“Your purest relationship with God is the way you treat others.”From Devoción
One time, as I meditated, God came to ask me what I wanted. My answer was: “Nothing, absolutely nothing.” And the question came again: “What is it that you want?” Then the answer came running, suddenly, out of the deepest corner of my heart: “What I want is for You to be in my life.”
I understood that everything else I might have wanted now seemed completely short-lived. “I want whatever You want for me,” I told Him, “for I am sure Your wisdom, Your plan and Your vision are immensely greater than anything I may have wanted for myself.” This made me feel confident and fully connected to God. Surrender brought me to the certainty that God loves me and shelters me.
The Cosmic Being created us to be extensions of His soul, just as our children are the extension of ours. How great is the love God can feel for His children? He wants what is best for you, because He is a parent.
From belief to lived experience
Believing in God is very different from having full knowledge of who He is. Knowledge is what comes from having a direct experience from our Consciousness; belief is simply the acceptance of a possibility. That is why I suggest you go beyond belief into knowledge, and that you do it with the primal tool of devotion.
To experience devotion is to have a relationship with God, not with the concept of Him, not with the idea of Him, but as a true lived experience in Him. You cannot deny that God is in you, because He is your very life. Allow this experience to happen in you, and you will always be in God, no matter what.
So ask yourself: to whom are you devoted? If you are devoted to God, you are devoted to yourself, because there is no God outside of you. This relationship is with yourself, but not in a narcissistic way; it is quite the opposite.
As you treat life, so you treat God
If the life that contains us is God, I ask you: how do you treat life and those around you? Your answer will tell you how you treat God. How much kindness is there in your heart for your fellow human beings, whatever they are like? That is the amount of kindness you express to God.
However you behave toward life is how you behave toward Him, the Divine Father and Mother. And just as you are with life, life will respond to you in the same way.
I understand that it is not easy. We perceive ourselves through the mind, and it is with the mind that we judge: we assign a concept to a person to decide whether they are good or bad, or we rate them by how much gratification or how many benefits they offer us. That is how we consider some people worthy of our regard and others unworthy. And we forget that every person who appears in our life is part of the stage we ourselves are creating together with God.
If you claim to be devoted to God, you have to understand that He is everywhere. There is no place where He is absent. Do not go and kneel for hours somewhere to pray if, when you walk out, you are going to treat your fellow human beings with indifference or hostility. You cannot profess your love to God in the privacy of your home and then, as soon as you are out the front door, act like an antagonist.
And even if you justify yourself because others do not see God in you either, what matters is that you do see Him. Otherwise you would be just like those you consider unworthy of your benevolence. This relationship does not happen behind closed doors in your house, but in your relationship with everyone around you, recognizing the divinity in each one and treating them with benevolence and compassion.
Without rituals or intermediaries
If your true essence is love, in what way does your soul need to grow? By sustaining, manifesting and transmitting love. You need no knowledge or powers, only to experience love, without rituals or mantras, free of dogmas and intermediaries.
It does not matter whether you meditate for hours, make pilgrimages to sacred places or practice ancient rites: illumination will come through grace. God’s mercy reaches you through your dedication and your love, by being a good human being and practicing gratitude. Personally, I live out that love and that devotion every day by seeing in each person an expression of Him, without offering devotion to anyone or anything in particular, because everything around us is the representation of Divinity.
To develop devotion, you can subdue your concepts and ideas, your desires and longings, and simply allow silence to be there. That is the greatest act of devotion you can perform. Even if you go down on your knees before any altar, if your mind is out shopping you are not truly surrendering. Only in silence will you allow God to be.
He does not ignore you
We have grown used to thinking it is the other way around: that God ignores us or has better things to do. But in reality you are the one ignoring Him, going through the whole day without noticing the divinity that lives you and waits for you to realize that it is always there. Do not wait for something to happen. Simply enter into relationship: that is devotion.
The true relationship with divinity consists in yielding every idea or concept of your mind and surrendering yourself to love and compassion. The greatest stage you have for this is your own life. If the world is full of anything these days, it is full of stages for practicing compassion and love toward your neighbor, in other words, of spaces to serve God.
In every breath
This is a way of life based on your light and your clarity. There are no techniques here: simply learn to live up to the recognition of God in yourself and in everyone.
You, who wear yourself out searching for happiness, peace, love and God, let me tell you that it is there, within your reach and within everyone’s reach. In every breath and in every blink of an eye, it is available to you. Everyone can access that possibility; all you need to do is want it.
That time, when God asked me what I wanted, the answer came out of the deepest corner of my heart. That same relationship is waiting for you. I invite you to live in it.
From Dr. Zuluan Orion's books: Devoción · Illumination