Changing the focus of my attitude towards God changed my life. As a child, like most of us, I was taught that God was outside of me, in heaven. That he punished me if I misbehaved and was happy and would reward me if I behaved. All natural disasters, deaths, and misfortunes were attributed to God, because it was “God’s will.”
Aside from what we were taught in the religion we learned, our relationship with God is directly related to our relationship with our parents. In this life, they were our first experience with love. Since our parents did not understand the concept of unconditional love, the love they gave us was conditioned. From then on, that was our idea of love. If you behave I love you, if you misbehave I punish you. In our minds as children, our parents were all powerful, they knew everything, they loved us and they punished us. In God we project the role of father, with all the attributes that we knew of what it was to be a parent, but with a much more exaggerated vision of His power.
I blamed God for all my unhappiness. The anger I had with Him when I believed that He had chosen me to go through such difficult situations in life was immense. Besides, I was terribly afraid of him because at any moment He could decide that I deserved some other punishment.
I was terrified of having to face everyone in the Final Judgment in order to be punished for some wrong that I had committed. This led me to want to be perfect, which brought a lot of stress and disappointment every time I failed. How could I have a good relationship with someone who caused me so much fear and anger?
It wasn’t until I found the wonderful book called A Course in Miracles that I began to know the true God. In reading this book I was faced with all my misconceptions, not only about God, but about myself and my perception of life.
Now I see God as the Totality of love, from where everything flows, including us. If God created us in His image and likeness, we are perfect, pure love, supreme intelligence, justice. The essence of God is always within us, because we are part of Him. In other words, God is the sum total of all His creation.
When we came to the third dimension of time and space, it was as if they put a veil on us and we forgot our perfection, our divine essence. We began to seek God outside of us, rather than within.
When I understood this, I began to search for Him within myself and I found Him. It has been a wonderful thing. To commune with Him, all I have to do is quiet my mind, so that I can hear and feel Him. God’s main way of speaking to us is through our feelings, through that inner voice that always knows where we have to go.
Another way of seeing God is by looking into the eyes of each being that comes into my life. The eyes are the windows of the soul and within each being is God. If I relate to every being that comes into my life, I am relating to God in him or her. It’s that simple.