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.
Monday, May 28, 2007
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.
The Illusion of Requirement
5. The Illusion of Requirement
This Is The Fifth Illusion:
REQUIREMENT EXISTS
The existence of Insufficiency led rapidly and inevitably to the idea of the next Illusion.
If there were enough stuff, there would be nothing you would have to do get whatever it was that you wanted or needed. You would just reach out and it would be there. But that is not how humans decided that it is. They said, there is not enough. So now they faced the question: How does one get enough? How does one qualify?
You imagined that there must be something that you had to do in order to get the stuff of which there was not enough—something that would allow you to lay claim to it without argument. This is the only way that you could figure out how to get everything—including God—divided in your favor without killing and squabbling.
You imagined this to be the Requirement.
You told yourselves that fulfilling it—whatever it was—is “what it takes.” That idea has held firm to this very day. If anything, it has grown stronger. You believe that when you do the things you need to do, you can be the things you want to be.
If you want to be happy, if you want to be secure, if you want to be loved, then there are things you are going to have to do. You cannot be these things unless you have enough. And you cannot have enough unless you do what it takes to get enough—to qualify your enough.
This is what you believe, and because you believe it, you have elevated doing to be the highest place in your cosmology.
Even God says there is something that you have to do in order to get into heaven.
This is how you have it put together.
This is the Requirement.
Mind you, now, all of this is based on The Third Illusion—that you are separate. When there was only One of you, there was always enough, and so, there was nothing you had to do in order to be anything.
And that idea of separation was based on The Second Illusion—that Failure exists. Because God failed to get what He wanted, He separated all humans from Him.
And Failure was based on The First Illusion—that Need exists. God could not fail to get what God wanted if God wanted nothing, and God would want nothing if God needed nothing.
In truth, there is only one Illusion, and all the others are permutations of that. Everything else is an expansion of the only Illusion, with a different nuance.
Thus, the Illusion of Requirement is nothing more than a different take on the Illusion of Need. Similarly, the Illusion of Insufficiency is a different take on The Illusion Need, as is The Illusion of Failure, and so on, through all The Illusions of Humans.
You will see clearly, as you explore each illusion, that each is an outgrowth of the illusions that have gone before. It is like watching a balloon being blown up.
The announcement of your species that there is a Requirement that must be met in order to acquire anything of which there is not enough—including God’s love—has proven to be one of the most significant decisions the human race has ever made. It has resulted in entire lists and sets of rules and regulations, guidelines and procedures, laws of God and laws of man, by which you imagine you must live you life.
Here are few of the things you have decided that you must do in order to have a good life on Earth:
Be a good boy or girl.
Don’t talk back.
Get good grades and go on to college.
Graduate with a degree and find a good job.
Marry and have children.
Be good parents and give your children more than you were given.
Be cool.
Do as you are told.
Don’t do bad things—or, at least, don’t get caught.
Follow the leader.
Don’t ask too many questions, and don’t ask any of the wrong ones.
Keep everybody happy.
Do not include your self in the group of people you are trying to keep happy if it may mean excluding someone else from the group.
Don’t impose on anybody, especially when you get old.
And here are few of the things you have decided that you must do in order to please God and get into heaven:
Don’t do anything bad—and forget about not getting caught, because you will.
If you do do something bad, for God’s sake, beg forgiveness and promise never, ever to do it again.
Be a good boy or girl.
Do not play with yourself.
Do not play with anyone else, either. Not that way…
In fact, do not play much at all. Try to understand that all pleasures of the body are, at best, distractions from what you really came to earth to do, and, at worst, absolute sins against God.
If you must have pleasures, do not enjoy them.
Do not enjoy money.
Do not enjoy attention.
Do not enjoy sex.
Above all, do not enjoy sex.
Never, ever have a sexual relationship outside of marriage and never, ever love more than one person in “that way.”
If you must have sex for any reason other than procreation, be embarrassed, do not freely or uninhibitedly enjoy it.
Do not take money for something truly enjoyable, and if you make a great deal of money, make sure you give most of it away.
Believe in the right God.
For heaven’s sake, believe in the right God.
Beg forgiveness and mercy form God for having been born imperfect, and ask Him for help in meeting the conditions for you to be loved again.
Humans have many other beliefs. These were listed here to give you just a few examples. This is what you have to do. This is the Requirement, and you would do well to understand it.
Who set this Requirement? Who put it into place?
You say that I did.
You claim that the author was God. And since there is not enough God to go around, you have to lay claim to Me in order to justify setting yourself up as the winners in your competitions.
You claim, then, that yours is the One Nation Under God, or that you are the Chosen People, or that yours is the One True Faith.
You lay claim to Me and you do so viciously, ferociously, for you feel that if you can lay claim to Me, you can then lay claim to anything else you desire, in My name.
This you have done for centuries, waving high your holy books, your crossers, and your flags to justify taking what there is not enough of by whatever means is necessary—including killing. You have even gone so far as to call such an event a holy war, seeking to close wounds in your soul while you open wounds in the bodies of others.
You have performed the most ungodly acts in the name of God, and all because you think that I have a Requirement that you must fulfill in order to receive Me, My love, and all the stuff of Life.
As long as you believe there is something that you have to do, you will struggle to find out what it is, and struggle further to achieve it.
Achievement will become your god. Indeed, it already has. Yet, if doing the right things brings you happiness and allows you to go home to God, why has all the striving to do those things felt so unhappy, and seemed so surely to be leading you away from God?
