God's love is real. God's blessing has touched all of mankind from the beginning.  We were created out of love and in the name of love to share in the divine essence.

Our longing to know the Living God has deepened over eons of experiencing ourselves as wandering and lost in time and space.  We have longed for God and have felt alone, attempting always to survive and prosper without full awareness of divine love. Our history reflects our many individual and collective attempts to find peace and security through religion, philosophy, political identification, material wealth, and romantic love. We have used all kinds of rational and logical explanations to comfort ourselves while we experienced the absence of connection with a greater whole.

We looked to our families and communities for love and identity but the void continued to permeate our souls and intensified the desire to return home. Our forgetting of the oneness has led us down many paths of suffering while we sought the way home, again and again.

Lesson after lesson taught us where to look and where not to look for answers and, time after time, in great distress we asked for help and upliftment. These lessons were not wasted, for in God's universe there are no wasted experiences. As we were ready for new teachings the experiences we needed came to us unbidden. It was up to us to recognize the grace present within each event. Sometimes we did, and sometimes we were unable to.

In this present moment, we recognize the nature of our own seeking as well as the nature of mankind's seeking for wholeness and a return to divinity. Many of us are conscious of this quest. Many are ready, or are becoming ready, to celebrate and open to the reality of God's presence. As each of us opens to the grace present in our lives, we grow in light and progressively join in the creation of an enlightened planet.

The remembering of our divine essence is part of God's plan for the earth. Recognition of the limiting nature of old beliefs and identities, roles imposed on us or those we have chosen, and labels we have assigned ourselves or those we have placed on others, serves to bring what is more true of ourselves into greater focus.

When we genuinely look for the truth at the core of our beings we begin the journey home in a deeper way. For the remembrance of the way home has always been within us. The remembrance of our divine essence has always been within us. It is a matter of seeking it with a whole heart and trusting that the seeking itself will reveal to us the layers of limiting ideas with which we have encircled ourselves.

In seeking the way of return that is within we are compelled to confront our willingness, or unwillingness, to trust life itself as our primary teacher. There are many doubts about life and God that we carry that will be revealed to us as we seek. These doubts are based on our soul's history – the ongoing experience of separation from the oneness. We have lived in and with doubt in the reality of God's presence, in and with the sense of abandonment. What we feel now as separation within us is the legacy of this history.

Many individual patterns of hurtful behavior toward others are based on this legacy; many planetary patterns are based on this legacy as well. Patterns of war, oppression, cruelty, misuse of planetary resources, disrespect of the animal kingdom, as well as other abuses of power run through the entirety of human history. Doubt in the perfection of ourselves, of others, and of all that is has been with us for a very long time.

Yet we are each being called to face this doubt within us and to face it with the confidence that seeks faith in the midst of it. For doubt is not opposed to faith; it is the precursor of faith – that which creates the longing out of which faith itself can grow. We are being called, each and every one of us, to allow doubt to become an internal experience of healing whose outcome is trust. When doubt assumes its higher purpose as the stepping stone, through longing, into faith, the inner experience of divine presence becomes more accessible. The calling out to God receives an answer.

Our healing into wholeness is based on this transformation of doubt into faith. As we move through whatever dark night of the soul lies before us, we are brought through the darkness into a new way of relating to love and to life.

The experience of doubt that God is real occurs primarily on the mental level but is often associated with powerful emotions such as despair, hopelessness, withdrawal, or anger. Doubt itself is produced by a mind that is vulnerable to energies of darkness, as well as to the experience of density resulting from being in a human form.

Within the human body the separated intellect observes and tells itself that only that which it can see and touch is real. If God cannot be seen or touched in this way, it deduces, then God is not real. Energies of darkness, when present, fuel those tendencies within the individual that are anti-growth, anti-light, and anti-life. They are the energies of choosing to be closed down, isolated, and mistrustful, and also of wanting power or control for the ego or separated self. These energies create fear and mistrust when 'letting go' is contemplated and they create fear and mistrust when a relationship with God is pursued. They are energies within the individual that are inherited from the soul's past that operate to sabotage or postpone forward movement into light and truth.

