The Future of God by Deepak Chopra.
When your mind and heart are truly open abundance will flow to you effortlessly and easily.
Faith is in trouble. For thousands of years religion has asked us to accept on faith a loving God who knows everything and possesses all power. As a result, history has walked a long and sometimes tumultuous road.
Find out more about Deepak's new book The Future of God at http://bit.ly/FOG_AZ on amazon or at http://bit.ly/FOG_BN on Barnes and Noble.
There have been moments of great elation interspersed with unspeakable horrors in the name of religion. But today, in the West at least, the age of faith has drastically waned. For most people, religion is simply taken for granted. There is no living connection with God. Meanwhile, unbelief has been rising. How could it not?
Once you expose the unhealed rift between ourselves and God, a deep kind of disappointment rises to the surface. We’ve gone through too many catastrophes to trust in a benign, loving deity. Who can pon– der the Holocaust or 9/11 and believe that God is love? Countless other heartbreaks come to mind. If you probe into what is really going on when people think about God, their comfort zone with religion shrinks. They harbor a nagging sense of doubt and insecurity.
For a long time, the burden of faith has rested on the imperfect believer. If God doesn’t intervene to relieve suffering or bestow peace, the fault must be in us. In this book I’ve reversed things, putting the burden back on God. It is time to ask some blunt questions.
What has God done for you lately?
In supporting yourself and your family, which is more effective, having faith or working hard?
Have you ever really surrendered and let God solve a really tough problem for you?
Why does God allow such suffering in the world? Is this all a game or an empty promise that a loving God exists?
These questions are so troublesome that we avoid asking them, and for millions of people, they aren’t even important anymore. The next technology that will improve our lives is always on the horizon. A God who matters in the twenty-first century is all but extinct.
As I see it, the real crisis in faith isn’t about declining church attendance, a trend that began in Western Europe and the United States during the 1950s and continues today. The real crisis is about finding a God who matters and can be trusted. Faith presents a fork in the road, and all of us have come to it. One fork leads to a reality upheld by a living God; the other leads to a reality where God is not just absent but a fiction. In the name of this fiction, human beings have fought and died, tortured infidels, mounted bloody crusades, and performed every imaginable horror.
There’s a heartrending show of cynicism in the New Testament when Jesus is on the cross—a slow and agonizing way to die – and the bystanders spit with mockery, including the chief priests of Jerusalem:
“He saved others,” they said, “but he can’t save himself! He’s the King of Israel! Let him come down now from the cross, and we will believe in him. He trusted God, so let God rescue him now if he wants him!” (Matthew 27:42–43)
The vitriol in those words hasn’t diminished over time, but there’s a more unsettling point. Jesus taught that people should trust in God completely, that faith can move mountains. He taught that no one should toil today or save up for tomorrow, because Providence will pro- vide everything. Leaving aside the mystical meaning of the Crucifixion, should you and I have that kind of trust?
If people only knew it, they reach a fork in the road many times a day. I’m not writing from a Christian perspective—I practice no organized religion in my personal life—but Jesus didn’t mean that Providence will supply money, food, shelter, and many other blessings if only you wait long enough. He meant this morning’s food and tonight’s shelter. “Ask and you will receive; knock and the door will be opened” applies to choices we make in the present moment. And this greatly raises the stakes, because if God is disappointing for all the times he hasn’t come through for us, we are disappointing for all the times we have taken the road of unbelief—literally every hour of the day.
The seed of unbelief is in all of us. It offers plenty of reasons not to have faith. I hope as a compassionate human being I would have looked at the spectacle of a crucifixion and felt pity. But when it comes to my own life, I go to work, save for the future, and look over my shoulder at night on a dangerous street. I put more faith in myself than I do in an external God. I call this the zero point, the nadir of faith. At the zero point, God doesn’t really matter, not when it comes down to the tough business of living. Viewed from the zero point, God is either pointless or feeble. He may look down on our suffering and feel moved, or just as likely he may greet suffering with a shrug.