And, perhaps even more important, how will it be determined whether or not all of this was worth it? By what measure, what system, will it be decided if the Requirement has been met?
This is something you did not know. This was the question that humans began to ask.
Clearly, there was a flaw in the Fifth Illusion. This should have revealed the idea of Requirement 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 Fifth Illusion that The Sixth Illusion was created.
This Is The Fifth Illusion:
REQUIREMENT EXISTS
The existence of Insufficiency led rapidly and inevitably to the idea of the next Illusion.
If there were enough stuff, there would be nothing you would have to do get whatever it was that you wanted or needed. You would just reach out and it would be there. But that is not how humans decided that it is. They said, there is not enough. So now they faced the question: How does one get enough? How does one qualify?
You imagined that there must be something that you had to do in order to get the stuff of which there was not enough—something that would allow you to lay claim to it without argument. This is the only way that you could figure out how to get everything—including God—divided in your favor without killing and squabbling.
You imagined this to be the Requirement.
You told yourselves that fulfilling it—whatever it was—is “what it takes.” That idea has held firm to this very day. If anything, it has grown stronger. You believe that when you do the things you need to do, you can be the things you want to be.
If you want to be happy, if you want to be secure, if you want to be loved, then there are things you are going to have to do. You cannot be these things unless you have enough. And you cannot have enough unless you do what it takes to get enough—to qualify your enough.
This is what you believe, and because you believe it, you have elevated doing to be the highest place in your cosmology.
Even God says there is something that you have to do in order to get into heaven.
This is how you have it put together.
This is the Requirement.
Mind you, now, all of this is based on The Third Illusion—that you are separate. When there was only One of you, there was always enough, and so, there was nothing you had to do in order to be anything.
And that idea of separation was based on The Second Illusion—that Failure exists. Because God failed to get what He wanted, He separated all humans from Him.
And Failure was based on The First Illusion—that Need exists. God could not fail to get what God wanted if God wanted nothing, and God would want nothing if God needed nothing.
In truth, there is only one Illusion, and all the others are permutations of that. Everything else is an expansion of the only Illusion, with a different nuance.
Thus, the Illusion of Requirement is nothing more than a different take on the Illusion of Need. Similarly, the Illusion of Insufficiency is a different take on The Illusion Need, as is The Illusion of Failure, and so on, through all The Illusions of Humans.
You will see clearly, as you explore each illusion, that each is an outgrowth of the illusions that have gone before. It is like watching a balloon being blown up.
The announcement of your species that there is a Requirement that must be met in order to acquire anything of which there is not enough—including God’s love—has proven to be one of the most significant decisions the human race has ever made. It has resulted in entire lists and sets of rules and regulations, guidelines and procedures, laws of God and laws of man, by which you imagine you must live you life.
Here are few of the things you have decided that you must do in order to have a good life on Earth:
Be a good boy or girl.
Don’t talk back.
Get good grades and go on to college.
Graduate with a degree and find a good job.
Marry and have children.
Be good parents and give your children more than you were given.
Be cool.
Do as you are told.
Don’t do bad things—or, at least, don’t get caught.
Follow the leader.
Don’t ask too many questions, and don’t ask any of the wrong ones.
Keep everybody happy.
Do not include your self in the group of people you are trying to keep happy if it may mean excluding someone else from the group.
Don’t impose on anybody, especially when you get old.
And here are few of the things you have decided that you must do in order to please God and get into heaven:
Don’t do anything bad—and forget about not getting caught, because you will.
If you do do something bad, for God’s sake, beg forgiveness and promise never, ever to do it again.
Be a good boy or girl.
Do not play with yourself.
Do not play with anyone else, either. Not that way…
In fact, do not play much at all. Try to understand that all pleasures of the body are, at best, distractions from what you really came to earth to do, and, at worst, absolute sins against God.
If you must have pleasures, do not enjoy them.
Do not enjoy money.
Do not enjoy attention.
Do not enjoy sex.
Above all, do not enjoy sex.
Never, ever have a sexual relationship outside of marriage and never, ever love more than one person in “that way.”
If you must have sex for any reason other than procreation, be embarrassed, do not freely or uninhibitedly enjoy it.
Do not take money for something truly enjoyable, and if you make a great deal of money, make sure you give most of it away.
Believe in the right God.
For heaven’s sake, believe in the right God.
Beg forgiveness and mercy form God for having been born imperfect, and ask Him for help in meeting the conditions for you to be loved again.
Humans have many other beliefs. These were listed here to give you just a few examples. This is what you have to do. This is the Requirement, and you would do well to understand it.
Who set this Requirement? Who put it into place?
You say that I did.
You claim that the author was God. And since there is not enough God to go around, you have to lay claim to Me in order to justify setting yourself up as the winners in your competitions.
You claim, then, that yours is the One Nation Under God, or that you are the Chosen People, or that yours is the One True Faith.
You lay claim to Me and you do so viciously, ferociously, for you feel that if you can lay claim to Me, you can then lay claim to anything else you desire, in My name.
This you have done for centuries, waving high your holy books, your crossers, and your flags to justify taking what there is not enough of by whatever means is necessary—including killing. You have even gone so far as to call such an event a holy war, seeking to close wounds in your soul while you open wounds in the bodies of others.
You have performed the most ungodly acts in the name of God, and all because you think that I have a Requirement that you must fulfill in order to receive Me, My love, and all the stuff of Life.
