Extrapolating from the Gospel That We are God: Neville Goddard's "This is Your Future"--We Inspired the Writing of the Scriptures as a Success Manual for Ourselves

Neville Goddard delved into the Bible to find out what it really says, because he found that God is REAL. I think we are attracted to him because we haven't found a man more "into" the Bible in a balanced way than Neville.

The spiritually anchoring event in Neville's life was his trip to Barbados in 1933. His family had just left from visiting him in New York, and he found that he wanted to go back to Barbados. But he could not, because he was flat broke in the Great Depression. His friend and mentor, Abdullah, said to him, "You are in Barbados," which was ridiculous, because he was obviously in New York.

Abdullah was teaching Neville and others Kabbalah, the mystical approach to Judaism. If Neville believed that what he wanted was truly had--that he was in Barbados--then that seed would mature and he would be in Barbados. The exercise got religious in that the Kabbalah's mystical approach to Judaism WORKED, and Neville realized that thus he had found God, the power behind the working, and it--God--was one with his imagining. Neville began a life-long endeavor was to find out what the Bible MEANS by what is says.

Which brings me to extrapolation. If the Gospel of Moses is true, that we are God, that God himself lives IN us and is living in us AS us, and that the imagining by which he becomes in our dimension is OUR imagining, what does that extrapolate to?  What is the logical conclusion of this arrangement? to where does it lead?

All of our answers have to match up with the Bible. Many of us read and listen to Neville's lectures over and over because he studied so much and had such great insights that his knowledge of the Word just poured out through everything he said. And what he revealed to be the Bible's true meaning isn't anything like what we have understood to be its meaning. We "just never thought of it like that," never saw it that way before.

It is amazing to me how big the network of ideas is for such a little truth. What little truth? When you hold the Bible in your hands, you hold the explanation of one simple, central, wordless truth: "No eye has seen and no ear has heard, and the human heart has not perceived, that which Allaha has consecrated for those who have mercy on him" (1 Corinthians 2: 9; Victor Alexander translation from the ancient Aramaic).

The one, simple, central, wordless truth of the Bible is the Gospel of Moses: that what the Ineffable has consecrated for those who have mercy on him . . . is to be Itself.

We are the work of the Gospel, which is that the Ineffable decided to make a manifest-form, a duplicate extension its invisible No-thing self.

A duplicate extension of the original. Not a nearly-like, not a 99.99% like, but a DUPLICATE: ITS INEFFABLE SELF IN FULL MANIFESTATION. THAT is the simple, central truth of the Gospel--that our destiny is to be the Ineffable . . . FULL ON!

"God," being the Heavens and the Earth, was created by the Ineffable to become as It was before the beginning.

THAT is the idea we extrapolate from: the nature and character of the Ineffable is ours; the power and wisdom of the Ineffable is ours; the destiny of the Christ is ours; the faithfulness of the Ineffable is ours; the purpose and work of the Ineffable is ours; the joy and satisfaction of the Ineffable is ours; the power of creating by intelligent use of our will (imagining) is ours.

It does not look like that right now? For us to get to the Paradise of being the full and mature manifestation of the Ineffable, we NEEDED to come for a season to this sphere of death. We will never be more "dead" than we are right now! Here we have the complete forgetting of our being God. We have the experience of amnesia, a virtual coma of ignorance. By this we learn individuality and independence.

Knowing that we were going to go through this, we gave ourselves great and precious promises to believe on in faith, so that when the attitude of faith WORKS, we will know that we have found GOD to be one with our attitude of mind.

So, let us extrapolate--our attitude or "state" of mind as the Ineffable IN THE PRESENT becomes matured as manifest reality IN THE FUTURE.

What, then, if we take control of our minds and purposely create attitudes or states of minds now that we want to enjoy in manifestation later. What if we HAVE a happy heart? What if we FEEL satisfied? What if we ARE grateful? What if we FEEL love and pride and acceptance?

I recently read Hudson Taylor's Spiritual Secret, and in it is the story of a lone British missionary in distant station in China in the 1800's. He had run out of funds, and his cook had run out of funds, and they had no resources or reserves. Well, they did have one resource left in reserve: he said, "Trust in the Lord and do good; so shalt thou dwell in the land, and verily thou shalt be fed" (Psalms 37: 3), and he went out to preach.

Frustrated by a long delay in the canal system of China, the man bringing the missionary's funds decided to leave the boat and to walk the remaining miles to the station. Doing this he arrived days earlier; in fact, on the day the missionary had come to his last

It worked.

Rejoice and believe and trust . . . to have mercy on "him." Him who? On God, who is everyone around us! Let us imagine well for everyone! Do well for everyone! Share the Gospel! Be noble and loving and gracious and happy, for by mercy we are bringing our destiny to fruition, for the Father is Merciful. THAT is what the name/nature 'Abraham' means: God is Merciful. And WE are God!

Stop Misreading the Bible: Genesis 1: 1 Says That God was Created, and wasn't

If I understand what Victor Alexander says about the Aramaic word 'brasheeth' ("in the beginning") correctly, and if the Aramaic 'brasheeth' is equivalent to the Hebrew 'beresheeth' ("in the beginning"), then in the very first sentence of the Bible it says that God was created by that which was "before the beginning." See Victor's comment at http://v-a.com/bible/john_1_1-5_audio.html

Either of these words could be translated as "the Beginning," giving us: "(That which was before) The Beginning created God--the Heavens and the Earth." The only thing that was before the beginning, which therefore was the beginning, was the Ineffable.

The "Heavens" of this "created" God included myriads of spirits, consciousnesses which altogether agree as one. This is the point of Deuteronomy 6: 4: the God created as YHWH is an e'had--myriads of consciousnesses in agreement. Thus "God" in Genesis 1: 1 was the e'had--the myriads who said, "Let us make man in our image."

One ineffable Most High over myriads of spirits who are "flames of fire" = 'ELOHIM': "Over the flames" (the literal meaning of Elohim, says Alexander).

God, of course, was not created as we think of creation. We think of creation as some sort of magical popping into existence. God was imagined, and is being imagined, by the intelligence of the Ineffable. The Ineffable's imagining is an emanation of Itself. The myriads of spirits that are God--the e'had--are the Ineffable by virtue of being Its intelligence's manifestation.

How interesting that "God" became us just as the Ineffable became God--by imagining.

There is no "other" from the Ineffable. There is only one true God: the ineffable Most High, the myriads of spirits of God, and us. We are all one being. And we are doing Its will by becoming as "the Ineffable" Itself.

Instead of boasting that they are Not of This World (NTW), Christians should be promulgating that "There Is No Other ("TINO!") or "There is No Division" (TND!) or "There is No Division or Distinction" (TNDD!)

How to Stop Terrorism III: Demonstrate to the Clerics That Their Theology--Their Interpretation of the Qur'an--is All Wrong

I have nothing against Islam. I have nothing against Muhammad--peace be upon him--and I have nothing against the Qur'an. Although I was raised in the Methodist Church, became a Pentecostal and have gone to Christian seminaries, etc., etc., I feel no more affinity to Christians than I do to Jews, Muslims or Hindus. This is because virtually all of them interpret the scriptures through a DUALISTIC worldview; and the world, the universe, the whole of reality . . . is not dualistic.

It was over a long period and through much wrestling with meanings and ideas that I came to realize that the whole of existence--the universe and all dimensions in it, through it and beyond it, including the Ineffable Most High God--are one being. EVERYTHING is non-dual.

Non-duality is the Gospel of Moses. It is the testimony of Jesus Christ, the spirit of prophecy IN us as noted by James, Mark, John, and Paul in the New Testament. Non-duality is the message of the Upanishads and the Vedas and is the goal of Yoga. All these demonstrated the non-duality of reality through symbolic language and illustrations. The Heavens are mind and spirit and the Earth is all physically manifesting phenomena . . . and altogether they are the "God" the Ineffable is imagining. Our imagining is His imagining, and His imagining is creation's becoming. What becomes is him.

Symbolic language and illustrations. If Muhammad is a prophet, his message of the non-duality of the universe is posed in figures of this speech. But it is difficult to understand because to become into this dimension, we had to FORGET that we are the powerful intelligence of the Ineffable, the Source of Life. We became completely IGNORANT of the oneness of the universe with the Ineffable.

