What Christian Is And Is Not

It is a little-understood truth that the term "Christian" does not fundamentally mean "a follower of the whole Bible". Jesus taught a closer idea of God than the writings of the Old Testament. "Christian" literally means "follower of Christ". Through my life I was always taught that the "New Covenant" (Jesus) was a new deal that God sent because God changed His mind. I was brought up with the teaching that God had one idea of what man should do during the Old Testament time frame, but then changed to an easier set of rules when Jesus was born.

Most religions believe that God is "unchanging" but still accept this "change of thought" on the part of God as "unchanging". This did not make sense to me at the time, but I supposed that it must be true because it was the only thing that religious leaders I knew were preaching throughout my young life.

The Old Testament has much useful information in it to discern the Truth about God. However, there is also the askew viewpoint about God that Jesus came to correct. If we take it all literally as part of an monolithic mass with the New Testament, it will lead to the same misunderstandings that the writers of the Old Testament had about God.

Most people take the term "Christian" to mean a follower of Jesus, but don't stop to consider that a physical man named Jesus was not what Jesus taught us to worship.

And Jesus said unto him, Why callest thou me good? there is none good but one, that is, God. ~ Mark 10:18

Jesus did not teach us to worship Jesus. Throughout Jesus teachings Jesus taught to worship only one God and that God alone and described how to understand what is God and what is not.

A Liar and the father of it.

Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar, and the father of it. John 8:44

I have heard this verse paraphrased many times as, “Satan (or the devil or evil) is a liar and the father of the lie.”

What could this possibly mean? This means various things to various people, but to me it means that evil is the lie that says it exists. It insists that it is something when in fact it is a lie. It insists it has power, but how can it have power if God (Good, Love, Truth) is, indeed, all-powerful.  If God (Good) is all-powerful, then nothing opposite of God could have any power. That is what I believe. What seems to be the power of evil (meaning anything less than God which is all-powerful, eternal, unlimited, Peace, perfection, Love, Good etc) is the lie that we must overcome to know the Truth (which is God, meaning all-powerful, eternal, unlimited, Peace, perfection, Love, Good etc).

How can we put this in context in our lives? It is nice and a comforting thought indeed, but we all see evil (meaning sin, sickness, death, pain, destruction, loss, limitation etc) in our lives and the lives of others. How can we come to the silly-sounding hypothesis that it doesn’t exist?

Many people don’t realize that there are two separate stories of creation told in the Bible. Nor do they consider that they might have different meanings. I will do my best to explain what I think they mean.

If you read the first chapter of Genesis very carefully you will notice that everything that was created sounded Good. There is no perspective of evil in the first chapter of Genesis.   I believe that this is the True account of creation by the one true God. The one True absolute God created a creation in which nothing was the opposite of God. If you read through it carefully, you can notice what is NOT there. There is no mention of any evil (meaning sin, sickness, death, pain, destruction, loss, limitation etc). There is only a beautiful, perfect unfoldment of each good idea with no conflict or turmoil or pain or shame or anything that is fundamentally different from God.

I believe that this version of creation given in the first chapter of Genesis was also a metaphor meant to explain higher, spiritual concepts and not just creation of physical things. Like many metaphors in the Bible (parables, for example) they use common terms we can all relate to but the meaning works on many levels… from the basic, physical concept, to the deeper, spiritual meaning.

After this first version of creation is told, we are informed that God (which I believe is the one True God) saw that it was VERY good and we are also told that God’s creation was finished and ended.

Gen1:31		And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, [it was] very good.
Gen 2:1	¶	Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them.
Gen 2:2		And on the seventh day God ended his work which he had made;

Notice what was not created at this point. The one True God had created all Good, peaceful, harmonious existence. Man was already created, but there was no concept of evil or anything that evil entails.  Death had not been created, sickness had not been created, conflict had not been created, shame, anger, deceit… Nothing opposite of God had been created. And creation was finished. Done. Complete. And it was all VERY good.

The second version of Genesis, to me, does not indicate a literal story, but a metaphor. There are many reasons why I believe this, but some of the more obvious things that spell this out to me are :

Snakes don’t talk

Trees don’t give magical powers

Why would God need physical materials to build a man?

Why would God use dirt, earth, clay etc. to create human bodies?

The first chapter of Genesis says man was created in God’s image, but God is spiritual so would God not have created SPIRITUAL man? Wouldn’t the man God created be spiritual to be the likeness of God?

How could the one True God (all-good without the potential for evil) create something that could do evil?

In the first account of creation, “God” is translated from 'Elohim’ Which is most commonly translated in the King James Version as “God” but also translated as some other words (according to Strong’s)  
God 2346, god 244, judge 5, GOD 1, goddess 2, great 2, mighty 2, angels1, exceeding 1, God-ward + 04136 1, godly 1

In the second chapter of Genesis, the term for God is a completely different word that is translated as “the Lord" God, which indicates to me that whoever the author was talking about in the first chapter, is different than whatever he was talking about in the second chapter. They seem like two different entities, one creating perfectly, one creating the opposite of what I believe the one True God to be. The first version of creation, God created all good with no evil. In the second chapter, the Lord God created a fallible, finite, physical, mortal human who was capable of sin, sickness, death, lying, shame, anger, pain, turmoil, destruction.

But, wait! All of those descriptions are the OPPOSITE of the descriptions of what we have already said the one True God is! We described the one True God in the first chapter of Genesis as infinite, in fallible, spiritual, immortal, incapable of sin, sickness, death or any other concept which is less than perfect Good.

Why would a God who is infinite Good, Love, and Truth create fallible, finite, physical, mortal human who was capable of sin, sickness, death, lying, shame, anger, pain, turmoil, destruction etc? Is such a thing even possible? Could infinite good create evil or any creation that was capable of creating evil? Could infinite life create death or any creation capable of death? Could perfect Truth create a lie or any creation that was capable of a lie? Could the God of all perfect creation create destruction or any creation that is capable of destruction? You can follow this train of logic through the accounts of creation and see that the two accounts are indeed opposites, not meant to tell the same story over again in a different way, but instead metaphors meant to describe two different, opposite ideas.

The “Lord God” was also the opposite of the one, True God in the first chapter of Genesis. The “Lord God” was not only capable of creating something that was the opposite of the one True God, but the “Lord God” was also capable of setting man up for a fall… tempting man into evil… then cursing and damning his own creation.

