What is your concept of God? Do you like this word? Does it bring comfort or does it bring feelings of judgement, anger and punishment? Do you believe God loves you? What is your concept of God?

I believe that your concept of God means everything to your life and dictates how it unfolds. I do not believe there is one person who does not have a concept of God, even if that concept is that there is no God. We all have some inkling or feeling that there is something greater than ourselves. This feeling might be submerged in our consciousness, but it is still there. Even when we are experiencing the darkest times of despair, it might be caused by not being able to reach into or feel that part of ourselves.

Why do I believe that we all have a concept of God? The reason I believe this is because I believe we all came here with God encoded in our DNA. It is something we remember about ourselves, even when we can’t remember. It is why we struggle, why we try, and why we give up.

I grew up as a Catholic, and my concept of God was a judgmental God who, when I died, would let me know whether I was going to hell or heaven. If not heaven or hell, maybe I would find myself in a place called purgatory, where I would wait out my time until I would be enough to maybe get a shot at heaven. As I grew older, this concept of God didn’t make much sense to me, and I searched for something that did make sense. I traveled down many roads, but not once did I leave the thought behind that there was something greater beyond everything I was experiencing in the world.

Finally, I discovered the New Thought philosophy and it became clear to me. I learned that the God I was searching for was right here within me. It became clear to me that I was a manifestation of the One Spirit that bound all life together as one. This made logical sense, and the Voice within me concurred with what I was learning. However, although I sought to continue to believe this and did my best to remember it on all occasions, I still had my moments of struggle and challenge. It was and is a journey to accept this concept of the Inner Presence, the Christ within me.

This battle between God as man/woman or God as a man on the cloud is what I believe is one of the major problems with this world. That man on a cloud causes us all to feel separate from it, judged and separate from each other. Who has the best God, the true God? Even if this God is the worship of money, it seems this is what is responsible for all our wars, poverty and the climate crisis.

I believe as a species, with no where else to turn, are evolving into the concept that God is a Presence. It is Energy. It is the Source of all things. As the quantum physicist knows, God is the Field. This Field is what the Hindus would call “The Perfection.” It is pure Energy that is constantly creating and recreating from itself. This Energy is Love. Ralph Waldo Emerson let us know that “God is Love.” Ernest Holmes  let us know that “Love is the Cosmic Force whose sweep is irresistible.”

We say we are creating our lives from a Law of Cause and Effect, but that is not the totality of it. We are causing effect in every moment, as we think and perceive. The way we look at everything, what we believe about ourselves and our world is shaping reality right now. The Observer Effect: “

“The observer effect is the phenomenon in which the act of observation alters the behavior of the particles being observed. This effect is due to the wave-like nature of matter, which means that particles can exist in multiple states simultaneously. When an observer measures a particular property of a particle, they are effectively collapsing the wave-function of that particle, causing it to assume a definite state.” Science ABC

My favorite thing to do is to meditate upon God. I ask myself what is God? What am I? Why am I here in this experience? What is mine to learn? When I am struggling, I ask “How can I look at this from a higher viewpoint?”

One of the things that always comes up in New Thought classes is the idea of challenges. Why do we get sick? Why do we have troubles? Why do good people suffer? These are all great questions, but until we can apply these questions to ourselves, we will never know the answer. I know when I am suffering it is because I have somehow separated myself from God. I become this lone person swimming through a sea of difficulties with nowhere to turn, thinking I am doing it all myself. When I suffer or am sick, I sometimes blame myself or think I did something wrong. This is so far from the Truth. Ernest Holmes, the philosopher, author and mystic and Founder of the Science of Mind, once wrote that suffering was the journey of the soul back to itself. I believe this is true. When we suffer, we are somehow being called home, to go deeper into ourselves, to remember who we are. I do believe that the day will come when we will not suffer; when we simply turn our lives over to our higher selves – our God selves.

Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote this.

“Get your bloated nothingness out of the way and allow the divine circuits to flow.”
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

In every class I’ve been in or taught, this quote always gives the participants a sense of resistance. Why? I think they find it somewhat insulting. What’s that – bloated nothingness? Surely not me! Dr. Jim Lockard, in a recent blog, defined our bloated nothingness as…

“…our fear-based egoic mind or the act of staying distracted from the work of alignment with God within. We are always in alignment with some kind of potential, positive or negative. Our spiritual practice is to come into alignment with the positive and release our connection with the negative.”

Haven’t you spent some time bickering with others or about others or putting yourself down about something? Maybe you’ve been lamenting about what is going on in the world, feeling helpless to do anything, getting angry at people who aren’t doing the job you think they should be doing. There are a million ways of distracting ourselves from “our alignment with the God within.”

But even at these times, God has not left us to sit on a cloud looking down on us and criticize us. What if we were the ones doing this to ourselves? What if this impersonal, but oh so personal Divine Presence was just Love waiting for us to open up those Divine Circuits? What if all the Good that we could ever want or need was already here and the only thing keeping it from us was ourselves.

Emma Curtis Hopkins, 20^th Century Healer wrote, “There is a good and I ought to have it.” What if we really lived that mantra.

Quoted by Dr. Jim Lockard in his blog, Ernest Holmes wrote this.

“Since the only life you can have is the life of the Spirit within you, you need but permit Its radiance to flow through your thought into self-expression. You are surrounded by a dynamic force, a great surge of living power. You are immersed in and saturated with the vital essence of Life. Its presence permeates everything, binding all together in one complete whole.” Ernest Holmes

This is the God I want to know and live. At CSL Kaua`i, this month is about expansion. What I know is that if I tell myself that this is my Truth and literally go out and live as that, I will be living as God and reaping the life of that majestic presence.

We are all on a journey. Our vision at Center for Spiritual Living and its Institute of Magnificence is “To awaken Humanity to Its Magnificence by walking the bridge from duality to Unity.” This is a daily practice, a spiritual practice.

The other day, someone asked me how I stay so positive, “You are a rock,” the person exclaimed. Well, the only answer I could come up with it that I work on it every day. I choose to be positive. I choose to have faith. I choose to trust no matter what. It’s a choice. It isn’t always easy, but the more I let go and let God, the more successful and happy I am.

I use Spiritual Mind Treatment, which is not begging, but praying to myself to align myself with my True Self, my highest self. Everything is already here. I am waking myself up when I pray, unlike this statement by Charles Filmore, which just made me chuckle because it’s so true.

“We have been so persistently taught that prayer consists in asking God for some human need that we have lost sight of our spiritual identity and have become a race of praying beggars.”

I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to be a praying beggar. It sounds just awful and so belittling and insulting to the Power that is everything. The title of our talk at Center for Spiritual Living Kaua`i on Sunday, October 8 was “So Big!”  Do any of you remember when you were a child and your parent exclaimed, “How Big is the Baby?” The child would put his or her arms above their heads and exclaim “So Big!” We were meant to copy our parents. I remember doing this with my children. We’d both laugh because it felt so good.

That is the way we are meant to feel, “So Big!” That’s who we are because we are an individualization of the One Power forever connected and infused with the Energy that made the Cosmos. We are Cosmic stuff. We are! That’s how big we are?

How big are you? Say it with me. “So Big!”
Love and Aloha,

Rev. Rita Andriello-Feren, Author, Teacher, Artist and Spiritual Director of Center for Spiritual Living Kaua`i. My books are available on AMAZON.