October 16, 2008

• There is no failure or reason for guilt

• Evil is a human creation

• There is no devil

God speaks and each of you listens as you are able to hear. The truths that come through us originate with God. They are shared with you because you choose to be open.

There is no human being who exists without experiencing discouragement or anger or guilt, for no individual is ever fully formed in the Spirit. You are all of the Spirit, but your paths are provided you in order that you may eventually become the Spirit.

When you are faced with opportunities that you see yourselves somehow failing, you must all remind yourselves that it is not a matter of succeeding or failing; it is a matter of growing. You grow by acknowledging your successes, but you also grow through your awareness of what you perceive to be failures. The truth must be known that you never fail. There is nothing that you do that is marked by failure. You are human beings. It is not intended that you be perfect. Human beings will do what they recognize to be wrong, but they proceed nevertheless. That is not a failure. It is part of experiencing human life.

If you are to accept these events without guilt, it is only through an acknowledgment of those moments in your lives that you can characterize as evidence of growth. You do grow. You do evolve. You do learn. You do evaluate. You provide second thoughts that you must never judge. When you see your actions and determine them to be failures, it is not merely an acknowledgment of not having reached a goal, but it is rather a failure to acknowledge your humanness. You do not fail. You only succeed, for you continue to try. There is no place, no grounds, no reason in human life for true feelings of guilt.

Are there those who do evil? Yes, but those actions are not failures. They’re not evidence of a lack of God’s presence. They’re not evidence of a lack of self-value. Some things you do will be acknowledged as successes. Some things you do will be acknowledged as not being successful. Not being successful does not mean you failed. It simply means there is more to be done. When you experience guilt, you are denying your own value. There is no gain. Guilt is not a path to growth. Forgiveness is.

When you take actions, when you behave in a certain way that you later regret, allow yourselves the luxury of growing through your awareness, but don’t deny your true divinity when you do not achieve or behave or say what you know would be more beneficial. No human being fails. The only failure is one of self-denial. In fact, there is no failure. You grow, you evolve, you develop through your experiences, whether those experiences are positive or whether they seem to be negative.

Darkness is not a kind of energy. Darkness is the absence of light. The absence of light is an indication of a spirit’s being hungry for affirmation. When night falls and you are surrounded by darkness, there is no power to that darkness but what you as human beings give it. Conversely, when the sun is brilliant, you cannot give power to the sun. It is there. The light is an energy, independent of your recognition. The sun shines on a cloudy day. The sun is present throughout your lives although you may not see it. The light has its own energy. The darkness has only the energy you give it. The energy of that darkness is the meaning you apply to the darkness. The darkness may be felt to be the source of great fear. A child may have great anxiety in total darkness, but it is the child that creates the anxiety. The anxiety does not come from the darkness.

Flowers respond to sunlight not because flowers create the response. The sunlight elicits the response. This potential belongs to the structure of the flower, but the sun has an energy of its own that enhances the flower. The sun has an energy of its own that is passed to the trees and the plants. The darkness has no energy of its own. The response is only from within the entity that experiences the darkness.

Is there any evil force that confronts humankind? There is no evil force that exists outside what is created by human beings. The evil force is the fear the child creates in the nothingness that is the darkness. Evil—evil thought, evil energy—is the result of human interaction. It is the creation of human beings.

The brightness of the sun is the creation of God. The energy that comes from sunlight is the creation of God. You receive nourishment from the sunlight whether you are aware of the details of that nourishment or not. Your bodies and live plants are dependent upon sunlight. The energy is external.

The evil energy you wonder about exists, but it is internally generated. There is no devil, as you may call it, that is out there somewhere encouraging, directing, giving energy and purpose to evil acts. It is not a separate entity in competition with God. What is often claimed as the work of the devil is the work of humankind. It is the work of humankind wrought from fear. From that fear emerges the need for power. Someone who is poor, in financial terms, may dream of riches. An individual who is dark in mood and feels depressed and feels oppressed dreams of a capability to dominate all that surrounds that individual. When you encounter those who seek power as a means of control, it is correct to recognize that such effort is born out of fear, but fear of what? Fear of inadequacy, fear of being a victim, fear of being ultimately powerless, fear of losing control—control of one’s own life and by extension, the control of others.

The darkness of the spirit, as it often is referred to, is really a darkness given life from the human condition. The devil resides in humanity. There is no plant that is a devil. There is no inanimate object that is the devil. True, plants and animals may consume other plants and animals, just as human beings can attack other human beings, but that tendency that you then choose to label as “the work of the devil” is actually unrelated to an external entity. Plants can consume plants because that is what they do. That is the way they are designed. Plants can consume animals because they are designed to do that. It is not a moral choice. It is not a choice of any kind, and therefore it’s not evil in your sense. But when an individual attacks another, seemingly with no cause or with some artificial reason, that is a matter of choice and that is evil coming from the human condition.

You are all on your own paths of life, but it does not mean that all paths point in the same direction at all times. Your paths take you along a course that is appropriate for who you are at any given moment. But because a single path may be appropriate for you does not imply the same appropriateness for another. Because paths take on different directions, there will always be apparent conflicts. If you were all designed to take the same path, all would evolve in the same way. But that is not what God is. That is not how God impacts creation.

There is an independence. There is an individuality which must be cherished and valued. That independence must always provide, at some point, conflicts that may seem irresolvable. You can try to resolve. Whether you succeed is not important. What is essential is that you were committed to responding in a way that reflects your perception of God. Those perceptions change over a lifetime, and therefore the responses will take on different measures. Conflicts, personal relationships each belong to your individual growth along your chosen path.

There is therefore no evil as a power that is centralized as an entity. There is only evil that exists in the hearts of human beings and plays itself out on a stage for others to witness. The only true energy in the world is the energy of what God has created. It is therefore good energy. It is energy upon which to build one person’s life, a couple’s life, a community’s life, a nation’s life, a world’s life.

You’re given your lives, your human lives, in order to experience these seeming opposites: good and bad, God and the devil. If it helps to perceive evil as an entity in a kind of tug of war, then there is nothing inappropriate about such conceptions. But it does not serve to understand the reality if you use your perception of evil as a mandate for some kind of evil entity that is centralized.

Human life is not basically evil. It carries with it all that is good and positive. But human life can be a source for what is negative and destructive. It is important that all of you live your lives with an effort to accept who you are and where you are. You must live your lives accepting that you are human beings. You are divine but you still must develop. You are divine but you can grow. You grow toward one another, and in doing so you are growing toward God.

Accept therefore those disappointments. Reject the tendency to devalue your own lives as given evidence by a sense of personal guilt. When you are aware that your achievements have not matched your perception of an appropriate goal, accept that as evidence of your continuing growth, as evidence of an opportunity to become stronger, but reject a sense of personal guilt. There is no place in God’s creation for guilt. There is no place therefore in the human response for guilt. You are as you are. You grow as you grow. You pursue your path as you pursue that path. No one is fast or slow. There are no winners or losers, and everyone finishes.

Feel blessed in your lives. Feel blessed when you are aware of what you have not yet achieved. Feel blessed for every indication that affirms your growth, and feel blessed for your awareness of our efforts to guide and enlighten and comfort.

Amen.