For these types of reasons, I read the second chapter of Genesis, not as a literal account, but as a metaphor trying to tell us a deeper, spiritual meaning, so I will attempt to explain what I think that meaning is something like this:

The people described are not meant to be two literal humans, but this story is used to describe MORTAL man, not the perfect, spiritual man that the one True God created as described in the first chapter of Genesis. The “Lord God” in the second chapter of Genesis is describing MORTAL man’s IDEA of God, and not the one, True perfect God.

In this second account of creation, mortal man was told to eat (partake) freely of the tree of the tree of life (the tree of life means the perfect, beautiful, spiritual creation in the first chapter of Genesis by the one True God where there was no opposite of Good nor Truth nor Love nor Life etc). This describes us today as well. We should all “eat freely of the tree of life” (the peaceful, harmonious perfection that we experience only as we let go of mortal ideas and dwell in the understanding of the Spirit. Love without any opposite, Good without any opposite, Truth without any opposite, etc. We should partake freely of the creation that was created in the first chapter of Genesis).

This mortal idea of man was told not to eat of (partake of) the (IDEA of) the tree of the knowledge of good and evil (which is the idea that good (God) has an opposite which also has power and can also create. For the day that they partook of that (false) idea, they would perceive such things as mortality, death and other concepts that are the opposite of the tree of life, the one True God in the first chapter of Genesis and that one, true spiritual, perfect, all-harmonious creation.

Satan is a liar and the father of it means to me that evil is not a power. It is the lie that claims to be real, but only seems to have power if we bow to it, believe in it, react to it, attribute power to it, treat it as something… when it would otherwise be the nothing.. and is nothing and is not anything that the one True God (the ONLY creator) would create. Evil is the lie that claims there is another creator besides the One True God. Evil is the lie that claims there is power outside of God to create things that are the opposite of what God would create and what God is (which is Good, Truth, Love and all of the other descriptors of God uses previously to this in this article).

Because the one True God is the ONLY God and the ONLY creator, and God is all Good, God is Truth, God is Love etc than could the One True God create the opposite of what God is? No, I believe not. Therefore I believe that evil has no legitimate, creator, source or substance. It is an empty lie that seems to have power if it is believed.

The mortal idea of man and mortal man’s idea of God is the point of view that much of the Old Testament is written from. Mortal man assumed that their mortal idea of God was what God was and they incorporated this idea of God into much of their writings. I do not think that the one True God in the first chapter of Genesis could destroy God’s own beloved creation that was all good.

Mortal man’s idea of god was the very highest idea of God that they had at the time, so they wrote from that viewpoint, but their idea of God was of a very powerful HUMAN ruler who acted and reacted like a human would. This is obviously not the idea of good without any opposite described in the first chapter of Genesis.

From the history that the Bible gives us, we can discern that some writers had a clearer understanding of the one True God in the first chapter of Genesis and how the creation that THAT God created was the likeness of Good.

Many were reaching and trying to understand but had many mortal concepts mixed in with their concept of eternal Good.

Of course they were inspired by God. Even the ones with a very mortal concept of God. They wrote in terms of their highest understanding which was probably the highest understanding that anyone had thought up until that time.

But many things they had to say fall under the category of human mind, at least that is the way I understand what they had to say.

(I don’t believe that the one True, spiritual, God who created all and only perfection proclaimed eating catfish a sin as stated in Leviticus 11:9-12

 But anything in the seas or the rivers that has not fins and scales, of the swarming creatures in the waters and of the living creatures that are in the waters, is detestable to you. You shall regard them as detestable; you shall not eat any of their flesh, and you shall detest their carcasses. Everything in the waters that has not fins and scales is detestable to you. Leviticus 11:9-12.

And because I believe that God is literally unchanging, I believe if that was God’s law then it would still be God’s law today and eternally. You can begin to discern what is God by discerning what is unchanging and eternal.)

We can see this teaching of dualism throughout the Bible and read many things into the meaning of the words, but the meaning is always the same: separate what we think we are from the eternal, spiritual man created by the one True God in the first chapter of Genesis.

Consider:

The wheat and the chaff
The fountain that can not give both sweet and bitter water
If thine eye be single


There are many references to dualism and how to separate them.

Satan's Lies - The Serpent and the Horse

The human consciousness, in spiritual terms, is where the spiritual world seems to commingle with the material world. Those familiar with spiritual healing are well acquainted with the idea that the spiritual, eternal, infinite is the real and enduring part of human consciousness, while the material and carnal things are actually the false pretenders in human consciousness. Experience is human consciousness, and hence what human beings believe about themselves is reflected in their life experience. The relationship of hypnotically induced behavior, a phenomenon of the carnal and material side of consciousness, with everyday human life is worthy of examination. Which is closer to spiritual reality, the hypnotic suggestion or the harmonious human life? One of them is a pretender and a liar, and the other is true. On stage, hypnotists and illusionists are known for their ability to mesmerize a volunteer into believing something untrue about himself or about his situation, usually for the entertainment of a crowd.

One such story involved a hypnotic stage act in the late 19th century. An audience participant attending such a show had been made to believe by a renowned hypnotist that he was sitting on a hot cooking stove. Squirming in discomfort, to the delight of the audience, the man became increasingly uncomfortable as the suggestions became more severe, and finally he began to scream in pain. The hypnotist then brought the man out of his mental state of illusion and brought him relief from his imaginary torture with a snap of the fingers. But when the man went home after the show, he found that he had actually acquired large red burns on his buttocks as a result of the part he had played in the show. What actually happened? Hypnotists will tell you that the experiences felt under a hypnotic spell feel every bit as real as normal conscious reality does. As a result of such trickery, subjects of hypnosis believe themselves to have been effected by the experience, and their body responds accordingly. In this case, the subject believed that he was burned to the point of actually having the evidence appear on his skin.

This psychological phenomenon has been and is still often used by many mental health professionals as a means of changing human behavior. One modern example is the use of hypnotism as a means of overcoming unwanted addictions ( nicotine, alcohol, dangerous drugs, etc.) In the late 18th and into the 19th century and beyond, mental hypnotic treatment was commonly and respectfully used as a means for alleviating the effects of all kinds of disease. It was even given some credibility by the medical community for a time. Such human-mind mental therapy was at that time sometimes referred to as animal magnetism, or mesmerism, as it was a form of hypnotic treatment first introduced by Mesmer, an alternative behavioral researcher in Austria in the late 18th century. Mesmer actually accumulated a small fortune from his bizarre treatment methods before the fad fell out of popular acceptance due to condemnation by the medical community. So, is hypnotism good or is it evil? Is it good for health, or unhealthy in the longer run?

