The many meaning of the word "love"
Dear Neal,
With gratitude I have read your book, often thinking - finally somebody said it! And good timing, too!
I also wanted to share with you some comments. Please, forgive my errors, my English is still very young, it's all new to me.
You use the word "love" often. But what I noticed is that in English the word "love" is greatly misused. When you talk about the love which is GOD, it's a different sort of love then the one that goes in the end of the telephone conversation in California: "by-by, luv ya". It's almost necessary to come up with another word for love which is God. It's just not the same thing. Human love is warm, nourishing, sensual and sentimental. It requires time, actions, proofs and tests. It's the state of the soul. To know itself it does need to know what love is not.
The love which is God is the state of oneness. There is no experience of boundaries of the soul or the body. The one who loves doesn't feel separated from the one who is being loved. It does not need the experience of the opposite to know itself because there is no opposite. It is a total bliss, overwhelming, flooding all other sensations. It is everlasting orgasm, the word "love" is too small for it. Probably, as well as any other word. In the dense vibrations of our physical reality it is virtually impossible to experience it. But we do have here something vaguely resembling our experience of oneness before we were born here, that we call love.
The difference between the two could be described as if you need to be on the top of the Everest and you already got in the car in San Diego to go to the airport to fly to Asia to climb it. So, that getting in the car in San Diego is the closest we can get in our physical reality to experiencing love which is God, compare to it being on top of the tallest mountain.
It's confusing enough that we have the same word for all the spectrum of human emotions: sibling love, parental love, love to motherland, love of chicken soup, love of lovers, love of scuba diving, etc. But to give the same name to experiencing God is simply irrelevant. If we still need some sort of a symbol for it, maybe "the everlasting orgasm" sounds most accurate. Human love is associated with "open heart" feelings. Connection with God is experienced by every single cell in the body as unbearable ecstasy when it is almost hard to breathe. The body loses its tactile sensations, its boundaries, everything disappears. It's the complete, total homecoming.
The other comment is on "birth of evil". I thought that you addressed that phenomena somewhat groundlessly. The whole concept you are introducing on evil's right to be part of our lives is very new for the mass consciousness. So I thought it deserves a more careful approach. The "birth of evil" was not that simple. It was not created voluntarily as some sort of horrible trouble maker entity. Besides, I have not witnessed fear to be known in other realities*. It is our sole privilege.
God sure had fun designing humans.
That design came out beautiful and intricate. Let me bring the analogy of driving a car. As I sit behind the wheel, I do little movements turning the wheel, pushing some buttons on the dash board. And the whole big, heavy machine obeys my commands. Watching the traffic from the sidewalk, we understand how it works. Traffic rules and street signs create that urban harmony. It is obvious to us that God is not moving each car. It moves because it was designed to move. And we also know very well what will happen if one car will decide to move ignoring the rules. Somebody is going to get hurt.
The same thing is true with humans. We are designed to live in our bodies according to various rules. All the fun is that our physical bodies and situations that we go through during our reality - time-space continuum with it's own specific order and purpose lives are only the tip of the iceberg. And those rules are written on the underwater part of it. Through the history of humankind there were attempts to bring the knowledge about them out in the open. That's how morals were created in every culture. But they mostly have failed. Because those rules were created in high vibrations and by the time they arrived into the heavy, dense earth atmosphere they got transformed and misunderstood. Nevertheless, they have their full power on us. God's part in it was the very creating of this complicated, interconnected system called human being. Our design provides us with free will, which is also our sole privilege. It exists only in the realities with humans. I have not perceive it in any other realities, which are infinite..
Our other outstanding characteristic are two basic instincts. We were automatically assigned all the basic instincts that animals have. But that is not accurate. For example: humans can choose death to protect their ideas, and many did which is not thinkable of in the animal world. Or: the excited artist or scientist can go hungry for days forgetting to eat. Try to imagine a lion being so involved with some project. Or: a lot of people consciously choose not to have children, for example, which is also a trait unique to humans. And so on and so forth.
Our two basic instincts are very different from those in the animal kingdom. First, is the instinct of self-destruction (which got the name of "evil" in the religious scriptures). Second, is the burning desire to self-realize as immortal. To carry out a mission that will keep one's name in history. To accomplish something that will rise one above the level of sluggish automatic existence. It is the strive for the reconnection with God. This duality, polarity, if you wish, is the key reason behind all of our movements. It is the guarantee that we are not going to sit still here. It is a blessing and sponsor of our evolution.
