to find that the illusion of interest has become very real indeed…
The device becomes the experience.
By this process you have come to actually believe that you are separate; that Disunity is possible in the unified field you call the universe.
Now, I have described the Third Illusion as the most powerful Illusion, and that it is true. It has had enormous impact on your day-to-day experience. Most significantly, your belief in separation has led to your idea that there is “not enough.”
When there was only One Thing, and you knew that you were that One Thing, there was never question of there not being enough. There was always enough of you. But when you decided that there was more than One Thing, then (and only then) could it appear that there was not enough of the other thing.
This “other thing” that you think there is, is the stuff of Life. Yet you are Life, and that which Life is—which is God, Itself.
Still, as long you imagine that you are separate from God, you will imagine that you are something other what God is—which is Life itself. You may think that you are that which lives, but you will not imagine yourself to Life Itself.
This separation of Itself from Itself is what you have called the casting out from the Garden of Eden. Suddenly, where once there was eternal life, now there is death. Suddenly, where once there was abundance, now there is not enough.
Suddenly, it seems that there are many aspects of life competing for Life itself. This is impossible in Ultimate Reality, but not in your imagination. You can imagine that you are in competition—with the birds, with the bees, with every other living thing and all other human beings.
You can create a nightmare in which all that supports your life seems to limit it. Thus, you will actually attempt to subdue that which supports you.
You were told to have dominion, but you have decided that this means domination. So you have actually begun a war with nature, and with the natural order of things.
You have used science and technology to twist and turn and manipulate nature so that it bends to your will. You are slowly destroying nature as it naturally is in attempt to experience yourself as you already naturally are.
You already what you seek to be—eternal, unlimited, and one with all—yet you do not remember this. And so, you seek to subdue Life in order that you may have more abundant Life. And you do not even see what you are doing.
Life becomes the single common denominator. Everyone wants Life, and the things that support Life. And, because you think there is more than one of you, you are afraid that there may not be enough Life to go around.
Out of this fear you produce your next imagined reality: death.
A life that you ought to be eternal (until you imagined that you were separate, it never occurred to you that you would not always “be”) now seems to have a beginning and an end.
This is the Illusion of Insufficiency played out at the highest level.
The experience of your life beginning and ending is really nothing more than the onset and the dissolution of your idea of yourself as “separate.” At a conscious level, you may not know this. At a higher level this is always clear.
It is at this higher level that you seek to end the experience of separation, to remind yourself that this is an illusion you have created.
Though I have told you may times, it is a good time now to discuss once more why you have created it.
You have created the Illusion of Disunity in order to experience the reality of Oneness. Only when you are outside the reality you can experience it. When you are apart of The Whole, you cannot experience yourself as The Whole, because there is nothing else. And, in the absence of that which you are not, that which you are, is not.
In the absence of cold, hot is not. In the absence of tall, short is not. If everything is short, then nothing is short, because “short” does not exist as something that can be known. It may exist as a concept, but it is not a concept that you can directly experience. It can only be an idea, never your experienced reality.
Similarly, in the absence of Disunity, unity is not.
If everything is experienced as unified, then nothing can be experienced as unified, because “unity” does not exist as discrete experience. It is not something that can be known. It may exist as a concept, but it is not a concept that you can directly experience. It can only be an idea, never your experienced reality.
In this context, you cannot know yourself as Who You Really Are.
Yet it is our wish to know ourselves as Who We Really Are. Thus, we must first create the experience of Who We Are Not. Since we cannot create this experience in Ultimate Reality, we must do so through illusion.
In this way, we can rejoice in what is really so, and know it. In this way, we can experience Who We Really Are.
The All Of It.
The One And Only
We are The Collective, The Single Reality In Multiple Form—having taken Multiple Form that we might notice and experience the glory of our Single Reality.
This is a simple explanation of the purpose of relativity, which I have given you many times in our ongoing dialog. It is repeated here so that you may understand it thoroughly, so that you may awaken from your dream.
…
Until you awaken from your dream, the Illusion of Disunity from Life will create a perceived need to survive. Before separation, you never questioned your survival. Only when you stepped away from Life (Me), and imagined yourself as separate, did Life Itself become that of which there was “not enough.” You began to make decisions about what you felt you had to do to survive—to have more life.
This became your primary goal, your new basic instinct. You even began to think that the reason you coupled with others was to guarantee your survival as a species. You lost sight of the fact that you coupled in response to the only real instinct, which is love.
You have called your new basic instinct The Survival Instinct, based on your idea that you might not survive. This idea is false, for your survival is guaranteed forever, and even forevermore. Yet you do not remember this, and so do not think there is enough Life, given that there are so many aspects of life competing for it.
And, indeed, that is how you see it. You imagine that you are in competition with all other “stuff of Life” for Life Itself. You are competing with your very self for more of your self. Your belief in Insufficiency has even led you to conclude that there is not enough God.
Not only is there enough Life (which you translate into a belief in death), and not only is there not enough of stuff of Life (which you translate into a belief in lack), there is not even enough of That Which Created Life (which you translate into a belief in a limited God).
Because all of these things are limited, you must compete for them. And you are destroying your planet and yourselves because of this belief.
You are even destroying yourselves in competitions for God, which you call religions. You have been killing yourselves, sometimes seeking to annihilate entire civilizations, in your insane competition for God.
You do not admit that you are doing these things, because to admit it would be to acknowledge that there may be something inaccurate about the way you view life and the world—and particularly about the way you view God—and this you have not been able to do.
Such an admission would require enormous humility, and humility is not presently a large part of your planet’s philosophy or theology.
Your theologies, in particular, have been most arrogant, assuming and proclaiming to have all the answers—leaving no questions and entertaining no doubts.
Yet something about these belief is not working. The idea that there is not—not enough God, not enough of the stuff of Life, not enough Life Itself—has led to more than simple competition. It has led to brutal repression, to suppression, and to massive depression. Religions have repressed frank and honest inquiry, governments have suppressed dissent, and millions of people live, as a result, in both economic and psychological depression. All of this has come out of idea that Insufficiency Exists—for sufficiency would solve all of this.
If you thought that there was enough to go around, there would be no more self-destructive behaviors, no more fighting over resources, no more squabbling over God.
But there is not enough. About this you are clear.
Still, if there is not enough, how does one get enough? How can survival be assured without killing and squabbling?
Clearly, there was a flaw in The Fourth Illusion. This should have revealed the idea of Insufficiency as false, but humans knew at some very deep level that they could not give up the Illusion, or something very vital would come to and end.
Again, they were right. But again, they made mistake. Instead of seeing the Illusion as illusion, and using it for the purpose for which it was intended, they thought they had to fix the flaw.
It was to fix the flaw in The Fourth Illusion that The Fifth Illusion was created.
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