As long as you believe there is something that you have to do, you will struggle to find out what it is, and struggle further to achieve it.
Achievement will become your god. Indeed, it already has. Yet, if doing the right things brings you happiness and allows you to go home to God, why has all the striving to do those things felt so unhappy, and seemed so surely to be leading you away from God?
And, perhaps even more important, how will it be determined whether or not all of this was worth it? By what measure, what system, will it be decided if the Requirement has been met?
This is something you did not know. This was the question that humans began to ask.
Clearly, there was a flaw in the Fifth Illusion. This should have revealed the idea of Requirement 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 Fifth Illusion that The Sixth Illusion was created.
The Illusion of Judgment
6. The Illusion of Judgment
This is The Sixth Illusion:
JUDGMENT EXISTS
Your decision that there is something that you must do in order to obtain that of which there is not enough—including God—required you to answer difficult question: How will it be determined whether a person has met the Requirement or not? And what will happen to those who have not?
Your answer to these questions produced the invention of Judgment.
Someone, you reasoned, must be the final arbiter. Since the Creator was the one who established the Requirement, it seemed only that the Creator would also be the one to decide who had met the Requirement and who had not.
For a very long time your species has held the thought that there was something you had to do in order to please God—and that failure to please God produced dire consequences. That you came to such a conclusion was understandable. Looking around you, you saw that people’s lives went well, and some did not. Primitive mind asked, Why? And primitive mind came up with a primitive answer.
Fortune smiled upon those who were in favor with the gods. It was the gods who had to be satisfied, and then the gods would judge.
Sacrifices and rituals of all kinds grew up around this belief, all designed to mollify difficult deities.
In these earliest days, your sense of Insufficiency was so strong that you even imagined the gods to be in competition with each other. There were many gods to please, and it was often not easy to keep track of what had to be done to keep everybody happy.
Each new earthly disaster, each hailstorm, each hurricane, each drought, or famine, or personal misfortune was seen as evidence that one of the gods had not been satisfied—or, sometimes, that they had been warring each other.
How else to explain what was going on?
Now, these beliefs arose in ancient times, and through the millennia they have been refined and clarified. Most humans today do not believe that there is a long list of ill-tempered gods who have to be mollified. Today most people believe that there is only one ill-tempered God who has to be mollified.
And although it may seem as if your species long ago evolved out of the primitive constructions that created an “I’m-going-to-get-you” kind of God, these idea continue to dominate your planet’s theologies.
This God As Avenger model of Deity has never lost favor in your societies. You’ve used both personal and planetary disasters as evidence of its validity. Even in very recent times, such as when your AIDS epidemic hit, there were many people—including some religious leaders—who proclaimed life’s misfortunes to be God’s punishment for the individual or collective misbehaviors of the human race.
Humans continue to agree in numbers that there is a Requirement set down by Me, which they must meet in order to become eligible for rewards here and in heaven. They continue to agree that there is a system of Judgment by which it is determined who has met the Requirement and who has not.
On the other hand, some theologies state flatly that no one can meet the Requirement, no matter what they do. Not even if they lead a perfect life, without error, blunder or mistaken of any kind. This is, the teaching declares, because everyone is born imperfect (some religions call this Original Sin), with a blotch on their soul even before they begin.
This blotch cannot be removed by any act that the person performs, not even an act of true repentance, but only the grace of God. And God, it is taught, will not grant this grace unless the person comes to Him in a very specific way.
This teaching claims that I am a very particular God, one who will bestow the joys of heaven upon anyone who does not do as I say.
It is said that I am very stubborn about this; that it truly does not matter how good people may have been, how compassionate or generous or kind. It does not matter how sorry they may be for their offenses, and it does not matter what they have done to make amends. Indeed, it does not matter if they have made the greatest contribution to the betterment of life on the planet that the world has ever seen: If they have not come to Me by the right path, saying the right words, believing in the right religion, they cannot sit at the right hand of God the Father almighty.
Because such rightness is required, this idea could be called righteousness…
Given their belief that this is the way God has set things up between Himself and the entire human race, members of the human race have set things up precisely the same way with each other.
Taking a page out of God’s book (what’s good for Me ought, certainly, to be good for you), humans have put a “blotch” on each other even before they begin. As I have already described, they do this to others of the “wrong gender”, color, or religion. They extend it to those of the “wrong” nationality, neighborhood, political persuasion, sexual orientation, or whatever other “wrongness” they choose to create. In doing this, human beings “play God.”
Yes, it is God, you say, who taught you to prejudge like this, for it is God who put the first blotch of imperfection on your own soul—who prejudged you, even before you had a chance to prove yourself, or the other.
Pre-judgment—that is, prejudice—must, therefore, be okay, for how can what is acceptable for God not be acceptable for man?
And what is the reason for My having declared all of you imperfect at the moment of your birth? I have done it, so the teaching goes, because the first humans were bad.
So we see how you have doubled back to the first Three Illusion to justify the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth. And so it is, with each Illusion producing the next, and each new Illusion proving those preceding.
Your cultural story says that when Adam and Eve sinned, they were driven from Paradise, losing happiness and their claim to eternal life—and yours along with it. This is because I sentenced them not only to a life of limitation and struggle but to eventual death (The Fourth Illusion)—none of which they experienced before they misstep.