In this ignorance we approach the revelation of the scriptures, and we cannot recognize the oneness because we have not heard of it. It is beyond our wildest dreams. How could we believe in such a wild idea unless someone tells us of it? Well, it is what the scriptures tell us, but we cannot hear them. It is what preachers and priests and clerics are SUPPOSED to be telling us, but they, also in the amnesia and holding to a dualistic worldview, cannot imagine it either.

Sincere, devout and earnest, preachers, priest and mullahs/imams and what have you read the scriptures knowing that they are true, but misunderstanding that truth. Thinking that "truth" means literal and historical, they miss that the scriptures are talking about God AND us AS one. Yes, they are literal and historical in that they apply TO US.

Muslims are no exception to the Gospel. Their clerics, unfortunately in their misreading and misunderstanding of Muhammad's message (peace be upon him), think that people should be forced to accept their error. Of course, they do not think it is error, but that is because no one has told them of the oneness that is meant by the scriptures. The oneness is the Revelation.

Whosoever would like to stop terrorism needs to strategically communicate the oneness of God--which INCLUDES us--to those who would be terrorists: "Hey, you've got God all wrong. He is the whole of everything--no division, no separation. The 'people' in the Bible (etc.) are ALLEGORIES, symbols, natures and states of being IN the one. They are allusions to what is going on in us PSYCHOLOGICALLY, in our spirit and consciousness. Their 'names' refer to OUR natures, eternal states we PASS through as we become aware of our being God."

The scriptures are success manuals for this divine development program. In them we find what we are and what we need to do. Love, uplift, protect and teach . . . in the constant perception of the oneness of all. THAT is Islam, and Judaism, and Christianity, and Hinduism. Terrorism--not so much.

Eve Was Not a Woman: a Principle of Interpretation

Surprise, surprise. "Eve" in the Bible is the manifesting ACTION of Adam's desire, the "rib" taken during his deep sleep.

Read that that he, God's life-force Adam (the spirit of God "breathed" into you, me, and everyone else AS us), dreamed what he (we) desired intensely, vividly, feelingly, urgently . . . and God worked our dreams into our forthcoming reality . . . because He and We are one. That is what you are inside, my friend--God.

Therefore this manifesting action of God WHO IS EACH AND EVERY ONE OF US "shall be called 'womb-man,'" because all living comes from . . . "me, my 'I.'"

Is There Healing in the Atonement? is the Wrong Question.

What has the atonement got to do with it? The atonement has nothing to do with healing. Healing is in God, the Power that is intelligent. That Power is the answer. Or, rather, the Intelligence is the answer. Healing is God rethinking us.

The "atonement" properly occurs at the beginning of our death, which is the "life" we are living. The atonement occurred when we gave up our life as God to become man in this death of memory. Each of us, in every state we find ourselves, are Christ who atoned himself to man. We sacrificed ourselves to save man, whom we have annexed. Repentance is a remembering of that sacrifice and getting things back in the right order; we are NOT the man, we are the spirit of God IN him.

Our real lives inside are God. That is what Jacob is to Esau, our inner man in relation to our outer man. Jacob, the inner man in the ignorance we begin our lives in, becomes Israel: the inner man having realized its Godhood ruling as man. Godhood and healing are ours not because of the atonement, but because we are God. Healing is, if anything, a "Yup. Yes, you are," acknowledgement by the Ineffable that we are right in assuming our oneness with him.

The promises of God are true and for us because we are the one who made them to us!

The Seventh Day Advaitaist

I joke about being a Seventh Day Advaitaist. 'Advaita' is Sanskrit for without-division. I believe in the principle of non-dual reality, that everything from the ineffable, Most High No-thing to simplest physical photons, quarks and quantum particles are altogether ONE being, and that WITHOUT DIVISION. That is, everything is one unified, whole being: the Ineffable.

The Ineffable, as I refer to the Source of the imagining that has created and become us, is not just that Imaginer but the whole spectrum of manifest reality. The Ineffable is the creative force and the created--the becomer and the manifest; the sender and the sent; the imaginer and the imagined; the Lord and his Christ; the Father and the Son--and altogether we are YHWH--the PATTERN of the Ineffable becoming form.

I read this wonderful little poem by Tersteegen the other day, quoted in Hudson Taylor's Spiritual Secret (Chicago: Moody Press, 1932, page 233):

He told me of a river bright
That flows from Him to me,
That I might be, for His delight,
A fair and fruitful tree.

--THAT is what YHWH means.

Taylor's secret was that he realized that Christ is All (see chapter 14, the Exchanged Life, pg. 154ff). Everything is Christ's work, and that work is ours because we are him. God is one, and he, Christ, lives in each and every one of us. His work is faith. THAT is what Moses was talking about in his Gospel: Exodus 3: 14 means that we are "one with Him whose work it is." One, not two.

Which brings me to Jethro. I have another blog of only one or two postings, I think, called the Lost Flocks of Jethro. Jethro is the great mystery in my life. What is Jethro? The name/nature means "his jutting over." Is it the bit of abundance that comes our way in faith? Is it the universe? Is it the Form that the Ineffable desired and which we are becoming? I think it is this latter. The Form is and ever shall be the manifestation of the Ineffable. It does not really have an ending. It is Advaita--eternally two . . . without division.

Between the beginning in Genesis and the end in Revelation is the Sabbath. God is doing his work, and that is us in our "now." We, in this minute, are the work of the Ineffable becoming. In this his seventh day, what shall he deny us if we do his work?

How to Stop Terrorism II: Strategically Communicate the Correct Theology of the Book to Overcome Ignorance

A very large part of the present problem is the mistaken notion Muslims have that Jews and Christians understand their own scriptures--the Bible or the "Book." Nothing could be further from the truth.

Jews and Christians, and thus Muslims, too, almost unanimously believe that the narrative of the Bible is a factual, historical record of people and events (albeit in some cases changed): that Adam was a man and that Eve was a woman made out of Adam's rib, taken while Adam was in a deep sleep; that Noah made a wooden ark that survived a world-wide flood; that Esau and Jacob were sons in conflict; and that Moses led the Israelites out of Egypt. All believe that Jesus Christ was a man, be he a teacher, a prophet, or God incarnate.

The missing factor in all of this is the ignorance of man. Our ignorance is vastly underestimated. "It is appointed unto man once to die" (Hebrews 9: 27). This "death" appointed each of us was the forgetting of what we are when we, the spirit of God, became born in this awareness. Our amnesia was amazingly thorough, and the problem is that it still is.

Thus Jews, Christians and Muslims alike THINK that we are people using our brain-based minds in a dual universe. Dual in that, even while we have a "spirit" which keeps us alive, it and God or Allah are separate, distant, and divided from us.

The whole point of the Bible is that this is a non-dual universe. THAT is what Moses was writing about. Dualism is our mistake from our ignorance. The Gospel of Moses is that we are God, or at least we are included in what God is. THAT is what Exodus 3: 14 is all about: our imagining is God's imagining, and that is how things come about.

It is admittedly hard to understand that the people and events in the Bible are states of being, understanding and awareness and their relationships. There are no historical people in the Bible other than ourselves, which is what the narratives are about. The authors of the scriptures used in some cases stories about historical figures, but the stories themselves are not necessarily historical. The "literal" part of them is what they mean about our spiritual reality.

Our spiritual reality is more real than our physical reality. For if we change our spiritual state, our physical state will subsequently change also. In the final analysis, nothing is real except the Ineffable, the Most High God who is the source of our imagining. Because everything ultimately is the Ineffable, everything is one. This is the meaning of non-dual. There is nothing in the universe but the Ineffable, and then only because It is imagining.

We belong to the Ineffable, and are the Ineffable however we be in ignorance. There is not one of us who is not the Father, and if the Father, then Jesus Christ--God's power in man and God's wisdom in man. This Muslims need to understand whether Jews or Christians ever do or not: Jesus Christ is the spirit of God the Father who became--and is becoming--each of us. "Spirit" is consciousness, and the consciousness each man, woman and child has IS Jesus Christ, God the Father--Allah Almighty.

If a person hate and destroy his fellow man, it is because he does not know the Father (John 16: 2). There is no service to God in killing Him. If you want to have mercy to God, love him. He is your fellow man.

