From the Teacher to David: God is Everything and Everything is in God

"Teacher" I said, "If God is everything and everything is in God, and, as we learn God is good…what then is evil? Where did it come from?"

"If I give you your hearts desire, you will call me "good"…and if I strike you, then you will call me "evil," he said patiently. "But here in this world you define good and evil by what affects you subjectively. The Wise have always said that God is not confined by our view of good and evil, and He cannot be defined by the limits of our mind."

"If so, Teacher," I said, "What then is evil and how did it come into the world? What then is Satan…what are angels, devils…?"

He held up his hand for me to be silent and continued, "The Torah says, "And God said, 'Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.' And later, 'So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.'

"The Hebrew, as you know, reads נעשה אדם בצלמנו, which comes from the source צלם or image, but the root of this word is צל , which means shadow or shade. This is what man is: not the image of God as we understand an image, or a copy…but a shadow or shade of God, not equal to God, but still capable of being God-like and capable of creating within the limitations of our collective being.

"We create "good" in this world and we also create "evil." We create devils but we can also create angels. Satin is simply the collective embodiment of man's failure to use the incredible unlimited energy of the Creator to fill the universe with light and we chose to keep this light or energy to ourselves. This perversion of the creative force granted to man is the cause for the "breaking of the vessel" which we talked about before. This inevitably leads to waste, ecological crises, famine, injustice, war, death, and destruction. These become the crippled children of our collective being.

"We were given the power to create, within the boundaries of this, our test-tube world, and the collective "we" chose ego and self gratification over everything else…the desire to receive for the sake of receiving…and thus we created what we now call "evil."

"Our salvation will come because our soul recognizes this creation of our as being out of harmony with the universe and just as we have created "evil" we can also strive to create "good." This also is the first step in "repairing of the vessel.". We do so by striving to fill our creation with empathy and love until this collective effort will channel the unlimited energy of the Creator into everything and everyone, and we return to the garden.

What is Spirituality and What It is Not

Since the name of my website and this blog is Spirituality Information, the time's come for me to set down my thoughts on this question--what is spirituality?

It is easier to say what it isn't. For me, it is not other-worldly. It is not leaving your body. It is not hating this life and waiting for another life after this one.

It is not exerting power over people or using mind control.

A man I grew up with wrote to me and said that on a crowded street inManhattan, he could will himself a parking place. Zip, he just closed his eyes, and he could make anyone do anything, even hurry back to their car and drive away!

No, spirituality for me is not magic. It is not imagining a mouse like W.B Yeats used to do and projecting the image to a cat who then runs after it. It is not inducing an altered state of consciousness, like Yeats used to do, by meditating on symbols then communicating with disembodied spirits angels.

It is not holding a pendulum in your hand, like I used to do and asking a question and watching it move to answer "yes" or "no. It is not putting your hands on a table, like people used to do, and asking a spirit a question and watching the table tilt in yes or no.

It is not listening to the silvery tones of astral bell, the vibrations of chakra bowls, the soft and soothing music sold on CD's. It cannot be bought in stores. It is not smells or bells or burning a flower to ashes and putting the ashes in a bell jar in order to make the phantom of the flower rise.

It is not so many things and more.

So what is spirituality?