Other cultural stories and theologies that arose and exist on your planet do not embrace the Adam and Eve scenario but nevertheless create their own evidence of the Requirement. On this, most agree: Humans are imperfect in the eyes of God, and there is something that they have to do in order to achieve perfection—variously described as Purification, Salvation, Enlightenment … whatever.
Because you believe in human imperfection, and since you believe that you have received this characteristic from Me, you have felt perfectly free to pass it on to others. all the while you have expected the same thing of others that you have been told I expect you: perfection.
And so has it come to pass that humans have gone through life demanding perfection of those whom they, themselves, have called imperfect—namely humans.
First, they do this to themselves. This is their initial, and often most costly, error.
Then they do it to others. This is their second mistake.
They have made it impossible for either themselves or others to ever fully meet…
The Requirement.
Parents demand perfection from their imperfect children, and children demand perfection from their imperfect parents.
Citizens demand perfection from their imperfect government, and the government demands perfection from its imperfect citizens.
Churches demand perfection from their imperfect followers, and followers demand perfection from their imperfect churches.
Neighbors demand perfection from other neighbors, races from other races, nations from other nations.
Your world rushes to judge, in particular, anyone receiving the rewards—fame, power, success—that are supposed to go only to the perfect, and your world condemns those in whom it uncovers the slightest imperfection.
So fanatical have you become that you have made it virtually impossible for people to become leaders, heroes, or icons in your present day and time—thus robbing yourself of exactly what your society needs.
You have placed yourself in a trap of your own devising, unable to release yourself from the Judgments you have imposed on each other, and the Judgment you believe God has imposed on you.
Yet why should a simple observation about you make you so uncomfortable? Is simply observing that something is so really a Judgment? Couldn’t it be merely an observation? So what if someone has not met the Requirement? What does it matter?
These are the questions that humans began to ask.
Clearly, there was a flaw in The Sixth Illusion. This should revealed the idea of Judgment 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 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 Sixth Illusion that The Seventh was created.
This is The Sixth Illusion:
JUDGMENT EXISTS
Your decision that there is something that you must do in order to obtain that of which there is not enough—including God—required you to answer difficult question: How will it be determined whether a person has met the Requirement or not? And what will happen to those who have not?
Your answer to these questions produced the invention of Judgment.
Someone, you reasoned, must be the final arbiter. Since the Creator was the one who established the Requirement, it seemed only that the Creator would also be the one to decide who had met the Requirement and who had not.
For a very long time your species has held the thought that there was something you had to do in order to please God—and that failure to please God produced dire consequences. That you came to such a conclusion was understandable. Looking around you, you saw that people’s lives went well, and some did not. Primitive mind asked, Why? And primitive mind came up with a primitive answer.
Fortune smiled upon those who were in favor with the gods. It was the gods who had to be satisfied, and then the gods would judge.
Sacrifices and rituals of all kinds grew up around this belief, all designed to mollify difficult deities.
In these earliest days, your sense of Insufficiency was so strong that you even imagined the gods to be in competition with each other. There were many gods to please, and it was often not easy to keep track of what had to be done to keep everybody happy.
Each new earthly disaster, each hailstorm, each hurricane, each drought, or famine, or personal misfortune was seen as evidence that one of the gods had not been satisfied—or, sometimes, that they had been warring each other.
How else to explain what was going on?
Now, these beliefs arose in ancient times, and through the millennia they have been refined and clarified. Most humans today do not believe that there is a long list of ill-tempered gods who have to be mollified. Today most people believe that there is only one ill-tempered God who has to be mollified.
And although it may seem as if your species long ago evolved out of the primitive constructions that created an “I’m-going-to-get-you” kind of God, these idea continue to dominate your planet’s theologies.
This God As Avenger model of Deity has never lost favor in your societies. You’ve used both personal and planetary disasters as evidence of its validity. Even in very recent times, such as when your AIDS epidemic hit, there were many people—including some religious leaders—who proclaimed life’s misfortunes to be God’s punishment for the individual or collective misbehaviors of the human race.
Humans continue to agree in numbers that there is a Requirement set down by Me, which they must meet in order to become eligible for rewards here and in heaven. They continue to agree that there is a system of Judgment by which it is determined who has met the Requirement and who has not.
On the other hand, some theologies state flatly that no one can meet the Requirement, no matter what they do. Not even if they lead a perfect life, without error, blunder or mistaken of any kind. This is, the teaching declares, because everyone is born imperfect (some religions call this Original Sin), with a blotch on their soul even before they begin.
This blotch cannot be removed by any act that the person performs, not even an act of true repentance, but only the grace of God. And God, it is taught, will not grant this grace unless the person comes to Him in a very specific way.
This teaching claims that I am a very particular God, one who will bestow the joys of heaven upon anyone who does not do as I say.
It is said that I am very stubborn about this; that it truly does not matter how good people may have been, how compassionate or generous or kind. It does not matter how sorry they may be for their offenses, and it does not matter what they have done to make amends. Indeed, it does not matter if they have made the greatest contribution to the betterment of life on the planet that the world has ever seen: If they have not come to Me by the right path, saying the right words, believing in the right religion, they cannot sit at the right hand of God the Father almighty.
Because such rightness is required, this idea could be called righteousness…
Given their belief that this is the way God has set things up between Himself and the entire human race, members of the human race have set things up precisely the same way with each other.
Taking a page out of God’s book (what’s good for Me ought, certainly, to be good for you), humans have put a “blotch” on each other even before they begin. As I have already described, they do this to others of the “wrong gender”, color, or religion. They extend it to those of the “wrong” nationality, neighborhood, political persuasion, sexual orientation, or whatever other “wrongness” they choose to create. In doing this, human beings “play God.”
