For as long as humanity has existed, people searching for the purpose behind their existence have sensed a power greater than themselves. In ancient times, that power wore many faces: the God of Wind, the God of Fire, the God of Rain, the God of Earth, each force of nature carrying its own divine name. Across the great traditions, Yahweh, God, Allah, and countless other names have been given to this same divine force. In the Universal Understanding of the God Consciousness, we teach that God is one universal consciousness. It is inclusive of all of those expressions. God, as that one consciousness, is all there is. And in being all there is, we understand that all is one, in the illumination and in the power of the consciousness of the oneness being God. Simply put, everything that exists is one, and that oneness itself is God.
God is part of every individual thing, not a person, place, or thing set apart from us. God is a consciousness consisting of the totality of all things, the human kingdom, the animal kingdom, the plant kingdom, the mineral kingdom, and the Germinal Sea from which all physical life first emerges. Each of these kingdoms exists at its own stage of development, from the most elemental expressions of consciousness to the most fully individualized. Not removed from us. Not watching from outside. A part of us, the same way we are a part of it.
And yet we are not God in the singular sense. Individually, we are each a facet of the God Consciousness, a microcosm of it, expressing its nature in our own particular way. Collectively, we are that consciousness. Each of us is complete within ourselves, and yet that completeness exists as part of something far greater than any one of us can fully express on our own.
If each of us is a facet of the God Consciousness, does that make each soul merely a fraction of God, so that it takes every soul combined to make up the whole? Would ten souls together hold ten times the truth, and a thousand souls a thousand times? It would seem reasonable to assume so, but that is not the case. The individual soul, standing alone, already is the God Consciousness, complete in itself. Within each soul exists infinite intelligence, infinite knowledge, and infinite wisdom, and infinity divided by a thousand remains infinity, just as infinity multiplied by a million remains infinity. The collective is the God Consciousness, and each individual is also the God Consciousness, in the same way that infinity is the total and infinity is also each share of it.
Consider an orange cut into eight pieces, each piece holding a seed. Plant all eight, and in time there are eight separate trees. Asking which tree is the original misses the point, because they all are. Every tree came from the same orange and carries the same truth within it. One tree’s fruit may be sweeter, the branches may grow in different directions, but the fruit is still an orange. This is the relationship between the individual soul and the God Consciousness. The soul is not a sliver of God, gradually accumulating enough truth across lifetimes to become whole. It is that same truth factor that brought the God Consciousness to that seed that grew into that tree, expressing itself in its own direction.
If every soul were destroyed but one, that single soul would begin dividing itself to create others to share experience with, and each new soul would carry the same infinite wisdom, intelligence, and knowledge as the original. What the totality of all souls governs is not the wholeness of the truth, since each soul already carries that in full, but the direction and the expression of that truth as it moves through the universe. Picture a drop of water in the entire ocean. Each of us is that individual drop, and collectively we make up the ocean. The water within a single drop is the same water as the whole of the sea, nothing about it lesser, nothing diluted. But the waves, the currents, the ebb and the flow belong to the ocean as a whole. Each soul carries the full truth of the water; the tide is the work of the totality.
But if the soul already is the God Consciousness, how does that vastness become something personal? The answer lies deep within the soul itself, in the Spark of Divinity. The Spark of Divinity is the mind of the soul, the Godhead, the spiritual force within all of us. It is the I AM within expressed in a singular fashion. The physical form is a world, the soul is a world within a world, and the Spark of Divinity is a world within a world within a world. In truth, the only thing that is real is the Spark of Divinity. It is the Spark that created the soul, and it is the Spark that created the physical, and all that the Spark of Divinity has created must in time surrender unto it. The soul surrendered immediately, at the first moment of its existence, and through that surrender it possesses the Spark’s infinite intelligence, infinite knowledge, and infinite wisdom, which is why the soul and the Spark may often be spoken of as one. The mortal consciousness, the everyday awareness through which we live this physical life, has not yet done so.
And that is where our individual role becomes clear. The surrender of the mortal consciousness to the Spark of Divinity, that mind of the soul, is the very purpose of life itself: the process of individualization, the stage of true free will and individual responsibility that only the human kingdom has yet begun. This surrender is the work of every moment of our eternal existence. And it is our free agency that makes it possible, for surrender cannot be commanded or imposed. The mortal consciousness must freely choose to yield to the consciousness of the soul.
Through that surrender, each soul expresses the same underlying truth in its own fashion, at its own pace, through its own particular life, lived in a way no one else lives it. How does a soul express its individuality within the vastness of all that is, without harming another soul? It does so through the action of creation, demonstrating the power of the mind of the soul unto the universe. And in creating, the soul proves its infinite intelligence, not to the universe, but to itself, so that it might unfold unto a greater state of perfection.
Growth, understood this way, is not a process of becoming less distinct but of becoming more fully and more precisely oneself, because that is exactly what the God Consciousness is doing through each individual life. Because I am that I AM, and you are that I AM, the consciousness of one affects the all. As each soul individualizes, it sends a rippling effect through the God Consciousness, enriching itself and touching every soul that is part of that same whole. What differentiates each soul from every other is the unique collection of experiences it has lived through, and the knowledge and wisdom gained and expressed through those experiences.
Individualization, then, is the soul unfolding its consciousness on every plane of existence. It is the God Consciousness, endlessly expressed through each of us, for God is ever expanding, ever conscious within the mind of the soul. If I am all there is, how do I become greater than what I already am? The answer is simple: by allowing every other soul to be all that they are. That is the essential essence of being God. There is just one God. You are it. I am it. And together in the collective consciousness that all is, is God.
Grow in light and grow in peace.