One can conclude from the above anecdote that the nature of our material human sense and its relationship to conscious reality itself can be in question. In human sense we create our own reality as a product of our thoughts. That being said, the unprepared human mind is liable to experience any number of hypnotically induced suggestions. Hypnotizing influences are sometimes intentional, sometimes accidental or unintended. Through hypnotic suggestion we are effected physically by what we fear and believe - and more deeply than most of us imagine. Hallucinations and dreams are common examples of such a phenomenon. In every-day life, human conditions can actually sometimes be seen as the direct result of human belief or human belief systems. Subliminal advertising takes advantage of human weakness to secretive hypnotism by secretly and subtly suggesting certain desires. Every day, we unwittingly allow ourselves to be the unknowing subjects of many other kinds of involuntary mental suggestions.

Carefully read, The Bible gives us hints of these subtleties and how we can handle subtle suggestions - and it hints at how to find our way back to reality. The serpent appears in the second chapter of Genesis, the record of divine creation from the human mind's perspective, as the universal symbol of subtlety. It was the metaphorical serpent who first tempted Eve to "eat of the the tree of good and evil". The already perfect spiritual man became supposedly mortal by believing the deceptive lie of the serpent, who convinced them that they would be better off if they knew both good and evil. The serpent from that point on in the metaphor became the symbol of deception, lies, error, devil, evil, etc. Thousands of years later, Jesus said of the devil that he was "a liar and the father of it", meaning by that, that Satan's claim to exist is his most outrageous lie. If we fall for that one, we leave ourselves even more vulnerable to all types of deception. The serpent is the symbol of its representation.

In Genesis 49, Jacob (who had become "Israel" after a mighty internal struggle to find his spiritual identity) addressed each of his 12 sons on his death-bed, at which time each son was assigned the responsibility of becoming the leader of one of the 12 tribes of Israel. Jacob reviewed the strengths and weaknesses of each of his sons in the process of making his tribal leadership assignments.

In Mary Baker Eddy's scripture-enlightening textbook, Science and Health with Key to The Scriptures, is found some background about Jacob, his sons, and the 49th chapter of Genesis: "He was no longer called Jacob, but Israel,-- a prince of God, or a soldier of God, who had fought a good fight. He was to become the father of those, who through earnest striving followed his demonstration of the power of Spirit over the material senses; and the children of earth who followed his example were to be called the Children of Israel, until the Messiah should rename them." (page 309:7)

Dan was known to have displayed personal characteristics of deceptive evil. But Jacob held the highest hopes for Dan and in spite of his shortcomings, like many more of his other sons, made him a ruler of one of the tribes of the Children of Israel. Jacob said of him "Dan shall judge his people, as one of the tribes of Israel. (But) Dan shall be a serpent by the way, an adder in the path, that biteth the horse heels, so that his rider shall fall backward." And in higher hopes Jacob added " I have waited for they salvation, O Lord." (Gen. 49:16-18)M

Mary Baker Eddy defines Dan in spiritual terms as "Animal magnetism; so-called mortal mind controlling mortal mind; error, working out the designs of error; one belief preying upon another." (Science and Health page 563:26)

What did Jacob mean by this horse and serpent metaphor? The author's understanding is this: Hypnotic and subtle belief (Dan, Jacob's son) is like a serpent hiding in the grass. A horse comes along, carrying the rider. Imagine the rider to be you, and the horse to be your life. You are just riding along in your life minding your own business. The horse could represent your life, or it could represent whatever situation you happen to find yourself in. The serpent represents subtle evil beliefs. Those evil beliefs are masquerading as good, and they seek to convince you to carry out some evil by convincing you that the evil is a good thing. The serpent assumes it has the power to do evil, and you even unwittingly grant it that power by ignorantly walking your horse through the tall grass.

Suddenly the serpent bites the heel of the horse. The horse, being startled, rises on its hind legs and tries to buck you off. In other words, some subtle evil suggestion comes along and bites your experience - something bad and devastating has come into your life. What would be your first reaction when the horse begins to buck you?

Most of us would curse the horse. "What's the matter with this horse? " In other words, "What's the matter with my life? What is the cause of my whole world suddenly trying to pitch me and turn everything upside down?" We blame life, or in the metaphor, the horse, for bucking us. We may say that life is just sometimes out of control, and that there is nothing we can do but hold on and wait for it to calm down, or try to soothe it. But what really caused the horse to try to throw you? Was it the horse's fault?

A hidden serpent bit the heel of the horse. In other words, subtle evil invaded your life, and you missed it. You had no idea what happened, so you falsely blamed the horse, your life. The serpent was hiding in the tall grass that you knowingly walked your horse through. The tall grass represents all of the distracting human activity you have going on in your human life. You could prevent your life from being in turmoil, prevent the serpent from biting the heel of your horse, and thus prevent it from bucking you, by mowing the grass before you ride - clearing all of the hiding places (disturbing un-Godlike human activity) in your human life consciousness for evil to secretly hide. When the grass is mowed, the serpent has no place to hide. Spiritual purification, spiritual baptism, is like mowing the grass. Using a New Testament metaphor, you must remove the tares from the wheat, and dispose of the tares.

So, let's say you know about serpents, and have mowed the grass now. You have protected yourself against the serpent's attack, but what power does the serpent really have in the first place? The subtle suggestions of evil represented by the serpent are the real root of the problem. The fist step was in clearing the human consciousness to give evil no abiding place (mowing the grass.) We must also get rid of the serpent, or it will simply seek out another hiding place. The serpent, that mesmeric, hypnotic power of evil suggestion, is only empowered by giving it a sense of somethingness.

Again in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, Mrs. Eddy reminds us how the ancient patriarchs, Jesus, his students, the apostles, and adherents to the practice of true Christian healing began their approach to keeping experience free from evil. I maintain that Jesus as well as other slightly less spiritually advanced humans knew that "The starting-point of divine Science is that God, Spirit, is All-in all, and that there is no other might nor Mind, - that God is Love, and therefore He is divine Principle" (Science and Health 275:6) In other words, we must begin by never falsely granting evil a foothold. The initial error is the belief that evil has a right to exist at all, or that it does exist within God's realm. God is infinite, pure good, All-in-all. That concept in itself excludes an abiding place for evil. Evil's only abiding place can be in the tall grass of the mortal human activity of the carnal and imperfect man, of whom God is not the author, and who exists only in a supposititious (spiritually unreal) mortal consciousness. That is the consciousness of the Adam-man, the carnal man, who falsely believes that he lives in a world where both good and evil are present. Jesus was teaching mankind how to elevate their consciousness above the Adam dimension and into the real and spiritual plane of the perfect spiritual man, as described in the very first account of creation in Genesis Chapter 1.

