God Beyond Religion
Experience your connection with a higher power beyond the confines of religion.
What you need to know
Our world is emerging into a “Greater Community” of life in the universe, and contact has begun with other forms of intelligent life. Now and into the future, we will find ourselves in the midst of a vast cosmos of sentient life that all share a common connection to God and are all a part of God’s creation in an expanding and evolving universe.
Here we can no longer consider the human family to be the center of God’s creation or the sole focus of God’s purpose in the world. And though this will challenge some of our long-held and most cherished beliefs, it represents a tremendous liberation of the human mind and spirit.
Many people around the world are distancing themselves from organized religion and the outdated dogmas that have caused pain and disassociation in their lives and which no longer reflect their experience of life in a changing world. This partly a natural shift from our tribal past to a new experience of our shared humanity.
Yet even beyond this, people are beginning to sense the presence of the “Greater Community—the larger fabric of life surrounding our world. Our awareness is naturally expanding beyond the confines of our human world and its isolation in the universe and this is producing a new religious experience and the vision of a greater God not bound by our human traditions—the God of a “Greater Community” of worlds.
Becoming aware of this larger universe, we can begin to experience God in a whole new way. God is no longer a vengeful entity that manages our lives and checks our track record for sins and good deeds. Nor is God bound up in the dark and often checkered past of our human history and its tribes, empires, states and religious institutions. In light of a Greater Community of life in the universe, our experience of God is now free of those things.
God is a universal presence that permeates all life—a force that gives purpose and direction to the universe, not a larger-than-life character performing miracles or giving grandiose demonstrations. This begins to liberate our mind and spirit to approach God in a new way and to think of ourselves as participants in a much bigger panorama of Divine purpose in the universe.
This is the “New God Experience.” And this is what it means to grow and evolve our experience of God to account for a larger reality of life and expand our vision of God’s plan in the universe beyond the confines of our human world, which has existed in isolation for so long.
The God of this larger Universe seeks to engage us with the rest of God’s creation beyond the human sphere. Instead of thinking God’s plan only involves humans with other humans, we should now consider our human family’s future engagement with entirely different worlds and with the other vast portion of God’s creation that is already interacting as part of a Greater Community of worlds.
This universal vision of God embraces a greater range of experience, beyond our human theories and beliefs, and an experience that leads us into a greater sense of purpose and destiny and a greater bond of relationships within and beyond the bounds of time and space.
Though it may be difficult to consider God at this scale, it is important that we begin to do so in preparation for our present and future encounters with other forms of life. For example, thinking of the universe within a Christ-centric framework and projecting this belief onto other sentient life will only disable our interaction and communication.
It is important that we now consider that God lives within each one of us and in all sentient life forms in the universe and permeates an infinite panorama of life that is not limited to one preferred race of people or one world. This is a much more expansive God than we have thought of in the past—one for all intelligent life in the universe.
While this vision of God and God’s plan is big, the details of how God works are intimate to each one of us and exist right at the center of our being. God’s work in the universe isn’t through huge demonstrations, impressive miracles, or grand events that move life all at once, but through a calling and attraction that moves within us at the level of our spiritual nature—in that aspect of our being that is still connected to God.
The New Message teaches that God created the universe as an environment for those seeking separation from God in our original state, beyond time and form. As a result, God allows for the physical manifestation of the universe to function and evolve while calling those individuals in separated form to discover their will to end their separation and move in the direction of reunion with life.
The mechanism for this positive movement is greater and greater levels of relationship, affinity, and communication between individuals, within and even beyond the world. Like small streams merging into larger bodies of water, we move down this river of relationship back into reunion with the divine.
In this sense, God is the experience of a deeper current in our life that brings us into purposeful and meaningful relationships in life and guides us into contact with the core of our being which is still connected to God.