The purpose of this planet is to Love.  If you wish to understand how this works, take your ideas about war, particularly this war, and look at it from the point of view of planetary Love.  I know this is difficult, but you must understand; God's delight is the extension of Love into ever greater areas of consciousness.  There has been a slow but steady expansion in the hearts and minds of mankind as you moved out to cover the globe and learned to love greater numbers of people.  You found love came when agreement between you was present.  Your sense of loving and being loved was lost when too much disagreement arose.  So what is needed is a way to increase your areas of agreement and decrease those of disagreement.

The more people you can agree with and feel at ease and relaxed around, the more the tension between you dissipates.  Those boundaries of separation soften and become more gentle.  If you are missing love in your life, you may be looking at the differences rather than the similarities between you and other people.  As you relax and soften around the seeming separations, you will be participating in the expansion of planetary love.  The greater the love in the world, the greater the potential for future love.  It moves out in ever expanding ways.

When the people of different cultures in the Middle East begin to interact within their countries, they carry the potential for mutual understanding.  Each time they talk to one another, the possibility is there.  When there is an attempt at understanding, then agreement is possible and love can arise!  For a long time, the Middle East has represented to you, and you to them, two closed systems; two foreign bodies which seemed inscrutable and mysterious.  Since they are not alike, there is always a tendency for each to feel their system is superior.  Feelings of superiority make love almost impossible.  There is very little understanding or communication between these systems, therefore they contain no wisdom of the heart.  Hearts can be moved under extremities such as war because both sides share the same basic fears and confusion.  Therein lies the opportunity for love.  There is a chance to drop the mental beliefs and respond to one another through the understanding of the heart, knowing another individual is facing the same fears you are.  Such a recognition of similarities brings hope of an ending to hatred and conflict.

It is only when physical bodies get together that understanding has a chance.  I mean that literally, because the faculty of understanding the other person's point of view is not in the mind.  You may agree with many different points of view in theory; but in actual fact, theories cannot make you feel love nor create a space for an inner knowing of the similarities between you.  When this war is finished, something very interesting will begin happening.  Since Americans and other allies will be left to live in the Middle East, where they can begin to gain a new understanding of their surroundings based on similarities.  They, in turn, will be able to influence those others who now stand so far apart.  Being exposed to the influence of these countries can help them break out of the limited boundaries.  What is necessary to take advantage of this opportunity is the willingness to acknowledge the presence of a different point of view, and to see how that does not necessarily make others separate, just interesting.

Frankly, war is not the maximum way to bring about this kind of understanding.  I am by no means raising the flag of war, saying that God wants it so you can all have a chance to love.  But I want to repeat something I have said from the first year we met.  God uses everything to bring you Home.  Anything you create, God can use to reveal a quality of love that can unite this planet in a knowledge of Oneness.  That is the point of this God experiment.  How you come to this is your choice.  I want you to deeply understand the beauty of this.  It means no matter how diabolical, dark or painful your life may be, the same basic law applies.  No matter what drama and war are going on in your thoughts, your feelings or your actions, each moment can be used by the Divine within.  You need to be willing to have it happen.  Just ask!

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I would like to remind you again that many of you have identified yourselves with what you call your ego, what I call your "small self."  Your small self does not contain the eternity of truth within it.  The ego is simply a conglomerate or cluster of different beliefs you hold.  These beliefs are constantly changing.  If you find one piece of information you didn't previously have, a long held belief you would have died for just evaporates; and you have a totally different point of view.  Your ego does not have the eternity of Truth, just of change.

You believe one thing one moment, yet the opposite under different circumstances.  You will find when you begin to watch your belief structures, that many of these beliefs do not agree with each other at all.  You say things like, "War is evil," and "We must protect our country at all costs."  "All men are equal," and "Our way must prevail," which show an inconsistency in many of your beliefs.  Are you clear about what you are defending in the middle of a desert on the other side of the world?  Please stop a moment and ask yourself what these beliefs are, and how much you need to defend them.

