There is no religious belief that, once you know it or say you believe it, will magically unlock the door to God. So, I would advise you to remember this: the impulse you feel to know God…that impulse IS God.  But, having said that, don’t get too attached even to the impulse because, the truth is, God is more than any impulse you feel.  I realize it sounds like I’m speaking from both sides of the mouth and I suppose I am.  It’s a great paradox, but I know of no other way to put it.

Start with the impulse because that’s closer to the truth of who God is than anything else.  By giving your attention to the impulse, it’ll grow and expand.  There is nothing more you need to do in order to know God.  God’s presence is not the reward you get for believing the “right” things.  If you will follow the inner longing you feel to know the living God, you will become conscious of God.  Just try this and see what happens.

Albert Einstein once said, “I want to know the mind of God; everthing else are details.” I have often wondered whether he recognized the significance of his own words. The desire to know the mind of God is to know God. There is no need to make a problem of this. Yet, most religions do. God wants to be known. Why would she make it difficult? It is religion that complicates knowing God, saddling it with a carload of beliefs as onerous as the proverbial Sears catalogue. The prophet Jeremiah put it this way: “I (meaning, God) will put my law within them—write it on their hearts…they’ll know me firsthand.”[1]  It doesn’t get much simpler than this.

The prophet Isaiah once said, “Seek the Lord while he may be found…”[2] On the surface, that sounds like good advice to give a spiritual seeker. But, upon closer examination, it’s not so wise either. To seek God implies effort, even struggle and neither is necessary in God’s Kingdom.

It is true Jesus said, “Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you.”[3]  But, these words have been greatly misunderstood by Christians, as have most of the other words attributed to him. Even very devoted followers of the Christian path assume Jesus meant we are to ask, seek, and knock, and continue doing so, as if there’s some kind of Divine resistance which can only be overcome by our persistence.

To the contrary. God desires that you know her, which is precisely why you feel the inner impulse to pursue him. So, again, start with the inner impulse. Know that, as you do, you have met with Mystery already. St. Francis of Assisi put it this way, “What you are looking for is what is looking!” Jesus provides his own clarification, too:

“Don’t bargain with God. Be direct…This isn’t a cat-and-mouse, hide-and-seek game we’re in. If your child asks for bread, do you trick him with sawdust? If he asks for fish, do you scare him with a live snake on his plate?…You wouldn’t think of such a thing. You’re at least decent to your own children. So don’t you think that God who conceived you in love will be even better?[4]

There’s a line in A Course in Miracles that goes, “When we are ready, God will take the final step in our return to him.” When you ask, seek, and knock, it is not to overcome God’s resistance. You ask to know God, and keep asking, you seek to know God, and keep seeking only because, as you do, the result is an ever-expanding awareness of this Presence you know already. That is to say, the asking, seeking, and knocking are the spiritual practices necessary to grow in God-consciousness…to live a God-realized life.

You can make knowing God a struggle, if you’d like.  I did for most of my early adult life.  What’s more, most religions, including Christianity, have succeeded in making a personal relationship with God into a problem. Know, however, that it takes no effort to know God. Yet, if you ask many religious people about their faith experience, they will say things like, “I’m trying to be a good follower.” This is so unnecessary, as I gratefully learned on the Sunday afternoon of my own awakening.

Being Christian is simply the recognition of and response to the inclination you feel to know God.  That’s it.  Everything else are details.  Take a step today toward what you feel, and you will likely discover that what you feel is the God you wish to know.  Add anything else and you’ve made it into a religion and not a relationship.  Responding to the inclination brings you face-to-face with Inspiration.  To be inspired is to be “in-Spirit,” a word made up of two others, the prefix in and the root word spirare meaning “to breathe.” Hence, to know God is as simple, indeed as natural, as “breathing in.” Whether you are conscious of it or not, with every inhalation, you are literally breathing in the presence of God.  Remind yourself of this today and celebrate.

