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Excerpt

God has spoken to you many times in many ways over many years, but seldom as directly as this.

This time I speak to you as You, and that has occurred on only a handful of occasions in the whole of your history.

Few humans have had the courage to hear Me in this way-as themselves. And fewer still have shared with others what they have heard. Those few who have listened, and shared, have changed the world.

Aesop, Confucius, Lao-tzu, Buddha, Muhammad, Moses, and Jesus were among them.

So, too, Chuang Tzu, Aristotle, Huang-po, Sahara, Mahavira, Krishnamurti.

Also, Paramahansa Yogananda, Ramana Maharshi, Kabir, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thich Nhat Hanh, the Dalai Lama, Elizabeth Clinton.

As well, Sri Aurobindo, Mother Teresa, Meher Baba, Mahatma Gandhi, Kahlil Gibran, Baha-' Alla-h, Ernest Holmes, Sai Baba.

Including Joan of Arc, Francis of Assisi, Joseph Smith . . . and more, others, not mentioned here. This list could go on. Yet, relative to the total number of humans who have inhabited your planet, the number is minuscule.

These few have been My messengers-for all have brought forward The Truth within their hearts, as best as they understood it, as purely as they knew how. And while they have each done so through imperfect filters, they have nonetheless brought to your awareness extraordinary wisdom, from which the whole human race has benefited.

What is amazing is how similar their insights have been. Offered at vastly different times and places, separated by legions and centuries, they might just as well have been speaking all at the same time, so tiny have been the variances between them, and so huge the commonalities.

Now it is time to expand this list to include others, living today, as My latest messengers.

We will speak with one voice.

Unless we do not.

You will make that choice, even as you have always done. For in each Moment of Now have you made your decision, and announced it in action.

At the beginning, your thoughts are Mine, and Mine are yours. For at the beginning, it can be no other way. There is only one Source of That Which Is, and the one Source is That Which Is.

All things emanate from that Source, then permeate the Isness all over, and reveal themselves as Individuations of the Whole.

The individual interpretations of the one message produce the miracle of Oneness in many forms.

This Oneness in many forms is what you call Life.

Life is God, interpreted. That is, translated into many forms.

The first level of translation is from the unified non-physical to the individuated non-physical.

The second level of translation is from the individuated non-physical to the individuated physical.

The third level of translation is from the individuated physical into the unified physical.

The fourth level of translation is from the unified physical into the unified non-physical.

Then the cycle of Life is complete.

The continuing process of the translation of God produces endless variety within God's unity. This variety of the unity is what I have called "individuation." It is the individual expression of that which is not separate but which can be individually expressed.

The purpose of individual expression is for Me to experience My Self as the whole, through the experiencing of My parts. And while the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, I can only experience this by knowing the sum.

And that is who you are.

You are the Sum of God.

I have told you this many times before, and many of you have heard this as the son of God. That, too, is correct. You are the sons, and daughters, of God. Yet it does not matter what labels or names you use, it adds up to the same thing: You are The Sum of God.

So, too, is everything around you. Everything that you see, and do not see. All That Is, All That Ever Was, and All That Ever Will Be is Me. And all that I am, I am now.

I Am That I Am-as I have told you many times.

There is nothing that I have ever been that I have ceased to be. And there is nothing that I will ever be that I am not now. I cannot become anything that I now am not, nor can I fail to be anything that I once was.

This is as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.

I am coming to you now, in this day and time, as you begin another millennium, so that you may start a new thousand years in a new way: knowing Me at last, choosing Me first, and being Me always, all ways.

There is no mistake in the timing. I began these new revelations early in the last decade, continued My conversations with you throughout the last years of the century, and in the final moments of the last millennium reminded you how you may have a friendship with Me.

Now, in the first year of the new millennium, I speak to you with one voice, that we may experience communion.

Should you choose this experience of communion with God, you will finally know peace, and joy unbounded, and love fully expressed, and full freedom.

Should you choose this truth, you will change your world.

Should you choose this reality, you will create it, and at last fully experience Who You Really Are.

It will be the hardest thing you have ever done, and the easiest thing you will ever do.