Yes, it is God, you say, who taught you to prejudge like this, for it is God who put the first blotch of imperfection on your own soul—who prejudged you, even before you had a chance to prove yourself, or the other.
Pre-judgment—that is, prejudice—must, therefore, be okay, for how can what is acceptable for God not be acceptable for man?
And what is the reason for My having declared all of you imperfect at the moment of your birth? I have done it, so the teaching goes, because the first humans were bad.
So we see how you have doubled back to the first Three Illusion to justify the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth. And so it is, with each Illusion producing the next, and each new Illusion proving those preceding.
Your cultural story says that when Adam and Eve sinned, they were driven from Paradise, losing happiness and their claim to eternal life—and yours along with it. This is because I sentenced them not only to a life of limitation and struggle but to eventual death (The Fourth Illusion)—none of which they experienced before they misstep.
Other cultural stories and theologies that arose and exist on your planet do not embrace the Adam and Eve scenario but nevertheless create their own evidence of the Requirement. On this, most agree: Humans are imperfect in the eyes of God, and there is something that they have to do in order to achieve perfection—variously described as Purification, Salvation, Enlightenment … whatever.
Because you believe in human imperfection, and since you believe that you have received this characteristic from Me, you have felt perfectly free to pass it on to others. all the while you have expected the same thing of others that you have been told I expect you: perfection.
And so has it come to pass that humans have gone through life demanding perfection of those whom they, themselves, have called imperfect—namely humans.
First, they do this to themselves. This is their initial, and often most costly, error.
Then they do it to others. This is their second mistake.
They have made it impossible for either themselves or others to ever fully meet…
The Requirement.
Parents demand perfection from their imperfect children, and children demand perfection from their imperfect parents.
Citizens demand perfection from their imperfect government, and the government demands perfection from its imperfect citizens.
Churches demand perfection from their imperfect followers, and followers demand perfection from their imperfect churches.
Neighbors demand perfection from other neighbors, races from other races, nations from other nations.
Your world rushes to judge, in particular, anyone receiving the rewards—fame, power, success—that are supposed to go only to the perfect, and your world condemns those in whom it uncovers the slightest imperfection.
So fanatical have you become that you have made it virtually impossible for people to become leaders, heroes, or icons in your present day and time—thus robbing yourself of exactly what your society needs.
You have placed yourself in a trap of your own devising, unable to release yourself from the Judgments you have imposed on each other, and the Judgment you believe God has imposed on you.
Yet why should a simple observation about you make you so uncomfortable? Is simply observing that something is so really a Judgment? Couldn’t it be merely an observation? So what if someone has not met the Requirement? What does it matter?
These are the questions that humans began to ask.
Clearly, there was a flaw in The Sixth Illusion. This should revealed the idea of Judgment 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 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 Sixth Illusion that The Seventh was created.
The Illusion of Condemnation
7. The Illusion of Condemnation
This is The Seventh Illusion
CONDEMNATION EXISTS
There had to be a consequence of Judgment. If it was true that Judgment Exists, there had do be why.
Clearly, one was judged in order to determine whether one should receive the rewards of meeting the Requirement.
That’s how humans constructed it. Seeking insight, trying to find answers, you went back to your original cultural stories, and to the first Illusions on which they were based.
You told yourself that I separated you from Myself when you failed to meet My Requirement the first time.
When you were perfect, you lived in a perfect world, Paradise, and you enjoyed everlasting life. Yet when committed the Original Sin and rendered yourself imperfect, your experience of perfection in every way ended.
The most perfect thing about your perfect world was that you never died. Death did not exist. Yet with your experience of perfection ending, you accepted The Fourth Illusion as fact. Insufficiency Exists. There was not enough. There was not enough life.
So death must have been the consequence. This was the punishment for not meeting the Requirement.
But how could that be so? The advanced thinkers among you asked. Now everybody dies. So, how could death be the punishment for not meeting the Requirement? Even those who did meet the Requirement died.
Perhaps the reason for the existence of death was that there simply was Insufficiency in the universe. Insufficiency was the state of things. This you learned from The Fourth Illusion.
Yet if death was the result of Insufficiency, then what was the outcome of not meeting the Requirement?
There was something wrong here. Something did not add up. You went back to your original myth. God threw Adam and Eve out of the garden when they did not meet the Requirement. This created Disunity, which created Insufficiency, which created the Requirement.
So insufficiency was the result of God’s punishment. The punishment was separation, and Insufficiency was the result. Death is the insufficiency of Life-so, by a stretch, death was the punishment.
This how you reasoned it out. The purpose of death must have been to punish you for not meeting the Requirement. For without death, there was only what there always was—namely, Life Everlasting. And if you could live forever, what was the consequence of not having met God’s requirement?
So what always was had to be called the reward.
That’s it! You said to yourself. Everlasting Life is the reward. But now you had another conundrum. If death existed, then Life Everlasting could not.
Hmmm.
There’s a challenge here. How to create a way for both to exist—despite the fact that the two appear to be mutually exclusive.
You decided that the death of the physical body did not mean the end of you. Since the existence of death precluded the possibility of a life that goes on forever, you decided that life must go on forever after physical death.
But it life went forever after physical death, then what was the point of death?
It had no point. And so, there had to be created in your after-death experience…another outcome.