This is the Mystery that is God, the miracle of God’s grace: the desire you feel to know God can only mean one thing:  a spiritual awakening has occurred in you already

1. I know who I am.

For most of my adult life, I’m pretty certain I did not. For example, my identity was entangled with a variety of ego-identifications: my ministerial “calling”; the size of the church I served — the bigger, the better, of course, as size added an illusory significance to the ego, the “little me,” as Eckhart Tolle calls it; the titles I earned; the successes I achieved; the clothes I wore; and so forth. I even made the mistake of thinking I was my body, as well as the voice(s) in the head.

But none of these things are really who you are. You are not your body, for example, as a recent news report served as a good reminder. It was the story of Charla Nash

The question occurred to me, “Is Nash still Nash even though she no longer looks like Nash?” Of course! Why? Because Nash is not her body. She is not her thoughts either. And neither are we.

I came to this awareness soon after a series of life-altering events which I describe in my book – events like the sudden and unexpected death of my father and, a few months later, the breakup of a 20-year marriage. I became increasingly disillusioned, even depressed. Much of what I had been taught to believe no longer seemed to work. Even the stuff I had been saying I believed, I quietly questioned but could no longer accept or pretend to believe.

I was left with no alternative but to leave the ministry and everything I had ever known. However, I left empty-handed, in terms of all the previous points of self-reference. I can remember many nights staring at the ceiling and wondering, “Who the hell am I?” The best answer I could come up with was, “I have no clue.” Yet (and this is the blessed but inexplicable part of it all), the emerging awareness that I was clueless as to who I was, instead of incarcerating me in some kind of dark cell of despair, opened for me as a door into greater freedom and inner peace. I later learned, when you no longer know who you are, you are likely getting closer to who you really are.

2. I know why I’m here.

I suspect one of the biggest disservices our culture has perpetrated on people — and by “our culture” I refer to virtually every religious culture — is to teach people that they showed up for some grand purpose. That you, and only you, can fulfill that purpose. Furthermore, your immediate purpose in life is to figure out what that grand purpose is and then, of course, do it.

There’s only one problem with this religious indoctrination: It isn’t so. Which is why most people go through life frustrated and wondering what they’re here to do. I am not suggesting, however, that each of us has no special gifts and a career or calling to match. But the supreme purpose for your existence has nothing to do with your calling or your career.

So what is life’s purpose? A grand enterprise shared by all humanity, it is the achievement of God-consciousness or Divine awareness. “Achieve” may not be the right word, as it implies effort. The real truth is, to borrow the words of one of the characters in Deepak Chopra’s, novel “Why Is God Laughing?”: “God is not difficult to find; God is impossible to avoid.” In other words, we show up to know God. You may not feel as if you do but that’s because you’ve either forgotten you do or, like many, you’ve been religiously indoctrinated to believe you don’t.

I suspect this may be the church’s greatest error in the last two centuries. Virtually every Christian tradition I know talks about the grace of God but, when it comes to actual practice, these same traditions saddle souls with stuff they must “do” to know God — stuff that’s as onerous as the proverbial Sears catalogue. By a horrendous act of religious reductionism, grace has been made into laws that, if strictly followed, will make it possible for one to know the divine. It seldom does, however, which explains why scores of people have left organized religion only to seek another spiritual path.

Now, I’m fully aware that many readers have had their fill of the God-talk. So, if you are more comfortable calling life’s purpose the process of becoming self-aware, so be it. Or maybe you’re more comfortable with what my favorite French writer, and self-proclaimed atheist, Andre Comte-Sponville calls “the oceanic feeling,” or “spontaneous mysticism.” In his beautifully written “The Little Book of Atheistic Spirituality,” Comte-Sponville coined a word – entasy – to describe his own spiritual transformation.