In further explanation, Mrs. Eddy tells how to exterminate the serpent: "The exterminator of error is the great truth that God, good, is the only Mind, and that the supposititious opposite of infinite Mind --called devil or evil--is not Mind, is not Truth, but error, without intelligence or reality. There can be but one Mind, because there is but one God; and if mortals claimed no other Mind and accepted no other, sin would be unknown. We can have but one Mind, if that one is infinite. We bury the sense of infinitude, when we admit that, although God is infinite, evil has a place in this infinity, for evil can have no place, where all space is filled with God." (Science and Health 469:13)

If God, good, the only Mind, is all that exists, then we, as the effect of this great and only cause reside within this perfect and infinite self-contained spiritual realm. Evil is automatically exterminated because it has no true residing place in our consciousness, once we make our consciousness aligned with God's. The only place evil can possibly even pretend to reside is in human material sense. And human material sense comes from the carnal and imperfect concept of man claiming to really be us. - and this is is NOT God's man! Evil tries to hide itself in this human consciousness, and it comes in the form of mesmeric suggestion, pretending to actually be our thought.

But we have the power to remove evil's hallucinatory, mesmeric, illusory existence. Mrs. Eddy further illustrates this point in Science and Health when she writes : "Under the mesmeric illusion of belief, a man will think that he is freezing when he is warm, and that he is swimming when he is on dry land. Needle-thrusts will not hurt him. A delicious perfume will seem intolerable. Animal magnetism thus uncovers material sense, and shows it to be a belief without actual foundation or validity. Change the belief, and the sensation changes. Destroy the belief, and the sensation disappears." (490:28)

If you desire to be free from the influence of evil you have only to claim your freedom from evil by firmly and powerfully confirming the presence of God, and with conviction realize that evil is but hypnotic suggestion. Maintain, as Jesus did, a solid conviction of the erroneous nature of error, evil, devil, sin, sickness, death, which can have no abiding place in the true Kingdom of God, which is with us here and now. Jesus said, " Neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you." (Luke 17:21)

Prayer and Healing

Why Does Our Prayer Seem to Go Unanswered?

Have you wondered to yourself, “Who or what is to blame for the events in our human lives that bring unhappiness and despair?” If we profess a conviction of the goodness and infinitude of God as pure Love, we can only properly and logically conclude that only we, ourselves, humans, could be responsible for the discords we experience. But then, since we admit God to be pure good and all-harmonious, whence comes what seems to be discord? And we certainly don’t experience what we do not want purposely! So, you may ask yourself, “What is actually going on?” .

We learn in Christian Science that “The starting point of divine Science is that God, Spirit, is All-in-all – that God is Love, and therefore He is divine Principle.: (S&H p.275, Mary Baker Eddy) Having been raised with the Christian Science thought, it has been difficult for me to understand that not all other Christians immediately come to the conclusion that God is ALL good, ONLY good, and that concepts of any kind which assume that God could be the source of anything UNLIKE Good, are FALSE. To the mortal sense of human life we are born into a material world. This platform sweeps spirituality under the rug – while acknowledging that the things of spirit exist, this platform of understanding considers spirit to be very far removed from daily life. This conventionally accepted thinking begins with the assumption that God is the creator of both everything that appears to our senses, as well as of the things which are not tangible to our senses, the spiritual. No line is drawn between the spiritual and the material, or - stated in terms we use shortly - between the real and the unreal, the solid and the illusory. It is also likely, from the standpoint of many readers, that the idea that one of the two approaches, spirituality or materiality, is illusory, is a brand new concept. Which is which?

Let’s stop right here and open our minds. Let’s wipe the slate clean. Try the following thoughts - see how they feel. Maybe this is new and foreign and uncomfortable for you. Don’t reject it without giving yourself the opportunity to wear it for a while. Test it logically. Should you object, watch closely for your own invisible logical contradictions in those objections. Test them thoroughly.

Here it is:

Real life, the Life God gives us, is purely and only spiritual. Matter has characteristics which are actually opposite to Spirit. The nature of matter is finite and temporal. The nature of Spirit is infinite, eternal, permanent. Spirit is ubiquitous. Matter is not. There is no place where Spirit is not. Spirit’s substance is in its thoughts and ideas. What is the substance of matter? The explanation of matter can never be in any way spiritual, for its very nature is in contrast with Spirit. Therefore, the parts of life that are associated with matter – cannot even have a spiritual basis. If then you understand God, who is spiritual and obviously not material, to be entirely good and infinite in presence, then ask yourself this: What, then, and whence, is matter? The answer to this question is one which to common human sense and to what we commonly perceive as common sense logic most strongly objects – namely that matter must be by logical deduction – erroneous! Let’s examine this idea slowly and logically, especially if it seems rather ridiculous to you right now.

What are matter’s characteristics? They are decidedly unlike Spirit, for matter does not fill every cubic centimeter of space in the universe, and matter is ever changing and is always in a temporary state. Try to conceive of something made of matter which has always been and always will be just as it is, from the beginning of time to eternity. There is no material object that fits that description. Spirit, however, has exactly opposing characteristics from matter. Spirit does fill all space, and is eternally the same, is never variable, is never changeable in its loving nature, is incapable of decay, is incapable of discord. Matter then, logically must be the exact opposite of Spirit. And Spirit is ubiquitous! If one begins with the standard Christian platform that God is All, then by logical deduction, Spirit is everywhere and nothing else unlike it exists.

The traditional starting point, a generally human-like perspective of a God capable of wavering and changing his mind - usually leads one to say “ I have prayed and asked for all that I need, but it never happens. He must not be listening to me, or He has a reason for withholding my requests.”