How to Stop Terrorism I: the Only Effective Way is to Stop Terrorism is to Teach the Truth That the Oneness of God Includes Us--That We are All the Father, and the Father is Jesus Christ

The only effective and permanent way to stop terrorism is to correct man's estimation of Jesus Christ. The error we make is thinking, believing, and perceiving that Jesus Christ is outside and separate from ourselves. Some believe that Jesus Christ was a prophet, some believe that Jesus Christ was God incarnate, almost everyone believes that Jesus Christ was and is separate from themselves.

But the Bible teaches that Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today and forever. If this is true, then Jesus Christ was never a separate man. For Jesus Christ is the power of God and the wisdom of God in every man, woman and child.

Oh, Jesus Christ is God, all right, but he is God WHO HAS BECOME YOU. He is not a separate God, another God, a lesser God: he is the only true God who imbues each of us with his spirit, his consciousness, which because of forgetting that it is God (in order to be here) thinks that it is us.

Yes, God did become incarnate in the person of Jesus Christ, who is each of us. There are not two Gods, only one. God the Father sent himself to become us -- God the "Son" -- and here we are. We are not less for what we are, we are less because we have taken upon ourselves human limitations in our perceptions. We took on human ignorance to lift these states to the heights we left, and more, to become individually, independently, the Father who sent us.

That is deep, but the point is . . . that it is NOT that "Moses was a prophet, Elijiah was a prophet, Jesus was a prophet, and Mohammad was a prophet." Jesus is the SPIRIT of God in us, his power and his wisdom, that testifies of our being God according to the scriptures. The testimony of Jesus in us -- and the prophets -- is the spirit of prophecy. And that spirit in us . . . is God the Father.

God the Father only SEEMS separate from us because we talk about him specifically. He sounds so unlike us. It is hard to believe that he is and is ALSO us, and that we who seem so unlike him are ALSO him. We assume there is a division, but there is no division between ourselves and God. The continuity -- the link between him and us -- is Jesus Christ.

If you are looking for that link that is Jesus Christ and God -- spirit -- in yourself, consider your imagination. Your imagination is the "body" of God. Spirit is consciousness, and vice versa. We create our worlds with our imaginations. If we all recognize that the reality that is Jesus Christ is not a separate human man but is God the Father within us, we will have no reason to kill one another.

(This may be continued later.)

The Frequency and Duration of Neville Goddard Imagining Exercises

10 seconds and out?
Sleep in it for a month?
Over and over until you are "there"?
Do nothing?

Two of the most puzzling aspects of trying to learn how to manifest from Neville Goddard's lectures are the duration and frequency of, well, doing it.

Neville learned the Law, as he called it, from Abdullah, an Ethiopian Jew who practiced and taught Kabbalah. Neville wanted to go to Barbados, and Abdullah told him, "You are IN Barbados." It took Neville a month to "get" it, a month of imagining that the wintry streets of New York were palm-lined dirt paths in balmy Barbados, and of imagining when he went to sleep at night that he was sleeping in his bed in his family home in Barbados. It took a month, but it manifested.

In Army boot camp, Neville wanted to be honorably discharged (per existing regulation) and back in New York with his wife and daughter. He imagined that he was in New York, and that he was NOT going back to the Army. The voice told him, "Do nothing," which he did, and nine days later he was on a train headed back to New York, honorably discharged.

Visiting Barbados again--this time with no way to leave the island--Neville imagined over and over and over in his room his boarding the ship as he would have to do in leaving, and the very next day the steamship company called to offer him passage.

Very often in his lectures Neville stressed to imagine exactly what you want "over and over and over, until it takes on all the tones of reality--until you are no longer thinking OF it, you are thinking FROM it."

Yet in "God's Law and His Promise," he says it shouldn't take anyone more than ten-seconds to bring what someone wants to your mind's eye and to hear them say that they have what they desired, to bring yourself to a state of vision that reaches a spiritual sense of climax that "it is done."

What is the catch? IT IS NOT HOW OFTEN NOR FOR HOW LONG ONE DOES IT, BUT HOW WELL.

From the month it took him to imagine being in Barbados at his beginning, to the 10 seconds he spent to hear a friend near his end, Neville through PRACTICE AND UNDERSTANDING grew in the ability to ACHIEVE QUALITY in his imagining. Eventually, "there" was a realm he could flit to in a heartbeat. What you wanted, he could almost instantly see AS DONE in the future, and being in the future in his mind, he could see and hear you there, too. How much time and effort we need to get there depends upon our skill in imagining well.

In the months before I was baptized in the Holy Spirit, I was learning how to meditate in an occult meditation workshop at the metaphysics bookstore in Honolulu. I didn't know at the time that I was being groomed for demon possession, but when the big moment came, I was shown what was going on and, leaving there, through events I was led to the House of Praise in Kaimuki where I accepted Jesus, and then to Grace Bible Church where, while praying for the gift of tongues I WAS ABLE TO USE THE SPIRITUAL TALENTS I HAD LEARNED IN THE MEDITATION CLASS TO CAST CONTROL OF SELF OUT OF MYSELF AND TO SURRENDER COMPLETELY TO THE SUPPORTING ARMS OF THE LORD. If he hadn't caught me, I would have fallen flat on my face.

My point is that I was not led by the deceiving spirit (which was but an illustration) but by the Lord Jesus Christ to learn spiritual skills--spiritual talents essential to my ability to release myself from my rebellion and to accept the Holy Spirit. I learned how to "un" myself well. I learned how to inwardly float with no effort to hold myself up and how to open up myself to another realm. Having completely surrendered my self-lordship to God's lordship, God welled up from deep within me in a display of his power and glory and I "received" that which had always been within me, that which I am, the consciousness of God, the Holy Spirit.

There are many, many people who have never heard of this stuff. And many of them suffer greatly. Yet this is scripture; it is the contents of the Bible which is published almost everywhere. It is the Gospel of Moses promulgated freely for the last three thousand years plus.. How to imagine well is what we all were supposed to learn from childhood, for it is our salvation. Salvation inside in the spirit, and salvation outside in the things that we need, are BIG things in our lives.

Frequency and duration, though . . . In Neville's book The Law and the Promise, page 19, a woman pained from a childhood accident, having heard of the Pruning Shears of Revision, sought to revise the accident that had caused her years of pain and suffering. It took her a considerable amount to time and effort to enter the reliving of the event, but at long last she was THERE: she could feel wind and the rush of the swing she had fallen from, the acceleration and the pause at its height. As a child she had jumped and landed wrong. But there again in her imagination, she jumped . . . and landed correctly. She ran to get her mother, to show her what she could do, and again and again she jumped for her imaginal mother. . . and landed correctly. Here is quality of imagining: she was healed of her back pains.

By the way, R. H. Jarrett in IT Works! (DeVorss, 1926) suggests writing down a list the things that you want and reading the list three times a day, and thinking of the things you want as often as possible. I am mindful that Neville kept a journal, and I keep half-sheets in my pockets at all times for writing down ideas that come to me (shower time is especially hard). I think it might be useful for you to write down what you want and, when you read the list, to go in imagination to the end you desire for each thing on the list. It goes without saying, of course, do not write down anything bad or anything you would not want anyone else to see, because then they almost certainly will.

And here is something you may not hear anywhere else: the manifestation of what you want, when it occurs, will be transitory. There is no permanent "end." We never reach "there" with nowhere else to go. But when what we do works, it is God right there in that working for that moment. If we could--gasp!--grab that moment ("Abel" in Genesis, and "Vanity" in Ecclesiastes), we would see God in the experience, and God would not be divided from us!
_________________________________

Note Bueno added 11-28-2019:

Well, it is live and learn. Neville learned the causation by imagination process we call manifestation from Abdullah, a black Ethiopian Jew, in the 1930s. I do not think the terms beta, alpha, theta, and delta were bandied around much as states of consciousness back then. Neville learned to perform the process especially when falling asleep, and to work through the days events backwards as part of the process. It is my understanding that these exercises will lull a person into a theta state of consciousness, where imagination is the principle mode of thinking and communication with the subconscious and God, the Source of our thinking, is at its clearest.