This is you called Condemnation.
It fit perfectly, when you thought about it. It fell right into line with The Second Illusion—the outcome of life is in doubt; Failure Exists!
Now you could have your cake and eat it too. Now you could have death and Everlasting Life, punishment and reward. By placing both after death, you were able to make death itself not the punishment but simply the ultimate manifestation of Insufficiency—the most impressive evidence of The Fourth Illusion.
One Illusion now really began to support the other. The interweaving was perfect. Your work was complete, and this was the reality produced by your cultural story, and by your endless creation and passing on of myths that solidified it.
Myths support the Story, and the Story supports the Illusions. This is the superstructure of your entire cosmology. These are underpinnings of all your understandings.
And they are—all of them—false.
Death does not exist. To say that death exists would be to say that you do not exist, for you are Life itself.
To say that death exists would be to say that God does not exist, for if God is everything that is (which is exactly what God is), and if all things form a unified whole (which they do), then if one thing dies, all things die—which would mean God dies. Of one thing dies, God dies.
This, of course, cannot be. Therefore, know this: Death and God are mutually exclusive. It is not possible for them to exist side by side.
If death exists, then God does not. Or, it must be concluded that God is not everything that is.
This brings up an interesting question. Is there anything that God is not?
If you believe that there is a God, but that there is something that God is not, then you can believe in a great many other things. Not only death but the Devil, and everything in between.
If, on the other hand, you believe that God is the energy of Life Itself, and that this energy never dies but merely change form, and that this Divine energy not only is in everything but is everything—that it is the energy that forms that which has taken form—then it is a small step to understand that death does not, and cannot exists.
This is what is so. I am the energy of Life. I am that which forms that which has taken form. Everything you see is God, in differing formation.
You are all God, in formation.
Or, put another way, you are God’s information.
This I have said to you before, yet now you may at last truly comprehend it.
Much of what I have said to you in our conversations is reiterated a number of times, and this is, of course, by design. You must have a firm grasp of every concept you have been given before you can grasp new concepts you would seek to understand.
Some of you will want to move faster. Some of you will say, “OK, I’ve got it already!” Yet do you really have it? Your life lived is a measure of what you have and what you do not have. It is a reflection of your deepest understandings.
If your life is an experience of constant joy and total bliss, then you truly have it. This does not mean that your life is without the conditions that can cause pain, suffering, and disappointment. It does mean that you live in joy despite those conditions. Your experience has nothing to do with conditions.
This is unconditional love, of which I have spoken many times. You may experience this with regard to another person, or with regard to Life itself.
When you have an unconditional love of Life, then you love. Life just the way it is showing up, right here, right now. This is possible only when you are “seeing the perfection.”
I tell you that everything and everyone is perfect. When you can see this, you have taken your first step toward mastery. Yet you cannot see this unless and until you understand exactly what everyone is trying to do, and the purpose for everything under heaven.
For instance, when you understand that the purpose of this dialogue’s returning to its main points repeatedly is to bring you deeper and deeper into your own understanding, and closer and closer to mastery, then you will love the repetition. You will love it because you understand the benefit. You embrace the gift.
This will bring you equanimity in this moment, and in all the moments of your life, no matter how unpleasant you might previously have judged them. You will even find equanimity in the moments before your death, for you will see your death, too, as perfect.
You will find and create equanimity even more masterfully when you understand that every moment is a dying. Every moment is the end of our live as what you were, and the beginning of your new life as what you now choose to become.
In each moment you are recreating yourself anew. You are either doing this consciously or unconsciously, with awareness or completely unaware of what is going on.
You don’t have to be facing the moment of what you have previously called “death” in order to experience more life. You can experience more life whenever you wish, in a hundred different ways, at a hundred different times—at the moment of your birth, at the moment of your death, or at moment in between.
This much I promise you: You will experience more life at the moment of your physical death—and this will do more than anything else to convince you that there is more life, that life goes on and on, and never, ever ends. In that instant will you realize that there was never not enough. There was never not enough of Life, and there was never not enough of the stuff of Life.
This will dissolve The Fourth Illusion forever. Yet that Illusion can be dissolved before the moment of our death, and that is My message here.
The way to produce more life is to experience more death. Don’t let death be a once-in-a-lifetime thing! Experience each moment of your life as a death, for that is, in truth, what it is when you re-define death as simply the end of one experience and the beginning of another.
When you do this, you can have a little funeral each moment for what just passed, for what just died. And then you can turn around and create the future, realizing that there is a future, that there is more life.
When you know this, the idea of not enough is shattered, and you can begin to use each golden Moment of Now in a new way, with new understanding and deeper appreciation, with larger awareness and greater consciousness.
And your life will never be the same, ever.
…
Once you understand that there is always more Life, you will learn to use the illusion that there is not enough Life in a way that serves you. This will allow the illusion to assist you, rather than hinder you, as you walk your path and make your way back home.
You can relax, because you know that you have more time, even though the illusion is that your time is running out. You can create with enormous efficiency, because you know that you have more Life, even though the illusion is that your life is ending. You can find peace and joy, even though the illusion is that there is not enough of whatever it is that you think you need in your life, because you know now that there is enough. There is enough time, there is enough Life, and there is enough of the stuff of life to allow you to live in happiness forever.
When you allow yourself to experience that there is enough of what you once thought there was not enough of, extraordinary changes occur in the way you live your life.
When you know that there is enough, you stop competing with others. you stop competing for love, or money, or sex, or power, or whatever it is you felt there was not enough.
