Chapter 2 - Experiencing Life Beyond Thought And Reason

Chapter 3 - Discovering How This Life Is Not The Only Life We Are Living.

Chapter 4 - Giving Up The Good And The Bad Of Human Life For Something More Wonderful.

Chapter 6 - Waking Up And Discovering What "I Am" Really Is.

Chapter One - Letters

The following are excerpts from some letters I have written to students and fellow travelers over the past year.

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Yes, I do believe you have the spiritual consciousness to heal others. I would encourage you to let God work through you in this way. The way I found that this happens is when I let go of my own desire to gain any satisfaction or personal human rewards in attempting to help others. When this happens, the true healing power of God can flow through without any encumbrances of human thought or will. We can become one with God and realize that nothing is separate from His ever present love. Most people feel detached from their spiritual identity because of a false belief that their human existence is "all there is". The truth is that human existence is such a very small and brief experience in our eternal being that life can never be fully experienced, as it is meant to be, when we confine our thoughts to only our human existence. Who we really are is not dependent on our body or thinking brain. We are all part of the total ONENESS of God and never separate from Him except in our own misguided thoughts. Personally, I trust my soul much more than I would ever trust my reasoning brain. I, myself can do nothing unless it be given to me from a power higher than the understanding my simple reasoning brain can know of. You may very well be that angel unaware.

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Quote from letter. "Meditation and spiritual awareness gets me through my problems. I reach out to my "higher self" which is above all my problems.... I rise above myself and actually see myself below and(as weird as it may sound to some) tell myself below the things that make me realize what is really important and unimportant in life. I used to call this presence God and He finally became as personal as He could get in the form of my higher self. Identical to me in every way with the exception of not being able to feel pain, fear, doubt or uncertainty. It is just like my ghost double but the funny thing is that it is ME but residing outside of myself just above me about three to four feet away. It's like I turn into my higher self and see Bob Gupton below and reassure him that All is well. It's the only way I can make it through life and I wouldn't trade this awareness and presence for the life I used to have. When I have learned to become one with my higher self, I know I will be free from all this pain. Sometimes I guess I tell my self, I'd rather do it myself until I realize that this higher self is the real me. Once I get rid of my doubts about this, the oneness will set me free.

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You are so right about our minds flitting from one thought to another and most times without the thought of God. I usually think of everything as God appearing "AS". You are God appearing as ________, your house is God appearing as shelter and home, etc... One might tell a child, "There is no spot where God is not."

This world is an illusion as our senses do not enable us to know much beyond them. But there is something beyond our "conscious" senses that we all know.

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Humanly, we think by "feeling" someone's pain, we are doing something "good" for them. Humanly, we all respond to and feel better from empathy and compassion from another. But where we sometimes make a mistake is when we don't know what else to do after that or realize that we cannot do any more. If we know that that empathy and compassion is not something we simply "invented" or created in our mind, we let God finish what He asked us to begin. Perhaps that empathy and compassion, or love, or caring, or human help, or any desire to give IS simply a wake up call to someone. We may just be acting as God's alarm clock for that someone. It is not for us to think humanly of "what else needs to be done now?". If the person chooses to "go back to sleep", perhaps their bed is more comfortable to them than they wanted us to believe.

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Most think of work as a way of earning money and think of it as supply. But supply is not something that comes to us but rather something that comes from us.

In this illusionary world we accept so much that is not true and suffer because of our misconceived beliefs. Trying to convey thoughts that come to me about the spiritual world is as difficult as trying to get you to see a photograph in this e-mail by just my description of it...It will never look the same as the real picture. I can only tell you that I just don't take this human life so seriously. When God created us in His image..that image was "spirit" and not this human body. Don't be concerned that our brain can't comprehend the realm of our true identity. Most are frightened by the thought of being more than they really are. They want to be more and realize something greater than themselves but unless their senses prove it they disbelieve it.

Life is wonderful...here on this earth and in our bodies and in the infinitude of our total existence. I am not so detached from the world that I don't extend my thoughts of truth into "supply", joyful living, prosperous living, and most important living my "purpose". As Jesus said "I of my own self can do nothing". So it is with my self....No more struggling in life to attain anything...but everything somehow comes to me in a measure that I would have termed Extreme Success and Prosperity in years past. When the importance was released along with much else...Good things came but in a way that didn't matter whether they did or not..

I constantly meditate on "the Kingdom that is not of this world". Through years of seeking truth, I slowly came to the realization and experience of living in that kingdom while still residing here in my body and mind. I just "woke up".

So in thinking about how you will manifest your supply, realize how knowing the truth about everything and everyone could benefit everything and everyone in your consciousness at the present and future as they come into your experience. Pursue the healing arts. You will find your gifts there. If you are led to perform any tasks that may be needed by others along the way, take the rewards from them as a form of manna.

