There are two premises I go on: God loves all its creation, and out of God came all things. Knowing that, ultimately everything’s going to be good. But since we don’t really live in ultimates all the time, then we have to look at it in segments.
This world was created by a subpower of God called the Kal power. A rough equivalent, though it’s not the same, would be the devil or Lucifer or Satan. The God that I deal with is the creator of the Soul, and the Soul is above the Kal power. The Soul itself is eternal and can never be destroyed. The Kal power (the negative power) would be God over this world, and that would include in us—the body, the emotions, the mind. Consequently, the Soul is always at war with the flesh. That’s where we get the idea of good versus evil. Most people define evil as that which doesn’t feel good to them. I’ve defined evil as that that gets between you and God.
That leads to the idea of sin, which originally meant to miss the mark. When we miss the mark, we have then fallen and no longer have a first place or “Garden of Eden.” Then we’re down to this state here on the physical. The original sin as instituted in the Garden of Eden was not sex. It was pride. When Eve wanted to eat of the fruit of good and evil, or knowledge, so she could be like God, that was the pride statement. That’s why we often hear it said that pride goes just before the fall. It’s not the pride of having done something really well, which is a past event; it’s the pride that we explode towards a new event. That pride always goes out before we fall inside.
The thing that makes us fall has to be looked at rather carefully because anything that takes us from God would be a temptation. Temptations, then, are going to be of the flesh or how we feel inside of the flesh or how we think inside of the flesh. So we can be tempted mentally, emotionally, or physically. A lot of those are inherent within the Earth plan. Eating too much food is an example on the physical level; the food is here. An emotional push might be to have a companion. There can be the mental thinking of philosophical ideals that may take us away from God. Those are inbuilt temptations on the planet.
When we look at life historically, those things have always been here and are the temptations that are set up by the negative power. Those temptations always test us internally. They will vary a great deal, but they’ll primarily have a similar idea behind them, which is to take you away from feeling the fullness of the Spirit inside of you here. Said another way, the negative power tries to get you to substitute something else that will give you the pleasure that the Soul will give you.
The fallacy in the temptation is that all the things that we deal with in the physical, the imagination, the emotions, the mind—all these things always change. So whenever we partake of something that’s changing, we can never have permanence, because we’re eating of impermanence or participating in or thinking about impermanent things. When we take that inside of us, it produces an impermanent state. So the deception of the negative power is to make you go for temporary fulfillment, which would then make you go after impermanent things.
God’s plan is to go for the long-range things, which is then permanence. In one way, it’s God saying, “Come to me.” Because God created all things below him, it would be foolish to stop short of God.
The negative power gets blamed for far too many things. Looking at the same things that tempt us in the negative can also be looked at in the positive. Anything that can make us fall can strengthen us to succeed. The difficulty is discerning if it’s going to lift us or if we’re fooling ourselves, and that is challenging because there’s an inbuilt illusion on the planet. When I look at you physically, I really don’t see you. You are the Soul. The things around you that I see physically are what you have placed out into the world for the Soul to live here. So if I want to relate to you, I must relate to you on a Soul level. That’s very easy to do. The first thing to do is to have respect, the second is to care for the person, and the third is to support the person. All of that is called loving.
So if we maintain the dignity of the human being, then we have respected, supported, and cared for them. It may do nothing for anything out there when we do that, but we’re not trying to save the world. But we evolve ourselves because of that goodness in our nature.
The spiritual radiation that comes off us is more effective than if we walked down the street smiling at people because the people you affect when you smile are only those who are physically near you. But the radiation of Spirit from you can affect thousands that you don’t see, who may be in buildings, on trains, etc. The radiance of Spirit is the spiritual realm, and so you can walk in the world and not be of it. You’re of the Spirit and then you walk in the world.
When you walk in the Spirit, you can do things that other people might condemn, because they would condemn themselves if they did it. But you can do it with freedom because you’re in the Spirit. The one who condemns does it in karma, and the one who does it in Spirit doesn’t get karma. You’ll know when you’re doing it spiritually because people will attack you and attempt to make you take on the karma. And you can tell those that are from the material plane because they will be doing the negative judging. That’s one way you can discern a person’s intent towards you. When we are in the Spirit, we do not judge what people do. When we’re in the negative part, we do judge and we get judged immediately by our own ideas and thoughts.
Religions, for the most part, are building themselves upon human misfortune. They aren’t building themselves upon people’s goal towards God, even though they talk about it. That’s easy to demonstrate by looking at what the churches and the religions teach. They often teach to fear, to be guilty, to repent, to change—and those are all material things. The spiritual ones teach loving and going to God. Therefore, you don’t have to deal with the other things; they fall away, because they can’t go to God.
Generally, spiritual people are much happier than the ones who are not doing the spiritual approach. In the spiritual approach, God is always the focus of the direction. For example, when we get married or we have relationships, we do not look at each other; we look towards God. Then we have our coming and our going in a consciousness of God. And the relationship is very fulfilled on all levels: sexually, physically, emotionally, mentally, financially. The Spirit fulfills all of it, but it will never be it.
So in sex as a temptation, we can find the Spirit. In looking at the imagination as negative fantasy, we can find the vision of God. In the emotions as a negative thing of depression and doubt, we can find joy and happiness and ecstasy. In the mind, instead of finding negative thinking and talking about life, we can find the thoughts about God and the consciousness of loving in God. So we defeat the negative by using it to go to the positive.
When a person who is evil and one who is spiritual are seen to do the same thing, you can’t tell by looking at them which is which because physically it’ll look the same. But karmically, one will be burdened and one will be freed. And that may not be known for many, many years after the event you’re looking at. So we’d have to wait a long time before we judge who is the evil one or who is the good one. So the spiritual person and the one who is judging will react the same way if they’re honest. Neither one has to judge. They wait until the verdict comes in, and then it is told by someone else.
That’s the most honest approach to anyone. It then allows for acceptance, cooperation, enthusiasm, and to willingly, lovingly endure. Those things all keep tying together. So all we have to do is move into acceptance or cooperation or enthusiasm, and we don’t have to be concerned about temptations. Because even if we think we’ve chosen wisely and we haven’t, we won’t be caught in that because we’re always moving on anyway.
Then what has happened is only an experience that we use to assist other people with. And if you’re going to help people with your experience, it would be foolish to have judged it. That would be like judging a dictionary when you’re looking in it to learn how to spell a word. That’s the same way with our experiences: they become a dictionary or an encyclopedia of life.
Baruch Bashan.