FEATURES
Many western
religions resist this
personal experience
of unity, fearing that
the mystically-inclined
individual will defy
religious authority or
steal its power: who
needs religion when
you have God?
religious authority or steal its power: who needs
religion when you have God?
Next, we need to silence thought, because thinking
maintains this separation from God. Thinking creates duality - the split between what is and what
we think about what is. Thinking invariably creates
a lens through which we interpret reality. Instead of
seeing a tree, we name and describe it, talk about
it, and stop seeing it altogether. “If you’ve seen one
redwood, you’ve seen them all,” a famous president once said. This mindless aphorism is simply
untrue.
So how do we experience our oneness with God?
If we are of the same substance as God, then the
most direct way to experience the divine is to experience our own nature directly and to realize
that our being is God’s Being and our consciousness is God’s Consciousness. I am what God is. This
does not include experiencing ideas and feelings,
because both are constructed from thought forms
creating more duality. Every emotion arises as a
consequence of what you think is happening. Experiencing the substance of God means experiencing consciousness and being directly and without
thought.
The New Thought movement views our thoughts
as divine, too, and encourages us to use them in
creating a new kind of world. There is much of value in this approach as long as ego doesn’t start
55 | NEW CONSCIOUSNESS REVIEW
manipulating outcomes to serve its own grandiosity. In this new consciousness-without-thought, we
discover that the world is already infinitely beautiful, precious, and complete just as it is - we make
it ugly with out dissatisfaction and judgment. The
mystics have been showing us this for eons. It’s
time to listen.
Now here’s a suggestion that will help you make
this shift into a consciousness beyond thought.
People generally have incredible difficulty slowing,
stopping, or releasing their thoughts. This is why
meditation is frustrating for so many. But when
you shift into sensory awareness, thinking stops by
itself! Imagine, for example, that you are looking
for faces in a random display of dots, or carefully
painting trim, or standing on one foot on a balance
beam. You can’t think and perform any of these
tasks. So if you want to experience God directly,
intensify and focus your perception directly on
the sensory experience of your own being or consciousness. Just stay there. The only thought that
might be helpful in this exercise is to remember
that you are now experiencing God!
This experiential shift from cognition to perception, from thinking to sensing, will lead to
the next stage of human spiritual evolution
because it allows us to experience God as the
very source of our own consciousness, being, and behavior. More than that, we fill with
divine energies that will transform us. Conscious Being changes our very structure and
function right down to the molecular level.
It will saturate, pervade, suffuse and remake
you if your practice this kind of direct perception and if you let the new you happen. I t is up
to you. But remember, the key is to experience
God as what you already are, an experience
that will both transform and divinize you.