We all have small bits of God in us, as that pure essence, the Soul and the spirit of the Soul. This church of the Movement of Spiritual Inner Awareness knows that we all want God, more God, bigger God, gigantic God to be our servant. But we are here just to serve God. – John-Roger

This article by John-Roger was first published in the New Day Herald, March 1997

I’ve found in my experience that God is everything. He’s your birth, He’s your life, He’s your suffering, He’s your joy, He’s your death, and He’s your eternal life. So to God goes all the glory. It’s nice to know that God is in everything. But maybe you’re not real sure that God is inside of you, and, if He is, where is He? God is in your spiritual heart. Where’s the spiritual heart? All of your body is God’s spiritual heart. Now we have to know how to get there.

The mind is always chattering. While you’re listening to me and the Spirit that is coming through, your mind talks to you of other things. That’s your “monkey mind.” God speaks of love, love in many, many ways.

Maybe ten years ago, when I was in Greece on the island of Santorini, I met a very old Greek man. I was walking with a group of people who were visiting the island with me, and there he was, so I nodded and smiled. He nodded, also, and I walked by him. I had gone about ten yards when I heard this voice saying, “Where are you going?”

“Nowhere.”

“Then come back here.” I wasn’t sure if it was his voice, because he never let on, but I somehow knew that he wanted me to come back. I suspected that he was telepathically communicating to me. So I went back to get a closer look while the group walked on. He said to me, “How are you?”

I looked at his mouth. He had this big long beard, whiskers all over, and a mustache. I could see them moving just a little bit, and then I got that he was talking with his lips, though he wasn’t moving them very much. I said, “What do you want?”

He stroked his beard way down and said, “So, what do you know about love?”

“My fair share.”

“There’s no fair share.”

I said, “Well, I have to be going,” and he said, “They’ll be back in a while. They went down a dead end. When they come back out, I’ll be waiting.”

The people were shopping, and with shoppers you never know when they’ll come back, so I stayed with the man because the street was a dead end, and they had to come back. He again said to me in perfect English, “What do you know about love?”

I said, “Well, there’s sexual love, there’s love of a child, there’s love of your spouse, there’s a love of your friends, there’s the love of God, there’s God’s love for us.” I was on a real good run and was getting all over the place: the love of the rocks, the love of the house, the love of the sun, the love of the sea-everything I could see.

He said, “What about the love of arguing?”

That made me pause, and I said, “So, what about it?”

“Unsophisticated people.”

“Oh,” I said, “there’s love of marriage,” and he said, “That’s a little better.”

I asked him if he was married, and he said he was. I looked at him and saw beautiful eyes and eyebrows that were bushy and gray and a little black. Some of the eyebrow hairs were sticking straight out, and I wanted to go pull them out. So I said, “The love of plucking eyebrows” (I was going for points), and then I asked, “Well, what do you know about love?”

Right around that time, a couple that lived in the house (they were maybe thirty years old) were coming downstairs, talking loudly to each other. You might even say they were yelling. The old man asked me, “What are they doing?”

I said, “Well, I don’t understand the language, but from everything that I can understand, they’re arguing.”

He said, “That’s so only in other countries. Here, they’re making love.”

“Right. And when they get through fighting, they’ll go to the bedroom and make love.”

“No,” he said, “that’s sex.”

“Well, there’s loving sex.”

“That’s not what they’re doing. They’re getting close to each other. And all they’re doing is trying to find out how to get in.”

Just about that time, the young man grabbed the young woman by the shoulder and just pulled her around and laid a big kiss on her, right in the midst of her yelling at him. That was probably the juiciest kiss in Greece. She was trying to push away, but not really hard. The fellow by me said, “They’re making love.”

I commented, “Well, they’re not yelling anyway,” and he said, “You can’t yell with somebody’s tongue half-way down your throat.”

“Well,” I said, “if that was an American woman, half of his tongue would still be in his mouth, and she’d spit out the rest on the ground.”

