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Chapter 1 of Conversations

This past Monday I exchanged with my friend Shah Eleven Minutes (Coelho) for Conversations with God (Walsch). Although I am still in phase 2 of (re)reading the book, I have some thoughts I need to juggle around.

1. God communicates to us through feelings, thoughts, and experiences. These are "tools of knowing" (4). But of course not all thoughts, feelings or experiences are derived from God. We must be able to discern what is our Highest Thought, Clearest Word or Grandest Feeling from all the other feelings, words, thoughts and experiences that result from other causes. How do we get to this moment? Is the Highest Thought or Grandest Feeling intuitive? What if there is a constant disconnect between how we feel and what we think? What if we believe rationality trumps experience and emotion? What then?

2. According to Walsch, Joy, Truth, Love-- these are the products of your Highest Thought, Clearest Words, and Grandest Feeling, respectively. These are what we ought to strive for in our experiences. Does joy-truth-love occur simultaneously? Does the experience of one without the other two mean that we are not at our highest point of consciousness development? Why these ideas in particular and not pleasure, happiness, and fufillment? What is so special about these particular concepts?

3. Walsch argues that God is not the creator and decider of all things in your life. Rather He is the observer. God has created you, and given you the power to create the conditions of your life. Your free will allows you to make decisions. You are responsible for your actions, your thoughts, words, experiences to the extent that you create and uncreate them. God does not care either way what you do. It is a manifestation of your self delusion to think that your next A in class will make God happy, or that God needs to hear from you five times a day. Supplication, too, is a misguided act. Rather prayer is meant to express gratitude for the awesome experience of living, loving, creating. It is done in remembrance of your creator.

This reminds me of a conversation I had this past year that is reconstructed as follows:

Sadia: It gets done.
Person: No. I get it done.
Sadia: Same difference.
Person: No. Two different things entirely.

I get it now: Take responsibility, rather than relinquishing self agency to God, Fortune, or Chance.

4. Words can only symbolize what you know just as easily as they can confuse what you know. How often have words interfered with your feelings? I edit and reedit my thoughts as often as I breathe, and will certainly consider reevaluating the significance of words and text in my life. The process of editing is really done to appear rational, logical, or consistent. The content of our hearts is a hodgepodge of inconsistencies. We relegate the responsibility of sorting to our brains. Perhaps if there was no intermediary between our hearts or souls , the quality of our lives would be different.

5. If "every human thought, and every human action is based in either love or fear," and "love sponsors fear sponsors love sponsors fear," then can fear not be a stepping stone for love (15-16)? If fear and love are extremes on a scale, or even binaries that influence all other ideas and motivations, can we not be moderate in both rather than looking only to love?

Next: Chapter 2

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