For God to have a future, we must escape the zero point and find a new way of living spiritually. We don’t need new religions, better scriptures, or more inspiring testimony to God’s greatness. The versions we already have are good enough (and bad enough). A God worthy of faith must actually matter, and I don’t see how he can until he starts to per- form instead of disappoint.
Making such a radical change involves something equally radical: a total rethinking of reality. What people fail to realize is that when you challenge God, you challenge reality itself. If reality is only what appears on the surface, then there is nothing to have faith in. We can stay glued to the 24/7 news cycle and do our best to cope. Yet if reality is something that extends into higher dimensions, the story changes.
You can’t rebuild a God who never existed, but you can repair a broken connection.
I decided to write a book about how to reconnect with God so that he becomes as real as a loaf of bread and as reliable as a sunrise—choose anything you trust in and know to be real. If such a God exists, there’s no longer a reason to be disappointed either in him or in ourselves. Nothing like a leap of faith is required. Yet something deeper must be done, a reconsideration of what is possible. This implies an inner trans- formation. If someone tells you “The kingdom of heaven is within,” you shouldn’t think, with a twinge of guilt, Not in me it isn’t. You should ask what it would take to make the statement true. The spiritual path begins with a curiosity that something as unbelievable as God might actually exist.
Millions of people have now heard about “the God delusion,” a slogan from a band of militant atheists who are avowed enemies of faith. This disturbing movement centered around Professor Richard Dawkins cloaks its vehement, often personal attacks in terms of science and reason. Even if people don’t apply the word atheist to themselves, many are still living as if God doesn’t matter, and this affects the choices they make in their daily lives. Unbelief has implicitly won where it counts.
Faith, if it is to survive, can only be restored through a deeper exploration of the mystery of existence.
I have no harsh things to say about atheism without the militancy. Thomas Jefferson wrote, “I do not find in orthodox Christianity one redeeming feature,” but he also helped found a society based on tolerance. Dawkins and company are proud to be intolerant. Atheism can be humorous about itself, as when George Bernard Shaw quipped, “Christianity might be a good thing if anyone ever tried it.” Every strain of thought has its opposite, and when it comes to God, unbelief is the natural opposite of belief.
It’s not right, however, to suppose that atheism is always opposed to God. According to a paradoxical 2008 Pew Research survey, 21 percent of Americans who describe themselves as atheists believe in God or a universal spirit, 12 percent believe in heaven, and 10 percent pray at least once a week. Atheists have not entirely lost faith; there’s nothing in that to judge against. But Dawkins proffers spiritual nihilism with a smile and a tone of reassurance. I realized that I had to speak out against this, even though I feel no personal animus against him.
Faith must be saved for everyone’s sake. From faith springs a passion for the eternal, which is even stronger than love. Many of us have lost that passion or have never known it. As I argue for God, I wish that I could instill the urgency expressed in just a few lines from Mirabai, an Indian princess who became a great mystic poet:
The love that binds me to you, O Lord, is unbreakable Like a diamond that smashes the hammer when it is struck. Like the lotus rising from the water my life rises from you, Like the night bird gazing at the passing moon I am lost dwelling on you. O my beloved – come back!
In any age, faith is like this: a cry from the heart. If you are determined to believe that God doesn’t exist, there’s no chance that these pages will convince you that he does. The path is never closed, however. If faith can be saved, the result will be an increase in hope. By itself, faith can’t deliver God, but it does something more timely: It makes God possible.
When it comes to God, almost all of us, believers and non- believers alike, suffer from a kind of nearsightedness. We see – and hence believe – only what’s right in front of us. The faithful see God as a benign parental figure bestowing grace and justice as he judges our actions here down below. The rest of us think God is far more distant, impersonal, and uninvolved. Yet God may be closer and more involved than that, closer than breathing, in fact.
At any given moment, someone in the world is amazed to find that the God experience is real. Wonder and certainty still dawn. I keep at hand a passage from Thoreau’s Walden about this, where he speaks of “the solitary hired man on a farm in the outskirts of Concord, who has had his second birth.” Like us, Thoreau wonders if someone’s testimony about having a “peculiar religious experience” is valid. In answer, he looks across the span of centuries:
Zoroaster, thousands of years ago, traveled the same road and had the same experience, but he, being wise, knew it to be universal.
