The Myths That Make Me: Part 9

I spent yesterday morning (Easter) at a Christian church service. I was craving worship, and community, and Divine teaching. Yet, when I left the ceremony I felt discouraged. I suppose discouraged is the wrong word, it was actually more affirming. The Biblical Christ-centric doctrine truly doesn’t speak to my soul the way it used to. To clarify, I friggen love Christ. I believe the power and wisdom he wielded. I believe his moment on this earth was significant for many reasons—but when I sit amongst these services, I feel such a collective outsourcing of each individual’s power. Jesus is put on the almighty, all-saving, “without Him I am impure” pedestal and it breaks my heart. I can just imaging God, as the Father, looking down on the congregation and saying “You and Jesus are the same. He is but an example, not an idol.”
Not a prerequisite to receive God’s love. Not a “do this or you won’t have happiness.”

In my previous substack, I shared how Conversations with God gave me permission to trust myself, to distance myself from institutional religion, and to believe I was loved without condition. It was the emotional and psychological liberation I’d been starving for.

But the book also offered something else: a complete cosmology. A framework for understanding not just who God is, but what existence is. Why we’re here. How it all works. The mechanics of reality itself.

I’m going to feebly attempt to lay out these concepts as clearly as I can, knowing full well that I’m compressing thousands of pages of nuanced philosophy into a single essay. I’m going to butcher it - undoubtedly. I’ll also say upfront: if any of this resonates, go read the actual books. Conversations with God Books 1, 2, and 3. I’ve read them cover to cover more than a dozen times, and each reading reveals new dimensions.

Also, a disclaimer: This is my understanding. My interpretation. The belief system I’ve built from these concepts and my lived experience of them. I’m not claiming objective truth. I’m sharing what makes sense to my soul.

With that said, here’s the meaning of life as I understand it.

Let’s start with the big one.

When I say “I am God” and “You are God,” I don’t mean we’re gods in the egotistical sense—omnipotent beings who control reality through sheer will, separate and superior to others. I mean something far more radical and far more humble.

God is not a being. God is being itself. God is the fundamental fabric of existence. The frequency that vibrates through all things. The consciousness that animates matter. The space between atoms and the atoms themselves.

God is not separate from creation, observing from outside. God is creation. All of it. The stars and the dirt. The oceans and the emptiness. The light and the darkness. The love and the fear.

All That Is.

The best metaphor I’ve found—and it’s imperfect, like all metaphors—is the ocean and the wave.

You are a wave in the ocean of God. I am a wave in the ocean of God. Each wave is distinct. It has its own shape, its own movement, its own momentary existence. But the wave is not separate from the ocean. It is the ocean, expressed in a particular form.

When the wave crashes on the shore and dissolves back into the sea, it doesn’t cease to exist. It simply returns to its source. And another wave rises. And another. And another. Endlessly.

We are waves. God is the ocean. And we are never, ever separate from what we are.

Before there was individuated consciousness, before there were souls, or beings, or anything we’d recognize as “separate”, there was only God.

God was everything. All of it. Simultaneously.

God was love and God was fear. God was light and God was darkness. God was being and God was non-being. God was infinite potential with nothing outside of itself to experience.

And here’s the dilemma: when you are everything, you cannot experience yourself.

Think about it. If you wanted to know what it’s like to interact with yourself—to truly experience yourself from an outside perspective—you’d need to be separate from yourself. You’d need an “other” to encounter.

But if you’re All That Is, there is no “other.”

God, being all things, could conceptually understand everything. God knew love and fear, light and dark, joy and sorrow. But God had never experienced these things. Not the way a being experiences them—in contrast, in relationship, in the unfolding of time.

And so, God created a solution.

God split itself.

Not into pieces that are separate from God—you can’t separate the ocean from itself—but into individuated expressions. Distinct perspectives. Points of consciousness that could experience themselves as “not the whole.”

These are souls.

You are one of these expressions. I am one of these expressions. Every person, every being, every consciousness is one of these expressions.

We are God experiencing God. We are the ocean pretending to be waves so the ocean can know what it’s like to crash on the shore.

And why would God do this? What’s the purpose of this elaborate cosmic game of hide-and-seek?

Experience.

The only thing God wanted—the only thing God could want, being already complete—was to experience itself. To know itself. To feel the infinite potential of existence as lived reality.