The more practiced one is at getting into the theta state, I am informed, the easier it is to do. Mastering the process of theta-izing the mind would allow one to clearly "hear" the having of what was desired in the proverbial heartbeat, and not have to repeat it over and over and over to some level of reality it has already had.

From Rags to Riches AND the Wisdom of the Ages in Just Two Pages -- Such a Deal!

To succeed in this world, it helps to know WHAT IT IS, HOW IT WORKS, and HOW TO USE IT. God knows they do not teach us this stuff in school, so we put it into the Bible: the Success Manual (rightly read).

WHAT IS

BEFORE there was any physical or spiritual thing, there was the Ineffable No-thing. 'Ineffable' means a nature that is so far outside the realm of our experience and consciousness that there is nothing we can say to describe it. The Ineffable is incomprehensible. It is infinite, invisible and eternal, and has become an intelligence that is powerful. This intelligent power has become all things both seen and unseen--the universe.

HOW IT WORKS

The Ineffable No-thing was an unmoving, unconditioned awareness of being. Then it moved; It imagined. In imagining, the No-thing became an action--an imagining, a thinking, a dreaming. This action of consciousness has become us. We are the consciousness--the action of imagining (called in the Bible 'spirit')--of the Ineffable. Before birth, we were God. We still are God, but after birth we have become Man.

The difference is that in order to become Man, we had to forget that we are God. We are ever the intelligence that is powerful, but we have forgotten it! Forgetting is, in the Bible, "death." This death has made it impossible to maintain right thinking and doing right. Because of this death, our ignorance from the amnesia of forgetting, we have much missed the mark of doing right (please see Romans 5: 12).

Nevertheless, we imagine, and what we imagine becomes an expansion of ourselves. Therefore, if we are negative, we create a negative expansion of ourselves. If we believe we are weak, we create a weak expansion of ourselves. And positive, positive; capable, capable; etc., etc. What we imagine in the present becomes our future reality. In the Bible, we are as potters at our wheels creating our worlds, for 'potter' means imagination.

HOW TO USE IT

In short, do what God does. Mentally create a scene which suggests that everything of the situation you want exists, and imagine the experience of that existence in such vivid detail that it becomes your reality. Genesis chapter one is our example of this.

There are conditions involved in the long of the process, of course. Creating images in our ignorance is worse than pointless. Adam (our life) runs around in ignorance unashamed of whatever corrupt act we perform. What we desire becomes, but it is not worthwhile. When we see the worthiness of what is right we may desire it, but we cannot perform right without consciousness of right.

Glory be to God who reveals his Glory to us (the "Serpent" in Adam's Garden and the "burning bush" to Moses, "Jesus Christ" to Christians, etc.) and regenerates our conscience of right and wrong through repentance. Take the sandals off your feet, my friend, and receive God's Law--the right of Its own nature--as the consciousness you shall live by. What you want can become if God is involved. If It isn't, maybe you shouldn't want it.

In repentance, surrender the conditioning this world has placed upon you and forget what is wrong in this world. Let it go. Take up instead an awareness of God's better world, the world in which your Godly desire exists. Create your world anew as that existence. Especially in sleepiness, we can see and hear what God would have us become. "For God may speak in one way, or in another, yet man does not perceive it. In a dream, in a vision of the night, when deep sleep falls upon men while slumbering on their beds, then He opens the ears of men and seals their instruction" (Job 33: 14-16).

At least for the moment, be almost asleep . . . but not quite. Just kind of float there. Remain in control of your awareness and become aware of exactly what you want. Imagine it oh so thoroughly, until it is as real as all reality. Give this imagining all the emotions and senses of the time and place and situation that would be real in it, and then enter the dream so that you are not thinking OF it but are rather thinking FROM it. It becomes your present feeling of location and 3-D reality, and where you presently are physically becomes your flat, distant memory. And then fall sleep in that dream.

YOU, GOD, AND GRATITUDE

"Believe you receive, and you shall have" (Mark 11: 24). If you believe you have received what you desired, be grateful. The eternal One who became you is becoming still through you (see Exodus 3: 14, Victor Alexander's translation). How wonderful to be included in that One! For this the Bible says, "Rejoice! And again I say, Rejoice!" Thankfulness--don't leave home without it! Keep your positiveness in front of you, beaming from the confidence in your heart.

The Universe is a Display of God's Becoming

It struck me today that the universe is a display of God's becoming. The whole of it, trillions of trillions of stars and planets and peoples--life--is display of the invisible Ineffable becoming form. "IT" is behind all of the display. How great is that Thinglessness!

The little mustard seed knows naught but that it is mustard. We ought know naught but that we are "IT," the Thinglessness. What is our display?

Then it struck me that God is a display of the Ineffable. "Oh," I thought to myself. "It isn't a list of three things that the Ineffable created in Genesis 1: 1, God, the Heavens and the Earth, it is a list of ONE thing that the Ineffable created: God. In the beginning the Ineffable created one thing to be display of Itself: God--the Heavens and the Earth."

The Heavens and the Earth--all dimensions of the universe both visible and invisible, spiritual and physical--are the God the Ineffable created by imagining Itself in form. We are all one big thing, the display of the Ineffable becoming form.

One does not need to be a brain surgeon to see our destiny in this

Added Feb. 14, 2015:

You understand, of course, that "the Earth" is all of the so-called physical universe--gravity, light, gases, radio waves, electro-magnetism, etc. And "the Heavens" are the invisible spirit realms--mind, thought, consciousness, experience. The flow of these are "waters."

I suppose there is a firmament, a kind of insulator, between the higher God-consciousness in the spiritual realms and the ignoranced human awareness we are born with. This firmament will eventually be overcome and the Heavens and the Earth will be joined.

All of this is one item. The Heavens and the Earth are the one God. All is intelligent, and all intelligence is the intelligence of the Ineffable who is above all.

Imagine, above all the universe, above all that is "God," is an imagining, ineffable No-thing. Infinite and eternal--how wonderful It is! And It is no further away than our consciousness of self, and our destiny is to be It!

All the more reason to read the Bible, meditate on its Law-the NATURE OF THE INEFFABLE we are and shall become--and learn to do Its works in accordance with that nature. Maranatha!

The Steele Hypothesis of How James Became the Gnostic Jesus Who is Not the One We Usually Worship

The Steele Hypothesis is that many people before the supposed time of Christ had grasp of the true meaning of Gnosticism, which is what we are actually talking about when we talk about Jesus (though without all the gobbledygook that is usually layered on over the core of Gnostic philosophy).

My impression is that the core of Gnostic philosophy is that it is our experiential knowledge of Christ, the power of God and the wisdom of God in us (actually the spirit of God who IS us, being in all actuality the Ineffable who by imagining has become us), which saves us.

My hypothesis is that "James the Righteous," who in Hebrew was called Jacob, "the brother of the Lord," had a Gnostic understanding of the Old Testament and of Judaism. Jacob the Righteous so embodied Christ, and had so much to say about the enterprise the priests, Pharisees and scribes had made of Judaism, that they killed him for it.

This Jacob was known by and much respected by an Indian Therapeute who shared Jacob's Gnostic-core philosophy. We know the Indian, a Buddhist, by the name of Mark. I believe that Mark shared James' appreciation of the Gnostic core of Judaism, Buddhism, and Hinduism, and what we call today "Christianity"--for groups like the one Jacob led had withdrawn from the folds of the religious organizations and sought to live pleasingly to the God "with whom we have to do."

After Jacob was murdered by the Jews, Mark wrote James' story FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF THE GNOSTIC-CORE JESUS, who was the real "person" they had rejected and murdered when they rejected and murdered Jacob the Righteous, who we call James, "the brother of the Lord."

You will note that "Mark" was an Indian Buddhist missionary who had worked his way up from India through Persia and back down the fertile crescent to Palestine and probably to Alexandria in Egypt. He was probably a devout student of philosophy and found the common Gnostic core in the religions he encountered and studied. I am not making this stuff up--do your homework looking up the reforms of Emperor Ashoka of India and the mission of the Therapeutae, and also Christian Lindtner's Theory of the Buddhist source material for the Gospel of Mark. Gerald Massey wrote extensively about the influence of the Egyptian myths, which Mark also would have learned, in the formation of what I call the Hebrew Gospel of Moses in Ancient Egypt, Light of the World.

