Who or what is God? A question without an answer really—or with an infinite number of answers. For God is not really a concept that can be explained or a puzzle that can be solved. God is an experience, one that is as unique as every individual on this planet or every soul in the universe. And it cannot be contained within any description or answered question. Perhaps metaphor comes closest to expressing what God is.  And we each have our own inner metaphors for the experience of the Divine.

For me, God is the seed at the center of all creation as well as the flower that arises from the seed. It encompasses creation itself. God’s essence is gender-free, formless. God is birth and death, inhalation and exhalation, shakti and shiva, yin and yang. God is the eternal harmony in which there are no false notes, the truth within which there are no opposites, the Oneness that holds everything. God is an endless ocean of love, a light that shines from each individual soul and from the collective Soul of the cosmos. There is nothing I can imagine that is not God, nothing I can experience that isn’t God.

Higher thought.

Spirituality. 

Liberation. 

God consciousness.

Understanding.

Wisdom.

Does that list seem way too ambitious for little old you to ever attain? 

Well, my darling… all these things are already part of you. You just need to learn how to access your seventh energy, that we connect to through Higher Thought. 

It is through the seventh energy that we make our unique and purposeful connection to Spirit, to the Conscious Universe, to our Higher Power, God, or whatever name you use. 

How and when did we lose our intimacy to our beloved Creator, to one another, to all living things but most importantly to ourselves?

How did we evolve by not evolving to forget that we are born out of this earth and therefore all of creation is truly one?

Where do we begin to die, live and be reborn to remember this quest of life we are so fortunate to be part of? 

Perhaps when we look at the word intimacy, this is the first place where we either could use more insight, more respect or maybe some deeper reverence. The word intimacy in the Temple Hayes dictionary which translates into--IN-TO-ME-SEE-- is a simplistic way to identify with our relationship with life. While so many people in the world are longing to grow up, longing to understand life’s meaning, perhaps aching to release addictions, not really wanting to die while they are living, feeling drained and disconnected, there is always going to be common truths no matter what anyone ever tells you--we all long to be loved, valued and respected.

Many people disregard the role of “belief” in shaping our lives as being some sort of “New Age” malarkey, meaningless nonsense. They emphasize the science of epigenetics that clearly states that environment controls genetics, which in turn, determines the character of our lives.

Consider this story: Mutt and Jeff are two twenty-something year-old friends, who grew up together in side-by-side houses. Walking down a sidewalk, all of a sudden, a harmless garter snake slithers out of the grass and crosses the sidewalk in front of the two friends. Jeff sees the snake and is consciously excited by the beautiful animal that crossed his path. Next to him, Mutt on observing the same snake, goes into a state of fear and releases a burst of stress hormones. Fortunately, Mutt’s heart is in good shape, if it had been compromised, the sight of the snake could have even caused him to have a heart attack.

Both Mutt and Jeff are in the exact same environment and see the same stimulus, the snake. However, their responses are radically different. Conventional insights describe epigenetics as the science of how “environment” controls behavior and genetic activity. Based on how the tissue culture environment controlled the behavior of my cultured stem cells in experiments are carried out over 50 years ago, I recognize this to be true. The big question is, “Why did these friends display such significantly different behaviors in the exact same environment?”

If you are currently grieving the loss of who you used to be, you need to know that you are not that person any more. When you can’t continue to have the same old conversations that you used to have, and you can’t continue to hang out with people that you really don’t resonate with, and you can’t continue to perpetuate situations or scenarios in your life that aren’t loving, you are outgrowing the created self. 

When you outgrow your created self and your identities, you begin to discover who you are beyond it all. There is a grieving process that happens as you begin to break free from the identity and the confines of the limited self. In this phase of transitioning away from the created self, it’s not that it needs to be healed, changed, fixed or improved, it’s just that you have outgrown it.  

Intuition — our sixth energy — is a natural part of all of us — although many of us were raised to repress these “gut hits” in favor of logic and reason! 

But when you don’t honor and trust your gut, your creative energy can be misdirected and you will make choices that you may regret later. Instead of working on behalf of your imagination and vision, it shows you evidence of stories full of mistakes,threats and detours, contracting instead of expanding your view of what is possible. The key is to balance this energy so you can see infinite potential, picking up on ideas, vibes, and messages that might be otherwise lost. 

Intuition: Your Inner GPS System

Renewal holds an immediate appeal. In marketing, it is the magic word motivating buyers of vitamins, diets, skin creams, and exercise machines.  But in reality, your existence depends on every cell in your body knowing with perfect precision how to renew itself. There are hardly any cells in your body today that were there when you were born, and certain types of cells (skin, stomach lining, and red blood corpuscles) renew themselves very quickly, in a matter of weeks.

These well-known medical facts point to a hidden secret, for it isn’t physical renewal that holds the key. Imagine a house where the bricks fly in and out of the walls, yet the building is always standing. Its blueprint remains intact even as physical objects constantly change. Your body’s blueprint remains intact thanks to the invisible intelligence contained in every cell.

Instead of looking to DNA for the source of this intelligence—DNA is just another piece of the physical picture—the secret lies with how your body uses its intelligence. You can renew yourself by consciously using the same principles that keep your body in a natural state of renewal.

We can learn to go quiet in the middle of what would ordinarily be a psychological riot going on within us. The frantic search for any answer – being suddenly caught up in a stream of thoughts and feelings trying to figure out what to do with some frustration – turning to those frantic answers, looking for them, is like turning on a fan and hoping to straighten out the papers on your desk.

We mustn’t be afraid to Go Quiet in those moments. In much the same way as we look out and see something beautiful, we can look interiorly and see that inside of us there is a scramble going on for some kind of security, and to know in that moment that it is not who we really are that’s afraid of what’s going on.

Here’s something that’s stunning. I remember the first time I heard it and what it did to me, and how my mind actually went quiet when I heard it. Listen to this idea.

What if the weather outside your window is actually a reflection of the weather conditions inside you? What if your perceptional framework for viewing life shapes everything, including how you see physical conditions such as rain, snow, clouds, and sunshine that appear to be outside you? What if nothing is quite as it seems to be to the mind? What if the world is as you are?

Ever since I was a small child, I have carried within me an at-times-overwhelming grief about the nature of life, death, and eternity. The “human condition” terrified me; infinity terrified me. Late at night, I described my fear to my mother as “the world goes on forever and ever.” She comforted me and tried to help me learn to distract myself with happier thoughts. But the core unease never really disappeared. In college, I found infinity hiding inside my astronomy and philosophy textbooks. Fear of death and whatever came after was always hovering in the back of my consciousness. In my 30s, I turned to a spiritual quest to try to resolve it. That was the beginning of a shift in my perception.