It will be the hardest thing you have ever done because you will have to deny who you think you are, and stop denying Me. It will be the easiest thing you will ever do because there will be nothing that you have to do.

All you have to do is be, and all you have to be is Me.

Even this will not be an act of will but a simple acknowledgment. It will not require an action, only an admission.

I have been seeking this admission forever. When you grant Me admission, you let Me into your life. You admit that you and I are One. This is your ticket to heaven. It says: Admit One.

When I gain entrance into your heart, you gain entrance into heaven. And your heaven can be on Earth. Everything can truly be "on earth as it is in heaven" when the time of separation is over and the time of unification is at hand.

Unification with Me, and unification with all others, and with every living thing.

This is what I have come to tell you, once more, through the messengers of today. You will know them as My messengers because they will all be bringing the same message:

We Are All One.

This is the only message that matters. It is the only message there is. Everything else in Life is a reflection of this message. Everything else sends it.

The fact that you have so far failed to receive it (you have heard it often, but you have failed to receive it) is what has caused every misery, every sorrow, every conflict, every heartache in your experience. It has caused every murder, every war, every rape and robbery, every assault and attack, mental, verbal, and physical. It has caused every illness and disease, and every encounter with what you call "death."

The idea that we are not One is an illusion.

Most people believe in God: They just don't believe in a God who believes in them.

God does believe in them. And God loves them more than most of them know.

The idea that God turned stone-silent and stopped talking to the human race a long time ago is false.

The idea that God is angry with the human race and kicked it out of Paradise is false.

The idea that God has set Himself up as judge and jury and will be deciding whether members of the human race go to heaven or hell is false.

God loves every human being who ever lived, lives now, or ever will live.

God's desire is for every soul to return to God, and God cannot fail in having this desire fulfilled.

God is separate from nothing, and nothing is separate from God.

There is nothing that God needs, because God is everything there is.

This is the good news. Everything else is an illusion.

The human race has been living with illusions for a long time. This is not because the human race is stupid, but because the human race is very smart. Humans have understood intuitively that illusions have a purpose, and a very important one. Most humans have simply forgotten that they know this.

And they have forgotten that their forgetting is itself part of what they have forgotten-and therefore part of the illusion.

Now it is time for humans to remember.

You are one of those who will lead the vanguard in this process. There is nothing surprising in this, given what has been going on in your life.

You have come to this book to remember The Illusions Of Humans, so that you may never again be caught up in them but achieve communion with God once more in the living of your life through the awareness of Ultimate Reality.

It is perfect that you have done so. And it is, obviously, not happenstance.

You have come here so that you may know experientially that God resides within you, that you may have, whenever you wish, a meeting with the Creator.

The Creator may be experienced and found within you and all around you. But you must look past The Illusions Of Humans. You must ignore them.

Here are The Ten Illusions. Get to know them well so that you will recognize them when you encounter them.

1. Need Exists

2. Failure Exists

3. Disunity Exists

4. Insufficiency Exists

5. Requirement Exists

6. Judgment Exists

7. Condemnation Exists

8. Conditionality Exists

9. Superiority Exists

10. Ignorance Exists

The first five of these are the Physical Illusions, having to do with life in your physical body. The second five are the Metaphysical Illusions, having to do with non-physical realities.

In this communication, each of these illusions will be explored in detail. You will see how each has been created, and you will see how each has affected your life. And before this communication is complete, you will also see how you can undo any effects of these illusions that you wish to undo.

Now, the first step in the process of any really open communication is that you must be willing to suspend your disbelief about what you are hearing. You will be asked to do that here. Please temporarily give up any previous notions you may have about God and Life. You may return to your previous ideas at any time. It is not a question of abandoning them forever but of merely setting them aside for the moment to allow for the possibility that there may be something you do not know, the knowing of which could change everything.

Examine, for instance, your reaction to the idea that God is communicating with you right now.

In your past, you have found all sorts of reasons not to accept that you could have an actual conversation with God. I'm going to ask you to set those thoughts aside and assume that you are receiving this communication directly from Me.

To make it easier on you, I will speak of Myself in the third person through much of this communication. I recognize that it may be a little unnerving for you to hear Me using the first person singular. And so, while I will do it once in a while (just to remind you who is bringing you this information), I will most of the time speak of Myself as, simply, God.