There is no solid center point within the ego to give it consistent direction.  The ego is exactly like clouds in the sky.  You defend to the death your love affairs, your children, your individual rights, your jobs; all of it!  Yet your beliefs about these situations are constantly changing.  You are defending clouds that shift about and dissipate endlessly; not only from moment to moment and year to year, but from lifetime to lifetime.  You "come in with" some of your beliefs, and you have never stopped to examine them and see if you still wish to maintain those beliefs or to stop creating them.

The ego is not a very useful place to go to look at the larger picture of your life.  There is no unifying nucleus in it that tells you which would be the best way for you to move.  It does not consistently say, "God is over here," or "Goodness is over there," or even, "This will make me happy."  With nothing to direct it, going first in one direction, then another, the ego keeps you in motion all the time.  You call that motion "living."  Your beliefs all exist within the ego-structure.  Some come and bump up against you and leave, while others just float in very quietly and stay with you, day after day.  It is helpful to understand the very fragile, unpredictable, and inconsistent nature of ego motion.  When you stop looking for a central you in that structure, you will begin to experience an I that is vaster.  You experience a state of vast, benevolent equilibrium.  Within that vastness, the go and its manifestations simply move here and there.  It does not let you know it is going anywhere in particular, that it does not have any focused destination in mind.

Where then do you go to get the focus that you want for your peace of mind and heart?  How do you place your feet firmly on the road to God?  Let us go back to the analogy of the sky and the clouds.  The clouds are present; and the empty, vast Sky is the Divine mind of consciousness, that pure, conscious awareness you have come to call God.  It is that unlimited immensity that silently and majestically allows all of the comings and goings of the clouds.  There can be the greatest thunderstorm imaginable, and the sky is not affected.  You could not even see the clouds if it were not for the illumination from the sky.  This is the Light of God-Consciousness which is contained within the magnificent wholeness of the vast, ever present sky.  Magically, the Light is within the light.  Consciousness is luminescent Light, and it doesn't need another power source to provide that illumination.  It comes from within.

It would help to stop a moment and identify with the vastness of Sky.  You can visualize it deeply out of your own consciousness, holding the picture so it becomes more familiar and can fill an expanded place in your psyche.  As you imagine this, do you not begin to feel something else present?  Do you get any sense of a vaster feeling for yourself?  The ego will say, "You're making that up.  It's just your imagination.  Forget it.  The reality is the clouds."  Do not believe the ego!  Keep identifying with the vast Sky.

 

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When you really begin to pay attention to the ever changing flux of your thoughts and beliefs, you will become aware that, although you are thinking, there is no thinker.  Have you ever really found a thinker inside yourself?  You have a brain, but what motivates it?  where do ideas come from?  How do beliefs arise?  What's really going on?  As you begin to ponder these questions, many of you will realize that, in your pursuit of God-Consciousness, you are trying to find a person, a thinker or doer inside you.  But is there one?

 

For those of you who are ready for a new kind of awareness in these troubled times, we ask you to allow yourself to feel the possibility that there is no thinker, no doer.  Allow yourself to entertain the chance that you are a very loose conglomerate of belief structures you 'think' are acting in unison.  Confusion arises because of your identification with your body.  Since it is so obviously present, you have believed the body is 'you.'  Well, is it?  If that is true, when the body dies, where is the 'you' that was so identified with that structure?  I know I am asking a lot of expansion this morning, and some of you may decide it is too big a stretch; but I am trying, in the time we have left, to bring this truth to its finest focus.  There will be a wonderful moment of delight when you realize, that which you have identified as 'you' is nothing more than an ever shifting, ever changing conglomerate of beliefs.  If you did not have the ability to change these beliefs, you would remain the way you now are forever.  Is your present awareness the understanding you want to have for eternity?  Please take a few moments to really answer this question.

 

It is misidentification that is causing the confusion.  When you say, "There is somebody here," you identify that somebody as the nucleus of a belief structure called ego.  I am trying to tell you that is not the definition.  That is not the truth.  That is not truth!  What you are is that which asked the question, who is aware of 'something' which is the mysterious, unnameable, yet totally knowable, consciousness.  It is ever present, ever present, ever present!  It is always there, and that is the part of your awareness asking the question.  It has nothing to do with the ever changing manifestation of what you would call your limited ego-self.