Mark was also influenced by the Persian Zoroastrian philosophy of Ahura Mazda, which posits that God is both good and evil. With his intimate knowledge of both the early history of Ashoka and the Jewish priests, Pharisees and scribes, certainly Mark could see the evil that is man's initial ignorant view of the world no matter how "religious" he may be.

In telling Jacob's conflict with the literal-historical thinking Jews, Mark wove together all of the insights of wisdom he had learned from the ancients as a revelation of the Gnostic core. That is why we find his Jesus quoting the ancients at every turn and posing symbolic wisdom stories in every pericope.

Soon after "the Beginning of the Gospel of Jesus Christ" was published, people were polarized either for or against Christ and the Jews. Christ need never have lived as a uniquely separate man for the church of Jesus Christ to be born of him. His being Jacob and Jacob's being Him was enough. The present baptism in the Holy Spirit is fully explained by the ecstatic experience of true Gnosticism.

While first and second century Gnostics recognized that Mark's Jesus was the Inner Man and could worship him as God, which he is, the uninitiated figured that Jesus was the Jewish God become a historical man killed some years ago in Palestine and who was coming again is judgment. Paul started this way and taught this (see his epistles to the Thessalonians) and waited, and waited, and waited, and waited.

Hmm. Something was screwy. "Let me look at those scriptures again. Let's see, Moses, Joshua, Promised Land, inner man. Oh, I've got it. It happens NOW and in the inner man. I've been looking at the skies. I should be looking inside. Eck. Jesus, forgive me!"

An E-mail Exchange I Had With a Christian About Neville Goddard, Part IIl.

Dan,

Hello. It's been a while. I hope you've been doing okay. I've listened to a few of the Neville Goddard's lectures lately and I would say that at minimum I find his lessons insightful to the world of faith. I guess my biggest concern is trying to grasp the idea that the Bible is merely a screenplay. I suppose I can see it in many of the stories of the Old Testament, however from the book of Acts forward it becomes more difficult to see. Additionally, many historians have spent lifetimes proving the genealogy and the geography depicted in our Bible.

I have a couple of questions for you. The first, as a general question can you 
give me some of the greatest realities that you have been able to imagine in as 
well as the time frames it took to do so. My next question I would ask of you is 
if it would be possible to schedule a phone call sometime in the near future? A 
problem I have with communication via email is that a) I'm usually too tired at 
the end of the day to make myself log on and type. Secondly by the time I get an 
evening where I do not feel too tired to do so I've usually forgotten most 
important things I had to ask.

When I originally stumbled upon your blog I was intrigued at many of your 
postings. I can honestly say that I really don't have anybody who I can 
communicate with regarding the concepts of Neville Goddard.

I have spent the majority of this winter watching countless YouTube videos and 
reading my Bible. Most of these actions have been a major blessing, but the 
blessing has not been without cost. I've crammed a plethora of theologies and 
viewpoints inside my little melon. As I mentioned before I spent many years in 
the United Pentecostal church. Due to a church scandal from the pulpit my family 
and I decided to find a new church. This has been no easy task. After many 
months of visiting affiliated churches in our area we decided to follow a long 
life desire of moving near the beach. I had hoped there would be more churches 
than what there are near where we decided to live. Perhaps we bought the cart 
before the horse.

Nonetheless I hope I'm able to come off as a genuine individual who simply wants 
to have a better understanding of these viewpoints we've discussed.
Let me know if there is a time where you would have a few minutes to speak on 
the phone as I believe I could glean so much more information in a far shorter 
period of time. 

I look forward to hearing back from you,
Jake

______________________________________________ 

Jake, 

It's good to hear from you. I hope you will give me some time in which to reply. I am not a professional counselor or life coach or minister. I want to attack some of the problems I see in your thinking. This is not to attack you, but the problems. This is merely my opinion on the ideas. 

"I would say that at minimum I find (Neville's) lessons insightful to the world of faith. I guess my biggest concern is trying to grasp the idea that the Bible is merely a screenplay."

The Bible is not a screenplay; it is revelation of God. THAT is why Neville had faith in it. What it reveals is that the manifestation OF God includes everything we know. The manifestation--Christ--has also become us. Therefore, we are de facto the manifestation of God. Christ is All.

We are the ones writing the screenplay to our getting to the End.

But I get what you mean by "screenplay." It is that the stories in the Bible are not historical record of literal events. Neville's oft stressed opinion was that every word of the Bible is true. It just isn't true in that way. Even if it was, what good would that do us? Our lives are not changed by historical happenings but by their MEANING. Christ was crucified and rose from the dead? Wonderful, but so what? He crucified himself to become me. Oh. And if I, then, am Him, then I SHARE IN HIS LIFE.

I hope your becoming a Pentecostal included the baptism in the Holy Spirit. That "Howdy-do" was a foretaste of what is ours when we overcome our ignorance.

I do not think of Jesus as God's "Word" anymore. As Victor Alexander (v-a.co/bible) points out, the Greek logos, meaning, ironically does not convey the meaning of the Aramaic word milta, manifestation. Word/expression/intention/meaning goes out separate from the body. Milta, manifestation, goes out WITHOUT DIVISION. Manifestation IS the body of God; it is "concrete" appearance: the invisible becomes seen.

The "concrete" is the spirit within us. We have awareness of being--"I think, therefore I am." This is as close perhaps as we shall ever get to seeing Jesus Christ, God in Heaven. "Heaven" is our head-ball, and the spirit thinking, "I think, therefore I am," is Jesus, the manifestation. Take a good look.


"From the book of Acts forward it becomes more difficult to see. Additionally, many historians have spent lifetimes proving the genealogy and the geography depicted in our Bible."

Were that the people in the first and second centuries had the resources our scholars have now. The Steele Hypothesis is that many people before the supposed time of Christ had grasp of the true meaning of Gnosticism, which is what we are actually talking about (though without all the gobbledygook that is usually layered on over the core of Gnostic philosophy).

My impression is that the core of Gnostic philosophy is that it is our experiential knowledge of Christ, the power of God and the wisdom of God in us and actually the spirit of God who IS us, being in all actuality the Ineffable who by imagining has become us, saves us.

My hypothesis is that "James the Righteous," who in Hebrew was called Jacob, "the brother of the Lord," had a Gnostic understanding of the Old Testament and of Judaism. Jacob the Righteous embodied Christ, and he had a lot to say about the enterprise the priests, Pharisees and Essene scribes had made of Judaism. He took them to task, and they killed him for it.

This Jacob was known by and much respected by an Indian Therapeute who shared Jacob's Gnostic-core philosophy. We know the Indian, a Buddhist, by the name of Mark. I believe that Mark shared James' appreciation of the Gnostic core of Judaism, Buddhism, and Hinduism, and what we call today "Christianity"--for groups like the one Jacob led had withdrawn from the folds of the religious organizations and sought to live pleasingly to the God "with whom we have to do."

After Jacob was murdered by the Jews, Mark wrote James' story FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF THE GNOSTIC-CORE JESUS, who was the real "person" they had rejected and murdered when they rejected and murdered Jacob the Righteous, who we call James, "the brother of the Lord."

You will note that "Mark" was an Indian Buddhist missionary who had worked his way up from India through Persia and back down the fertile crescent to Palestine and probably to Alexandria in Egypt. He was probably a devout student of philosophy and found the common Gnostic core in the religions he encountered and studied. I am not making this stuff up--do your homework looking up the reforms of Emperor Ashoka of India and the mission of the Therapeutae, and also Christian Lindtner's Theory of the Buddhist source material for the Gospel of Mark. Gerald Massey wrote extensively about the influence of the Egyptian myths in the formation of what I call the Hebrew Gospel of Moses in Ancient Egypt, Light of the World.

Mark was also influenced by the Persian Zoroastrian Ahura Mazda, which posits that God is both good and evil. With his intimate knowledge of both the early history of Ashoka and the Jewish priests, Pharisees and scribes, certainly Mark could see the evil that is man's initial ignorant world view.

In telling Jacob's conflict with the literal-historical thinking Jews, Mark wove together all of the insights of wisdom he had learned from the ancients as a revelation of the Gnostic core. That is why we find his Jesus quoting the ancients at every turn and symbolic wisdom stories in every pericope.