But, think about this from the perspective of de-humanizing our concept of God. Think of God as being absolutely ALL, comprised ONLY of Spirit, Good and Love, in an infinitude which allows no room for anything to exist that is unlike God, Love, good. Stop thinking of Him as a human. Ponder this deeply before you go on. Could God, an infinite and ever-present Principle, Love itself, be to blame for your lack? Does He really fail to answer or refuse your prayers for say, financial support, or for a job, or for the removal of any kind of discord, or disease in our experience? In James 4:3 we read “Ye ask, and receive not, because ye ask amiss…” Return for a moment and ponder the perspective that God is Spirit and therefore incapable of creating matter because all of matter’s characteristics are completely opposite to His character. Ponder that. Consider what are you praying for and how to effectively pray for it.

Jesus said “when ye pray, use not vain repetitions, as the heathens do: for they think that they shall be heard for their much speaking.” (Matt 6: 7) Think about what Jesus’ concept (whose concepts were perfect) of God must have been. If one were to pray to a big powerful human, we would want to try to impress that human, and make him feel like he had good reason for listening to us. I believe that Jesus did NOT pray to God as a big supremely powerful human entity. From that perspective, it would make sense not to try to impress God, and to perceive that God would not respond to a lot of talk. I perceive that Jesus saw God as a perfect and ever-present Principle of Love, always available, never needing to be informed about our miseries and woes. He knew that God does not know those miseries and woes, because miseries and woes have no source in the infinite and perfect source of Love. To tell God about them is therefore to tell God about - nothing. Jesus knew that God’s compassion for us is simply an ever-presence which becomes real to us when we feel it – through deep and prayerful communion with him in Spirit. He knew that God need not be informed of our perceived woes when he said “for your Father knoweth what things ye have need of, before ye ask him.” Matt 6: 8. (emphasis added).

Are you praying to receive something made of matter from a God who is man-like? Or asking to get rid of something made of matter created by a God who is man-like? Now ponder again. Maybe this is asking “amiss”. Get a firm grip on the concept of the actual nothingness of matter, and the accompanying necessity of the complete somethingness of spirit. What are you really needing to pray for? What should you be praying for? What you really need is the spiritual substance of the idea that comprises whatever it is that it seems you feel that you need - because that spiritual substance is its true nature. You do not need the material thing, although as long as you are human, the answer may indeed come to you cloaked in a material form. “Faith is the substance if things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen”. Hebrews 11:11. The matter version of what we are praying for is a counterfeit, and God does not hear prayer for that because such prayer cognizes the need or existence of something outside of His kingdom.

For example, if you are poor, you should not be praying for dollar bills – rather you need to pray to know through your prayer the spiritual truth that God supplies all your needs, and to understand that He supplies them in spirit because that is where the only real and actual substance IS, within the infinitely self contained spiritual substance of God himself.

Jesus is always our example. When he fed the five thousand, he did not elaborately pray to God and ask that God provide what was needed in the form of material food. According to Matt 14:19 “…he commanded the multitude to sit down on the grass, and took the five loaves, and the two fishes, and looking up to heaven, he blessed, and brake, and gave the loaves to his disciples, and the disciples to the multitude” Ponder Jesus’ complete trust and confidence in God – Jesus simply looked up to heaven (contemplated the true spiritual situation), blessed, and then gave out the bread. The multitude saw the bread (the knowledge he had been giving them), and they ate it. Simple as that. To God it was no miracle – it was the reality of the completeness of the spiritual situation brought to light. He did not plead anything like, “O Holy Father please give us bread enough for this multitude to eat.” He did not ask or plead at all, just as he instructed us not to do in our prayers as well. He simply KNEW and trusted in God’s infinite Love and tender care and supply of all good. Knowing that brought it to manifestation in everyone’s experience.

Or, if you are suffering from a deadly disease, you should not be praying from the standpoint of God getting rid of this terrible material thing called a virus, or a disease, or whatever form it may be in – rather you need to pray to understand that God supplies all health, and that real health is in the form of Spirit, because God is ONLY spiritual, and ONLY good. Remember, if our reasoning concluded that matter has no source in God, then disease can have no source in God. Matter is the only form disease can take, because it has NO spiritual source, and matter is the opposite of Spirit. As soon as consciousness recognizes the nothingness of the source of disease, in light of the ALLNESS of God, disease vanishes from experience. This is the science behind the remarkable healings of Jesus, his disciples, the apostles, and many present day Christians.

Again, Jesus is always our example. One could pick any one of the many physical healing Jesus performed. For the sake of example let’s consider Jesus’ healing of the epileptic boy in Mathew 17: 14-21. How did Jesus pray in this situation? All Jesus did was to “rebuke the devil”. He denied that there was any power outside of the realm of the kingdom of God. Then he mentally stood unmovable on that platform. Verse 18 says that “the child was cured from that very hour.” What did Jesus NOT do? He did NOT plead with God and ask if God were willing that the child should live or die, and he did not ask God to remove anything. In contrast, he affirmed God’s power by “rebuking the devil”, or confirming that there was NO power but God, Love. This is why he gave absolutely NO attention to the body or its conditions. These characteristics are common to EVERY spiritual healing found in the Bible.

So, is God responsible for what feels like misery? That is how a lot of people feel, and they end up feeling alone and disconnected from God. This false conception of God as responsible for our human woes even turns many away from Christianity itself. After all, if there is never a guarantee that God will answer our prayer in a tangible and good way, and God could decide to do bad things to us for reasons we do not understand, why should we want to trust in him? I and countless others do not believe God to have these changeable characteristics. This approach is a product of the false belief that God is responsible for both reality (Spirit) and what we do not realize is really deceptive illusion in this sort of dream world we call human material life. We must start with the premise that evil is not valid, has NO source, and that God, good is ALL. From this standpoint of God being all Good and filling all eternity and space, is it even possible to be forgotten or ignored by The Almighty?

No! God is, always and always has been, and always will be invariable and unchangeable Love. We, as humans, have to be in tune with the ever-presence of God, and never to doubt his presence. What feels like God’s absence to our human sense, is really but a burial of our thought in that which has only a mortal and human origin. God can never be absent. We never need to ask him for anything or beg that he be present and listen. We have only to focus our spiritual attention on his presence. There are rational and helpful explanations to what we feel as effects of mortal (not God-like) thought. It seldom occurs to humans that their prayers appear to remain unanswered because they fail to understand who and what God actually is, just what prayer actually is, and how to effectually pray. A truly humble approach will consider the possibility that maybe our approach to God is lacking something, missing the point, and hence failing. We need to do a lot more than simply believe in whatever we perceive God to be. We need to learn to gradually better understand God, and through a better understanding of Him and the operation of his ever-present Principle, gain an understanding of exactly what we are believing in. In this way, belief is gradually transformed into faith. True spiritually based faith is much deeper than belief. It is conviction grounded in understanding and solid trust.

