Jesus said that the Kingdom of Heaven is not somewhere out there, but is within. And if God is in Heaven, it follows that God must be dwelling in each of us. Not only that, but as Sathya Sai Baba (the late Indian Avatar) said, God is all things. There isn't anything that isn't God. So we have it on the highest authority that everything we experience, internally or externally, is some aspect of divinity manifesting itself. One perplexed devotee of Sai Baba once asked him that if all things are God, do we have free will. Sai Baba, speaking from his divine self, replied, "Bangaru, there is no free will. Everything is my will." In fact, he once said that even your attitude towards him, whether hostile or loving, is his will. That is difficult to accept because we are constantly making choices and decisions. And at our level of reality, such decisions seem real. Yet, at another level, the higher perspective, we have to acknowledge that the divinity within us can arrange life to achieve experiences, and we may merely perceive them as our own thoughts.
At our level of reality, we live in a universe of dualities. We constantly make judgments over whether what we experience is good or bad, beneficial or detrimental, right or wrong, ugly or beautiful, and so forth. Yet if God is everything, and our judgments are God's will, then it follows that this dualism is some form of divine play. In other words, if all things are one, then to be experienced as two, God had to will it for whatever purpose God desired. According to some metaphysical beliefs, God created the phenomenal universe in order to experience. That is, if all were experienced as nothing but the indivisible God, then God would have nothing to do. So God set up this illusion of separateness as a play to experience duality and the drama of contending opposites.
In our ordinary state of consciousness, we are bound by this duality because that's the way we experience the world. And it's easy to judge because in a world of duality, everything lies somewhere along a spectrum of opposites. We have a stake in making such evaluations because our physical survival depends on it. Those things and events that benefit our survival and well-being are judged differently than those things that have the opposite effect. So we live our lives seeking that which benefits us and fearing that which doesn't. In a way, we're trapped by our perceptions. We're caught in the illusion because if we saw things as they really are, including ourselves, we'd see nothing but God.
So we can go through life in either of two ways. And making that choice is yet another major judgment in the realm of dualism. In other words, the choice is whether to accept the dualistic view of life, or not to accept it. It may seem there is no choice, since what happens simply happens, and it will have an effect on us for better or for worse. Yet if we are part of God, and God is simply staging this play, then what we experience is merely God using us as actors. We seek experiences because God is seeking experiences. And if all things we perceive are an illusion and all things are really one, then all experiences, whether we judge them good or bad, are equally valuable and necessary for the ultimate purpose of our divine souls.
We have a tendency to ascribe some experiences as divine and some as either of an evil origin or somehow in the shadow of divine light. Yet if all is God, and God seeks experiences, then even evil events are God's will to be experienced. And if we are evil in some respect, that too is God experiencing the dualism of creation. Our souls go through life after life seeking experiences because we have a built in desire to be in this creation and to play with it. Our purpose, as divine beings, is to learn unconditional love. To do that, we have to experience all those conditions that prevent us from loving.
To love is to achieve union with the beloved, a sense of wholeness. In other words, love overcomes duality and divine love achieves union with the ultimate reality of divine being. So in this level of reality, we experience opposites as a way of learning to see past them. We are admonished by all divine authorities to seek out goodness and to be good because love is goodness. The opposite side of the dualistic equation is evil, and as Sai Baba said, evil has a right to exist for the purpose in which it was created. Even the Bible says that God created evil. But evil dwells on separateness. It's ultimately selfish and divides the world into what's beneficial to the ego and what isn't. Selfishness is evil.
Unselfishness acknowledges, in its goodness, the artificiality of separateness. That's why we are enjoined to be good. Not because of some war between good and evil, or the inherent wrongness of evil, but because it's a false perception we have to overcome. The original meaning of the Hebrew word for sin was to miss the mark. That is, to make a mistake.
So when we encounter an experience, our purpose should not be to judge it, but to accept it as a teaching tool. Then the duality will disappear as the experience is integrated into the wholeness of our divine being. We need not feel guilt or shame. We need only thank God for the experience. That doesn't mean we can't have preferences. We draw those experiences we need to ourselves to learn from them. If our egos only dwell on having good experiences, we will draw to ourselves the bad ones because the soul knows that we can't learn love without experiencing both sides of duality. When we no longer need to learn from what we would term bad experiences, they no longer have to be in our lives. Liberation results from the perception that all things are aspects of divinity and equally valid. The perception and more importantly, the belief in duality, ensures that we are chained to the earth having to learn not to have preferences. As Mother Teresa said, if God puts you on the street, accept it. If God puts you in a palace, accept that too as divine will. Sai Baba always told us to accept things with equanimity as the will of God and to cease struggling. It is judgment that signifies the struggle. As long as we judge events and attribute the good things to God, and the bad things to the devil, our own egos, or whatever, we haven't perceived the truth.
In reality, we can't experience the ultimate truth in our normal state of consciousness. That takes cosmic consciousness. But we can bear in mind the belief that we can merely accept everything that happens as an experience and nothing more. The meaning we put into that experience is a creation of our own ego's idea of the truth, and as holy people tell us, not the real truth that dwells in the soul. In the real state of reality, events have no meaning. They simply exist as part of the divine plan to teach us love. Every meaning we give them points directly back at the ego's plea for satisfaction. We can surrender our lives to God and merely accept what we do and what we experience without making an evaluation because we can have faith that it is God's will.
Jesus had a good time enjoying the company of tax collectors, prostitutes, and thieves. His was a perception of their true nature, not the role these people were playing in that lifetime. If we can look at all people as actors assuming a role, whether saint or sinner, we can accept them without judging them. We have all had lives of being good and lives of being bad, not because it's been a struggle to be good. Rather, we selected lives of opposing dualities as a way of teaching us love and wholeness. Nor do we have to judge ourselves, but merely realize that we chose the lives we have to teach us the same lesson. And our success in life will not come from overcoming what we think is bad about ourselves, but rather, in forgiving our own sins as we come to love ourselves and see only our divine nature. Our success in life will not come from trying to be good, but in trying to achieve unconditional love. And unconditional love doesn't judge, but accepts all things in wholeness. May we all find love in our hearts and accept life as the divine lesson it is without making an ego judgment; In our willingness to only love lies heaven on earth, because in love there is God.