The Many Voices of God

There are some people that would say to you that teach about spirituality, that to be spiritual or to be in Spirit is the goal of our existence. And while being attuned to Spirit or the Holy Spirit is valuable, we descended into this earth, this material realm with a purpose that can only unfold in this material realm. Part of the reason that we enter into this realm is to learn how to integrate Spirit and matter, that both exist, both depend on the same laws of God, both depend on the spirit, as well as physical laws around us. So, the mix of things that we live in—the material concerns and the spiritual concerns—are intended to help us integrate those two aspects of our existence.

If one were to look at the universe from the broadest perspective, it wouldn’t look that different from what the universe looks like from the very smallest perspective. And we float in between these two realms of perspective—the minutiae as well as the expansive and the broad. And in this process of looking back and forth, trying to understand where we are at any given moment, part of what we learn is that there are some things that occur in one context, and other things that occur in a different context. It might be tempting to say that one context is small or very insignificant, and that another context is very large and therefore very important. But really size in this sense does not matter. Because in the realms in which we are moving as human beings, both our spirit and our bodies are tightly integrated, dependent on each other in this realm. And it’s only when we leave this material realm, that we then become concerned solely with matters of the spirit. So, what does that mean for us, you might ask? And what it means is the integration of concerns that we have, this integration is important for our understanding of how we manifest, how we create, how we build, and how we become a partner with the process of God in this world.

Every human being at some point begins their spiritual journey trying to listen to that single voice that they perceive to be God. They somehow adopt a perspective that the voice of God is one voice. But the truth is, there are more than one voice, and the many voices of God exist within us as individuals. But it’s hard for us to see the unity that exists underneath those voices when we hear only the differences or the diversity in those voices. So, we might also understand that there is this spiritual or Spirit perspective and material perspective, there is what is small, and what is large, and so we find that there is one voice, but there are many voices. So, all of these spectrums of our experience of God—because God’s being is the universe itself—all of these experiences of God help us understand that we are constantly living within an experience of God.

It’s hard for us to understand when we suffer, but then, we have to learn how we contribute to our own suffering. We have to learn that we are not always a victim, but sometimes we are. Sometimes we are a victim of ourselves. Sometimes we reap from another person or another circumstance something that is part of our path to integrate into our understanding of being a human being. All of these experiences, human beings frequently make attempts to objectify them or to make an objective observation or a single observation that seems to hold the truth of all of these points of view. But that is part of the point of view or the framework that we need to understand—the multiplicity that we find in God as well as the unity that we find in God. When we move back and forth between this unity and this multiplicity, we begin to understand that there is a certain stability or groundedness in God. And in our love of God and truth, our love of love and kindness itself, but also our love of grace and mercy, there is a unity that provides a stability or an anchor, a grounding in that understanding of God’s presence. But with that grounded understanding, we are free or untethered in other ways where our freedom allows us to explore the multiplicity of perspectives, where we can feel as if our freedom comes from being unbound or unburdened, and this interplay of our connection, our disconnection, our seeing and not seeing, our hearing and not hearing, in all of these realms of experience, we learn to find the expression of God and the voices of God that speak to us. 

The multiplicity in the ways that God speaks to us should remind us that it is not just sound that repeats or mimics the voice of God. That there are visual ways that God might communicate. There are feeling, emotion or feeling ways that God might speak to us. There are concrete ways that we experience the laws of the universe, the Divine laws of Spirit, so our experience is varied. And just as our experience is varied, there are people that tune into one channel of this kind of expression, more than they might tune in a different way. So, if you don’t hear a voice or you don’t hear or see something that communicates directly to you, then it’s up to us to see how our feelings and our intuition might guide us. And if we don’t feel something moving inside of us, it’s often helpful for us to see the way the world moves around us. The ways in which the world might be gently nudging us along a path to a revelation that we need as a human being. And, just as I began speaking to you today, that revelation might be material, as well as it might be spiritual. And this is why science and spirituality sometimes seem to merge, because there is a point in which they do intersect. There is a point in which consciousness is seen as the creative force, and then there is the point in which the material movement of reality exposes what is spiritual. We are not so far along as human beings that we can use our minds to shape these forces to use them. In part, we haven’t learned to use them because we are not careful with them. We don’t respect them in the ways that they need to be respected. And up to this point in our existence, we are most likely to represent or respect what is represented by the material power that exists around us. We’re drawn to power that overcomes the obstacles in the material world in which we live. But those material obstacles frequently are only obstacles because we make the attempt to pass through them or over them to reach another material object. There are so many material obstacles that we don’t even need to encounter or to engage, but we can simply sit with patience, with strength in our own being, and overcome whatever lesson there might be for us in either the material or the spiritual, and sometimes both.

Now our consciousness about Spirit, we might think of faith, but we should not let our faith be such that we don’t accept any kind of proof or existence of other forms of reality. Just because we believe something or have faith that something is true, we shouldn’t be afraid of any material fact or any truth that challenges our faith. Faith, for us, is more like a perspective, an attitude that we bring to the things that we do. It is a spiritual capacity, but it’s not a capacity that overcomes every obstacle. There is not any one capacity that overcomes every obstacle. That’s why things like love and truth are part of the oneness of God. There is a unity that exists sometimes in places that we’re not aware. So, the contradictions that we feel or see or hear in all of these different voices of God exist for a reason, not for denial. They don’t exist to deny another perspective, or to deny another faith. They exist so that we can see the fullness of faith or the fullness of the spirit’s effect on the material, and the material’s integration into Spirt. We have to learn to respect the experience of other human beings, and when we know that someone proceeds in error, it is up to us to acknowledge their experience. We don't have to agree with or condone the results of their experience. We don’t have to agree with or condone the results of their experience, but at the same time, it is not helpful for us to deny their experience. So, if we take this kind of truth to heart, we begin to understand that things like fear that lead to denial are the things that separate us and cause us to lose connection to that underlying unity that is God. When that underlying unity is disconnected or denied, then we lose our ability to see how it is functioning in our favor. That it functions for us and helps us, and that it does not really prevent us from growing. We may pause, but we are pausing to gain more from the perspective, to gain more from the obstacles that appear, and we learn every step of the way, all of the beauty that exists in an integrated spiritual and material realm within the body of God. And when we say the body of God, we are also acknowledging that this exists within the consciousness of God, and it exists within us, as well as around us.