The competition is over.
This alters everything. Now, instead of competing with others to get what you want, you begin to give what you want away. Instead of fighting for more love, you begin giving more love away. Instead of struggling for success, you begin making sure that everyone else is successful. Instead of grasping for power, you begin empowering others.
Instead of seeking affection, attention, sexual satisfaction, and emotional security, you find yourself being the source of it. Indeed, everything that you have ever wanted, you are now supplying to others. And the wonder of it all is that, as you give, so do you receive. You suddenly have more of whatever you are giving away.
The reason for this is clear. It has nothing to do with the fact that what you have done is “morally right,” or “spiritually enlightened,” or the “Will of God.” It has to do with a simple truth: There is no one else in the room.
There is only one of us.
Yet the Illusion says this is not so. It says that you are all separate from each other, and from Me. It says that there is not enough—not even enough of Me—and so, there is something you have to do in order to have enough. It says that you will be carefully watched to make sure that you do it. It says that if you do not do it, you will be condemned.
This does not seem to be a very loving thing to do. And yet, if there is one thing that all your cultural stories have told you, it is that God Is Love. Supreme Love. Complete Love. Unfathomable Love. Yet if God Is Love, how could Condemnation exist? How could God sentence us to everlasting torture beyond description?
These are questions that humans began to ask.
Clearly, there was a flaw in The Seventh Illusion. This should have revealed the idea of Condemnation 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 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 Seventh Illusion that Eighth Illusion was created.
This is The Seventh Illusion
CONDEMNATION EXISTS
There had to be a consequence of Judgment. If it was true that Judgment Exists, there had do be why.
Clearly, one was judged in order to determine whether one should receive the rewards of meeting the Requirement.
That’s how humans constructed it. Seeking insight, trying to find answers, you went back to your original cultural stories, and to the first Illusions on which they were based.
You told yourself that I separated you from Myself when you failed to meet My Requirement the first time.
When you were perfect, you lived in a perfect world, Paradise, and you enjoyed everlasting life. Yet when committed the Original Sin and rendered yourself imperfect, your experience of perfection in every way ended.
The most perfect thing about your perfect world was that you never died. Death did not exist. Yet with your experience of perfection ending, you accepted The Fourth Illusion as fact. Insufficiency Exists. There was not enough. There was not enough life.
So death must have been the consequence. This was the punishment for not meeting the Requirement.
But how could that be so? The advanced thinkers among you asked. Now everybody dies. So, how could death be the punishment for not meeting the Requirement? Even those who did meet the Requirement died.
Perhaps the reason for the existence of death was that there simply was Insufficiency in the universe. Insufficiency was the state of things. This you learned from The Fourth Illusion.
Yet if death was the result of Insufficiency, then what was the outcome of not meeting the Requirement?
There was something wrong here. Something did not add up. You went back to your original myth. God threw Adam and Eve out of the garden when they did not meet the Requirement. This created Disunity, which created Insufficiency, which created the Requirement.
So insufficiency was the result of God’s punishment. The punishment was separation, and Insufficiency was the result. Death is the insufficiency of Life-so, by a stretch, death was the punishment.
This how you reasoned it out. The purpose of death must have been to punish you for not meeting the Requirement. For without death, there was only what there always was—namely, Life Everlasting. And if you could live forever, what was the consequence of not having met God’s requirement?
So what always was had to be called the reward.
That’s it! You said to yourself. Everlasting Life is the reward. But now you had another conundrum. If death existed, then Life Everlasting could not.
Hmmm.
There’s a challenge here. How to create a way for both to exist—despite the fact that the two appear to be mutually exclusive.
You decided that the death of the physical body did not mean the end of you. Since the existence of death precluded the possibility of a life that goes on forever, you decided that life must go on forever after physical death.
But it life went forever after physical death, then what was the point of death?
It had no point. And so, there had to be created in your after-death experience…another outcome.
This is you called Condemnation.
It fit perfectly, when you thought about it. It fell right into line with The Second Illusion—the outcome of life is in doubt; Failure Exists!
Now you could have your cake and eat it too. Now you could have death and Everlasting Life, punishment and reward. By placing both after death, you were able to make death itself not the punishment but simply the ultimate manifestation of Insufficiency—the most impressive evidence of The Fourth Illusion.
One Illusion now really began to support the other. The interweaving was perfect. Your work was complete, and this was the reality produced by your cultural story, and by your endless creation and passing on of myths that solidified it.
Myths support the Story, and the Story supports the Illusions. This is the superstructure of your entire cosmology. These are underpinnings of all your understandings.
And they are—all of them—false.
Death does not exist. To say that death exists would be to say that you do not exist, for you are Life itself.
To say that death exists would be to say that God does not exist, for if God is everything that is (which is exactly what God is), and if all things form a unified whole (which they do), then if one thing dies, all things die—which would mean God dies. Of one thing dies, God dies.
This, of course, cannot be. Therefore, know this: Death and God are mutually exclusive. It is not possible for them to exist side by side.
If death exists, then God does not. Or, it must be concluded that God is not everything that is.
This brings up an interesting question. Is there anything that God is not?
If you believe that there is a God, but that there is something that God is not, then you can believe in a great many other things. Not only death but the Devil, and everything in between.
If, on the other hand, you believe that God is the energy of Life Itself, and that this energy never dies but merely change form, and that this Divine energy not only is in everything but is everything—that it is the energy that forms that which has taken form—then it is a small step to understand that death does not, and cannot exists.