While your receiving a direct communication from the Deity may seem improbable to you at first, understand that you have come to this communication to remember, at last, Who You Really Are, and the illusions that you have created. Soon, you will deeply understand that you have actually caused this book to come to you. For now, simply hear Me when I tell you that in most of the moments of your life, you are living an illusion.

The Ten Illusions Of Humans are very big, very powerful illusions that you created during the earliest part of your experience on Earth. And you create hundreds of smaller ones every day. Because you believe them, you have created a cultural story that allows you to live these Illusions and thus make them real.

They are not really real, of course. Yet you have created an Alice in Wonderland world in which they seem very real, indeed. And like the Mad Hatter, you will deny that what is False is false, and that what is Real is real.

You have, in fact, been doing this for a very long time.

A cultural story is a story that has been handed down from generation to generation, across centuries and millennia. It is the story that you tell yourself about yourself.

Because your cultural Story is based on illusions, it produces myths rather than an understanding of reality.

The cultural story of Humans is that

1. God has an agenda. (Need Exists)

2. The outcome of life is in doubt. (Failure Exists)

3. You are separate from God. (Disunity Exists)

4. There is not enough. (Insufficiency Exists)

5. There is something you have to do. (Requirement Exists)

6. If you do not do it, you will be punished. (Judgment Exists)

7. The punishment is everlasting damnation. (Condemnation Exists.)

8. Love is, therefore, conditional. (Conditionally Exists)

9. Knowing and meeting the conditions renders you superior. (Superiority Exists)

10. You do not know that these are illusions. (Ignorance Exists)

This cultural story has been so ingrained in you that you now live it fully and completely. This, you tell each other, "is just the way it is."

You have been telling each other that now for many centuries. Indeed, for millennia after millennia. For so long, in fact, that myths have grown up around these illusions and stories. Some of the most prominent myths have been reduced to concepts, such as . . .

* Thy will be done.

* Survival of the fittest.

* To the victor go the spoils.

* You were born in Original Sin.

* The wages of sin are death.

* Vengeance is Mine, sayeth the Lord.

* What you don't know won't hurt you.

* God only knows.

. . . and many others, equally destructive and non-serving.

Based on these illusions, stories, and myths-none of which has anything to do with Ultimate Reality-here is how many humans have come to think about Life:

"We are born into a hostile world, run by a God who has things He wants us to do and things He wants us not to do, and will punish us with everlasting torture if we don't get the two right.

"Our first experience in Life is separation from our mother, the Source of our Life. This creates the context for our entire reality, which we experience as one of separation from the Source Of All Life.

"We are not only separate from all Life but from everything else in Life. Everything that exists, exists separate from us. And we are separate from everything else that exists. We do not want it this way, but this is the way it is. We wish it were otherwise, and, indeed, we strive for it to be otherwise.

"We seek to experience Oneness again with all things, and especially with each other. We may not know why, exactly, yet it seems almost instinctual. It feels like the natural thing to do. The only problem is, there does not seem to be enough of the other to satisfy us. No matter what the other thing is that we want, we cannot seem to get enough of it. We cannot get enough love, we cannot get enough time, we cannot get enough money. We cannot get enough of whatever it is we think we need in order to be happy and fulfilled. The moment we think that we have enough, we decide that we want more.

"Since there is 'not enough' of whatever it is we think we need to be happy, we must 'do stuff' to get as much as we can get. Things are required of us in exchange for everything, from God's love to the natural bounty of Life. Simply 'being alive' is not enough. Therefore we, like all of Life, are not enough.

"Because just 'being' isn't sufficient, the competition begins. If there's not enough out there, we have to compete for what's there.

"We have to compete for everything, including God.

"This competition is tough. It is about our very survival. In this contest, only the fittest survive. And to the victor go all the spoils. If we lose, we live a hell on Earth. And after we die, if we are losers in the competition for God, we experience hell again-this time forever.

"Death was actually created by God because our forebears made the wrong choices. Adam and Eve had everlasting life in the Garden of Eden. But then, Eve ate the fruit of the tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, and she and Adam were driven from the Garden by an angry God. This God sentenced them, and all their progeny forevermore, to death as the first punishment. Henceforth, life in the body would be limited, and no longer everlasting, and so would the stuff of Life.

