[Glass Joe]

(continued from above...)

Here is a brief summary of the stages of consciousness that the “How To Know God” book goes over. (BTW, these are my summaries, and not exact quotes, so you might see some discrepancies and aspects of stages not covered.) Each stage listed below is a brief summary of how a hypothetical individual is likely to see God, believe in God, and relate to God at his/her particular level of consciousness. But don’t get hung up on the particular stages. The map is not the territory. There could just as well be 777 stages instead of just 7.

So if anyone has read "How to Know God", or similar books that discuss levels of consciousness and how they help shape/filter our concepts of God and help create our relationships with God, I’d love to hear your thoughts about them.

STAGE 1: God can obliterate me, and for seemingly no reason at all. Life is full of fear of annihilation and anger at the lack of meaning or reason behind everything. I pray to God to show me just an ounce of mercy, and to somehow find it in His/Her heart to spare my tiny insignificant life from all the random chaos and destruction surrounding me.

STAGE 2: God can support me... just as long as I obey His/Her laws and commandments. I learn that I am actually useful to God. I pray to God to help me "fall in line" and locate my role within the system. If I do what's required of me, I'm rewarded handsomely. If I commit a single sin, I'm punished severely, and for all eternity. God's use for me and so-called love for me is 100% conditional. And my cooperation with him is purely contractual. If you take away God’s carrot dangling in front of me and God’s whip cracking behind me, I wouldn’t want any relationship with God at all. Even though I no longer fear God like I used too, I sometimes find myself hating Him. And I think God knows it.

STAGE 3: God can bring me inner peace from the cold harsh material world of birth and death, consisting of only empty guilty pleasures and inevitable excruciating pains. I pray to God to help me escape all the trappings of the outer world. I try to hold onto the peaceful sanctuary of my inner world for as long as possible, but the outer world, continues to keep dragging me back out of it. The outer world is like a loan shark that keeps knocking on the door of my inner world, reminding me of the mountains of karmic debt I must still repay. I really wish that God would somehow absolve me of this never-ending karmic debt and somehow permit me to live in this calm, safe, blissful inner world forever. But for some reason God never does this for me. The cruel heartless outer world still has its claws dug into me and refuses to let me leave.

STAGE 4: God can bring me insight and clarity into the true nature of reality. God can help me get a glimpse of the seemingly complex web of relationships between my vast inner world and the vast outer world. I pray to God to help me bridge this (apparently) wide and treacherous gap between these two very different worlds. At this stage, the outer world isn't seen as so cold and empty anymore. My inner world is no longer seen as so pristine and utopian anymore. Things are no longer as “black and white” as they used to be. Concepts like “Morality”, “Justice”, “Good”, and “Evil” feel like oceans that I I’m drowning in. I have nothing sturdy to hold on to anymore. So I trust my intuition a lot more than I trust rational analysis. I wish that God would help me out of this ocean and help me find the shore. But for some reason God doesn’t give me anything to keep me afloat. God gives me no definitive answers to any of the important questions that continue to bother me.

STAGE 5: God and I are teammates. We are the best of friends. We can even be seen as the best of lovers. However the relationship is viewed, whether as teammates, friends, lovers, or a Jedi-like “Force”, it’s an extremely personal and cooperative relationship. God needs me just as much as I need Him/Her. I pray to God for His/Her cooperation in manifesting a life full of unlimited adventure, love, creativity, and discovery. And God, surprisingly and for the first time, even starts praying to me (!), asking for the opportunity to see His/Her creations through my eyes and to feel them through my hands, and to experience everything in the world from my (wonderfully) limited and focused perspective. God shows me how to align with and navigate the river of life with minimal effort and with minimal resistance. "Winning" and "losing", "peace" and "disturbance", "pain" and "pleasure" don't matter anymore, but are seen as necessary and inseparable dichotomies. They are a part of the game. (You can’t have a game of Counter-strike without both terrorists and counter-terrorists.) Whatever role I play in life, it matters more than anything else how I play the game, and how I keep the game going and keep the plot moving forward.

STAGE 6: God and I are seen as complementary aspects and opposite polarities of the same infinite intelligent creative process. There can't be one without the other. There’s no God without I. No I without God. In this stage, there is no longer a "need" for each other or “cooperation” between us, any more than one side of a coin "needs" the other side or “cooperates” with the other side. God and I co-arise simultaneously. One side doesn’t “create” the other. Prayer is no longer seen as all that necessary anymore, and is really just a formality. God and I are more like lifelong teammates/friends/lovers who can simply read each other's subtle body language instead of needing to speak. God's thoughts and my thoughts are almost indistinguishable from each other now. I see what God sees, and God sees what I see. I truly want what God wants, and God truly wants what I want. When I suffer, God suffers even more so. When God suffers, I suffer even more so. Intention-Manifestation is almost seen as a redundant term. At this stage, what IS NOT intention-manifestation? IM comes almost as freely and as naturally as breathing. All objects/events/circumstances in both the inner and outer worlds are literally seen as abundant as air, water, or thoughts. Can you ever run out of thoughts?

STAGE 7: I am God. God is I. God and I are "not two". Now, even terms like “dichotomies” and “polarities” are seen as inaccurate and not quite right. We are no longer seen as two sides of the same coin. At this stage, there is no coin. Any aspect of this stage can't be put into words and all descriptions are inaccurate (including this description), because words are limiting and dualistic. Even the words “God” and “I” are meaningless now. There is neither God, nor I. Only Emptiness. Un-manifest. Unknown. Indescribable. Immeasurable. Infinite. Eternal. Boundless. Freedom. I AM THAT. Intention-manifestation has no meaning anymore. EVERYTHING is intention-manifestation. Thoughts have no meaning anymore. Prayer has no meaning anymore. When I pray to God, I pray to myself. All stages, including this one, are seen as exactly the same and perfect exactly where they are. The final stage, transcends, yet includes, all concepts of all stages. All my visions of God, ALL OF THEM, are seen simply as projections of myself. All my relationships with God, whether trembling in fear before God’s feet at Stage 1 or trembling in ecstasy as an aspect of God at stage 6, are all relationships with myself. I see that my whole existence, ALL OF IT, was always, still is, and will forever continue to be... a dream. But calling ALL OF IT “a dream”, calling EVERYTHING “a dream”, is still using dualistic language and is therefore inaccurate and not quite right. To call “IT” anything, to label it or try to make an understanding of it, no matter how subtle, is to miss “IT”.