Are you Spiritual But Not Religious?
Watch Patricia Summers and Reed Summers speak during the Messenger’s Vigil, Night 3, January 26, 2018.
PS: Take a moment and consider, if you can in just a moment, your journey with regard to God, and even religion if that has been a feature of your life. Go back in time and just sweep forward. Yeah. Revisit your experiences. In doing this, perhaps you feel dismayed by what’s been done in the name of God, perhaps. [whispers:] What’s been done in the name of God. Some of us might feel after all these years in this time, spiritual but not religious—not religious. Some of us have experienced, or come to experience, a bit of an emptiness around the rituals of religion to the extent that this has been a part of our life; sitting there—ceremonies and rituals—looking on; feeling, feeling deeper; and maybe, maybe feeling something and maybe not. Some of us may feel almost like a refugee of religion – amazingly, yeah.
Seeking God beyond religion…is that possible? Can it compete with everyday life and everything we have to do? Yeah, can it? Yeah. We’re still searching. We’re still looking. Aren’t we, many of us? Yeah, many of us. Some of us feel an ache at times, an ache, needing, needing a connection—needing a connection that we know should be there, is there. Where is it?
So, this is the journey. What I’ve said here doesn’t represent all of us who are searching for God beyond religion. Some of us wouldn’t even begin to describe our search in that way, you know? Yeah. I just know for myself the day came where I just quietly stood in the middle of a religious ceremony, you know, something that I had been attending for decades, and just realized, quietly, it was time to go. It’s time to go…yeah.
In fact, you might even engage in a simple practice periodically. Maybe you’ll have the opportunity today or tonight to do this, which is to sit quietly and just say the word, God. God. See what you see, if you see. See what you feel, if you feel. God.
And then take another moment, sit quietly and say to yourself, religion. Religion. Religion, yeah. And see what you see. See what you feel. See what you hear, yeah. There’s a dynamic relationship between this idea of God and religion. It’s existed for thousands of years here, in this world
So one of the most important ideas from the New Message Revelation that Marshall Vian Summers has received is that we may have left God, but God has never left us. And that Knowledge, our innate ability to know, is our God connection—not religion, not rituals, not traditions. Knowledge, what we most deeply know—our deeper experience—is where we may go to find our God connection, yeah.
This next passage that I’ll read is from “The New God Experience,” which is a revelation that Marshall received approximately one year ago. You can engage with this revelation, read it and actually hear the Voice of Revelation. And we’ll provide the resource for that at the conclusion of our time together. Powerful experience it was for him. And there’s also an accounting of his receiving this revelation, and what it was like for him: what happened that day, what kind of state he was in just before and just after this occurred. So I encourage you to seek that out, yeah. [she reads:]
God is with you, but you are not with God. The New God experience is within you, but you are not searching for it yet. It’s not an intellectual enterprise. It is a deep reckoning within yourself, into the greater part of you that you know very little about, the great well of wisdom of Knowledge within you that you experience perhaps only momentarily here and there when you feel its power to restrain you in certain things or to compel you in other things. [from “the Origin of the Messenger”]
RS: [reads from the same revelation:]
This is the beginning of the New God experience. But you must come to turn you must come to terms with your life. You cannot be travelling in many directions at once. You cannot be pulled and swayed by others or by the dictates of culture and religion if you are to have this greater freedom We speak of, if you were to finally be able to experience God’s Presence and Power in your life, moving you through the Knowledge that God has put within you, and seeing this Knowledge in others and responding to it within them, and forgiving people everywhere who have not yet found this greater power to guide them.
So, this is the New God experience that is opening in our world. And all of us have had some past experience of God and of religion and all that’s associated with God and religion. And as we begin to take steps towards a New God experience, it’s important to reconcile where we really stand. Where do we really stand with God and with religion? Because contained in both is a possibility and an opening for us to make contact with this deeper spiritual mind within us. But in all likelihood, we won’t be able to get very far if, at the level of the mind, we have the weight and the burden of negative past memory and association and all that we’ve experienced that may have been painful or discouraging in the name of God and religion.
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