It has been said in the universal wisdom that God gives to all people, whether good or bad, right or wrong, awakened or asleep. God loves everyone and gives to everyone, unconditionally. God is our provider. God is like an overflowing fountain, continually providing water to everyone. And everyone receives the water, in some degree, no matter what they do or how they are. This is God’s unconditional love.
God gives to all people. God loves everyone and gives to everyone, whether good or bad, right or wrong, awakened or asleep. But this should not be mistaken with moral relativism. This is not meaning that there are no distinctions of good and bad. It does not mean that God has care about what we do. It does not mean that God sees no distinctions of good and bad, or that spiritually there is no such thing as being wrong or doing bad things.
There are real significant differences between good and bad, right and wrong. And God wishes for the good, rather than the bad. Yet God loves all, no matter what, and God gives to all, no matter what choices are made. This is the unconditional love of God. It is God loving everyone and being available to everyone, no matter what. But this doesn’t mean that God’s Wisdom makes no distinctions between good and bad. Using a simple analogy, a mother can know what is good action rather than bad, and she will wish for that her child does the good; but if the child fails to do the good, she nonetheless loves the child. This is how it is for the Divine.
Everyone receives life energy, mental energy, emotional energy, physical energy; and then we do whatever we do with this. God provides, but then we must decide what to do with this. Some may use this energy to hurt or manipulate others; others use it to help or heal others. Here is the distinction between good and bad. Yet the water, the life, the energies, all flow nonetheless. The Divine is a fountain of overflowing love and life, and everyone can drink from it. So it all flows unconditionally, but still, there is a difference between good and bad, healing and hurting.
This means also that we are dependent on God. But it does not mean that God is directing the whole show, so to speak. God provides the life energies, the consciousness and mental powers, the higher emotional qualities, our physical abilities, and also our creative capacities; but does not direct everything, nor decide what shall be done, nor make people do what they do with these energies and abilities. So what we do with what God provides is really up to us. God, by way of nature, provides the energies and tools, which we then use, either by intelligent choice or by half-conscious automatic ‘choice’.
Yet we are not completely left on our own in our choice making. For God also provides inner guidance and wisdom that can be known directly through a person’s heart or mind, or both. And this higher-wisdom guidance, coming from the Wisdom of God, helps one to act in alignment with the Divine Purposes and Principles of life.
Certain people throughout history, who were particularly receptive and sensitive to this inner guidance, brought forth this wisdom to others. They taught others, started groups, or wrote spiritual prose; and so this provides spiritual wisdom to those who cannot yet receive it from within. But all of the prophets, masters and teachers had to have heard God’s guidance from within, before it ever came out to the world in the form of teachings, religions, or sacred texts. Thus, everyone has an inner potential of hearing the guidance from within, as well as receiving guidance from those who already heard it from within.
It is important to clarify, though, that all spiritual teachings are not exactly the same. This is due to various possible reasons. First, any guidance wisdom will have some sort of relativity involved, being relative to the needs of that particular person, place and culture. Some parts of the guidance may be universal, but there is bound to be parts that are somewhat relative to the time and place and people involved. Second, any kind of guidance or wisdom has to be expressed by some selected words, or perhaps by some kind of creative art. Yet this then requires some degree of interpretation by the listener or reader; because all words, sentences and also art have some inherent ambiguity, as especially with metaphor and analogy which is actually strung through most teachings. And thirdly, there is possibility that any particular guidance or message coming from the Divine Wisdom, as heard by a human being, could be distorted by the person’s own desire nature, or misunderstood, or skewed by their culturally conditioned thinking. So there are many possible causes for different teachings.
Generally though, people gradually inch towards being in better alignment with the Divine Wisdom because of their occasional receptivity to inner wisdom guidance in conjunction with the all-important factor of learning by experience what works best in life. For remember that we can, and it is divinely intended that we do, learn wisdom from actual life experience, through the learning process of: (a) being more intelligently awake, (b) being more sensitive to our physical and social environment, and (c) aligning our decisions and actions with the most value-important purposes/goals.
Thus, to gradually come into wisdom we do not have to be just reliant on inner spiritual guidance, nor on outer guidance from one of the religions or traditions; because we can also learn from our experience combined with our intelligence. That is, we can learn wisdom from life experience, but this does require a learning attitude – of inquiry, questioning, experiment, and reasoning. Then, if this process of learning is also combined with our spiritual intuition and our possible guidance from within, there is a much more likely chance of developing real wisdom, real knowing.