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I know your struggle to be "in this world but not of it" puts you in what appears to be a struggle between "supply" of this world and the peace of your real existence. I have found that the more I struggle to "want" something, the further it sometime goes from my grasp. When I lose my desire for what I want so much it comes to me. There is a big difference between the things I want and the things I need. We are not the creators of the desires of what we need so we need not be concerned that we will not have them.

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We see with our eyes but our eyes don't interpret what we see. We hear with our ears but our ears don't do the thinking about what we hear. What seems in control of all of our senses is our thinking and reasoning brain. It is a wonderful tool, like all of our sensory organs, but it is not the ruler of what is true about our being....It is just the manager of our material bodies. It just doesn't want to accept something outside of itself as being anything other than the interpreter of all that comes into our experience.

After all your years of study with Joel's teachings, you know you are not in your feet, legs, torso, head, "behind your eyes", or anywhere in your body. You don't need to "turn off your thoughts" to let God, your true self, become your true identity. You merely have to realize that nothing will happen to you, "it", or you as a human being that will take anything away from you. Your reasoning will never accept anything more than it is capable of knowing. Do you really think that even the smallest bit of anything comes from something outside of your true self? You can never take away more from an experience than you came with. Just because we can't see certain things with our eyes, such as light frequencies outside of our perception, or sound frequencies higher or lower than its capabilities can identify, doesn't mean they don't exist. The first thing you will or "your brain" will think about all of this is "I know all of this already". Everything you are going through is perfectly natural and expected. There is nothing you have done or haven't done that seems to be impeding your progress. You are in "exactly" the perfect place. It is a battle between what you want to believe and what the real truth really is. You don't have to believe anything.....Spiritual being is not psychological. You merely have to know through "experience" and not "words"... God Is, and then whatever you choose to think after that is just what your head allows your emotions to experience and not the real experience of God. It is the closest thing to it but until you securely and comfortably let go of all human attachments and importances, you are still confined within your human consciousness. The real truth already exists and it is merely waking up to the realization that you, the "I Am" is your true identity and has everything in its perfect place....It places little importance on your dream state in this human existence. In fact, it has made the reality you are experiencing now. The more you have the realization about this, the more "comfortable" you as a thinking and reasoning human being are about accepting something outside of itself as being the real you...the "I Am". As these human thoughts and battles are ceased with what you call "Your Heart", the real "Heart", God, your true self, comes into your experience like a beautiful sunrise. And at this time, you rise above all of these human experiences and become an observer of it rather than the personal being of it. You mature, graduate, grow up and all things become new and reflection becomes your reasoning. You know all things now...you just cannot be aware of them with your thoughts being the interpreter of them.

The main thing that will seem different is that you will see your human self as you would your own child and experience all the wonderful love as you would give your own child.

Your "heart" is the experience of God and not a mental function.

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What one interprets as a spiritual healing is always their truth about it....It's a matter of semantics... Any human language can always be misunderstood and then re understood within one's own understanding. I know I am being vague....It's what I'm not writing that you understand.

The key to understanding the conflicting opinions of others is to realize how broad the term "concept" is. There is only one truth but many interpretations or "concepts" of it. There are as many concepts as there are fingerprints. But in the spiritual realm there is no such thing as a concept.....Just as there is no such thing as time.

Many years ago when I heard this quote, "Time is a wonderful thing because it keeps everything from happening at once", it became my favorite quote...But the truth is everything in infinity did happen at once and we are seeing only one experience of it in our own little universe. The total scope of all there is we must separate into divisions of what we call time so we can try to understand where and what we are. But what puts that question in our mind? How much of our experience do we actually create?

Our concept of this life experience is mental....Any understanding of a mystery is mental....but where the answer comes from is not mental but spiritual. No one walking the earth is spiritual.....they are spiritual beings appearing as a human form...but the concept of this is mental... and the effects of the answers that come to us manifest mentally....or we are not aware of them. The problem is that when we take enlightenment as a mental process we diminish its worth. Understand that if anything improves your life or changes it in a positive way it is because we are "aware" of its activity and give credit to something other than its origin. We may call it God but realize that there is no correct mental concept of God in human thought. Joel says you will never know God as long as you have anything to hang on to....concepts, beliefs, etc.

So if something blesses your life and you feel it is God...that can be considered a healing...but trying to maintain its existence can be mental.

What I am about to say here......will sum it all up. A true healing occurs when the condition and the MEMORY OF IT ceases to exist because it never really existed in the first place....it was only a concept of something erroneous. So one would never know they ever had the bad condition they were trying to get healed of.