"You are an Individuation of Divinity. There is only One Thing, and all things are part of the One Thing That Is. Life is God, expressing Itself. You are a part of life, therefore, you are a part of God. The only way this could not be true would be if Life and God were somehow separate. Such a thing is impossible."
This is a very large statement. If we look deeply into its implications, and if we make a commitment to apply the true and full meaning of this statement in our everyday life, our everyday life would change dramatically.
Imagine if you really thought that you were a part of God. I mean, not just conceptually, or theoretically, but actually. If you thought that were actually true, you have to change your thinking, no? On a lot of things. Would you agree?
For instance, you could never imagine your needing anything ever again. You would suddenly see yourself as the Source of all that you would desire, rather than the Seeker of it. And if you really experienced yourself as the Source of it, you would spend no more time trying to find it, but rather, you would spend your time trying to find a way to give it away — so that others may have it, too.
(It is not a coincidence that this is what every true master has ever done.)
Yet here is the irony: It would be in the giving of it that you would experience the having of it — for it is axiomatic in the Universe that you cannot give what you do not already know yourself to have. Therefore, the act of giving to others what you, yourself, wish to receive causes you to experience that you already have it.
The truth is, you already have all of everything that you could possibly desire — you just don’t know it. You don’t "real-ize" it. That is, you don’t "make it real" in your life, because it is your imagining that you do not possess it. Giving it away causes you to instantly understand that you possess it.
This changes your whole life.
I am here to tell you that everything your mind could imagine that your soul could possibly want, your soul already has in profusion. All you have to do to experience that is to give it away.
This is why every religion on the face of the earth has its own version of the Golden Rule. Do, they all say, unto others as you would have it done unto you. Not because this is a nice thing to do. Not because God wants us to do this. No. Do unto others as you would have it done unto you because this is how the Universe works. This is the mechanism of life. It is how everything happens. What we send out, we get back. Because we are God.
And that is just one way that Who You Are can and will change your life, if you decide that Who You Are is Divinity Individuated. Next week, a look at another aspect of this. If you believe that Who You Are is God, "particularized", then you will necessarily conclude that it is impossible for you to be damaged or hurt in any way. And THAT has extraordinary implications for your life…
~Neale Donald Walsch
*I borrowed this from Peter Rollins through Mike Leaptrott.
"The first thing we have to give up (on this journey) is the pursuit of a singular answer (to a 2000 year old set of questions)."
"Love is God’s essence. Scripture says that God is just and merciful, but it does not say that God is JUSTICE itself or mercy itself. But, it does say that God IS LOVE, not just a LOVER." -Peter Kreeft
Do you comprehend that? ………Do you?
When inconsistencies in text, attitudes, and distortions of stories occur in the scriptures of the Old Testament, many Christians will quickly remind you that Christ put an end to the first dispensation. Hence, the creation of the New Testament. They will note that we worship on Sunday, not Saturday, that we do not follow Kosher laws, that we have outlawed slavery, and no longer believe in polygamy. So clearly the words of the Bible are not the unchanging "Word of God".
However, when these believing Christians speak of the New Testament, the specifically Christian "scriptures", their defense of the inerrancy, and literal authenticity of this dispensation suddenly stiffens exponentially. This testament is the very words of Jesus, the exact writings of Paul and the other disciples. These words must be trustworthy, inerrant, and infallible.
This attitude towards the "Christian" parts of the Bible ignores important, inevitable questions. Of the four gospels, Luke and Mark do not claim the authority of being apostles. Neither is listed by any gospel writer as being among the chosen Twelve. So their material cannot be of the eyewitness variety. Also, the question must be raised as to whether we have the actual words of Jesus in any of the gospels. We know, of course, that the words we have in the New Testament are not in the language which Jesus spoke. There is no real way to discover how much of the needs of the community at the time the gospels were written proved to be stronger than the historicity of the words themselves. There are hints in Matthew and John of these "needs", but no way at present to assess the strength of these "needs".
The fact that the gospels often do not harmonize has certainly been previously recognized and is probably a good reason for the rise of the theory of divine inspiration to counter the threat to inerrancy claims. The divine inspiration theory suggests that the writers (scribes) who wrote were directed by the Holy Spirit. Therefore, whatever disharmony that has been found to exist, is the result of human error.
This argument is not a helpful one. The inerrantists do not normally employ this argument until their backs are against the wall. Any errors can then be attributed to weaker human error, not to God.This idea sounds good, but it doesn’t hold water.
