For most of us the quest for peace of mind in an ever-changing world is an on-and-off endeavor. Caught up in the whirl of our daily lives, we seldom have or make the time to sit with our thoughts and ponder the questions we want most to have answered. Nevertheless, those questions return to us often, and in the still moments we cannot help but ask ourselves if our lives have meaning and if we are headed in the right direction. Amidst all the riches, demands and distractions that overwhelm us, are we contributing and making of ourselves all that we can? Isn’t there something more?
Having been reared with the worn out stories of mainstream religion, many of us now find the old teachings inadequate, even insufferable. As children we worshipped in accordance with the dictates of bronze age teachers who had never seen anything as sophisticated as a safety pin. Now we know that there are groups all over the globe who have their own stories to explain the origins of life, the meaning of our personal lives and how we should behave. Most of these accounts are incomprehensible, most conflict with others; in fact, most of them are self-conflicting. Virtually all of them grew out of violent tribal paradigms and were birthed by people whose lives bear no resemblance to our own. Yet all of them claim to be right and all claim to be divine. Where does that leave thoughtful individuals?
It leaves us at a new point of departure embarking upon a modern spiritual journey to explore our own complex moral nature. We Are God is about how we can fulfill our greatest potential and find joy amidst the sorrows of the world. It points us toward a new understanding of spirituality free from the sagging underpinnings of man-made gods, dogma, scriptures and priestcrafts. Our nature is not a gift from beyond us to be molded to conform to the capricious desires of an unfathomable diety. It is simply who we are.
We Are God speaks to us of an emerging and relevant spirituality that is purely individual, a new mysticism for modern men and women who wish to nurture the depths of their consciousness via an inward path that is unsupervised by anyone else. And because the foundation of the inward journey is the capacity to love ourselves and others this little treatise on love couldn’t be more timely. Most of us already know the importance of love in a spiritual life because we have experienced joy and heartaches in intimate relationships with lovers, children, friends and family. This teaching on love expands our understanding of the meaning of our lives and the importance of our struggles. It tells us to examine ourselves and our past without fear or regret and teaches us how to cull valuable lessons from our past, even our painful past.
These teachings on love do not promote renunciation of the world we live in. They offer a blueprint to guide us in building the life we wish to lead in the world. They explain the necessity of laying a spiritual groundwork for personal integration with divine consciousness by perfecting our capacity to love. And while there is no disparate being we could accurately describe as God, there are many godly attributes that we can perfect in our personal character which will foster our development and enable us to better love and be loved.
The survival of consciousness after death is a primary teaching of We Are God. Each of us is an individual manifestation of universal consciousness with a drive toward reunification with every other fragmented manifestation. We seek wholeness, not only within ourselves, but through union with one another. Learning to recognize the divinity within us is part and parcel with learning to recognize the divinity in others. The teaching that we are integral with eternal consciousness shows us an infinite array of new possibilities in examining and making our own choices.
The assurance that our lives are unfolding more or less as they should is deeply comforting because we live in a world all too eager to point out our frailties and shortcomings. Nevertheless, we must not let ourselves off the hook or sink into complacency but exert ourselves in contributing in every way we can. We are not here to excuse ourselves or seek the easy way. We are here to serve, to grow and learn. We are here to evaluate at every step along the way as we cut our path through the jungle of our lives as only we can.
As we move forward we can lay aside archaic notions of the spiritual life with its unreasonable demands, its whimsical promises to the virtuous and its fierce and fiery visions of the future of those who stray. We can exalt the possibilities of human nature, rejoice in its potential and acknowledge the stunning truths of science and psychology. Let us see the mystical possibilities in the insights of philosophy, art and history.
It is essential to our spiritual and moral development that we see the antiquated and obsolete religious forms for what they are and acknowledge that they do not serve our interests nor promote our growth. If we continue to cling to beliefs that stone and iron age minds conjured to make sense of their world we may neglect an opportunity to let reason guide our spiritual evolution. So while we repudiate the ancient tales of magic, let us honor our yearning for mystery and transcendence, for we are after all, both human and divine.