“That’s because they don’t understand that everything they do-everything they do-is making love.”

So I took a big step and asked him, “Did you call me back?” He didn’t answer because the couple had gone down the street to the shopping area (not back upstairs), and they were yelling at each other again. The old man told me that they were yelling to let everybody know they were in love, and I said, “He ought to kiss her again.” Then almost on cue, she reached around and put her hand behind his head and started kissing him all over. I asked, “Is that too much love-making?”

He said, “You don’t see much of that in public. I think they’re doing it for us.” Right then, they stopped kissing, turned around, and waved their hands back at us. He said, “They loved putting on the show for us.”

When I told the old man that it seemed so real, he said, “Oh, they really were angry at each other. They were threatening to kill each other. They were threatening all sorts of breaking arms, legs, and necks.”

“And that’s making love.”

“Exquisite!”

I just looked at him and said, “Are we making love now?”

“Are you?” he asked.

“Nah, I don’t think so.”

“Am I too old?”

“No,” I said, “I think I’m too young.”

“You don’t understand,” he told me. “If you and I talk quietly and discuss the sea, or if we yell and scream at each other, or if I take my cane and beat vou with it, I would still be making love to you.”

“I’m making love to you.”

He then said, “You started when you first saw me, when you came down the street, but you were nervous to have your eyes keep looking at mine.”

I said, “Well, I saw you. I saw your eyes; I saw your hair. You reminded me of a Greek sheep herder I used to know when I was about six years old.”

“Ah,” he said, “you were making love then, also.” I had not been in the presence of such a spiritual, loving, physical being for a long, long time.

About that time, the group I was with started coming back, but I didn’t want to leave. I had found a love. I didn’t understand it, but who understands love? You make love. If you don’t do that, you’re doing nothing because all of it is love. The long walk is making love. The changing of a baby’s dirty diaper is making love. Nursing a child. Going to get your child out of jail, insisting they go to school, disagreeing with what they want. They want to drive the car, and you say no. They want to be on their own, so you let them. Then they come home and say, “Feed me,” and you say, “Wait, you want to be on your own? Feed yourself.” All of that is making love.

Do you know how much God loves us? He gives us our own way, and He’s making love to us all the time. Then you see someone you are attracted to, and your friends say, “What do you see in that person? They’re not good looking.” If your friends were looking through your eyes, they would see that you caught a glimpse of God in the other person; it reflects back, and you feel the love-making for them. Then we wonder why. We forget that God is making love with us, because we’re busy trying to have sex out there, thinking that’s more important than love. it depends on your attitude.

If you care for the person, it’s making love. if you don’t care for them, it’s dishonoring and disrespecting them. Does God care? He’s making love with you and making love with the other person.

Do you think a human being can make that loving energy at the end of sex? We don’t know how. It’s the Spirit going through us like electricity. It gets to where we can’t stand it physically, and then God brings it to an end. It’s very addictive energy, and so we all have the addiction to being in the Spirit of God, except that we call it a sexual experience. We have forgotten that God is in everything. God created everything. Right in the Bible it says, “In six days, He created everything.” That means even your spit, even your bowel movement, and all we’re doing is acting out creation. God created the slums and the high places, and He said, “Whoever wants it, you can have it.” It’s a choice, and even if we go through life making bad choices, those choices are all in God. I call it the Divine Ocean of Love and Mercy.

I don’t go someplace looking for God. I just look for God. Sometimes I can’t find God, because God is me and I lost track. As soon as I stop my monkey mind, as soon as I stop my emotional sensationalism, I catch a glimpse of the glory of God, and then everywhere I look I see it. It isn’t something that you get bored with. It’s also something that you cannot hold for a long time physically, so it comes and goes, comes and goes, like the tides of an ocean.

One day it may come in very large, and that’s too much. it’s like a hurricane or a tornado or a tsunami, one of those tidal waves that covers the land. God is in that and the cause of that and outside of that.