Soon after "the Beginning of the Gospel of Jesus Christ" was published, people were polarized either for or against Christ and the Jews. Christ need never have lived as a uniquely separate man for the church of Jesus Christ to be born of him. His being Jacob and Jacob's being Him was enough. The present baptism in the Holy Spirit is fully explained by the ecstatic experience of true Gnosticism.

While first and second century Gnostics recognized that Mark's Jesus was the Inner Man and could worship him as God, which he is, the uninitiated figured that Jesus was the Jewish God become a historical man killed some years ago in Palestine and who was coming again is judgment. Paul started this way and taught this (see his epistles to the Thessalonians) and waited, and waited, and waited, and waited.

Hmm. Something was screwy. "Let me look at those scriptures again. Let's see, Moses, Joshua, Promised Land, inner man. Oh, I've got it. It happens NOW and in the inner man. I've been looking at the skies. I should be looking inside. Eck. Jesus, forgive me!"

Can you give me some of the greatest realities that you have been able to imagine in as well as the time frames it took to do so.


I promote and promulgate the same Gospel Abdullah and Neville Goddard taught because it is what the Bible actually teaches. I SEE in my life and those of others that what we think and say becomes. Somewhere along the line I heard that my Father knows my needs and will take care of them. Fame and fortune have not been among them as yet. I rest assured in Jesus Christ that I am where I am supposed to be for the development I have, and as I learn more I will develop more.

I know the Law as Abdullah taught it to Neville (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3L6B1eGrFvw ), that what we think and believe is what we receive, and I post its use for the sake of those who presently suffer lack because they don't know it because they were never taught it, those who do not have knowledge of nor faith in Jesus Christ as I know him. Think: the homeless. I know that the Law works--I see it in our daily, normal lives--but for myself, whenever I think that I should "prove" it by manifesting something that I want, I cannot for the life of me think of anything that I need.

You said you were watching youtube videos this winter. Did you happen to catch this one on Neale Donald Walsch?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FKOdKB6FWl0

Manifesting for greed's sake. How repulsive. How shallow and immature. Like Walsch said, it is sandbox metaphysics. Neville turned his understanding into a ministry: "I never get tired of hearing good things for others." What if we all--everyone--always thought the best for others? World peace?

I've crammed a plethora of theologies and viewpoints inside my little melon. As I mentioned before I spent many years in the United Pentecostal church. Due to a church scandal from the pulpit my family and I decided to find a new church. This has been no easy task. After many months of visiting affiliated churches in our area we decided to follow a long life desire of moving near the beach. I had hoped there would be more churches than what there are near where we decided to live. Perhaps we bought the cart before the horse.

Sorry about your experience. Scandals, unfortunately, go with the church. Money, power and sex. How could they not? But you decided to move, and there you are. This was the normal and ordinary use of the Law. And surprise, surprise, you crammed a plethora of theologies in your head and now you live where they need a church. Hmm. Maybe there is something you can do about that. "Do you know Jesus the way I know him now? I used to think of him as someone outside and away, but now I know that he is in me, and undivided from me."

The Holy Spirit is ever with us--God's very consciousness!--and is us. He is not separate. He is not in "me," the body; he is in me, my consciousness. I learned long ago that he wanted to be the center of my world, and that if I would listen, he would teach. What you free receive, freely give.

I don't really like talking on the phone. That is where I forget what I wanted to say. Do you really want me calling you up all the time saying, "Hey, something else about . . . "?

On the Gospel of Moses

"God" is explained in scripture so that we can understand how it works. The mistake we make is to see God so defined as separate and distant, something "wholly other." The Biblical view is that everything is God manifesting--something NOT separate, not distant, but "wholly SAME."

The Gospel of Moses is that we are God: "Before the beginning (the Ineffable) created (imagined) God, the Heavens and the Earth--US(!)" Genesis 1: 1, my translation with help from Victor Alexander and David Cooper (i.e., it is what it really says).

Ontic (what really is) reality is non-dual. It is the "orthodox" dualistic, separatist view that is BIBLICALLY heretical.

"The apostasy must come first." The apostasy that comes first is the separatist view we are born with, the worldview that develops from the ignorance of our birth. That remains until we have the experience of the oneness of God. Moses had that experience in Exodus chapter 3. He presents that same experience in Genesis chapter 3. It is a Gospel, not a history lesson: "Jethro" = the Tree; the burning bush = the serpent; Moses = Adam; the "rib" = intense, focused desire; Eve = the becoming of God. "Aheyah Ashur Heyah" (Exodus 3: 14, Aramaic) = WE ARE INCLUDED IN THE ONENESS OF GOD'S BECOMING.

The Ineffable is "advaita" (Sanskrit), not divided(!): "Not one, but not two."

"Examine yourself whether you are in the faith . . . know you not . . . how that Jesus Christ (God) is in you (i.e., IS you), except you be reprobate (still in the apostasy)" Says Saint PAUL in 2 Corinthians 13: 5 (emphasis mine).

The Gospel of Moses, that God has become man (and everything else, too), is what the "Christian" New Testament is all about. It is about the real and authentic Judaism: the belief that we are ascending unto full consciousness of our Godhood. Every real Jew ought to be a Pentecostal Christian. Hey, Jews, they are your scriptures--read them right and believe what they say (and thanks for keeping them for us).

"Jesus Christ, the same yesterday, to-day, and forever" (Hebrews 13: 8) = the invisible within us is always the spiritual connection between the Ineffable and ITS manifestation through which all spiritual blessings ("Jethro") flow.

We are Here to Learn How to Die

It should be obvious: we are here to learn how to die. The countless life-times should have been a hint. God the Father became us by dying of what he is. We become the next by dying of what we are. Christians eventually learn that we can't fight our way to getting what we want, but have to die of our efforts to let God do it in his own way, or not at all if there is better for us. It is in the surrender, the death, that there is victory.

Unexamined Lives are Undirected Train Wrecks

It is not that we wanted our lives to be train wrecks; our lives have been undirected train wrecks. It has been for us to take control of our minds and to direct our lives, and we have not.

Think only the positive and helpful, kind and loving. It has been for us to think good in response to what has been bad, to want and to think good for all.

We cannot reject bad until we know it. What "goes south" (bad) during the day we ought to revise in our minds at night as having gone well. "Resist the Devil (our ignorantly thinking bad) and it shall flee."

Reject thinking any longer on bad images. Revise the mind to believe what would have been good has been received. OUR CONSTANT POSITIVE ATTITUDE AND BELIEF FOR EVERYONE IS WHAT WE ARE HERE TO LEARN. It is a God of love. Be ye imitators of him.

There is No Reason We Cannot Think Our Way to Healing

Neville Goddard in the book The Law and the Promise, page 19, reports a woman who healed herself by thinking. She went back to when she made a mistake that injured her, and she by thinking UNMADE THE MISTAKE.

We are pretty well locked into whatever we are conscious of. Until we change what we are conscious of. The woman by thinking became conscious that her injury never occurred.

This is God through Moses saying to Pharaoh, 'Let my people go," for us to let our thoughts become his consciousness. We are to become God ruling as man: "ISRAEL." And the "mountain" in which we perform this service to God is the brain. By thinking, by faith, by believing.

All Spiritual Realities are ONE Reality: the Invisible Ineffable

There is the invisible that we are. I was going to say, "the invisible spirit that we are," but that is the problem I address here: the invisible is not spirit nor mind nor consciousness nor life nor any other thing we might call it. The invisible is just what it is.

We put names on its qualities, labels on any and every thing about it that we can distinguish. Then we think those things are either concrete or separate from one another: the Father is not the Son and neither is the Holy Spirit. What absurdity. God, the Imagining, the E'had, the Manifestation, the Word, the Spirit, mind, life power, wisdom, consciousness--if you can name it, it is the invisible.

There is just one invisible, and it is just what it is.

We Shall Accompish That For Which We Were Sent Out: We Were Sent Out to Become The Ineffable

I was listening again to Neville Goddard's audio lecture on youtube.com, Be Imitators of God. I heard again "My word will not return to me void but will accomplish that for which I sent it."

