There are many books that tell us how to find God. But the truth is that God is not lost or hiding. In fact, it is the actual, continuous omnipresence of God that is so hard for the human mind to fathom.
We always look in the wrong direction: toward someplace else, toward something mysterious and far away. We try to recapture something that we believe we had years ago in childhood or something that we read about in spiritual books. We try to improve our hunting skills so that we can capture an elusive God, a God who does not want to be found.
But God is not missing or elusive or invisible. It is we who need to make ourselves ready to receive God, who is always knocking at the door of our hearts, whose Voice is always speaking, whose Heart makes our hearts beat, and whose Breath is the world.
‘Receive God.’ We are the only thing that stands in the way of this ultimate action, this greatest desire, this end point that is also our beginning.
The Instruction Manual for Receiving God is a series of what I call seed passages, which lay out a real and practical path to making yourself ready to see the reality of God in your life at this very moment. Along with the seed passages, I have written commentaries to open up the main passages and, at times, to suggest a different approach to the idea being presented. Here are just a few examples:
The personal self is beauty itself - a piece of beautiful God-manifestation turning in the sparkling light, newly fallen on its temporary, tender, and newly existent self.
Many spiritual paths ask us to leave the ego - the sense of a separate, personal self - behind. They ask us to find that place where - they believe - the ego does not exist. But everywhere I look in the universe, from the farthest galaxies to the smallest vibrating strings creating the harmony of the quark and proton, I see the beauty that can only be uttered in the language of separateness. The problem is not in the ego but in the fact that the ego doesn’t see itself as the beauty it truly is. Oh, Reader! Let yourself heal into Yourself!
It is impossible not to walk to heaven or be pushed toward heaven or be kicked toward heaven while here on this earth.
The great teacher is life itself. Whether or not you have a human teacher, the great teacher is always in session, presenting the greatest lessons in the greatest way.
Of course, we don’t always trust life. Life has hurt us. It can be unpredictable, changing course when we least expect - or desire - it. But the more we trust what life brings us on a daily basis, the more the mystery of life reveals itself, until, finally, we are life itself.
Awakening is the birthright of every created being. To know God is our destiny.
What would it feel like if you realized that, from the very beginning, you were designed to look for, to find, and to receive God? That you were designed to awaken to reality? How would it feel to know that this would definitely happen in your lifetime, because you were made to accomplish this very thing?
If you let yourself feel this, many things will drop away. Those are the things you no longer need. Try to let them go. What is left is the answer you were looking for and the reason you were born.
To be God-realized is to have no free will. To have no free will is to be a completely autonomous being. To have no choice but to be with God gives you endless choices.
We all fear giving up our free will. We think our will - what we ant - is who we are. We often don’t know ourselves except through the medium of this will. But our search for freedom is only complete when we realize that everything we want in our deepest being is what God wants. It is only then that we come to our truest self, the place where there is no conflict between ourselves and God. This is the moment of realization that God is not an authority with whom we engage in some ancient war, but is identical with our most essential and tender self. God inside and out, a single, indivisible thing.
You can experience this right now. Say to yourself: My ego - even with its difficulties - is a beautiful thing, created by God. I need to love it since it is beauty in action. This is God’s will for me. Strangely enough, the more you can say this and mean it, the freer you will be and the more your true self - with its God-connected sense of free will - will shine.
From The Instruction Manual for Receiving God, © 2006 by Jason Shulman, published by Sounds True.
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