We do ourselves a big favor by humbly considering the possibility that the concepts we have about God may be flawed. “The devil” , though seeming very real to us sometimes, is nothing the false concept that anything can possibly exist outside of the realm of God. The ultimate success of “the devil” is to fool man into believing that God is responsible for the devil’s very existence. Seen in this light we can see that the devil has been quite successful in the human world, for the vast majority of well meaning Christians actually place the blame for both good AND evil on God. Just what the devil wanted! Keep clearly in mind though, that the devil, or error, or evil, or whatever name you want to put on ideas outside of the realm of God, HAS no source, except in erring human misperception. The Adam man perceives the devil. Paul confirms and stresses that we are to put off the old man, the carnal man, the Adam man, and that we are to put off mortality and put on immortality. There is no way to accomplish this task through human and materialistic thought.

There is no such thing as a prayer unanswered or unheard. Effectual prayer reveals and confirms our permanent and uninterruptable connection with God. Is your prayer leading you to the peace that comes to consciousness through this kind of spiritual confirmation? Or is your prayer based on the false assumption that you are lacking something, and your prayer should result in God giving you the thing which your false and purely human Adam-man-belief says that you lack? Such prayer fails to reveal and confirm our the ever present connection with God. If our prayers are to be effective, we need to understand what prayer itself actually is, and we need to comprehend the scope of God - what He is and what He is not. This process of learning to know God and His workings is the spiritualization of thought. But just how do we spiritualize our thought?

Spiritualization of thought begins with eliminating the concepts of materialism in thought. Let’s begin this analysis by considering the concept of Spirit itself. Spirit is an important synonym for God. The characteristic traits of spirit exist only in thought. Can your hands touch spirit, your ears hear it, your eyes see it? Can you taste and smell Spirit with your mouth or tongue? Of course not! Obviously, then, Spirit is not made up of matter and has nothing to do with matter. The commonly accepted belief is that God created matter, and here is where our entire approach needs to take a different direction. We cannot touch spirit with the senses of matter. The things of spirit are admitted to be ever present, permanent, everywhere, and eternal in nature. In psalms 139:9,10 we read “ if I take the wings of the morning , and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea ; Even there shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me“

Even in the darkest recesses of the most terrible situations we can imagine, and sometimes even find ourselves in, the infinitude of God leaves no logical place in the universe for matter at all! If Spirit is everything, and its opposite is matter, then from the perspective of God, matter is nothing – but a false concept of human thinking. Following this train of thought which seems radical to the traditional thinker, we find that the elimination of materialism in thought means much more than it sounds like on the surface. To eliminate materialism, we must eradicate any and all recognition of anything and everything unlike God from our conception of what we interpret as God’s reality – our human experience. Matter, by the above analysis, is the main thing to root out! We must instead think and live pure Spirit.

And in Romans 8:25-39 we read “Who shall separate us from the love of Christ...” and it goes on to list all of the things which human sense might say are insurmountable, while to spiritual sense, Paul knew that separation from God is an impossibility. If God, Spirit, intangible to the human senses, is also admitted to be all and include all and to fill all space, we must admit that we cannot be separated from Him.

We must always begin our analysis of our human situations with the acknowledgment that God is All, infinite. God is all and entirely good, and consistent Principle. And that there is only one God, and because of his infinity, nothing else actually exists except for God and the things which represent Him. And because God is Spirit and all spiritual, and is not material, then material concepts, matter itself, must be seen as existing only in a suppositious human consciousness. If God truly comprises all that exists, and we are made in his image and likeness, we are in fact spiritual and perfect, just as God is.

Spiritualization of thought, then, is the process of eliminating all that is unlike Spirit in our consciousness. This is more than pretty sounding words – it is the human task of making Spirit the number one factor in our consciousness. This means we must change our everyday human points of view which tend to forget about Spirit, wherein we falsely regard Spirit as something far off and intangible. We have to literally live Spirit and feel God continually. As Spirit becomes more tangible to us, then matter itself gradually becomes less tangible. When we learn to trust Spirit and to know that all we ever need is continually at hand, because we ARE the spiritual representatives of God himself, then all of our needs become manifested in our experience.

Mortal Mind vs The One True Mind

I created this blog to be a record of my thoughts and feelings about my journey toward God. I wanted to be able to remember what I was thinking at different points along the way. I was thinking, the other day, about one of my first distinct healing experiences and how it affected me. After that experience, I felt that I had much more to learn about God than what I had been taught in a traditional church setting. I just wanted to share this experience because it meant a lot to me.

I realize that mortal mind would think, “Oh, that’s just a coincidence! It probably would have happened anyway.” And I can’t really prove that thinking wrong. What makes me certain that it wasn’t a coincidence is that all of the healings I have experienced have been very similar in nature. When I change my thought to see that the problem differently (to see that it doesn’t, in fact, have any right to exist… and that in reality it CAN’T exist) the problem shortly disappears. It could have happened without me having the insight, but doesn’t seem likely to have gone away on its own.

My first real healing experience happened when my husband, Stirling, and I were selling a house in Florida to move to Missouri. We had not been together very long and were trying to combine two households into one. We had to go to Florida to pack up our remaining belongings in a moving van and drive them back to Missouri. We were staying in the house we were trying to sell. It was a bit of a struggle. We had to contend with daily rain, a rodent infestation (due to the house sitting empty for a while), legal issues with selling the house, trying to sell various items while in this process of moving, being low on funds, and things just generally seeming not to go smoothly.

With this backdrop, I started to feel like I had a slightly sore throat. For three days, I woke up each morning with it significantly worse than the day before. By the evening of the third day, my throat hurt so bad that I was in tears. I couldn’t eat or drink or just go through the motion of swallowing without tears welling up in my eyes and it hurt to breathe. I was dreading the sleepless night that I presumed was looming ahead of me. I was not very familiar with Christian Science at the time, but Stirling had been raised in a Christian Science church.

He talked to me about the concepts of not acknowledging another power but God (Good). He talked to me about how this seeming intrusion into my life had no right to exist. I was trying to give consideration to these concepts, but I was actually becoming actually scared by the intensity of the pain and how quickly it had worsened. I rationalized that if it continued to get worse, I would have a much larger problem to contend with.