If you find yourself suddenly infused with an experience you cannot explain, Thoreau says, just be aware that you are not alone. Your awakening is woven into the great tradition.
Humbly commune with Zoroaster then, and, through the liberalizing influence of all the worthies, with Jesus Christ himself, let “our church” go by the board.
In contemporary language, Thoreau is advising us to trust our deepest belief that spiritual experience is real. Skeptics turn this advice on its head. The fact that God has been experienced over the ages only goes to show that religion is a primitive holdover, a mental relic that we should train our brains to reject. To a skeptic, God persisted in the past because priests had the power to enforce faith, allowing no deviations among their followers. But all attempts to clarify matters – to say, once and for all, that God is absolutely real or absolutely unreal – continue to fail. The muddle persists, and we all have felt the impact of confusion and doubt.
Where are you now?
Let’s move from the abstract to the personal. When you look at yourself and ask where you stand on the God issue, you are almost cer– tainly in one of the following situations:
Unbelief: You don’t accept that God is real, and you express your unbelief by living as if God makes no difference.
Faith: You hope that God is real, and you express your hope as faith.
Knowledge: You have no doubt that God is real, and therefore you live as if God is always present.
When someone becomes a spiritual seeker, they want to move from unbelief to knowledge. The path is by no means clear, however.
When you get out of bed in the morning, what is the spiritual thing to do? Should you try to live in the present moment, for example, which is considered very spiritual? Peace resides in the present moment, if it resides anywhere. And yet Jesus outlines how radical such a decision actually is: “Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body. . . . But strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. So do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of its own.” (Matthew 6:25, 33–34)
In Jesus’s version, living in the present implies having complete trust in God to provide everything. His confidence in God is unlimited. Whatever Jesus needs will come. But what about the poor Jewish workers who were his audience, struggling to provide the bare necessities, grimly living under the thumb of Roman oppression? They might have hoped that Providence would care for them; they might even have had enough faith to believe it. Still, surrendering was a mystical act. Only Jesus was in a state of consciousness that was totally grounded in Providence, because he saw God everywhere.
In all of us there are seeds of unbelief, because we were born in a secular age that questions everything mystical. Better to be free and skeptical than bound by myths, superstition, and dogma. When you touch the skeptic inside you, unbelief is a reasonable state to be in. But for most people it’s also an unhappy state. They feel unfulfilled in a totally secular world where the deepest worship, arguably, goes to sports heroes, comic books, and having a perfect body. Science gives us no assurance that life has meaning when it describes the universe as a cold void ruled by random chance.
And so faith persists. We want the universe to be our home. We want to feel connected to creation. Above all, we don’t want freedom if it means enduring perpetual anxiety and insecurity, a freedom that has lost its moorings to the meaning of life. So whether you call it clinging to faith or abiding by the traditions of our forefathers, religious belief exists everywhere. For billions of human beings there is no livable alternative.
But what about the third stage, after unbelief and faith – certain knowledge of God – which is the rarest and most elusive? To be truly certain, a person may have to undergo a transformative experience or miraculously retain the innocent soul of a young child. Neither is all that realistic in most lives. People who return from near-death experiences, which are extremely rare to begin with, have no hard evidence about “going into the light” that would convince a skeptic. What has changed for them is private, internal, and subjective. As for the innocence of children, we have good reason for abandoning it. Childhood joy is a naïve, unformed state, and as happy as it was, we yearn to experience a wider world of achievement. The creative heights of human history are reached by adults, not overgrown infants.
Let’s say that you recognize yourself in one of these three states: unbelief, faith, and knowledge. It’s quite all right if they are jumbled and you have passing moments of each. According to cold statistical models, most of us cluster under the middle hump of a bell-shaped curve, part of the vast majority that believes in God. At the tail end of the curve are a tiny minority: to the left, the confirmed atheists; to the right, the deeply religious who pursue God as their vocation. But it’s fair to say that most people who respond that they believe in God aren’t experiencing either wonder or certainty. Typically, we devote our days to everything but God: raising a family, looking for love, striving for success, reaching for more material goods on the endless conveyor belt of consumerism.