To make matters more exciting, our model (going back to comparing our mechanism of that of a car) carries all the interdependency between personal karma, family karma, the country's or the nation's karma, professional karma, and so on. Plus, to all the karmic ingredients we have our dynamite personalities and the ingredient of fate. All of that is supposed to make the porridge tasty! And it does, but sometimes we lose the balance between first and second instincts (if you wish you can switch the numbers, it doesn't matter). When we run ourselves in self-destructing mode, we cannot experience that porridge as tasty. The good news is that it is absolutely in our power to switch the mode. It doesn't really take that much.
I'd like to say a little more about how our personality is involved in the game. First, it's important to understand the given. When we perceive people as independent individuals, we see only the tip of the iceberg again. In that unseen part we all belong to one organism. Our roots are all connected, so to speak. It's like when you look at somebody's hairdo you can see each hair but you also see that they all belong to the same head. Now, imagine that somebody's eyelash will start acting superior towards the same person's pubic hair! Wouldn't you want to spank it? Or fingers would start claiming that they are better and more important than ears, for example. It's obvious to us that it is an irrelevant claim. But precisely that is happening between people. When one person is feeling superior towards another, according to our design, the Whole is balancing the situation by reminding the first one how fragile that superiority is.
Through illness or bad luck or even death. Depends on how far it had gone. When one cell in the body starts acting against the interest of the whole organism and requires some special attention and energy, that person will soon be diagnosed with cancer, for example. The body in that case will start the process of neutralizing the stubborn cell. And if it is too late and that cell got too powerful, recruited lots of other cells, then the only way to stop the invasion is for the whole body to die. The same law of the universe is true in every part of it, in every time-space continuum. For example, being in a state of heightened awareness I have watched in the civilization of galaxies the same relationships as in the civilization of sperm.
When one person acts like cancer cell, he or she gets the same kind of treatment from the Universe. And as I mentioned before, it's not because God is watching our every step and evaluating it. It happens simply according to the cause and effect rules of our intricate design. Sometimes a whole nation disappears according to the same law. Shave the hair off, so to speak.
Let's look more attentively at what exactly that means- feeling superior. Pride is one of the most familiar, though there is a lot of subtle forms of pride. Pride is a terminal disease. In fact, it is the number one killer through the history of humankind. If you will look carefully you can see that it killed more people than all of the plagues, accidents, and illnesses put together through all sorts of wars, crusades, witch hunts, and tyrannies. Sometime later I'd like to devote more time to tracing the subtle merciless ways of pride eroding people's lives, slowly bringing to the end family lines, destroying the offspring's vocational future.
For example, mother's great pride in her child could cost that child a broken leg and later on drop out of school. Children's misbehavior serves as a lightening rod for parents, grounding the energy of pride, by putting parents down their children actually heal their souls preventing their terminal diseases. But as children mature and turn out to be good people after all, parents don't have their rod anymore. Which often leads to their serious health problems or car accidents or whatever. Nothing is one-digital here. The universe is extremely creative in balancing itself. It has a good, soft sense of humor, it is not emotionally attached to the process, and it is not in a hurry at all. When a person is too deep in his or her delusion, it takes a few generations of that family to untangle the knot. The earthly time between cause and effect depends on evolutional level of the soul.
The higher the level the shorter the time. In other words, when people with highly evolved souls make "mistakes", they face consequences immediately. And those in the very beginning of their journey do not have the means yet to recognize the pattern. So it doesn't make sense to make it even harder for them. They may never get it in their lifetime. So their children will have to deal with it and maybe the children of their children. Until somebody in that family will wake up finally and stop that pattern. It's kind of like filling a narrow throat pitcher with water- the fuller it gets, the faster the water level rises. So, the higher the evolutional level of the soul, the faster it evolves. It actually gets fun up there. At some point the soul doesn't need pain to grow anymore. It starts evolving without suffering. And it is absolutely beautiful!
Another aspect of superiority is condemnation. That is the big one. Feeling righteous is so tempting, so provocative. It's really hard to let go of that one in the world where it is so obvious that what "they" are doing is wrong! Look at "them" cutting down our rain forest! Or look what "they" are eating! And how "they" are worshipping! And how can God tolerate "them" raping our children and women! And what about all those ex-husbands and ex-wives? Isn't it all of their fault? Don't we have the right to get angry and aggressive towards "them"? Because "we" know better than that. Because "we" are better.
The sad truth is that "we" are very ineffective in "our" actions against "their" actions, as long as we are angry. Aggression hides our deep insecurity and fear.
