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.