So, why can’t we see God? Because we’ve been taught that God is someplace else. We’ve also been taught to believe the worst in people. We have the good side and the bad side, but the bad side is not God’s bad side; God is there also. It’s what we do with it that makes it bad according to our definition. So we know that if we’re going to see eye to eye with God or be in God’s thoughts, we have to change our way of looking and our way of thinking.

Now is the time to be a little selfish, think and do good things, because if it’s coming back, you’re going to have some good things appear. But you have to keep watching and listening, because it comes back in God’s time. We have our coming and our going in the body of God. If you’re not doing this, your God is too small. A scientific-type definition for God is that God is a being larger than which there is no other being. So then we ask, “Well, how big is that being?” I’m aware of 107 universes, and the God I know is immediately present in each and every universe.

It took-some time before I realized that. First I thought, “God is clever. When I go to that universe, God goes there, too. He wasn’t there before I got there.” I thought about that for a year or two – it’s called checking it out.

God said that He can be everywhere, and anywhere at the same time. He’s the Alpha and Omega. He’s omniscient,  omnipotent and and omnipresent everywhere all at once.  It’s enough to make you reel.

I thought, “God has to be checked out,” so I did what I call sort of a trick. By way of explanation, in the Movement of Spiritual inner Awareness, you can be on all levels simultaneously in the Spirit, but we really don’t teach that you can be on all those levels physically at the same time. We do know that you can bilocate and have your body here and be above it looking at it. You can also be aware that you’re out of your body. They mesh and don’t conflict, and it’s a very smooth process.

So I just bilocated from here to the farthest universe that I knew, and God was in both places. I thought, “Well, if I can do that, obviously God can do that.” But, see, I lost track that I am also God. I was doing an ego thing. In the Bible there’s a statement that says, “Do not tempt the Lord thy God.” That’s exactly what I was doing. I was tempting Him to show me all the things. Do you know why He didn’t do it? Because He couldn’t. He had already done it, and it was just me, seeing it. So I thought, “Well, that’s good philosophy, but I don’t know that that’s so. How am I going to trap God in this next one?” My mind was doing a kind of “trip” and was demanding more proof from God.

You can see that I’m one of these people who is skeptical. I don’t jump at every good deal that comes around, but I look at the information and ask the dumb, dumb, dumb questions. Because if God is in everything, all I’m doing is making love, and maybe the other person doesn’t like it that way and does something else. That’s the way they’re making love back, but we miss.

That’s okay. God is in the miss. Are you getting it? God is in everything. And what He’s not in, Christ is in, and what Christ is not in, the Holy Spirit is in. And what they’re not in, the Mystical Traveler is in. They’re all God. The Mystical Traveler is in everyone in this room.  Just in case you miss God and you miss Jesus Christ and you miss the Holy Spirit, you get to deal with the Travelers. The others are easier because you get away with more. Many people don’t like the Mystical Traveler for one reason: he tells them where they’re off-track only when they ask. But if you say to God, “If I’m off-track, tell me,” you may get silence. In the silence is God. In the noise is God. In the rivers is God. In the clouds. in these lights. In this person’s button. Well, not very much God in the button, but some.

That reminds me of a story. A young man went to see a great guru in India. The man had to go through a lot of hardships to get there, but when he got there and talked with his guru, he was in bliss. God was in the guru, and God told him, by way of the guru, “God is in you, too.” The man went ecstatic. He started going down the road to the city so he could tell everybody, “God is in you! Rejoice! Be happy!” Along came an elephant, walking down the same path, and the man said, “Move, elephant. I am God! God is in me.” And the elephant ran right over him. The man finally picked himself up, crawled back to the guru, and said, “An elephant ran over me. You told me God was in me.” And the guru said, “Stop. Bigger God in the elephant.”