"Yet God will give us back our everlasting life if we never again break His rules. God's love is unconditional, it is only God's rewards which are not. God loves us even as He condemns us to everlasting damnation. It hurts Him more than it hurts us, because He really wants us to return home, but He can't do anything about it if we misbehave. The choice is ours.

"The trick is, therefore, to not misbehave. We need to live a good life. We must strive to do so. In order to do so, we have to know the truth about what God wants and does not want from us. We cannot please God, and we cannot avoid offending Him, if we do not know right from wrong. So we have to know the truth about that.

"The truth is simple to understand and easy to know. All we have to do is listen to the prophets, teachers, sages, and the source and founder of our religion. If there is more than one religion and, therefore, more than one source and founder, then we have to make sure to pick the right one. Picking the wrong one could result in us being a loser.

"When we pick the right one, we are superior, we are better than our peers, because we have the truth on our side. This state of being 'better' allows us to claim most of the prizes in the contest without actually contesting them. We get to declare ourselves the winners before the competition begins. It is out of this awareness that we give ourselves all the advantages, and write our 'Rules of Life' in such a way that certain others find it nearly impossible to win the really big prizes.

"We do not do this out of meanness but simply in order to ensure that victory is ours-as rightly it should be, since it is those of our religion, of our nationality, of our race, of our gender, of our political persuasion who know the truth, and therefore deserve to be winners.

"Because we deserve to win, we have a right to threaten others, to fight with them, even to kill them if necessary, in order to produce this result.

"There may be another way to live, another thing that God has in mind, another, larger truth, but if there is, we don't know it. In fact, it is not clear whether we are even supposed to know it. It is possible that we are not supposed to even try to know it, much less to truly know and understand God. To try is presumptuous, and to declare that you have actually done so is blasphemous.

"God is the Unknown Knower, the Unmoved Mover, the Great Unseen. Therefore, we cannot know the truth that we are required to know in order to meet the conditions that we are required to meet in order to receive the love that we are required to receive in order to avoid the condemnation that we are seeking to avoid in order to have the everlasting life that we had before any of this started.

"Our ignorance is unfortunate, but should not be problematic. All we need do is take what we think we do know-our cultural story-on faith, and proceed accordingly. This we have tried to do, each according to his or her own beliefs, and thus we have produced the life that we are now living, and the reality on Earth that we are creating."

This is how most of the human race has it constructed. You each have your minor variations, but this is, in essence, how you live your lives, justify your choices, and rationalize the outcomes.

Some of you do not accept all of this, yet all of you accept some of it. And you accept these statements as the operating reality not because they reflect your innermost wisdom but because someone else has told you that they are true.

At some level, you have had to make yourself believe them.

This is called make-believe.

Yet now it is time to move away from make-believe and toward what is real. This will not be easy, because Ultimate Reality will differ a great deal from what many people in your world are now agreeing is real. You will literally have to be "in this world, but not of it."

And what would be the purpose of that if your life is going well? Nothing. There would be no purpose. If you are satisfied with your life and with the world as it is, there would no reason for you to seek to shift your reality and to stop all this make-believe.

This message is for those who are not satisfied with their world as it is.

We shall now examine The Ten Illusions one by one. You will see how each illusion has caused you to create life on your planet as you are now living it.

You will notice that each illusion builds on the previous. Many sound very much alike. That is because they are alike. All of the illusions are simply variations on The First Illusion. They are grander distortions of the original distortion.

You will also notice that each new illusion was created to fix a flaw in the illusion just before. Finally, tired of fixing flaws, you simply decided that you did not understand any of it. Thus the final Illusion: Ignorance Exists.

This allowed you to shrug your shoulders and quit trying to solve the mystery.

But the evolving mind would not allow such a retreat for very long. In just a few short millennia-a very brief time, indeed, in the history of the Universe-you have come to the place where ignorance is no longer bliss.

You are about to climb out of primitive culture. You are about to make a quantum leap in your understandings. You are about to see through . . . The Ten Illusions.

Copyright © 2000 Neale Donald Walsch. All rights reserved.