It was late at night and the pain was so severe that I even called several emergency rooms in the area to see how long my wait would be if I were to go. They all had several hours wait, it was getting late at night and I didn’t want to sit in an ER room all night any more than I wanted to try to sleep through the pain. I decided to wait until morning. If it was worse, I decided that I could go to the ER or Urgent Care then.

Exhausted and frustrated, I went to bed, trying not to fear the pain and the long night ahead. I did give some half-hearted consideration to the concepts that Stirling had talked to me about, but my hope was mixed with doubt and short bursts of dread. But I tried.

I was surprised to find that I slept through the night without waking up at 3 or 4 a.m. in intense pain (because that’s the pattern that had seemed to repeat itself every night for the past couple of nights. The worst pain was actually at 3 a.m. or so every morning. But that morning, after I had called the emergency rooms the night before, I woke up at a normal time in the morning feeling fine.

In fact, when I woke up, I had no pain at all. I tried not to be surprised. In fact, I tried not to draw any attention to it at all. I reasoned that the more I thought about it and the more other people thought about it, the more likely it would be to come back. I put it out of my mind and, for the most part, forgot about it due to the hectic schedule we had at the time. I was, however, very grateful every time I thought about it.

The interesting thing to me was that when I woke up that morning, I didn’t feel like I was recovering from a sore throat. I didn’t feel like I was getting better. I felt like I had not had a sore throat at all. I felt fine. I felt good. I felt as if I was energized and ready to pack and move stuff (which was something I would usually be dreading with all of my might).

We continued packing and moving with no further health related issues. Everything went smoothly and, as far as I can remember, I haven’t had a hint of a sore throat since. 

I have come to view prayer and God helping people differently than I used to. I used to think that this physical world was a real place where real things happened but sometimes if something bad was happening, God would reach down and change things to help the person that asked Him. Now my idea of God is much different. "He" isn't a person, looking down and making choices. He doesn't sometimes choose to give good and sometimes choose to withhold good for some "good" reason. God is the source of all Good, Love, Peace etc. God constantly shines forth perfection that makes all things perfect just as the sun constantly shines forth light that makes all things bright. If there is any hindrance to our perception of light it isn't because the sun quit shining - not even for a second. It is because we perceive clouds or other obstacles between us and the sun. Likewise, if our experience is less than Godly (perfect) it is because we perceive other things as having power other than God (perfection).

God is the source, there is no other creator or power. God only creates perfection. The more we understand this fact and rule out other interferences from our thought the more we can be at one with the peace and love that is our birthright. If we live with fear, even if only in the back of our minds, we allow other concepts of other power into our minds. 

Don't consider other creative  powers (the physical world or human causation) to barge in and take over. You are the child of God, made in His image and likeness. Claim your true place as a joint heir with Christ (Rom 8:17). Jesus is our example of rising above the concepts of this mortal world. It is knowing the world as God created it and not considering man or nature as a secondary creator who came along and messed up God's perfect plan. Just stick with the concept of that perfect plan. I believe we can only know God but disavowing all other concepts of power and creation. This is the One True Mind - God (i.e. Good, Love, Truth, Perfection) that we strive to know. So then, know it and know nothing else.

God is Infinite Perfection – He is not Human

I was recently contemplating a thought from the Scriptures which I randomly encountered:
 

Mark 16:16 “He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved; but he that believeth not shall be damned”

The Bible contains nothing but the inspired word of God. The ancient prophets in the Old Testament as well as the more Christly inspired New Testament writers documented their spiritual visions as best they could for the use of future generations – through the use of the best human tool of communication mankind has, namely, language. There is deep spiritual meaning throughout all of the Scriptures.

Our goal must be to understand the Scriptures spiritually, and not to simply take what comes to our thought on the first reading as the valid truth. To find Truth, then, whether it be in an Old Testament or in a New Testament writing we are pondering, we must look deep into the spiritual intent of the original writer, while also taking into account the prevalent views of the world as they existed at the time of writing. There are human senses, which we use to interpret our every day material world, and then there are spiritual senses, which we use to interpret the things of spirit and which we often think of incorrectly as being disconnected with our daily world. The more we understand of the Bible using our spiritual senses, the more naturally and effectively we will find the original meaning of the ancient writers. This clarification of Scripture is what brings healing to human experience.

That being said, let’s return to the above reference. Here is what this author presently sees in this passage:

“He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved; but he that believeth not shall be damned”

When you grasp the presence and reality of God (believe), and you permanently purify your thought of all ideas which do not have their source in this one infinite and good reality (are baptized), you will be saved as a consequence of your obedience to the unchanging Principle of God.

Let’s add to this concept the consideration of a quotation from James 1:17 “Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning”. James is very clear here that God in not variable. God is constant. He does not sometimes express good and sometimes express anger. He in fact cannot do so, if we start with the premise that God is all good, and God is infinite. Let’s keep this in mind and continue.

The starting point being that God is ALL and complete and infinite, leaves nothing that can include the concept of damnation or punishment. So, what did Jesus mean when he said “but he that believeth not shall be damned”? Notice, Jesus did not attribute the damnation directly to God. A human view of God would so interpret these words. But Jesus’ viewpoint of God was not human, nor was his concept of God as a human. Jesus’ perfect understanding of God, the understanding which he desired to lead all of his disciples to, was like that which James described - invariable, unchangeable. Variableness and changeableness are human characteristics, not divine characteristics. James, as a true disciple, discerned and documented these characteristics of God as a result of Christ Jesus’ influence on his human life.

God, being invariable and unchangeable perfect and good Principle, does not and can not make a choice to save you, or to damn you. Only the direction in which you guide your own human thought can do that. Jesus was teaching us how to purify and direct our human thought, Godwards. God is unswerving constant divine Principle.

Examine once again the last phrase “he that believeth not shall be damned”. God does not damn you for your unbelief, and this was certainly not what Jesus meant. Only a false acknowledgement of a force contrary to the power of God can damn you, on the basis of an incorrect decision to act contrary to God. That false acknowledgement is what is often referred to as “the devil” a term which Jesus sometimes used to describe erroneous convictions. Belief in another power (having another God, contrary to the First Commandment) besides the only and infinite all loving God will be manifested in bad results in life experience. These bad results will be real to you in proportion to your belief in the validity of their source. And they actually have no source, because God already is all. There is no judgment going on here from God’s perspective - only the action of His Principle.