We all have small bits of God in us, as that pure essence, the Soul and the spirit of the Soul. This church of the Movement of Spiritual Inner Awareness knows that we all want God, more God, bigger God, gigantic God to be our servant. But we are here just to serve God. But we can’t because we don’t know where He is, and we ask how we get there. Most of the churches aren’t getting it. Instead, they are doing traditions. Do you know that the Latin word for tradition means “the betrayer”? Tradition betrays the present. If you are doing traditions, you are always in the past, doing what somebody did thousands of years ago. God is present, He’s in the past, and He’s in the future. But those are just words because, in God’s vision, all of that is now, So you can do the tradition and find God, but then you think He’s only found in that tradition.

So you say that your tradition is right, and all the rest are full of the devil. Other people over in their own churches are finding God and saying, “Yours is the work of the devil.” But God is in both sides. Then who’s arguing?

It’s just God arguing with God. It gives Him something to do until we wake up. Most of the noise that we think of as God is our snoring. That is God who just lost it. So enjoy your spouse’s snoring. But God is also in ear plugs, so put God in, and let God snore.

God is fun. God is joy and happiness. God is a joke happening all the time. And jokes are funny. They keep us laughing, and laughing is inner jogging. If you laugh enough, you lose an over-developed stomach.

We must understand that because God is in us, we must discipline our mind, our emotions, and our body. God gave those things to our Soul, to learn how to create. And if you don’t feel close to God, guess who moved. You. Your feeling is just your sense of separation because even when you feel you’re not in touch with God, you’re still in touch with God.

Quit using this energy of God to waste your time. St. Francis of Assisi is a good example. Everything he did was done with God in mind. But he had a mistake working because he said that God was not in material things, so he started throwing his father’s merchandise out of the house. He was actually throwing God out of his father’s house because God was also in all his father’s merchandise.

How can God do that? The God I know can do anything He wants to and anything He doesn’t want to. And if He doesn’t think about it, He does it anyway.  Once you get that, your life probably won’t change dramatically. You may sit here and feel God in you, go out, get in your car, drive home, get in a car wreck, and ask, “Why, God, why? Why me?”

God may say, “You were handy. This other car needed a place to wreck, and since you and I are so close now, I thought you would be fine with him wrecking yours.”

Then we say, “God is crazy.” If we had that feeling about God, we would look in that “crazy,” but, instead, we worship the god of opinion: “What will others say and think? What if they think bad things about me?” Probably, they are not thinking anything at all about you. You’re wasting your time being narcissistic. If you’re going to have somebody take care of you, look in the mirror because that’s who’s going to do it.

There’s a story told about a psychiatrist walking into a mental institution. There was a man sitting on the floor, and he kept scratching himself. The psychiatrist said, “Why are you doing that? Why are you scratching yourself like that?” The crazy guy looked at the psychiatrist and said, “Because, I’m the only one that knows where I itch.” Think about that.

All the things you can do for yourself, get on with it. If you need help, God is waiting to help you, but you think it should come out of the sky. Here comes God down the street in another body, with a long beard and the eyebrows sticking out, or some other way. Have you got the point? God is all. And we’re allowed to create separation. But we create with God’s energy, with the Holy Spirit, and the Lord is overseeing all that we do. That’s why I say, “Not one Soul will be lost. Out of God come all things. God loves all of its creation.”

Wow! That means we’re loved. Then make your love match this fact that you’re loved. Does that mean to go kiss somebody passionately? It can mean this, but it doesn’t have to. You can go up and yell at them, “Get out of here!” Strong love-making, if maybe they are hard of hearing. God is in that, also. And when we poke fun, we’re poking God, from God to God. When you hurt, God is in the hurt because the hurt is part of your life, and God is life.

Now, I didn’t give you everything about it. I hope I stirred you up to think about it. Don’t go out of here being smug because God is a servant of us all. To see and know God, serve God in everybody else. That doesn’t mean get in their way or eat their food for them. Sometimes it means that you cross the street and walk on the side opposite from them because that part of God (the other person) needs to be quiet now. It has to think through something. So underneath all of that, we find a statement about God: God is wisdom.

Baruch Bashan