The current muddle is doing no one any good. Unbelief is haunted by inner suffering and a dread that life has no purpose. (I’m not persuaded by atheists who claim to live cheerfully in a random universe. They aren’t waking up every morning to say, “How wonderful, another day when nothing really has meaning.”) The state of faith is untenable in a different way: Throughout history it has led to rigidity, fanaticism, and desperate violence in the name of God. And the state of true knowledge? It seems to be the province of saints, who are exceedingly rare.
Yet God is hidden somewhere, as a shadow presence, in all three situations, whether as a negative (the deity you are fleeing when you walk away from organized religion) or as a positive (a higher reality that you aspire to). Being faintly present isn’t the same as being truly important, much less the most important thing in existence. If it is possible to make God real again, I think everyone would agree to try.
This book proposes that you can move from unbelief to faith and then to true knowledge. Each is an evolutionary stage, and by explor- ing the first, you find that the next one opens. Evolution is voluntary when it applies to the inner world. There is complete freedom of choice. Once you know unbelief in every detail, you can remain there or move on to faith. Once you explore faith, you can do the same, accepting it as your spiritual home or looking beyond. At the end of the journey lies knowledge of God, which is just as viable – and much more real – than the first two stages. To know God isn’t mystical, any more than knowing that the Earth moves around the Sun. In both cases, a fact is established, and all previous doubts and errant beliefs naturally fall away.
Hello everyone am Kim from the united state of America am here to testify in the name of this great man who has brought back happiness into my family after my lover Chris left me for 3years for another woman,i really loved Chris because he was my first love i tried everything within my power to get Chris back to my life but people i met just kept on scamming me and lying to me,Then normally on Saturdays i do go out to make my hair and get some stuff,Then i had people discussing at the saloon if they do listen to there radio well,That there is a program (how i got back my ex)And started talking much about Dr Steve how this man has helped lots of people in bringing back there lover,So immediately i went close to those ladies i met at the saloon and i explained things to them they said i should try and contact Dr Steve that he has been the talk of the town and people are really contacting him for help immediately we searched on the internet and read great things about Dr Steve i now got all Dr Steve contact instantly at the saloon i gave Dr Steve a call and i shared my problem with him he just told me not to worry that i should just be happy,He just told me to send him some few details which i did,And then he got back to me that everything would be okay within 36hours i was so happy then Dr Steve did his work and he did not fail me,My lover Chris came to me in tears and apologized to me for leaving me in deep pain for good 3years,So he decided to prove that he will never leave me for any reason he made me had access to his account and made me his next of kin on all his will,Now the most perfect thing is that he can't spend a minute without seeing me or calling me,Am so grateful to Dr Steve for bringing back the happiness which i lack for years,Please contact Dr Steve for help he is a trustworthy man SUPREMESPELLS@OUTLOOK.COM (1)If you want your ex back. (2) if you always have bad dreams. (3)You want to be promoted in your office. (4)You want women/men to run after you. (5)If you want a child. (6)[You want to be rich. (7)You want to tie your husband/wife to be yours forever. (8)If you need financial assistance. (9)If you want to stop your Divorce. 10)Help bringing people out of prison. (11)Marriage Spells (12)Miracle Spells (13)Beauty Spells (14)PROPHECY CHARM (15)Attraction Spells (16)Evil Eye Spells. (17)Kissing Spell (18)Remove Sickness Spells. (19)ELECTION WINNING SPELLS. (20)SUCCESS IN EXAMS SPELLS. (21) Charm to get who to love you (22)LOTTO SPELL CONTACT:SUPREMESPELLS@OUTLOOK.COM
