No, Ebenezer. You got it wrong. But I grew up believing you.

I’ve made some slight edits to the text.

Y’know, in the afterlife, people wander around dressed up like Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, or Napoleon and other people leave them alone. (1) Explained one afterlife communicator:

“[All] is purely a matter of choice and we can all suit ourselves in the matter. But whatever we do, we shall not be considered eccentric if we wish to indulge some fancy.

“Our friends will recall their early days in the spirit world when they were similarly situated, and, accordingly, we shall have their sympathetic support and co-operation in the fulfillment of our desires, whatever they may be.” (2)

Those who don costumes don’t harm anyone and they’re acting out their fantasy.

There are even enclaves, surrounded by tall trees, where religious sects can be alone by themselves and continue unmolested.

Everyone – acting out or not – is experiencing a love that completely satisfies them. No base motivation like pulling a humiliating prank on someone – arises. Nothing but more love arises.

OK, love being the vanilla flavor of the divine states of consciousness. Love does arise as other flavors, becoming bliss, courage, compassion, generosity, gratitude, etc.

Love is the basic building block of the material world. Just as electrons must move or the object disintegrates, love must move or the entire material world (matter, mater, Mother) disintegrates … back into the Void of the Father.

***

We don’t even think of some things as divine states, like abundance, or we have no idea of what others may take in, like mastery.

I was startled to see that abundance as a divine state had nothing to do with money.  It was an experience of satiation, completeness, enough-ness.

And, as Andrew Cohen explained, (3) we associate the resulting bliss with ownership of the object. The only relationship they have is that ownership had us cease desiring. Prior to that, the space was filled with desire.

That cessation created space for love or bliss to arise. And it did.

Perhaps we recall what the Buddha said: The three perils we fall into are craving (desire, I want), aversion (rejection, I don’t want), and ignorance. The ignorance is that none of this will work to liberate us – but we keep doing it, day in and day out, just with new objects of desire.

One Indian guru, who has since fallen from grace, captured the situation: the entire problem is “I want, I want, I want.”

To bring us back to the experience of abundance, I was at the time not particularly wealthy – OK, living from paycheck to paycheck – and yet here I was in the deep, deep experience of abundance.

It didn’t make sense but it was so transforming and uplifting a space that all concerns for earthly needs or making sense vanished.

So what do we do now with this heavenly experience, that came from within ourselves (probably the heart)? We reduce it in our minds to the feelings that come from hoarding wealth. Greed, primarily.

If you can really get that our appreciation of abundance is, not simply incomplete, but mistaken, then I imagine we’d be much closer to experiencing it as a divine state.

It actually has nothing directly to do with money, gold, wealth. We discover that it has everything to do with love – a river of love leading to an Ocean of Love and beyond. That we have in abundance. And as far as I’m concerned, the only abundance worth experiencing is an abundance of love or its derivatives.

In my view, if all we do forms part of a return to the Mother/Father One, then experiencing a divine state is the same as leaving the train behind, as scenic as it was, and taking a plane.

Footnotes

(1) Deceased Judge David P. Hatch: “There are many people here in costumes of the ancient days. I do not infer from this fact that they have been here all those ages. I think they wear such clothes because they like them. …

“One day, when I had been here only a short time, I saw a woman dressed in a Greek costume, and asked her where she got her clothes. She replied that she had made them. I asked her how, and she said:

“‘Why, first I made a pattern in my mind, and then the thing became a garment.’

“‘Did you take every stitch?’

“‘Not as I should have done on earth.’

“I looked closer and saw that the whole garment seemed to be in one piece, and that it was caught on the shoulders by jewelled pins. …

“I began to experiment to see if I also could make things. It was then that I conceived the idea of wearing a Roman toga, but for the life of me I could not remember what a Roman toga looked like.

“When next I met the Teacher I told him of my wish to wear a toga of my own making, and he carefully showed me how to create garments such as I desired: To fix the pattern and shape clearly in my mind, to visualise it, and then by power to desire to draw the subtle matter of the thought-world round the pattern, so as actually to form the garment.” (Judge David P. Hatch, LLDM, Letter XV.)

(2) Monsignor Robert Hugh Benson through Anthony Borgia, medium, Here and Hereafter. San Francisco: H.G. White, 1968, 71. (Dictated in 1957.)

(3) In Andrew Cohen, The Promise of Perfection. Lenox: Moksha Press, 1998.