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

Jeffrey Chappell interviewed on Transformational T...

I was invited to talk on internet radio about “Answers From Silence”, my book about spirituality, on Tuesday, June 3, 2014. I joined host Kristi Borst for nearly an hour of enlightening conversation. Here is the replay of the interview.

Please also check out Kristi’s website for more details about her work as an intuitive energy healer, artist, and radio host.

—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

The Obstacles To Enlightenment

“I’m not yet adequately evolved spiritually to become enlightened.”

“I don’t want to give up the things that enlightenment requires me to give up.”

“My ego is a powerful adversary that I have to conquer in a titanic inner battle before I can reach enlightenment.”

“Enlightenment is for famous saints, not for an everyday person like me.”

“The collective consciousness of the people on this planet is too violent and materialistic to allow me to rise above it and become enlightened.”

“I need to work out all of my psychological problems first, and then I will be clear enough for enlightenment to happen.”

“After I’m enlightened, all of the people and things that I love are going to seem different to me. I feel sad about losing them.”

“In order to experience the pure consciousness of enlightenment I must stop thoughts from happening, but I can’t overcome the tyrrany of thought.”

“Enlightenment happens so rarely. It could never happen to me in this lifetime.”

“I’m starting to raise a family and build a career. All of those responsibilities will sidetrack me from becoming enlightened.”

People can find even more obstacles to add to the list.

All of these obstacles are perceived as being sufficient to defeat enlightenment.

All of them are invalid.

There are no obstacles to enlightenment.

That is because there are no obstacles to something that is ultimately inevitable.

In that case, the question is: why can’t you just stop waiting and hoping and striving, and say to enlightenment, “Take me, I’m yours,” and have it happen?

It’s because of the mistakes that are being made. The mistakes are:

—believing that you desire enlightenment, and

—believing that you have an individual existence, like a branch believing that it is separate from the tree.

Enlightenment corrects these mistakes.

Answers From Silence says, “You might think that you desire enlightenment. Actually, enlightenment desires you. When you are pushing toward it, you are misperceiving. It is actually pulling you.”

And when you are enlightened, you won’t be enlightened individually. You will be enlightenment, enlightenment will be you, and there will be nothing there but enlightenment.

Beyond that, you may subsequently come to recognize that you were never there at all but instead that divinity was projecting you the whole time. “You” were the offshoot.

And the obstacles to enlightenment were never there either.

—JC

Your Spiritual Path—And Beyond

There are many spiritual paths. A very small list would include:

yoga
wicca
t’ai chi
religion
kaballah
astrology
divination
meditation
channeling
shamanism

Every spiritual path is a means for the development of consciousness and the growth of knowledge and experience. A spiritual path that works for you will be one that picks you up from where you are and carries you to the next level of your evolution toward enlightenment.

At this website I have written even more about paths.

And Answers From Silence says that “everything that happens in a person’s life is their path of enlightenment.”

This seems to be acknowledging the existence of spiritual paths and validating their value and necessity. And I fully support the beneficial results that you get from them.

And yet there is another aspect to the topic.

A path is something that you follow. It requires activity, and the activity unfolds in time.

Enlightenment requires no activity, and it is timeless.

A path leads away from your door. You must go out and track it and see where it leads you.

The enlightened experience is that enlightenment is everywhere. Therefore, enlightenment leads nowhere else. There is no place “to” or “from” it. There is only “in” it.

Seeking advice, my student Gideon asked me, “What path do you suggest that I follow?”

To which I answered, “You don’t need to follow a path. You need to sit still.”

They say that every drop eventually returns to the ocean.

Sit silently. The ocean will come to the drop.

—JC