My point is simply this: the purpose of human existence is to experience the inexplicable. I call that inexplicableness God. You call it whatever you wish. Or call it nothing at all. But when you’ve experienced what Christians call “salvation,” what easterners call “enlightenment” or what New Agers call an “awakening,” then for you, the arguing about religion, spirituality or even the existence of God is just interesting debate. Furthermore, the longing for meaning, joy and happiness — what everyone desires but few seem to find — well, that ends, too. You are already what religious cultures tend to teach you must attain through obedience or effort.

You can spend your life seeking to “do” something so as to create within yourself the illusory sense of self-importance. Or you can relax in the awareness you are everything already. The former will give you satisfaction, but I assure you it will be short-lived. The latter will give you satisfaction, too. And it is enduring.

Until the next post, peace.

One day, the rabbi took Jacob aside and said, “Jacob, why do you suppose Christians make it a habit to tap the side of the saltshaker while Jews always tap the bottom?”

Certain the rabbi was going to join him in ridicule of Christians, Jacob was more than ready to play along. “No, Rabbi, I do not know. Why do Jews tap the bottom of the saltshaker while Christians tap the side?”

“To get the salt out!” answered the rabbi.

There are many ways to tap the shaker, but the purpose is the same—to dispense salt.

Ask the followers of almost any religion what is the purpose of their religion and they will say the purpose is to guide them to know God. They may use different words or ideas to say this, but it is essentially the same purpose. Even in religions like Buddhism, where there is no belief in a Higher Power per se, they still speak sometimes of the “Universal Mind.” What is that, if it is not the same Reality toward which the words and names that others use point, too?

Similarly, a spiritual seeker in Christianity is really no different than a spiritual seeker in Islam, Taoism, or Hinduism. All want to know God, the higher self, or to reach what Hindus call Samadhi, which is “bliss consciousness,” what Christians may call, “salvation,” or “God-realization.” In other words, everyone wants to be complete, to be happy, and to alleviate human suffering, which The Buddha showed us is mostly self-induced anyway. In other words, we all seek the same thing. We just know it in different ways, based on our cultural, social, ethnic, and religious conditioning.  Since everyone is seeking God-consciousness, sometimes confused with “happiness,” then you can understand that every religion has evolved to help facilitate this purpose.

Yet, throughout the history of humanity, religion has been the prime cause of most human division and human and planetary destruction. If this is not mad, what is it?  Throughout the history of my own tradition, for example, Christianity has been either a Divine blessing or a demonic curse. Embarrassing to admit, it has been the latter far too often. If the human species is going to survive, it is imperative we make room on this little planet for everyone—that we have respect for all religions, as well as those who choose to have no religion.

Even as I say all of this, however, I realize, until a person wakes up, this will likely be more than they can accept. Until they experience a shift in consciousness, making it possible for them to see everyone and everything through lenses clear of conditioned thinking, then they will resist virtually everything I written so far. This is true whether they be a Christian, Muslim, or atheist.

If I have learned anything over the years, it is that every religion, in its own unique way, has something important to teach us about Ultimate Reality, or what I like to call the sacred art of knowing God. Even those who profess no religion at all may be able to teach the rest of us something about this Universal Intelligence, Consciousness, Being Itself or, as I am accustomed to saying, God.

I love the story I read of a Frenchman who approached the Dalai Lama after he had given a lecture in a city in France.  He said, “Your Holiness, I loved your words and I’ve decided I want to convert to Buddhism.”

In great wisdom, however, the Dalai Lama answered, “Why Buddhism?  Why would you wish to convert to this religious tradition?  You are in France.  In France, you have Christianity.  There’s nothing wrong with Christianity!”[1]

There isn’t, is there?  No more so than there’s anything wrong with the myriad of other paths one might follow toward the evolution of Divine consciousness.  It’s time humanity stops the insanity of thinking “We’re right, you’re wrong!” “We’re in, you’re out!” “We’re the chosen ones, you’re not!”

Just as is everyone,

You were born to walk with God;

So, why would you walk alone?