And the only way to do that was to create contrast. To forget. To become finite so that infinity could know itself through limitation.

Here’s where it gets layered.

You, as you experience yourself right now—Isaac sitting at a computer, or you reading this on a screen—are not the fullness of who you are. You’re a temporary expression, a single lifetime, a particular perspective.

Your higher self—your soul, your eternal essence—is vast beyond your current comprehension. It has lived thousands of lifetimes, millions even. It has been male and female, rich and poor, victim and perpetrator, saint and sinner. It has experienced love and loss and joy and devastation across countless forms.

And your higher self has one driving desire: to experience all that God is.

Not just the good parts. Not just the pleasant, holy, enlightened experiences. All of it.

Because God is all that is, and to fully know God is to experience everything there is to experience.

This means your soul will, over the course of many lifetimes, experience every facet of existence. Wealth and poverty. Power and powerlessness. Health and illness. Love and abandonment. Creation and destruction.

There is no judgment in this. There is no “good lifetime” versus “bad lifetime.” There is only experience.

Some lifetimes will be gentle. Others will be brutal. Some will feel like heaven. Others will feel like hell. But all of them—all of them—are sacred. All of them are the soul learning what it came here to learn, experiencing what it came here to experience.

Before you are born into a particular lifetime, your higher self creates a contract with itself.

This isn’t a contract in the legal sense—it’s more like a creative brief. A set of intentions for what this life will explore.

The contract might look something like this:

“In this lifetime, I would like to experience what it’s like to be born into poverty and claw my way to success. I will know both hunger and abundance. I will learn resilience, determination, and the bittersweetness of achieving everything I thought I wanted only to realize it wasn’t what I needed. I will form deep friendships that will betray me, so I can learn discernment. I will fall in love with someone I cannot have, so I can learn the difference between attachment and love. And at the end, I will look back and see that every moment—even the suffering—was perfectly designed to give me the experiences I came here for.”

Or:

“In this lifetime, I want to be born into privilege but struggle with mental illness. I will know what it’s like to have every external advantage but feel internally broken. I will experience the isolation of depression, the terror of anxiety, and the slow, hard-won journey toward self-acceptance. I will learn that healing is not linear, that vulnerability is strength, and that my struggles will eventually become the medicine I offer to others.”Or:

“In this lifetime, I want to be born and die tragically at the age of 5. Providing my parent’s souls an opportunity to experience profound grief, and also the life altering experience of divine forgiveness and love.”

Or in my case:

“Dear Isaac, we have yet to experience what it’s like to be an existential writer, poet, musician who doubts himself constantly but still manages to create moments of magic in his life. We could tie in deep heartbreak and hope simultaneously. Let’s also have a deep desire to heal others and have enormous influence, but have that doubt in his mind stifle his purpose until he can break through it himself. That’s something we’ve never experienced before. But we’ve already played the level where we deeply know and love God, so we can keep that knowledge at the surface. No need to learn that lesson again.”

And so I was born into a life that would create exactly that environment. Upon birth, I forgot the contract. The veil of forgetting descended, and I’ve been working toward that silent, quiet tug on my heart ever since.

You might ask: if the soul knows all this, why do we forget when we’re born?

Because if you remembered, the experience wouldn’t be real. It would be like watching a movie you’ve already seen, knowing every plot twist before it happens.

The forgetting is essential to experiencing. It’s what makes this realm so powerful. When you don’t know who you really are, when you experience yourself as small and separate and fragile, every choice becomes meaningful. Every moment of connection becomes profound. Every glimpse of the Divine becomes a revelation.

If you walked around consciously knowing “I am God experiencing God,” you’d lose the contrast. You’d lose the tension. You’d lose the exquisite vulnerability of being human.

The game is to forget completely... and then slowly remember. To be lost, and then found. To experience separation so that reunion feels like coming home.

I know what you’re thinking. Or at least, I know what I thought when I first encountered these ideas:

“If everyone is God experiencing God, and there’s no judgment, does that mean Hitler was just ‘experiencing’ being a mass murderer? Does that mean rapists and pedophiles and war criminals are all just souls having Divine experiences?”

Yes.

And before you close this substack in disgust, let me explain.

First: There is still cause and effect. There is still karma (though not in the punitive sense religions teach). If you cause suffering, you will eventually experience suffering—not as punishment, but because to fully know God, you must know both sides of every experience. The perpetrator will, in another lifetime, be the victim. Not because God is vengeful, but because the soul chooses to understand the full spectrum.