That state of mind leaves us practically powerless, it robs us of clear thinking and elemental energy. It is simple arithmetic: to be effective we need all of our energy to ourselves. We can't afford wasting it on anger! We were angry with them for too long. It doesn't serve us anymore! We are losing the battle, because "they" are not wasting their energy on feeling righteous.
Kahlil Gibran beautifully expressed it in his poetical prophecy: "He who is worthy to receive his days and his nights, is worthy of all else from you. And he who has deserved to drink from the ocean of life deserves to fill his cup from you little stream, too." He sure didn't mean the stream of your judgments. When Jesus Christ urged us not to condemn he didn't mean it's just bad manners. He meant that feeling superior towards another is hazardous to our souls, to our health, and to our planet. So, open heart, good nature is the best preventative health care available.
It's time to change the strategy. "They" are not our enemies. They are just on the other side. Like in the chess game. You play white, I play black. For the next game we will switch the colors. If in this series of "games" the total winning score would be after those who played self-destructive "evil" figures, this whole reality will vanish, and another series of games will start all over again somewhere else with the same parties involved. If a miracle will happen and "goodness", wisdom, and love will take over; peace of mind and creativity will prevail for a whole millennium and then another series of games will start all over again. It is as simple as that.
Page 25, 4,5 paragraph from the top: seen and unseen are not two equal parts. Seen and unseen relate to each other about like one particle of sand compared to the great desert of Sahara. For us the visible world is blown out of proportion. It seems very big and important. It reminds me of the map of the United States that I have seen, produced in New York. On that map, New York is spread on 5/6 of the territory and the rest of the country occupies the surrounding 1/6 in a cartoon like manner. Seen- our physical reality- is only one out of the endless amount of realities.
Talking about spirits as of the general population of the "unseen" is not accurate. Fortunately, they are not doomed to hang out all together in some soup, called "unseen". They belong to different realities in a highly organized manner. These realities are well protected from each other by their boundaries in the same way that our reality is separated from others.
Page 25, last line: Not all of God's creation has the same power to create. In fact, very few. Most of the realities don't have such a privilege.
Page 26, first line: God cannot adopt physical form out of the thin air. God created the rules of this physical world and is not going to violate them. To have the physical body in our world, one has to be born here. Through a woman. That's the only way. We are IT. But IT is not us. Like our clothing can be "us", but we are not our clothing.
Page 26, second line: "my purpose for creating you is to know myself through you, and as a secondary effect through you knowing yourself". There is a subtle difference.
Page 28, first paragraph: In the desire to know itself, God did not create purposefully any additional obstacles like lack of remembrance of who we are. We do not consciously choose to forget it. We consciously choose to enter this reality knowing that by arrival we will not remember why we did it. It happens just because of the physical characteristics of our material world. Its property is a low, heavy frequency that cannot hold the information from the higher vibrations. Material world simply is not possible in the high vibrations where knowledge originates. In transition to the low frequency, where physical reality is possible, information gets lost.
Page 29, second paragraph from the bottom: "I do not show my goodness"- Because there is no such thing in the space in between realities, where God lives. There is no good or bad, no kind or cruel. These terms exist only in our mentality and our choices.
Page 29, last paragraph: The words "love" and "not loving" are confusing here. When I am in a bliss I know it for sure. I do not need to refer to the previous state of fear or pain to know it. When I am experiencing happiness after the unhappiness, or fulfilled and satisfied after being desperate and disappointed, I do need both to know both. The word love seems to be too vague here for the accurate grasping of the idea. But, I could be wrong.
Page 30, on evolution: "Knowing- experiencing- being." Only in the human mind can there be a full stop in this sentence. In God's mind it's a never-ending spiral: knowing- experiencing- being- knowing- experiencing- being- knowing.
Page 31, second paragraph from the top: Male- female relationship is a dyad. But there is a growth into the Triune when they acquire the "space in between", which is family as an independent entity, when male and female together give birth to children and create home. That home of theirs is their "space in between".
Page 40, on hell: In my search for the answers to the questions that I had, I perceived the cellular structure of the universe. With each cell occupied by a different reality. It sort of looks like a honeycomb. If one looks up or down, right or left, one can see straight rows of different realities, coagulated in perfect spheres. Their surface is iridescent and clear, it's gleaming. One can see through it. They have a sort of soap bubble look. Because of their round configuration, there is the space in between them. That space in between is black like a night sky. But it is not emptiness. That blackness is extremely potent and it constantly flows, it never stops. I have experienced an enormous charge of it. Maybe electromagnetic, maybe ultrasonic, maybe that force will have another name in future science. Maybe it doesn't have to have a name.