We are that word sent out: "It is appointed once for man to die." We "died" (from being conscious of being God) into this dimension of death. We are as dead as we will ever get--the next "death" has no sting. We have been dead for countless lives and may be dead for unknown numbers more, BUT WE WILL ACCOMPLISH THAT FOR WHICH WE WERE SENT OUT:

WE SHALL BECOME AS GOD IS.

We shall ascend to the ultimate resurrection of being fully conscious of being God. We are taking this human's and all the other humans' natures on a trip to God's nature. We shall be like him as he is. The weird trip is that we are now him. This IS God. HE is the one becoming: he sent HIMSELF.

God is not what we think It is: Rabbi Davis A. Cooper

We cannot get too much of Rabbi David Cooper's authentic Jewish point of view. The dualistic, separatist, literal-historical approach to understanding scripture is the result of the ignorance that we adopted to become man. By that ignorance we misread the Bible. God is one. There isn't any other "separate" thing.


From: http://rabbidavidcooper.com/mystical-wisdom-teachings/2010/10/15/2361-god-is-not-what-we-think-it-is-print.html

2361 GOD IS NOT WHAT WE THINK IT IS (Print)

Friday, October 15, 2010 at 12:18PM | David Cooper

What is God? God is not what we think It is. God is not a thing, a being, a noun. It does not exist, as existence is defined, for It takes up no space (or includes all space but is not limited by it) and is not bound by time. Jewish mystics often refer to It as Ein Sof, which means Endlessness.
Ein Sof should never be conceptualized in any way. It should not be called Creator, Almighty, Father, Mother, Infinite, the One, Brahma, Buddhamind, Allah, Adonoy, Elohim, El, or Shaddai; and It should never, never be called He. It is none of these names and it has no gender.
When we call It God, what are we talking about? If we say that It is compassionate, full of loving kindness, the source of love, we may be talking about our image of what we think the divine nature ought to be but we are not talking about Ein Sof. In the same way, if we say that the God portrayed in the bible is vindictive, jealous, angry, cruel, uncaring, or punitive, we cannot be referring to Ein Sof. Ein Sof includes attribute but cannot be defined by any of them individually or all of them combined.
The mystery of the origin of the universe has every fascinated human consciousness from the beginning of recorded history. In all cultures of the world we find the timeless inquiry: Is there a creator and if so what is its nature? If not, how did creation begin and what is its purpose?
Mystics teach that there is a universal connection between all things; modern science offers the same message. This connection has various names, some say it is a soul force, others call it love; the ancients called it ether, science often names it energy. Yet, although there is general agreement that there seems to be a fundamental nature in the continuous unfolding of the universe, our relationship to the core of this nature has been a matter of considerable debate.
Jewish mystics are particularly concerned about naming the universal connection. People confuse names with identities. Many primitive cultures have name-secrets. They will not tell you their names for fear that you will have power over them. Similarly, at times, they will not allow you to take pictures of them. In the primitive mind, the essence of a person can be captured and imprisoned if one has control over a name or the image.
When we give a name to the nameless it is a stumbling block that trips most people. We think that if it has a name, it has an identity. An identity comes with attributes. So we think we know something about it. This is a mistake.
For thousands of years this mistake has become ingrained in the human psyche. The word "God" suggests an embodiment of something that can be grasped. We have given a name to the unknown and unknowable and then have spent endless time trying to know it. We try because it has a name; but we must always fail because it is unknowable. Judaism is so concerned about this misunderstanding, it goes to great lengths to avoid naming God. Yet various names seep through because our minds cannot work without symbols.
What then is the God that is written about in the bible? Kabbalists teach that the very first line of Genesis has been mistranslated. Most people think it says: "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth." But the actual words in Hebrew can be read another way. A Kabbalist could say: "With a beginning, [It] created God [Elohim], the heavens and the earth."
 That is to say, there was an initial creation out of nothingness the potential to begin--Beginningness. Once there was a beginning, God (in a plural form) was created--a God to which the rest of creation could relate. Then the heavens and the earth were created.
The implication of this interpretation profoundly affects our entire relationship with God and creation, for it says that all the names we have for God and all the ways in which we relate to God are a few degrees removed from the source of creation that precedes even nothingness. This is called Ein Sof, which is not the name of a thing but is an ongoing process.
EIN SOF
The idea of Ein Sof was first described by Isaac the Blind. He originated the actual use of the word Kabbalah to designate a variety of Jewish mystical teachings and practices. Prior to Isaac the Blind these teachings were referred to more obliquely, such as: the work of the chariot, the work of creation, the way of truth, and other phrases that hinted at hidden mysteries. People who followed the mystical path had many names as well: masters of knowledge, the wise-hearted, those who know measures and other enigmatic labels.
It is not known whether this teacher Isaac was really blind, or if this was an appellation intimating that he did not see things the way other people saw them. Indeed it was said that he had phenomenal mystical powers, being able to sense a "feeling in the air" whether a person would die in the near future and whether a person's soul was newly formed or was an older, reincarnated soul.
Isaac teaches that Ein Sof precedes thought (machshavah), and it even precedes the nothingness (ayin) out of which thought is born. Nothingness is viewed as a level of awareness that is the result of the "annihilation of thought."
The idea of the annihilation of thought, of course, is paradoxical. Can we imagine a void without beginning or end? Can we, limited by minds that are finite, imagine infinity? The answer is no, we cannot think of nothing.
 Anything that we can imagine has some kind of boundary--Kabbalists call it garment or vessel--and boundaries are containers. All thoughts, including all imagination, are garments or vessels.
By definition, a boundary sets limits. We may be able to put a name to infinity, we can draw a symbol of a figure eight on its side and say that this represents infinity, but no matter how much we may believe that our imagination is limitless, we remain confined by the boundaries of our own reality. If it can be imagined, it is not infinite.
As infinity is beyond the imagination, what about that which transcends infinity--that which created it? Ein Sof is not "restricted" by infinity. Indeed, we have suddenly run out of words because the idea of "trans-infinite" is a logical absurdity. What can go beyond infinity? Moreover, what can go beyond the Nothingness that surrounds infinity? This is Ein Sof. Although we are informed that Ein Sof is inaccessible through any intellectual endeavor, we may still ask if is there a "knowing" that surpasses the intellect? Does Isaac the Blind have access to a level of awareness through which he can sense, somehow, the imperceivable?
The answer is yes. Jewish mysticism teaches that we can know Ein Sof in ways that transcend thought. This aspect of developing a relationship with Endlessness, the source of creation, is the key to all Kabbalah and the life-blood of all Jewish practice. The secret teaching in developing this relationship with the unknowable is hidden in the mystical foundation of the nature of relationship itself.
The word "God," and all of its various names in Judaism, such as El, Elohim, Adonoy, Shaddai, and so forth, each represent aspects of Ein Sof. The exploration of these aspects gives us insight into the nature of Ein Sof. Thus, whenever God is discussed in this book, we are not talking about a thing in itself, but a representation of a far deeper mystery.
THE DIVINE KISS
In the Song of Songs, the mystic whispers about the kiss of its lover: "Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth; for your love is better than wine."
 We can feel the aching heart of the lover: "I am sick with love, his left hand is under my head and his right embraces me."
 We experience the thrill of anticipation: "My beloved put his hand by the latch of the door and my heart was thrilled; I rose to open to my beloved."
"Ah," we say, "the passion of young love!" But this is not a poem about young lovers. It is about us, about every human being, and it describes our potential relationship with the Divine. Perhaps you do not believe this; perhaps you feel that having an intimate relationship with the Divine is beyond you, reserved for others, or another lifetime. This is not so. It is part of our heritage; it is yours and mine to have. All we need do is learn how to let go of our fear, for fear maintains the barriers of separation.
In many traditions, the mystical expression of our  relationship with the Divine is through eros, the flame of a burning heart. Why? Because when we awaken to the realization that the presence of the Divine is revealed in the fullness of each moment, our hearts melt and the floodgates of our inner yearning open wide.
This is a mystical epiphany. It cannot be rationally explained. Although we cannot cross the barrier between us and that which lies beyond infinity, we can experience in the depth of our being the realization that for each step we take, the Divine steps with us; each breath we draw is connected with the breath of the universe; and that lover, beloved, and the essence of love itself are all reflections of exactly the same thing. In each of these moments we "know" the presence of the Divine and there is no separation.