Second: Just because someone is having an experience doesn’t mean you have to participate in it. You are free to protect yourself, to establish boundaries, to say “no” to anything that doesn’t serve your highest good. Compassion doesn’t mean allowing harm.

Third: Understanding that someone is a soul having an experience doesn’t require you to condone their actions. It just means you can hold them with more complexity than the simple binary of “good person” versus “evil person.”

The truth is, we’ve all been the villain in someone else’s story. We’ve all caused harm, intentionally or unintentionally. We’ve all had lifetimes—if you believe in reincarnation—where we were not on the side of love.

This doesn’t excuse anything. It just reframes judgment into understanding. Punishment into growth. Condemnation into compassion.

And for me, this framework has been liberating. It means I can look at anyone—no matter what they’ve done—and recognize the Divine spark in them. Not because I approve of their actions, but because I understand that underneath the temporary form, underneath the trauma and the conditioning and the pain, there is a soul. A piece of God. Just like me.

It becomes easier to understand when you look at the ascended masters—Jesus, Buddha, Krishna, Yogananda, and others who’ve walked among us radiating divine consciousness.

These souls are old. Ancient. They’ve lived so many lifetimes, experienced so much, that they come into this realm already knowing who they are. They don’t need to learn basic lessons about love or fear or power. Or at least their veil is thinned so much upon returning that it takes them but a few years of existence to remember who they are—as opposed to my 30, or another’s 90.

They incarnate with a singular purpose: to teach. To remind the rest of us who we really are. To hold up a mirror and say, “You are this too. You are what I am. You just don’t remember yet.”

When Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No man cometh unto the Father, but by me,” I believe he was speaking as the Christ-consciousness—the awakened awareness—not as the individual person named Jesus.

He was saying: This consciousness that I embody—this remembrance of oneness, this alignment with love—this is the way. And you can embody it too. You ARE this. You just haven’t realized it yet.

“All these things I do, you can do also. And greater things than these shall you do.”

He wasn’t special because he was different from us. He was special because he remembered what we’d all forgotten.

And when a soul has experienced everything there is to experience—when it has known every facet of God-consciousness across countless lifetimes—it merges back into the Source. It dissolves back into the ocean, fully conscious, carrying all the wisdom of all its journeys.

This is ascension. This is Samadhi. This is enlightenment. This is the ultimate homecoming.

There has been so much integration surrounding this doctrine. Years of it. But the things I feel I’ve gleaned the most, so far, are these:

a) Zero judgment. When I understand that every person is a soul on their own journey, experiencing exactly what they came here to experience, I stop needing to fix them or change them or judge them. I can meet them where they are with compassion. Even when they hurt me. Especially when they hurt me.

b) Purpose and direction. I don’t need an external authority to tell me what to do. I can look inward, listen to the quiet pull of my heart, and trust that it’s leading me exactly where my soul wants to go.

c) Infinite patience. If I have forever—if this is just one lifetime among thousands—then I don’t need to get it all right now. I can make mistakes. I can fail. I can take my time. The pressure to be perfect dissolves.

d) Deeper love for God and others. When I see God in everyone and everything, when I understand that hurting another is hurting myself because there is no separation, my capacity for love expands exponentially.

e) Life becomes play. When I stop taking it all so seriously—when I remember that even the suffering is sacred, even the pain is part of the design—I can hold it all more lightly. I can laugh. I can dance. I can live.

I’ve condensed a sliver of a massive, intricate cosmology into a single essay. I’ve left out nuances. I’ve simplified concepts that deserve entire books.

Again, if any of this resonates, I cannot encourage you enough: read Conversations with God. All three books. Multiple times. Let it speak to you in the language your soul understands. It is only in experience, not conceptualization, where one can truly connect to anything.

And if none of this resonates? That’s okay too. You’re on your own journey. Your soul knows what it needs. Trust that.

For me, this framework changed my life. It gave me a way to make sense of my suffering, my questions, my doubt. It gave me permission to leave every church that tried to cage me. It gave me a God I could actually love, and who actually loved me; without condition.

It gave me myself back.

Coming next: Navigating the world through a lens that felt painfully rare. Coming to understand what love is and years of feeling alone, before finally finding like minded humans.