God In Disguise

The greeting, “Namaste” has been translated as “I bow to the God within you.”

When you use this salutation, you are acknowledging that there is Divinity in another person.

In disguise.

The disguise is individuality. Individuality comes from being separate from others, and from being incomplete and unbalanced in traits–some in the foreground, others in the background.

Universal God, by contrast, is Being connected with everything, and is complete and balanced in a state of totality. Accordingly, that is what is disguised beneath someone’s individuality.

It’s easy to see another person as God in disguise when that person is beloved by you.

But then there’s the irritating store clerk.

And the coworker who antagonizes you.

And the slow poke driving in front of you.

When you feel irritated, antagonized, and frustrated, how can you deal with it?

A quick reminder to yourself can help: that person is God in disguise.

Try it next time.

Lifting the disguise changes the complexion of things. It reveals the true Identity, instead of the role being acted in this particular circumstance. And it allows you to sense a compassionate link with the other person, even under challenging conditions.

Answers From Silence says, “You must bless everyone.” And, “I used to ‘sense out’ people when I looked at them. Each person had a different mood and vibe. Now everybody looks and feels the same to me—wonderful.”

But what about people who do truly bad things? How can they be God in disguise?

It can be that the disguise believes in itself and forgets true Identity. And there are degrees of forgetting, even to extremes.

But at the base of all experiencing, pure consciousness is pure consciousness. After that come all of the other levels of consciousness. Even the most forgetful of those couldn’t exist without the foundation of pure consciousness.

A more developed translation of “Namaste” is, “The God in me bows to the God in you.” Which is to say, God is in both places.

Yes, there is one more person who has forgotten true Identity, whose disguise you should lift in order to recognize God.

You.

—JC

Author Jeffrey Chappell Interviewed At The Library...

On July 22, 2014, Jeffrey Chappell was interviewed by Grace Cavalieri at the Library of Congress for her radio program, “The Poet and The Poem”. The event included Jeffrey reading excerpts from “Answers From Silence”, his groundbreaking international bestseller about spiritual enlightenment. The interview will be broadcast on National Public Radio stations throughout the United States for an indefinite period of time.

Around the same time, Jeffrey was also interviewed by Reverend Patricia Brooks, Kristi Borst, and Rose Rosetree. You can find descriptions of these events and links to them at this website on the “Video” page.

—JC

Answers From Silence Becomes An International Best...

During the first week of March, 2014, Answers From Silence became a multiple international bestselling book on Amazon.com.

Answers From Silence reached bestseller rankings in Kindle and paperback in the United States, as well as Number One ranking on Kindle in Canada, Number One ranking in France, and bestseller rankings in Italy and the United Kingdom.

The book launch included the simultaneous release of an iPhone app with quotes from the book, which is apparently a first-time marketing event.

The app, Enlightening Inspirational Quotes, contains 200 quotes from Answers From Silence and the writings at answersfromsilence.com.

The quotes app is also apparently the first of its type to have a music soundtrack. The music on Enlightening Inspirational Quotes is a recording of me, Jeffrey Chappell, playing one of my own solo piano compositions, “Candlelight”. Pianists, the sheet music is available here.

Thanks to everyone who has helped to make Answers From Silence an international bestseller and to make Enlightening Inspirational Quotes a success!

—JC

“Let Go And Let God”—And Beyond

“I’m trying to remember to trust that things will happen at the right time instead of me having to push to make things happen,” a friend said to me. “Things are going to take care of themselves. Let go and let God.”

This is a noble approach to daily life. It echoes aspects of the enlightened experience. And yet there is a difference between this approach and the enlightened experience.

The enlightened experience is that you don’t have to try to remember to trust that things will happen at the right time.

There is no need to try or to remember. Trust is an automatic and constant presence. It is the framework within which you always operate.

And in the enlightened experience, there is no issue of things happening at the right time. That is because time has been replaced by timelessness.

Timelessness makes everything right.

In time, there is one time and another time. There can be a right time and a wrong time for things to happen.

In timelessness, there is no other timelessness. Every timelessness is the right one, and everything happens at the right timelessness.

Yes, to have that sense is to have trust. But there is no need for acquiring that trust. It is directly built into your enlightened perceptions.

If you were asked to describe those perceptions, you might say, “I behold action taking place. Things take care of themselves. I do nothing. I am in God’s hands.”

And God never lets go of you.

—JC

Spiritual Success

I have ended up on several New Age email lists.

They send announcements telling me that there is something that I don’t have that I need to get.

I need to rewire my brain to overcome my blocks to success. I need to attend this seminar that will bring me the abundance that I was meant to have. I need to change my life by using this superior strategy for manifesting everything I dreamed of.

Spirituality is going to do this for me. My wishes will come true.

Yet something seems askew.

First, training oneself to think differently is not transcendental. It is what I would call re-arranging the furniture of your mind.

There can be benefits to it. But the “thoughts are things” angle is not fundamental enough. Even the mind is not fundamental enough.

There is something more primary than thoughts and more primary than the mind: pure consciousness itself. Before there was the painting, there was the canvas.

Dwelling there would be the best strategy.

Second, the premise that the purpose and the result of spirituality are to be able to score higher on worldly success is perhaps misdirected.

Worldly success is great. I am not disagreeing with that. If you arrive at it, you have my sincere congratulations.

It’s just that spiritual success can be measured differently. It is not about coming out on top, or doing things better and getting ahead, or positioning yourself for a bigger payoff from God.

It’s more about what God wants from you, and about you delivering that.

“Wants” is an interesting word. It can mean that there is a lack of something.

How could God lack anything?

If God is the awareness in everything of everything, as Answers From Silence says, then the lack would be in your awareness.

What your awareness lacks is boundlessness and timelessness. It lacks the knowledge of yourself not as an individual in the cosmos but instead as the cosmos in an individual.

The drop of your tiny, limited, individual awareness needs to be taken back into the ocean of boundless awareness. There, it will be buoyed by the totality.

Then God’s wish will have come true.

—JC

The Tyranny Of Thought

If you are seeker on a spiritual path, thoughts might seem to stand in the way of your evolution.

Thoughts run on completely spontaneously and effortlessly. They seem uninvited and unstoppable, an endless automatic stream of words with a mind of their own. Your mind.

Some people call this the tyranny of thought.

Why can’t you stop thinking? Worse yet (and here is the problem for spiritual seekers)—since you can’t, how will you ever quiet the mind sufficiently to contact and commune with your own pure consciousness, and to raise yourself to a higher level of spiritual being, and to dwell there without distraction and interference?

The way that you will do this is to know that you are not your thoughts. You were here before they were. Being precedes thought.

When you don’t identify with your thoughts, there can be no tyranny.

And in fact, it is possible to stop thinking. But you don’t do it by thinking about stopping thoughts. Instead, you drop your attention into pure consciousness.

If thoughts persist, then you just let them happen as you withdraw from them. They recede into the background, like boats on the surface of a lake that you are diving into.

They may never get totally extinguished. Answers From Silence says, “It’s not that you make everything stop. It’s that you let everything go….everything keeps going. But YOU stop.”

Then you can be, without thoughts.

—JC