One of the great Jewish mystics, Abraham Abulafia (13th century), says about one who has achieved this level of spiritual awareness: "Now we are no longer separated from our source, and behold we are the source and the source is us. We are so intimately united with It, we cannot by any means be separated from It, for we are It."
This is described in a lovely Sufi story of a man who constantly cried out to God, but received no response. After a while the devil whispered to this man, "How long will you wait for God to respond 'Here I am' to all of your entreaties?" This broke the man's spirit and he stopped calling out to God. In a dream, however, he envisioned an image of the Divine
 who asked him why he had stopped. The man said that God had never answered his call. The wise dream-image, representing God, then said, "Did you not realize that every calling of yours IS itself my response?"
The urge to call out to God is always answered simultaneously as it is spoken, for ultimately there is no difference between the caller and that to which it calls.
The Kotzker rebbe, Menahem Mendel (19th century), a famous hasidic teacher who lived his last twenty years in voluntary seclusion, asked one of his students, "Where does God dwell?" As the student stumbled in his attempt to respond, the Kotzker rebbe answered his own question, "God resides wherever we let God in!"
 Mystics throughout time, in all traditions, have said the same thing. We do not have to search for God because the presence of the Divine permeates all things. If there is a search at all, it is God searching for Itself, so to speak.
GOD IS A VERB
The closest we can come to thinking about God is as a process rather than a being. We can think of it as "be-ing," as verb rather than noun. Perhaps it would help us understand this better if we renamed God. We might call it God-ing, as a process, rather than God, which suggests a noun.
This idea was developed by Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, who goes further and explains that the kind of verb that represents God-ing is different from the ones we have in our ordinary language. Most of our verbs are considered transitive, which require a direct object, or intransitive, those that do not. He suggests that God-ing is a mutually interactive verb, one which entails an interdependency between two subjects, each being the object for the other.
For example, "communicating" could be such a verb. If I were speaking to an audience, I might not be communicating. I would be engaged in the act of communication, but if the audience were not attentive and were thinking about other things, I would not be communicating no matter how much I talked. My verbal communication is dependent upon a listener; it cannot be a one-way street. Other obvious verbs that fit into this category are loving, sharing, dancing, kissing, hugging, and so forth.
We can relate to God as an interactive verb. It is God-ing. Moreover, from this perspective, creation should not be treated as a noun. It too is an interactive verb; it is constantly creation-ing. And, dear reader, you should not treat yourself as a noun--as Joan, or Bill, or Barbara, or John. With regard to God as an interactive verb, you are also verbs; you are Joan-ing, Bill-ing, Barbara-ing, or John-ing in relation to God-ing, just as I am David-ing.Each part in the universe is in dynamic relationship with every other part. In human interactions, such as marriage, one partner is husband-ing while the other is wife-ing. The two, in this sense, are one. We normally experience relationships in terms of their component parts; we are mistaken, however, when we assume the parts are separate.
It is important to remember that the concept of God-ing is a way for us to have a relationship with the Divine. This should not be confused as having a relationship with Ein Sof. Many names of God are included in Ein Sof; God-ing is one name--a name that happens to be a verb rather than a noun.
The true discovery of the intimacy of our ongoing relationship with the Divine can dramatically change our lives. It often happens spontaneously, without a reason. Some call this experience "grace." It arises out of nowhere. We are sitting on the beach, walking in the woods, caring for someone who is dying, even driving on the freeway and suddenly we are overwhelmed by a strange light that penetrates our consciousness and we are never again the same. We read accounts of such transformations and conversion experiences that have changed the world.
Occasionally, individuals devote themselves to a spiritual life because of such experiences. However, most people who commit to an inner path do so because they yearn to connect with truth and meaning. This commitment usually involves undertaking a variety of practices that become part of one's daily life. They may include meditation, prayer, movement, diet, self-restraint, periods of seclusion, mantras, service, acts of loving kindness, and other time-tested techniques to alter consciousness. Eventually, when the practitioner's priorities are clear, the inner light of awareness slowly becomes illuminated and her or his perception of reality steadily changes. On the spiritual path, either through a brilliant flash of insight, or in the slow, steady progress of continuous practice, we gain wisdom. It is not intellectual knowledge, but wisdom--a deep knowing--inexplicable, indescribable and exquisite beyond imagination. This wisdom is the fountain of true mystical experience, the driving force of all spiritual inquiry. It is what sustains us when we are faced with doubts, nourishes us when the world seems bleak, and comforts us when we face the death of loved ones. Without it, where would we turn? What would we be without the awesomeness of the unknowable God?
There is no answer to this question; we cannot prove anything about Ein Sof. Rather, it is a self-reflecting inquiry. Yet, when viewed from the perspective of our dynamic relationship with the Divine, it is a self-fulfilling question, for paradoxically the source of the question is the answer it seeks. "What would I be without God?"
Consider this from your inner awareness. Not you the noun, the person you may think you are, but you the verb, the process of being in full relationship, continuously, with its creator. When a question arises within you, who is asking the question and to whom is the question addressed? Assume that there is no "me" to ask the question and there is no God out there to answer it. The question is part of the process of David-ing and God-ing in a mutual unfolding.
Try to do this in a way that melts all barriers of separation. No subject and no object. Simply an ever opening process. No past, no future; only now. Each moment is a fresh opening. Each breath we draw, each move we make is only Now. This is my dance with God-ing. It is an awesome experience.
Awe leads to wisdom. The opening of the Jewish morning prayers quote a line from Psalms that says: "The beginning of wisdom is the awe of the Y-H-V-H [the tetragrammaton, one of the key nameless names of God]."
 This Y-H-V-H is often referred to as Hashem, the Name. We don't want to give it a name, so we call it the Name. It is too awesome to name. Yet, we can experience awe.
Perhaps you will take a few moments to close your eyes and allow yourself to sink into this idea. Meditate on this thought: The teaching of the mystery of Ein Sof is that the center of our being out of which awe arises is that about which we are awed. It is It! When we contemplate our continuous process of opening, right here, right now, we realize that God-ing is always with us; always.The Zohar says: "Before shape and form were created, It [Ein Sof] was without form or appearance. Therefore, it is forbidden to perceive It in any way, not even by the letters of Its holy name or by any symbol. However, had It's brightness and glory not been radiated over the whole of creation, how could It have been discerned, even by the wise? Therefore, it descended on a [mystical] chariot to be known by the letters Y-H-V-H, in order that it could be inferred, and for this reason It allows Itself to be called by various names, such as El, Elohim, Shaddai, Zevaoth, and Y-H-V-H [among others, such as God], each being a symbol of divine attributes. However, woe to anyone who presumes to compare Ein Sof with any attributes. For it is limitless, and there are no means to comprehend it."
Another zoharic teaching says: "That which is within the thought [of Ein Sof] is inconceivable. Much less can anyone know about Ein Sof, of which no trace can be found, and which cannot be reached by any means of thought. Yet, from the midst of this impenetrable mystery, the first descent of Ein Sof [whatever gives us insight regarding It] glimmers like a faint, undiscernible light just like the point of a needle, a hidden recess of thought which is not knowable until a light extends from it where there is an imprint of letters."
The unknowable can be discerned. Beginning at an indefinable point as sharp as a needle, it radiates in various ways which can be perceived. This only occurs in the context of process and interaction. We are not an audience watching the God-ing process on stage. We are on stage, ourselves. We mysteriously begin to get a glimmer of God-ing when we succeed in merging with the continuous process of unfolding creation.
Our own experience of God-ing is not like anything we read about. It is a different kind of revelation than that described by ancient prophets. Perhaps some people still are able to hear a voice that booms out of the heavens. But this is rare, indeed, and even the Talmud has serious questions about its veracity.
However, we do not have to be prophets to experience God-ing. It is everywhere around us and an aspect of everything we do. It arises when we repeatedly encounter the magical quality of life, the incredible blend and variety of experience, the exquisite unfolding of nature, the intricacies of our minds, and more than anything, the awe, the profound awe we experience when we sense the enormity of this universe. Somehow the awe itself, ineffably, draws us into the center of creation. At some point we merge with it.
From GOD IS A VERB