Hello everyone am Kim from the united state of America am here to testify in the name of this great man who has brought back happiness into my family after my lover Chris left me for 3years for another woman,i really loved Chris because he was my first love i tried everything within my power to get Chris back to my life but people i met just kept on scamming me and lying to me,Then normally on Saturdays i do go out to make my hair and get some stuff,Then i had people discussing at the saloon if they do listen to there radio well,That there is a program (how i got back my ex)And started talking much about Dr Steve how this man has helped lots of people in bringing back there lover,So immediately i went close to those ladies i met at the saloon and i explained things to them they said i should try and contact Dr Steve that he has been the talk of the town and people are really contacting him for help immediately we searched on the internet and read great things about Dr Steve i now got all Dr Steve contact instantly at the saloon i gave Dr Steve a call and i shared my problem with him he just told me not to worry that i should just be happy,He just told me to send him some few details which i did,And then he got back to me that everything would be okay within 36hours i was so happy then Dr Steve did his work and he did not fail me,My lover Chris came to me in tears and apologized to me for leaving me in deep pain for good 3years,So he decided to prove that he will never leave me for any reason he made me had access to his account and made me his next of kin on all his will,Now the most perfect thing is that he can't spend a minute without seeing me or calling me,Am so grateful to Dr Steve for bringing back the happiness which i lack for years,Please contact Dr Steve for help he is a trustworthy man SUPREMESPELLS@OUTLOOK.COM (1)If you want your ex back. (2) if you always have bad dreams. (3)You want to be promoted in your office. (4)You want women/men to run after you. (5)If you want a child. (6)[You want to be rich. (7)You want to tie your husband/wife to be yours forever. (8)If you need financial assistance. (9)If you want to stop your Divorce. 10)Help bringing people out of prison. (11)Marriage Spells (12)Miracle Spells (13)Beauty Spells (14)PROPHECY CHARM (15)Attraction Spells (16)Evil Eye Spells. (17)Kissing Spell (18)Remove Sickness Spells. (19)ELECTION WINNING SPELLS. (20)SUCCESS IN EXAMS SPELLS. (21) Charm to get who to love you (22)LOTTO SPELL CONTACT:SUPREMESPELLS@OUTLOOK.COM
Hello everyone am Kim from the united state of America am here to testify in the name of this great man who has brought back happiness into my family after my lover Chris left me for 3years for another woman,i really loved Chris because he was my first love i tried everything within my power to get Chris back to my life but people i met just kept on scamming me and lying to me,Then normally on Saturdays i do go out to make my hair and get some stuff,Then i had people discussing at the saloon if they do listen to there radio well,That there is a program (how i got back my ex)And started talking much about Dr Steve how this man has helped lots of people in bringing back there lover,So immediately i went close to those ladies i met at the saloon and i explained things to them they said i should try and contact Dr Steve that he has been the talk of the town and people are really contacting him for help immediately we searched on the internet and read great things about Dr Steve i now got all Dr Steve contact instantly at the saloon i gave Dr Steve a call and i shared my problem with him he just told me not to worry that i should just be happy,He just told me to send him some few details which i did,And then he got back to me that everything would be okay within 36hours i was so happy then Dr Steve did his work and he did not fail me,My lover Chris came to me in tears and apologized to me for leaving me in deep pain for good 3years,So he decided to prove that he will never leave me for any reason he made me had access to his account and made me his next of kin on all his will,Now the most perfect thing is that he can't spend a minute without seeing me or calling me,Am so grateful to Dr Steve for bringing back the happiness which i lack for years,Please contact Dr Steve for help he is a trustworthy man SUPREMESPELLS@OUTLOOK.COM (1)If you want your ex back. (2) if you always have bad dreams. (3)You want to be promoted in your office. (4)You want women/men to run after you. (5)If you want a child. (6)[You want to be rich. (7)You want to tie your husband/wife to be yours forever. (8)If you need financial assistance. (9)If you want to stop your Divorce. 10)Help bringing people out of prison. (11)Marriage Spells (12)Miracle Spells (13)Beauty Spells (14)PROPHECY CHARM (15)Attraction Spells (16)Evil Eye Spells. (17)Kissing Spell (18)Remove Sickness Spells. (19)ELECTION WINNING SPELLS. (20)SUCCESS IN EXAMS SPELLS. (21) Charm to get who to love you (22)LOTTO SPELL CONTACT:SUPREMESPELLS@OUTLOOK.COM