A workshop on achieving a personal religion with a
simple God
Jim Cleveland / www.lightandlife.com
Presented at the Association for Light and Life
spiritual unity conference in Boise, Idaho, 2004.
Good Day, Brothers and Sisters, what a wonderful
gathering this has been.
Thank you for coming. From your presence, I assume you
can perceive that God and our planetary religions could
be considered … distinct and separate … and that somehow
we can separate and exalt the great simplicity that is
God from the complexity of dogmas that seek to
indoctrinate us at every turn. This is something I’ve
struggled with personally – an unnecessary bitterness
toward organized religion … grasping the true meaning of
spirituality … learning why we can’t live in peace and
good will.
It is a good time to resolve these issues, since we are
arguably in the middle of an ultimate battle between
good and evil. Some call it Armageddon. The End times. A
New Age. To the Teaching Mission, it’s the Correcting
Time. Some Urantia Book fundamentalists aren’t looking
for anything much, for another few thousand years
anyway.
By the way, remember the Age of Aquarius we used to
herald. It is actually just getting underway, for those
who wondered whatever happened to it. We made it a
cliché and then quit mentioning it.
These are certainly quickening and pivotal times.
Whether you feel pessimistic about it, or optimistic
about it. Or sometimes both.
Today, we see advocates of several major religious
orders in the world unleashing savage violence to
destroy their enemies. Their …. imagined enemies.
President Bush poses as a religiously righteous man; So
does Osama bin Laden. The Palestinian homicide bombers
are righteous. The Israelis in the tanks are righteous.
The Taliban was righteous too, remember them.
Well, are they all simply self-righteous? Are any of
them spiritual people at all? Are they just examples of
how mankind is always putting itself above God,
consciously and mostly unconsciously? Always, too many
people have done violent and evil deeds and then said
God okayed it or actually helped them do it. Always,
people have produced books and deemed them holy. Always,
they have had self-serving ideas and called them …
inspired.
We don’t need these people to anchor our religion.
It is time, dear brothers and sisters, to sweep away all
of these horrors cloaked in the name of various
religions. But to win Armageddon and to bring forth a
spiritual awakening on this planet is going to require
some clear thinking. We can see that our world of
proliferating dogmas haven’t provided it.
Truly, the really spiritual people today, in 2004, are
able to finally take all of this myriad of religious
doctrine …. with a grain of salt. Move above and beyond
it.
Let’s do that now, by beginning this session with a
Stillness exercise …. And a prayer. May we take a few
moments to relax, take some deep breaths, still your
mind, and enjoy the silence. (pause) Deep breathes,
lowering yourself from beta into a relaxing but
energized alpha state. Relax your mind. There is no
dogma on the planet, no history. The books all
disappeared. We are left to contemplate only the earth
and sky.
Open your inner vision now to a vast star field, a
panorama before you …. Each star glistening with a new
sparkle of illuminating, instructive and inspiring
information for you. You and God are the only immediate
reality.
Relax into this beautiful deep skyline. Be at peace in
the Stillness.
May we now ask of Father what we believe that we need.
Here is a prayer that I personally make … and to which
you may also ascribe.
Dear Universal Father, you represent to me TRUTH. Please
free us from the tangle of perspectives that complicate
the simple reality of YOU.
My new religion as of today is to always appreciate and
seek higher understandings of TRUTH … and to create
higher levels of Truth in Your name. Do not stagnate in
what we think is truth. Do not build fences around it.
Inhale deeply and … release … breathe freely …
Dear Infinite Mother Spirit, you represent to me BEAUTY.
Your energies have nurtured our lives and our world.
Mankind has often sullied the beauty of our creation by
polluting the soil, the water, the air, and the
landscapes. Please free us from the ugliness we have
spewed out upon you. Show us how to be celestial
gardeners. Give us visions of the Beauty that we can
create … and Be.
My new religion today, Mother Spirit, is to always
appreciate and seek higher understandings of BEAUTY …
and to create higher levels of Beauty in Your name.
Relax and inhale deeply …. Release … breathe freely …
Dear Michael, you represent to me GOODNESS. When you
incarnated as Jesus, you showed us a greater reality of
God and of ourselves. The virtues of altruism, mercy,
compassion, kindness, forgiveness, love, courage, faith,
selflessness. The myth of brute power. The reality of
triumph over mortal death, the power of resurrection ….
Showing us the way to live and die in faith and peace …
and how perfectly safe death is … a threshold.
My new religion today is to always appreciate and seek
higher understandings of GOODNESS, and to actually
create higher levels of Goodness in Jesus’ name.
So may I simply embrace a religion of Truth and Beauty
and Goodness today.
