“If you do not go within, you go without.”

Today’s post is excerpted from Book 1 of Conversations with God.

Hell is the opposite of joy. It is unfulfillment. It is knowing Who and What You Are, and failing to experience that.  It is being less. That is hell, and there is none greater for your soul.

Be hell does not exist as this place you have fantasized, where you burn in some everlasting fire, or exist in some state of everlasting torment. What purpose could I have in that?

Even if I did hold the extraordinarily ungodly thought that you did not “deserve” heaven, why would I have a need to seek some kind of revenge, or punishment, for your failing? Shouldn’t it be a simple matter for Me to just dispose of you? What vengeful part of Me would require that I subject you to eternal suffering of a type and at a level beyond description?

If you answer, the need for justice, would not a simple denial of communion with Me in heaven serve the ends of justice? Is the unending infliction of pain also required?

I tell you there is no such experience after death as you have constructed in your fear-based theologies. Yet there is an experience of the soul so unhappy, so incomplete, so less than whole, so separated from God’s greatest joy, that to your soul this would be hell. But I tell you I do not send you there, nor do I cause this experience to be visited upon you. You, yourself, create the experience, whenever, and however, you separate your Self from your own highest thought about you. You, yourself create the experience, whenever you deny your Self; whenever you reject Who and What You Really Are.

Yet even this experience is never eternal. It cannot be, for it is not My plan that you shall be separated from Me forever and ever. Indeed, such a thing is an impossibility – for to achieve such an event, not only would you have to deny Who You Are- I would have to as well. This I will never do. And so long as one of us holds the truth about you, the truth about you shall ultimately prevail.

…

This is the goal of your soul. This is its purpose – to fully realize itself while in the body; to become the embodiment of all that it really is.

This is My plan for you. This is My ideal: that I should become realized through you. That thus, concept is turned into experience, that I might know my Self experientially.

The Laws of the Universe are laws that I laid down. They are perfect laws, creating perfect function of the physical.

Have you ever seen anything more perfect than a snowflake? Its intricacy, its design, its symmetry, its conformity to itself and originality from all else – all are a mystery. You wonder at the miracle of this awesome display of Nature. Yet if I can do this with a single snowflake, what think you I can do – have done –with the universe?

Were you to see the symmetry of it, the perfection of its design – from the largest body to the smallest particle – you would not be able to hold the truth of it in your reality. Even now, as you get glimpses of it, you cannot yet imagine or understand its implications. Yet you can know there are implications – from more complex and far more extraordinary than your present comprehension can embrace. Your Shakespeare said it wonderfully : There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

It is not a question of learning [these laws], but of remembering.

Begin by being still. Quiet the outer world, so that the inner world might bring you sight. This in-sight is what you seek, yet you cannot have it while you are so deeply concerned with your outer reality. Seek, therefore, to go within as much as possible. And when you are not going within, come from within as you deal with the outside world. Remember this axiom:

If you do not go within, you go without.

Put it in the first person as you repeat it, to make it more personal:

If I do not
go within
I
go without

You have been going without all your life. Yet you do not have to, and never did.

There is nothing you cannot be, there is nothing you cannot do. There is nothing you cannot have.