This is what is so. I am the energy of Life. I am that which forms that which has taken form. Everything you see is God, in differing formation.
You are all God, in formation.
Or, put another way, you are God’s information.
This I have said to you before, yet now you may at last truly comprehend it.
Much of what I have said to you in our conversations is reiterated a number of times, and this is, of course, by design. You must have a firm grasp of every concept you have been given before you can grasp new concepts you would seek to understand.
Some of you will want to move faster. Some of you will say, “OK, I’ve got it already!” Yet do you really have it? Your life lived is a measure of what you have and what you do not have. It is a reflection of your deepest understandings.
If your life is an experience of constant joy and total bliss, then you truly have it. This does not mean that your life is without the conditions that can cause pain, suffering, and disappointment. It does mean that you live in joy despite those conditions. Your experience has nothing to do with conditions.
This is unconditional love, of which I have spoken many times. You may experience this with regard to another person, or with regard to Life itself.
When you have an unconditional love of Life, then you love. Life just the way it is showing up, right here, right now. This is possible only when you are “seeing the perfection.”
I tell you that everything and everyone is perfect. When you can see this, you have taken your first step toward mastery. Yet you cannot see this unless and until you understand exactly what everyone is trying to do, and the purpose for everything under heaven.
For instance, when you understand that the purpose of this dialogue’s returning to its main points repeatedly is to bring you deeper and deeper into your own understanding, and closer and closer to mastery, then you will love the repetition. You will love it because you understand the benefit. You embrace the gift.
This will bring you equanimity in this moment, and in all the moments of your life, no matter how unpleasant you might previously have judged them. You will even find equanimity in the moments before your death, for you will see your death, too, as perfect.
You will find and create equanimity even more masterfully when you understand that every moment is a dying. Every moment is the end of our live as what you were, and the beginning of your new life as what you now choose to become.
In each moment you are recreating yourself anew. You are either doing this consciously or unconsciously, with awareness or completely unaware of what is going on.
You don’t have to be facing the moment of what you have previously called “death” in order to experience more life. You can experience more life whenever you wish, in a hundred different ways, at a hundred different times—at the moment of your birth, at the moment of your death, or at moment in between.
This much I promise you: You will experience more life at the moment of your physical death—and this will do more than anything else to convince you that there is more life, that life goes on and on, and never, ever ends. In that instant will you realize that there was never not enough. There was never not enough of Life, and there was never not enough of the stuff of Life.
This will dissolve The Fourth Illusion forever. Yet that Illusion can be dissolved before the moment of our death, and that is My message here.
The way to produce more life is to experience more death. Don’t let death be a once-in-a-lifetime thing! Experience each moment of your life as a death, for that is, in truth, what it is when you re-define death as simply the end of one experience and the beginning of another.
When you do this, you can have a little funeral each moment for what just passed, for what just died. And then you can turn around and create the future, realizing that there is a future, that there is more life.
When you know this, the idea of not enough is shattered, and you can begin to use each golden Moment of Now in a new way, with new understanding and deeper appreciation, with larger awareness and greater consciousness.
And your life will never be the same, ever.
…
Once you understand that there is always more Life, you will learn to use the illusion that there is not enough Life in a way that serves you. This will allow the illusion to assist you, rather than hinder you, as you walk your path and make your way back home.
You can relax, because you know that you have more time, even though the illusion is that your time is running out. You can create with enormous efficiency, because you know that you have more Life, even though the illusion is that your life is ending. You can find peace and joy, even though the illusion is that there is not enough of whatever it is that you think you need in your life, because you know now that there is enough. There is enough time, there is enough Life, and there is enough of the stuff of life to allow you to live in happiness forever.
When you allow yourself to experience that there is enough of what you once thought there was not enough of, extraordinary changes occur in the way you live your life.
When you know that there is enough, you stop competing with others. you stop competing for love, or money, or sex, or power, or whatever it is you felt there was not enough.
The competition is over.
This alters everything. Now, instead of competing with others to get what you want, you begin to give what you want away. Instead of fighting for more love, you begin giving more love away. Instead of struggling for success, you begin making sure that everyone else is successful. Instead of grasping for power, you begin empowering others.
Instead of seeking affection, attention, sexual satisfaction, and emotional security, you find yourself being the source of it. Indeed, everything that you have ever wanted, you are now supplying to others. And the wonder of it all is that, as you give, so do you receive. You suddenly have more of whatever you are giving away.
The reason for this is clear. It has nothing to do with the fact that what you have done is “morally right,” or “spiritually enlightened,” or the “Will of God.” It has to do with a simple truth: There is no one else in the room.
There is only one of us.
Yet the Illusion says this is not so. It says that you are all separate from each other, and from Me. It says that there is not enough—not even enough of Me—and so, there is something you have to do in order to have enough. It says that you will be carefully watched to make sure that you do it. It says that if you do not do it, you will be condemned.
This does not seem to be a very loving thing to do. And yet, if there is one thing that all your cultural stories have told you, it is that God Is Love. Supreme Love. Complete Love. Unfathomable Love. Yet if God Is Love, how could Condemnation exist? How could God sentence us to everlasting torture beyond description?
These are questions that humans began to ask.
Clearly, there was a flaw in The Seventh Illusion. This should have revealed the idea of Condemnation 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 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 Seventh Illusion that Eighth Illusion was created.
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