May all else waft away for these moments right now with
the Holy Trinity. Imagine there are no books, no CNN or
Fox, no churches or temples at all. Just the glorious
beauty of the Creation in water, plants, animals, rock
and earth. I am naked and clean and washed with rain in
the Garden. I have tools for cultivation.
As I start fresh today, may I not be self-centered,
self-serving, self-absorbed. Please. This is part of the
animal origin nature from which I am gloriously
ascending. Thank you for these wonderfully evolved
mammalian bodies. Thank you for imbuing me with a
sharing of the Cosmic Mind. Thank you for the Holy Triad
of Spirits, which indwell me and assist me in finding
Truth
Beauty
Goodness
In Mind and Body and Spirit.
It will be my Personal Religion to understand these
things and to actually create them!
Create higher layers of truth.
Create new faces of beauty
Create an aura and environment of goodness wherever I
go.
My prayer is that this will bring PEACE.
May we awaken now with greater clarity and purity.
(pause)
And so, let’s use our minds a bit and explore again the
idea of separating God from religions ….. Religions,
plural of course. The ones who have always been out
there battling one another for your allegiance. Not the
personal religion we just recommended to you.
Now that we have clearly focused our religion and freed
our mind from the minds of others…. We don’t have to
accept any of the churches except for the services they
can provide and the venues they provide for our service.
They are described succinctly on page 1092 of the
Urantia Book. That would be in the paragraph just before
the one that relates all the ways that churches fail.
(read passages)
So organized religious advocacies are no longer a source
of Absolute Truth for us now. Like everything else on
Urantia, there are two sides to this goodness and
badness thing. We can put all this aside except for
philosophical discussion.
We now have a personal relationship with God that allows
us to ask direct questions and to get answers in the
Stillness. The Stillness time with God that anchors the
Urantia Book and has been the constant Teaching Mission
lesson for more than a decade.
Your prayers WILL be answered. Perhaps as an inner
knowingness a day or two later… perhaps from the next
person you meet. Your prayers will be answered; count on
it. The challenge is to be aware of the answers when
they come. And the answers often come with a brother or
sister and, chances are, they will need your reciprocal
service as well. This happens very, very often. We are
being guided in how to work together. This is the
central quest for people and societies on Urantia.
So you don’t need someone to communicate with God for
you, to pray for you, to save you with the tithe that
you give them. You don’t need to be degreed or ordained.
God will love and guide each of us. Our indwelling
Spirit of God guides us; the Holy Mother Spirit nurtures
us; Jesus inspires to be all that we can ever be. And he
has spoken to us forcefully that he is determined not to
lose a single soul, a single sheep of his flock.
So, if you came into this session saying to yourself:
“Why should we separate God from our religions;
shouldn’t we embrace all religions and strive to see the
commonalities and work together from this foundation. Be
altruistic and love everyone in all churches and faiths
and urge them to love everyone as well.”
My reply … Sure, that’s true, but …
I wouldn’t suggest embracing any of the mountain of
dogma that religions have published. It’s all polluted
by self-serving partisans. The best religion is a
personal relationship with God. More than ever in the
Correcting Time, the successful churches will be the
ones that profess this and promote it. As the Urantia
Book says, the religion of Jesus will ultimately
triumph.
When Jesus wanted to talk to the Universal Father, where
did he go? He separated himself from all of humanity and
went …. Into the wilderness.
The so-called wilderness. One man’s wilderness is
another man’s cathedral.
You can, of course, enjoy a church family as much as
ever. As long as you represent the simple religion of
Truth, Beauty and Goodness, you will fit into any church
and any situation. At their heart and in their roots,
all of the world’s faiths believe in the
truth-beauty-goodness paradigm as well. They are
ultimately on your side, and they will recognize it when
you stand up for these spiritual ideals. There are
countless millions of people who rejoice in a church
family without worrying about doctrine. They have their
cake and eat it too. Some Catholics ignore birth control
and think celibacy is dumb. Some Baptists have a drink
behind closed doors and don’t tithe. Some religionists
don’t believe they are the one and only true faith.
Since you don’t worship the church itself, or its
narratives, and don’t consider the minister infallible,
you can always speak up when you believe a policy of the
church does not represent Truth, Beauty and Goodness for
all people – not just members of the church. You can be
altruistic and loving, and you can promote altruism and
love; your minister and your fellow church members may
even challenge you to do so with their … separatist
attitudes. If you have a strong personal religion, you
can serve your church.
In this way, learning and growing people will be
constantly changing churches and other institutions in
the years ahead, as we all move through a Correcting
Time that is more far-reaching than most of us can
imagine. It includes all of the worlds of the Lucifer
Rebellion, and all worlds beyond those throughout the
local universe of Nebadon, and other universes that
presumably follow the activities here through universal
broadcasts.