What we know as 'addictive process' is fueled by these energies of darkness and their bi-product, doubt. Addictive process is based on the experience of separation from God. It is a response to the need which this experience produces and is an attempt to respond to this need in a fragmented and ultimately self-destructive way. Energies of doubt, despair, and fear are opposed to those of trust, hope, and faith. The first three are life-denying; the second three are life-enhancing. The first three create a frantic need to be in control; the second three create a path of healing and growth.

We are often brought into greater awareness of the first three within us when we are challenged by an opportunity to heal in depth. At such times when energies of darkness prevail we hold on to separation and isolation. Because of our doubting God, we become self-righteous and comfort ourselves by justifying rage and blame toward others and toward life generally. These emotional patterns are self-destructive and self-perpetuating; they lead to further attempts to control, and deny the reality of our primary experience of loneliness and separation. They also lead to the continuation of clinging to illusion and addictive patterns.

These patterns perpetuate the suffering inherent in this state for as long as the dark energies are empowered. Until the dilemma of loneliness and separation is recognized for what it is, new light will have difficulty entering the emotional situation to reveal the falseness of the paths habitually taken.

Darkness and doubt within us give rise to the perpetuation of addictive process. Yet in the midst of this, and especially with the support of others, a longing can develop to change directions. Then, for many of us, a struggle begins between the desire for growth and a way out and the persistence of negative behavior patterns. This struggle represents the battleground between light and dark forces within us that will continue until more complete alignment with the forces of light becomes possible.

For those who continue to struggle with surrender and seek to create meaning without God, there is a great need to attend to the removal of unconsciousness and denial which are part of our history of separating from the divine. For what is not conscious cannot be fundamentally changed. What is not conscious remains unhealed.

It is often through sharing with others that we are helped to move beyond denial and to leave behind a life that has been founded on self-will. With the help of others we can more easily examine the motives in our hearts at all levels and avoid bypassing areas of unconsciousness that need to be brought to the light. This common tendency is based on our difficulty facing ourselves honestly and in surrendering control.

Honesty with ourselves, however, must extend beyond the acknowledgment of our difficulty in managing addiction and releasing control into a broader acceptance of the spiritual nature of addictive process. This fundamental and core motive which fuels addiction relates to the hunger we have felt in the course of our human journey to remember our divine identity and to feel and receive God's love.

Recognizing and accepting helplessness in our often misguided attempts to reconnect with our divinity brings us to another level of humility as we see and feel the strength of our desire to return Home. As we move forward, we open the door of healing wider embracing our powerlessness and limitation while, at the same time, finding a new and legitimate sense of spiritual empowerment.

For many, this new understanding speaks to the unanswered question of why, despite our best efforts, we have endlessly encountered the same or new forms of addiction. Certain psychological blocks or negative behavior patterns have persisted, regardless of our attempts to follow guidelines for healing and spiritual living. Perhaps most troubling has been the growing dissatisfaction with our secular lives which often contain a haunting sadness or yearning that cannot be assuaged for long, even by the pleasures and joys of daily living.

Whether our longing stems from fear or desperation or the more conscious seeking that is based on love, it must be embraced wholeheartedly as the magnetic force that draws us to seek to know God. When we can embrace our longing fully it can become a powerful tool for transformation, a motivation for sanctifying our lives and for opening to the deeper truth of who we are. This longing can then become the way of return to the oneness.

Our part in the waking up process is to continue to loosen our grip on control a little at a time, allowing space for God's grace to enter every thread of our human lives. The experience of God's love, when it occurs, answers all questions of trust and allays all doubts which fall away like a skin we have outgrown and can shed.

With growing faith we are able to allow all of life to be in God. This shift prepares the way for becoming witnesses to the miraculous – the birth of the new within ourselves. We emerge as human beings illumined by the inner perception of the divine within, no longer diminished by our clouded and false perceptions of ourselves.

Holding the image of being childlike serves the transformative process with gentleness. With this as our focus we offer to ourselves and to each other the love and compassion that childhood invites and, as little children, explore a bright new world.  In a state of simplicity and innocence our hearts can now progressively open to the unveiling of God's sacred vision for humanity and for ourselves.