This chapter deals with the theological aspects of the spiritual world. For those readers who came here looking for an entirely secular explanation of ghosts, exorcism, and psychic phenomena, please remember that I began my own quest to understand these things as an avowed secularist myself. However, I was never able to avoid the question of God.
About God
God is not a “person”. God is not a man. God is not a “being”. God is pure consciousness! God does not live in any particular part of heaven. God “permeates” the spiritual and material worlds. God is really that divine “spark” that lies within you that makes you who you are. I use the conventional pronoun “He”, not to denote gender, for God has none, but simply to denote His parenthood of human consciousness. God has none of the petty desires or needs that we, as members of the human race, are subject to. He doesn’t care if you believe in him or not. He does not demand that we “worship” him! (It doesn’t seem likely that an entity powerful enough to create a universe of matter and populate it with living souls would have any self-esteem issues.)
God isn’t interested in your sex life. He doesn’t care about all the things we argue about and see on the evening news. Sex, politics and the regulation of our civil society are important to US as human beings. The stability and future of our civilization depends upon how we handle them. But God put us here to work these things out for ourselves. Civilizations come, and civilizations go, but people and their relationships with God endure.
In the words of author Stafford Betty, humility, kindness, honesty, courage, forgiveness, self-control, dedication to purpose and self-sacrifice within your own life are the golden traits that God most appreciates. Please note that every one of these traits spring from the universal good we call love!
God is not Justice. Justice is a human invention and infers both reward and punishment. Neither of these apply in the world of spirit. There is NO JUDGEMENT in Spirit except that which individual soul applies to itself. This may seem counterintuitive. After all, as you will learn in chapter 8 (The physics of Heaven), some souls rise into the higher realms where their spiritual lives are challenging but bright and pleasant while others sink into hellish realms where the conditions are increasingly dark and unhappy. You can be forgiven for thinking that some gatekeeper, or God Himself has cast the vicious into their hells while the virtuous and good are escorted into eternal happiness. This is not the case! The position to which any soul first comes to rest in the spiritual realm is a function of that soul’s spiritual buoyancy and spiritual frequency, both of which which were acquired while living its former life in matter. Souls that have lead good lives rise like a hot air balloon, while those who have lead dark lives sink like a stone. It’s a natural process and not something mandated by God or some star chamber of righteous angels. God created the spiritual “physics” that applies to the spiritual world. It is this spiritual physics that determines the structure of heaven, and it is this spiritual physics that causes the separation of the dark spirits from the bright.
You cannot understand ghosts, demons, angels, spirits or human souls without understanding why they exist in the first place. Without God there would be no spiritual world, and thus no ghosts; no demons; no angels; no Heaven; no Hell, and there would be no human souls to energize our material bodies. Even if a spiritual world could exist with no God, without Him, it would fall to chaos, for there would be no spiritual physics to separate the bright spirits from the dark.
Many spirits speak of meeting or perceiving God once they have crossed into the “mainstream” Heaven, but none speak of seeing Him as an individual person. He is not, after all, a material being. Spirits speak of a “presence”, an all-pervading atmosphere of love and wisdom. He is pure consciousness! He doesn’t speak in words, but rather in feelings and images. For them, He is present in every aspect of their existence. The famous medium Jane Roberts channeled the following from the spirit of William James, perhaps the most famous American philosopher of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Here, the deceased James is speaking of God from his own vantage point in the world of Spirit:
Nowhere have I encountered the furnishings of a conventional heaven, or glimpsed the face of God. On the other hand, certainly I dwell in a psychological heaven by earth’s standards, for everywhere I sense a presence that is well-intentioned, gentle yet powerful, and all-knowing. This seems to be a psychological presence and of such stunning parts, however, that I can point to no one place and identify it as being there in contrast to being somewhere else. At the risk of understating, this presence seems more like a loving condition that permeates existence, and from which all existence springs.
Biblical revelations aside, God does not speak aloud to anyone, living or spirit. Any statement from a psychic, mystic or anyone else that implies that he or she has received instructions direct from God is false.
People who enrich the lives of others by increasing the earthly supply of love, kindness, honesty, courage, forgiveness, compassion, wisdom, knowledge, beauty and freedom are inching closer to God just living their lives and doing their jobs. God is not vengeful, or prone to anger. Vengeance and anger are the provinces of PEOPLE motivated by darkness. These qualities have prominent places in ancient religion and within the world of matter, but in the world of Spirit, they exist only in those realms occupied by the spirits who have committed very evil acts and are emptied of God’s light.
God does, however, care about our individual personal behavior insofar as it affects other people. He created us for a purpose, and how each of us develops as a human being is of prime importance to Him. His two major rules are that we treat each other as we ourselves would want to be treated, and that we learn from our mistakes.
God is not a static entity. He is a living being and continues to grow through us. Insofar as we are all tiny sparks struck off from His body, each and every one of us is His child, and His parenthood of us means that He is a personal god. You do not need a church, a temple or a clergyman to intervene on your behalf. You can speak to God directly. And God speaks back to you! Not through words muttered into your ears, but subtly, through feelings, sensations and through that tiny voice you call your conscience.
He also speaks to you through the voices and actions of other people. Neither you nor the other person might realize at the time that there was any form of divine support, but sometime later, even years later you may think back to that event and realize that had it not been for that incident, your life might have been drastically different.
God is the embodiment of all positive attributes. He is the sum of all the souls who have ever lived and ever will live. He is the opposite of chaos, the opposite of evil, the opposite of anarchy. He is best described as the distillation of wisdom and love.
God gives us something beyond trivialities to strive for. Without God, there can be no serious purpose behind human existence other than striving to overcome our existential suffering so we can enjoy “sex, drugs and rock n roll.”
Theodicy-Does God cause bad things to happen to good people?>>>