To our knowledge, Jesus never wrote a single word except for the time he wrote in the dirt on the occasion of the adulterous woman. Jesus was a teacher, an oral communicator. No tape recorders, no words were taken down at the time, and a significant gap in time from the actual event to the time when his spoken words were actually written down, and translated from spoken Aramaic to the written Greek . Therefore, just how authoritative or secure can one be in claiming literal truth for the New Testament. Inerrancy is not a viable option for the serious Christian, even when the claim is narrowed to the New Testament only.
Christian New Testament writings reflect the issues which were prominent when the writing took place and the memory of events in the past which the writers wanted to transmit. As is well known, present history can temper and even modify past memory.
If we deal with this wealth of material of the New Testament honestly, we are compelled to journey far more deeply into the meaning of biblical truth than most people of this generation of Christians, either fundamentalist or liberal, seem willing to do. However, if you seek your truth, it is something you must be willing to do.
In my initial research on early Christianity which I undertook some five years ago, I entered a study of the gospels. One of the facts that made an impression on me was the very different character of the Gospel of John. The New American Bible describes the Gospel of John as "highly literary and symbolic" and "does not follow the same order or reproduce the same stories" as the synoptic gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke. John is full of "signs" and cryptic jargon.
All the Sacred books of the New Testament were written in the vernacular Greek, an Alexandrian dialect, called koine. This language was spoken, or at least understood, by all the educated inhabitants of the Eastern and Western parts of the Roman Empire. It was the language of all the cultured people of that time. The Evangelists wrote in Greek rather than in Hebrew…at that time only the capital letters of the Greek alphabet were used in writing, without diacritics, punctuation, or separation between words. Lower case letters appeared only in the ninth century, together with spacing between words. Punctuation marks were introduced only with the invention of the printing press in the 15th century. The present separations of chapters was introduced by Cardinal Hugo in the 13th century…
The Gospel of John to Christians is the most important of all. Here is the only place Jesus Himself claims divinity. Here Jesus is a full-blown savior god in the way an educated Greek scholar could understand. This results in a gospel that seems to be intended for the well-educated, Hellenistic-minded followers of the way -exclusivity . Here was the platonic Logos (a form of it) acceptable to the Greek mind. The troubling part is this "John" was no simple fisherman from Galilee. Even the church admits his advanced age (90) and the late dates of his writings. (90+ CE) His audience was not Jews and the book makes the remark "the Jews" at least 64 times. The author (or authors) also wrote of himself as the "disciple whom Jesus loved." (21:20) In the other gospels, John is mentioned in passing and while mentioned only once as "a pillar" of the Church along with James and Peter in Paul’s Epistles (Galatians 2:9) in passing while John doesn’t mention Paul at all.
It appears the writer (or writers) is a Greek convert and is obviously anti-semitic. This is based on the late date of writing; the heavy use of scholarly Greek, and the way the writer uses terms such as "the Jews". He never met Jesus anymore than Paul did. He is a virulent anti-Semite that hates Jews and John is the most anti-Semitic book in the New Testament. Most of modern-day fundamentalism’s dislike/distrust/hatred of Jews may be the result of the picture presented in John. Perhaps this book should be placed at the end, after The Revelation or with I, II, and III John. It should never have been placed between Luke and Acts (originally one work). There is also a Gnostic influence here as well. It appears that Part 2 of John was removed. It was just too Gnostic!
The Gospel of John is the most interesting of the gospels. It contains no geneology and no references to the "humanness" of Jesus as do the synoptics. John was most probably written by more than one author, possibly several authors. It certainly appears that Chapter 21 was added quite a bit later than the rest of the gospel (perhaps by a Johannine community). As an example, compare John 20:30 & John 21:25. These two verses express almost the same idea. Chapter 20 ends the Gospel of John very naturally only to have Chapter 21 suddenly reopen the story and add more stories and finally ending the book in almost the same manner as had Chapter 20.
There are certain incongruities about this gospel that clamor for more research. Some being:
The substantial differences between John and the synoptics
The author or author’s treatment of traditional material leaves us less confident about the veracity of this gospel.
The traditional attribution of this gospel to John, the son of Zebedee is most probably wrong.
The gospel was written late, probably between 90-140 CE.
Still, the Gospel of John attracts us perhaps more than the others for the very different picture of Jesus that is present there.
*Material from various sources on the Gospel of John
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