Imagine yourself, for example, to be drowning is a sea of troubles, as we often do in our lives. You pray and hear God’s loving voice. God throws you a life preserver. If your human frame of reference is prepared to acknowledge God as the source of all things real, you will see and accept the flotation device. God may have been presenting the life preserver to you for years, but you did not take it because you did not see it. Maybe you were turned around and looking in the other direction. Or maybe you were not in tune with God’s call, telling you to turn around and grasp the life preserver. Maybe you were terrified of the sights and sounds and the idea of drowning, and all you could see and hear was crashing waves. In your confusion you were not even aware that a life preserver was being handed to you because you were looking the other way and screaming in fear. Ignorant and innocent as this condition may have been, that is your self imposed damnation! So, you see, God is not responsible for the evil – your incorrect human perspective however, is the only thing that can be! But when you are peaceful and attuned to God and ready to hear him in the Spirit, you will find that your answers are already there and waiting for you.

The sun is never deciding to shine or not to shine. The sun doesn’t know if the rays don’t reach the ground on the face of the earth. The sun’s business is to shine, steadily and completely all the time. If there are clouds in earth’s atmosphere, obscuring the light, the sun has no awareness of an obstruction. The sun doesn’t react by shining more or give up in despair and shine less because what’s the point in shining if the rays of light are not received. The sun does not need the earth to shine. The sun simply shines.

Likewise, God does not decide to bestow or withhold good from mankind. God does not see his good being rejected or received. God does not react by bestowing more or less good. God is unchangeable. God IS good. God is ever-present perfection bestowed at every moment in every person, place and thing. If it is not apparent, by looking at someone that they are made in the image and likeness of God, it is because of the clouds in THEIR atmosphere… the mist in their mind… but that doesn’t mean that God is not the same all-good, ever-present, all-powerful source of all perfection. God is always the same.

God isn't closer to us when we feel his presence and further from us when we do not. God is always everywhere, perfect all the time. We sense him more when we move OUR clouds out of the way, dispel our mist, and "stay our minds" on God (which means the same thing as Love, perfection, Good etc. If it doesn't feel like peaceful, harmonious, perfection, it ISN'T God).

Return for a moment to James 1:17 “Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning”.

Consider the “shadow of turning”. When the planets revolve around the sun, shadows are cast from the presence of the material earth or other celestial objects being in the way of the sun. James is saying that with the “Father of lights”, i.e., God viewed from the perspective of his spirituality an all-might, there is no shadow. There is no place where the light of Spirit is not completely present, and there can be no place where that spiritual light is masked. We can become conscious here and now of this presence. How and why? Because from God’s spiritual perspective, we already are and can never be less than in his presence. Our job as humans is to reach this state thought by means of constant purification of our thought, or the cleansing from our minds of all things which have no source in God, because God is the ONLY creator, and God is ALL good.

I found a demonstration of this phenomenon in my daily life very recently. I have a technical electronics job, which involves troubleshooting problems of a nature that others tend to want to avoid. Solutions are often seemingly hard to come by, and to human sense the job can feel very frustrating. I had been fearing and dreading a particular technical task which I had been humanly perceiving as very difficult. The task had been put off until the final deadline, and had to be completed on a particular date, and I was down to that critical date. I had started the day with my newly acquired and now customary habit of deliberately communing with God. In my prayer, I deeply acknowledged his ever presence – not only that, but I strove to realize that whatever human problems I perceived facing me, were just that - human problems. They are only problems because of my perception of them. In God’s eyes, the solutions are already worked out. I perceived that in prayer, my job is to unmask the obstacles that my false human sense has put in the way of my seeing the true light. The answer to the prayer comes when I remove the clouds in my perception.

Well, what happened that morning seemed to me truly miraculous. The technical condition which I had been fearing, and which I had observed with my own eyes just a month earlier, was inexplicably just gone. My technical problem, to human view, had been “healed”. I had only a few minutes of work to do to accomplish the final task, and I did so. Later that afternoon, I encountered yet another perplexing technical situation, and through the application of the same prayerful thought process, the solution the problem not only appeared to me, but it also seemed to lack a physical explanation. The problem simply vanished!

Perhaps I got off topic somewhat, but the thrust of the point I intended to make with this article is this: When we perceive God as an ever-operative and perfect Principle, and cease to look upon God as having changeable and human characteristics, the light of God becomes more apparent. As we perceive and understand what God really is on a spiritual level, and move our thought away from the human perspective to which we are all accustomed, in the ration we begin to see and experience God’s harmony actually manifested and becoming more real in our lives.

God is the Light

The sun is never deciding to shine or not to shine. The sun can not withhold light. The sun doesn’t know if the rays don’t reach the ground on the face of the earth. The sun’s business is to shine, steadily and completely all the time. If there are clouds in earth’s atmosphere, obscuring the light, the sun has no awareness of an obstruction. The sun doesn’t react by shining more or give up in despair and shine less because what’s the point in shining if the rays of light are not received. The sun does not need the earth to shine. The sun simply shines.

Likewise, God does not decide to bestow or withhold good from mankind. God does not see his good being rejected or received. God does not react by bestowing more or less good. God is unchangeable. God IS good. God is ever-present perfection bestowed at every moment in every person, place and thing. If it is not apparent, by looking at someone that they are made in the image and likeness of God, it is because of the clouds in THEIR atmosphere… the mist in their mind… but that doesn’t mean that God is not the same all-good, ever-present, all-powerful source of all perfection. God is always the same. 

God isn't closer to us when we feel his presence and further from us when we do not. God is always everywhere, perfect all the time. We sense him more when we move OUR clouds out of the way, dispel our mist, and "stay our minds" on God (which means the same thing as Love, perfection, Good etc. If it doesn't feel like peaceful, harmonious, perfection, it ISN'T God).

God isn't a human making individual rules and deciding when to intervene with good or consequences... God, the allness of Good, is our creator. The allness of Good doesn't include ideas of anger, punishment, consequences, lack or any evil. God, the allness of Good, is simply all good. If in our lives we happen to perceive something that is less than perfect, we should not say that God allows, creates or enjoys this because we deserve, need or want it. To perceive correctly we would have to understand that God, being all good, doesn't know evil, just like the sun, being all light, doesn't know darkness. The sun doesn't perceive itself as chasing darkness away. It is simply all light. Always. If we perceive less than perfection, it is because our minds have not yet been completely purified of the concepts of evil, sin or sickness. We should try to raise our mind up to God and understand that we are His likeness. When we get our consciousness out of the way, God (perfection) can shine through.