Michael’s local universe is indeed in the spotlight in
these tumultuous times. And we are at the center of the
spotlight, the world of the cross, the world where our
Creator Son himself personally established a religious
legacy in his own human name. I am certain that we can
count on a full purification of that religion in time –
and we can all be part of that mission. Did you ever
think you would have that opportunity?
As you keep your relationship with God exclusively
yours, you will also receive incremental and exclusive
gifts that will continually brighten your life. Day by
day. Week by week.
Higher perceptions of universal truth …. As your vessel
can hold them.
Higher perceptions of beauty
Higher perceptions of goodness
Much of the shallow, self-serving, dogma-laden ideas of
the past will fall away. You will see and experience
many new enlightened perceptions of what is real and
what is faulty logic. Some of your new ideas may
surprise you. They will stretch you and inspire you into
a Cosmic View, a philosophical and spiritual
understanding of each challenge, each opportunity, every
situation.
You will make some startling discoveries when you free
your mind of complications; you will be making room for
them when you effect a purer perception of reality. An
open mind is a wonderful thing; it can learn and grow. A
closed mind will always suffer and doubt; it is in a
self-imposed prison, after all.
In your personalized religion, you will begin to see the
reality of true beauty – in the faces of the human
comedy drama that plays out before you every day. In the
amazing beauty of the natural creation. The majesty of
trees. The uniquely beautiful life forms of the fish,
animal and insect kingdoms. The amazing story of how a
tiny nurtured seed expands into a splendidly detailed
plant. There is beauty in Art … Architecture …
Automobiles … Angelic visions … Artichokes … Armadillos
… and in the Eyes of every human being that I have ever
been able to penetrate.
Through all of this, you will begin to understand what
Goodness truly is.
It will surprise you. You will find that goodness, like
God, like truth, like beauty, is simple too, so that
every human child of God can know it, and understand it
without either books or dogma.
All of these newfound treasures of the spirit will drive
you to more contemplation, more yearning, expressing,
sharing, giving …. And all of these things are good for
you in this world, your … school of material experience,
in flesh and blood. A living laboratory.
If your personal religion here is Truth and Beauty and
Goodness, you will seek these things… and you will
therefore find them wherever you go. And you will have
the opportunity to share them … in service.
And you will find this all so wonderfully energizing
that you will want to share more. And as you receive the
new energies and the blessings from each light that you
shine, you are empowered to give more and to receive
more and shine ever more brightly. Every step of faith
is rewarded with empowerments.
Your attitude will grow even more loving and caring and
peaceful so that, finally and forever, that ancient
curse to humankind with which we have been inflicted for
all the ages will be quelled.
That curse is ……Restlessness. Are we not all restless
souls?
What makes us restless? Knowing fear, not peace; knowing
competition not cooperation, knowing danger not
security, knowing alienation not family. It’s all enough
to make us restless.
When our quest is focused on more Truth, Beauty and
Goodness in our lives, rising above the fallible
philosophies of unknowing humans, then our lives can be
far less complicated and centered upon the great
simplicity that is God.
This great simplicity means that even the children of
God in an isolated village in the jungles of the deepest
nowhere have the spirit within that can bring their
souls to righteousness. There are indeed people in the
world who have nothing but a mud or stick hut and beds
of straw to sleep on, and they struggle each day simply
for sustenance and survival. No education. No
philosophy. No theology.
And yet even these people have our simple religion
within them too.
They appreciate and seek truth. They appreciate and seek
beauty. They appreciate and seek goodness. I have not
met these people except in National Geographic … but I
am utterly convinced that they do.
Separating God from Religions means separating God’s
essential features from all this dogma that has spawned
wars and massive horrors over the centuries, from
churches and faiths which have never grasped the
essential truth that they should be worshipping all
together, forgive one another past horrors, make a new
beginning in appreciation of altruistic love that rises
above their infantile beliefs.
And amazingly, when you fully embrace this clear-eyed
view of your relationship with God, you begin to see
that there are no enemies.
It’s unwise to be bitter about and battle organized
religions, for example. Make them better if you are
involved. Love your brothers and sisters who are
struggling within them for those very same things –
truth, beauty and goodness. When people of all religions
have a personal relationship with God and aren’t taking
their directions from some ancient prophet or some
present-day charismatic, they will make these religious
institutions into what they really should be. And many
preachers and priests will step down from their
pedestals and join the Correcting Time. It will happen.
It is already happening. And you can help directly. Or
you can serve in a myriad of other fields of interest.
You can spread love and wisdom anywhere, at any time, in
any place.
And all the while, your own personal religion is safely
tucked into your heart, your mind, your spirit. It’s all
inside you. Going with you across fields of darkness and
light. Growing your Soul. Forever more.
May we all ascend in Grace.
Thank you.
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