It was clear to me, it was exactly what they call in different spiritual scriptures, "life force", "chi", or "prana". That blackness contains everything, it gives birth to everything. Every reality was born out of that potent stuff. It penetrates each atom and cell of every reality. It is the black part of the black and white yin-yang sign. It is the ultimate femininity. It is the connective tissue that holds the universe together. It is constantly expanding as it gives birth to more and more realities. One of them is our solar system- our physical reality. While looking from that space in between onto our reality, one can perceive that everything is in there already: past, present, and future. Time, perceived as linear from the inside, could be seen altogether from the outside. Earthly time is a connective tissue that prevents everything from happening at the same time.
Among the infinite amount of realities, there are those that have nothing to do with us, which means that they existed long before us and they don't have any interdependency with us. There also exists numerous varieties of human created realities. In our likeness to God as the Creator we are very much capable of doing so. All it takes is for a big group of people to put a certain amount of energy into some chosen thought-form and when it reaches critical mass- here it goes... the bubble of new reality takes its place like a new satellite in the orbit of our reality. Thus, the realities of Hinduism, Judaism were created recently as well as Muslim and Christian realities. There even exists the reality of Shakespeare's heroes. It was enough that for four centuries all those interested in reading and rehearsing his plays, discussing and criticizing them, making movies and then watching them-- to bring that reality into existence. It is not a big and strong reality, its population does not have free will (it was not created in God's likeness, it was created by humans as a mere refection of human confusion) and it will vanish when people will stop putting energy into supporting the prototypes of tragedy.
But it does have it's existence now.
I wrote all of this in order to approach my comment on hell on page 40. It is true that such a thing as hell where you go for your sins does not exist. But I did perceive two other types of hell. One of them was created in the same manner as the reality of Shakespeare's heroes. For centuries, millions of people were feeding that Christian image of hell with their energy. By now it is quite enormous and it is quite a hell in there. The good news is that nobody is going to drag sinners from earth into that reality for eternity. The only way one can visit there, to pamper one's curiosity, is by their own free choice. They probably would not stay there long anyway. Hell's monsters don't have freedom of choice or any kind of freedom for that matter (it's a hell, remember) to cause any harm. Laws of the universe safely protect realities from each other.
The second reality of hell was effortlessly created by humans right here on earth.
You don't need to leave your body to watch it. For millions of people, it is enough just to look around or to look inside. With that much pain and suffering that is going on right now on our planet, it doesn't get any worse than that anywhere in the universe. Nothing can protect us from experiencing that one except our free will.
In the light of all of the above, when you state on page 61 that Hitler went to heaven, it is absolutely true in essence, meaning that he didn't go to hell, as nobody does. But the choice of words is confusing. For the same reason he did not go to hell, he could not go to heaven either in the sense that heaven is the place where you go for your good deeds. Heaven is also just another reality parallel to ours. People are not sent there for an eternity after they die. While free from their physical bodies, from that space in between realities where they would find themselves, they can visit the reality of heaven as well as any other reality and stay there as long as they wish.
Page 51, last paragraph: You wrote "accidents happen because they do". Do they?
Page 56: There are way more laws then the three that you mentioned. For example:
#4 The loss is inevitable of everything one gets attached to. It is pretty clear that you lose money when you get attached to having it. But it is trickier than that. Even if a person is attached to his or her perfection and spirituality it is still attachment and can only be cured by the pain of loss of it. Spirituality and perfection are just nice tools of self-expression. They are not God.
#5 Children inherit patterns that their parents did not complete.
And many more.
Page 94: "To know God you have to be out of you mind". That is true in a sense that to find out about God experientially, not traditionally mentally you have got to snap out of your mind, shift your habit of perception. The trick is to remember what you have found when you are safely back into your sober mind. To perceive God while you are out of your mind is easy, but to truly know God, you have got to bring that knowledge back into your physical body, which is God's creation after all. When you said, "you'll never find me in your mind" you practically said: "baker's skill is not in the bread we eat, and you will never find a poet in his poems". Knowing God without knowing God in one's mind and body is not a complete task.
Page 114: "A true king is not the one with the most subjects, but the one who leads the most to royalty". A king by definition is the one on the very top of a hierarchical pyramid. His true mission is not to create many more pyramids and more kings, but to take really good care of his subjects.
I ran out of the time I had set for writing this letter. There are two more big themes that I had wanted to address: on Christ's death and on sexuality. If you are interested, I will return to sharing my thoughts with you sometime later.
Your book is very powerful and inspiring. I am looking forward to reading the other two.
In Love and Service