This discourse began with the understanding that God gives to all people, whether good or bad, right or wrong, awakened or asleep. God loves everyone and gives to everyone, unconditionally. God provides life energy to everyone and the powers of intellect and willfulness. But also God provides an inner guidance to everyone, though most people do not hear it. For God does not force wisdom or guidance on anyone; nor does God force anyone to do anything. God is not making anyone do anything; and thus, not everything done by people is God directed or God willed. Moreover, the state of the world is not by God’s decision or direction; it is not by the hand of God. Rather, what happens in the world is mostly by the hand of human beings who are not even receptive to spiritual guidance and intuition.
Nonetheless, God provides energies and powers to all human beings; while the choice of how to use these is left to each person. And it is hoped that each choosing person will gradually develop from ignorance to wisdom, though this is a long road ahead. So, God is our Provider, but God is not choosing everything for us. The choosing is all up to us. This is one more gift of God given to us – the power of choice. But along with this power and freedom of choice comes the other side of having to very often learn from hard experience.
It might be kind of nice if we all were at every moment completely guided by the Wisdom of God, but this is not how it is. We have been given the power and freedom of choice, so we will inevitably make mistakes at times and go astray from the Divine Purposes of life. And so, all that we do does not have divine purpose in it. In other words, some of what we do, and possible more than just some, has no divine purpose in it – because we have gone astray from the Divine Purposes. Realize that this is possible – because we and everyone else are not in each moment automatically guided by Divine Wisdom and Purpose, nor being directed by a divine order.
The hard fact is that we can make mistakes and go astray, and also bring unnecessary trouble to ourselves and others. This is all possible because we have free choice and we can easily make choices from our ignorance rather than from God’s wisdom or guidance. This possibility of messing up is important to realize; otherwise we live in an illusory view from our cheap rosy glasses… believing that everything in the world and with us is just perfectly fine. Actually, there is no perfect; instead, there an everpresent possibility of progressive improvement and refinement.
Nonetheless in all of this, God continues to provide the energies and powers we need to make choices and learn. And through all of this, God loves everyone.. even the biggest screw-ups. Partly because in the bigger picture everyone is learning, and this means, at times, learning from mistakes. So, God loves us all through our individual processes of making mistakes, going astray, neglecting the Divine and even hurting others. God loves everyone. And God gives to everyone. But those who are in more alignment and harmony with Divine Purposes will be given even greater energies and powers. This in the efficiency of how things work.
It could be difficult for people to believe that God would love those who harm others or who deceive others for their own self-interests. And why would God, or the Divine, continue to give life and powers to those who harm life? Because God loves and gives unconditionally, while allowing everyone to make free choices – even when those choices are contrary to the Divine Goals. And remember, there are Divine Goals. The Divine can be unconditionally all-loving, not matter what; while also having Goals. In other words, the Wisdom of God has Goals, but the Power of God does not force everyone to head towards those Goals. Instead, there is freedom of choice, in the foreseen expectation that choices will lead to learning, and learning will lead to wisdom, and wisdom will lead to the Goals.
So, God allows the mistakes, but this is necessary in the larger process of things, which is ‘the divine process’, or what we call evolution. This is an unfixed, non-predetermined process of learning and creative trial and error. One could say that God allows all lives of creation to be in a learning process and to creatively unfold without the divine power absolutely forcing any particular outcome. And yet, throughout this process are varying degrees of divine influence, which indirectly and generally guides the creativity and evolution of lives, but not absolutely or deterministically.
Generally, lives begin as relatively ignorant then gradually develop intelligence. In addition, lives begin as relatively limited in sensitivity then gradually develop an expanded sensitivity and love. Each life also begins with relatively little power then gradually develops more power to be influential in the surrounding world. So this can all be understood as an organic development, from the ground up as it were. Yet pervading this organic process is the 'divine influence', which can be understood as the divine seeds inherent in all of this divine life, or can also be understood as divine guidance from within, and there are also outer influences of divine guidance and love-wisdom coming from living spiritual elders or from spiritual traditions.
Consider social evolution or the evolution of humanity. If we look back through human history, we will find too many examples of needless fighting and killing, and its consequential suffering for so many people. It is because we begin as humanity with an undeveloped sensitivity and undeveloped love and an undeveloped holistic intelligence and wisdom; which then results in harmful actions to others and to the greater whole of life. We might call this ‘insensitivity and ignorance in action’. Yet, like a growing child, humanity slowly develops its inner potentials for sensitivity and holistic intelligence; which then results in a gradual evolution towards greater social sensitivity and intelligent activity for the greater good.
So the Divine Plan, as it were, or what can be called the divine process, is that we all grow in sensitivity and intelligence, by way of our free choices and its consequential learning curve; and also because within everyone is a spiritual soul with a yearning for love and wisdom, though this must first be dis-covered and then allowed to gradually emerge.