Reward and Punishment

Does God reward us when we are very good and punish us when we are bad? I suspect that most people around the world would say: Yes! Isn't that the way the world works? You get rewarded when you do the right thing and punished when you don't. No, actually it isn't how the world works most of the time and that is what creates the great tension between what we are taught as children in church, temple, shul, or mosque, and what we see and experience in the world around us. Our life experience just doesn't square with our religious training in so many instances.

If that is so, then our religion quickly becomes less and less relevant to our daily lives and soon becomes a set of rituals that give us some comfort and a sense of belonging but have little real impact in our daily lives. For our spiritual practice to really be the center of our lives, it has to reflect how life really works and how things can really be if we follow the teaching. When we see a person judged by most in our community as bad but living a lavish and prosperous life, while the hard working, honest and good person barely scrapes by and encounters all manner of obstacles and hardships, we have to wonder why bad things happen to good people and the converse.

Jesus told us how it really works but we did not listen or understand because what He told us ran counter to what we were taught as children and how we thought it OUGHT to be. The Universe does NOT operate as we think it OUGHT to operate - it operates according to immutable laws laid down before the foundation of the Universe.

When Jesus told us that "To those who have much, even more shall be added unto them and to those who have little, even the little they have shall be taken from them" we recoiled from this seemingly unloving and unfair statement. It is often seen as one of Jesus' most controversial statements and causes a crisis of faith among many Christians. He was saying that those who think, speak and live poverty will receive even more. Those who think, speak and live wealth will receive more wealth. What you focus on, you create in your life!

Jesus told us the truth, often the cold hard unvarnished truth, but always the truth. Let's review what He said and what WE often believe.

Jesus said that it is done unto us as we BELIEVE. We are taught that it is done unto us as we DO.

Jesus said that the Kingdom of God was within each of us. We are taught that the Kingdom of God must be earned through good works and that it is located in a place called Heaven.

Jesus said that each of us gets in our life just what we believe in and expect to receive. We are taught that we get in our life what our Good Father wishes to give us and not one thing more.

Jesus said that we can heal anything in our lives, including our bodies with our faith and our belief. (It is your faith that does the work, not I). We have been taught that healing and life transformation comes from the Father by way of miracles and does not come from within each of us.

Jesus told us that no one can enter the Kingdom of Heaven unless he or she develops the Christ Mind, that mind that KNOWS THE LAWS of God and how to operate them. (No one comes to the Father except through me). We take that central statement of Christianity as the ultimate ego trip, if you don't worship me, you will never get to Heaven or be one with God.

Jesus was incapable of the human flaw of egotism - he had learned to literally develop the absolute unity with God that we call the Christ Mind, which is why he was called Jesus The Christ in His own time. He knew how to think as God thinks; He knew how to create as God creates.

He was telling us that until we learn what He had learned, we will never see the Father and we will never enter the Kingdom of Heaven (which is the peace that passes all understanding) The entrance to this Kingdom is within our own hearts and minds.

Then to make sure we understood that this was not just HIS gift but the gift of every human who will seek it; He told us that everything that HE did, we can do also -if we become students of Divine Law and learn to use it as HE did. It really is our good Father's pleasure to give us the Kingdom of God. In fact he has hard wired it in each one of us. All we need do is learn God's simple instructions for Living in the Law and we can do what the Christ did so long ago.

Now, I know that many readers may say, "Why Rev. that's blasphemy, only Jesus could do those things". I say to you that you could not be more mistaken. He told us repeatedly that He did only what each of us could do if we were willing to devote the time, the practice and the study of God's Laws, both spiritual and physical. Most of us are not willing to devote this much time, energy and focus so few ever achieve proficiency as Master's of Law and so only a very few possess this "gift".

Start today to understand this. There is no outside force that rewards and punishes. The Law instituted by God at the beginning of time creates our life experience in this life and in succeeding lives in response to just what we believe, think, speak and do. Nothing more, nothing less. We sow seeds with every thought we think that hardens into a belief. We sow seeds with every word we speak to ourselves or others, for good or ill. We sow seeds with every deed we do or every deed we omit doing.

Our greatest errors are in what we do not do, even though we are prodded to do it by the voice of God within. We allow fear, sloth and ignorance to keep us from the Kingdom time and time again. We know that we have done this the moment we decide that it is inconvenient or dangerous or scary to do the right thing. We always know!

What we sow, we surely do reap. If we plant corn we shall harvest corn. If we plant weeds, we shall harvest weeds! So many of us seem to believe that God will play favorites just this once and give us a bountiful harvest of luscious fruit from a lifetime of sowing weeds. Never has happened and never will. God is not and never has been in the punishment or reward business. We do it to ourselves! Hear this now!

We sow the seeds of our own joy and delight or the seeds of our own barren life of despair and disappointment. We are the directors and producers of our lives and the results of that life. God has cast us in the part and offers advice and direction but the outcome is ours to determine.

What if we have spent most of our life sowing weeds and poison? Are we then condemned by our own foolishness and ignorance to experience nothing but illness, poverty, despair? Oh, we shall experience some of what we have sown surely; but we may change the outcome on the very moment that we change our MIND.

On the day that we change our speaking, thinking and doing, on that day shall we be transformed and it is NEVER too late. God is not interested in how we begin our life's journey or in "keeping score" -that's what humans love to do and God is not human.

God is very interested in how we FINISH this life experience. God's favorite award is the Most Improved Player Award. Ours is the Most Valuable Player award. Can you see the difference? God is not about Champions. God is all about those who, through the renewing of their minds and hearts, rise from the ashes of their previous life of error and sorrow into the bright dawn of transformation and joy. God has no interest in our suffering, only we think that suffering is noble.

Transformation may be the hardest thing you ever do in this life. It takes tremendous will, great focus and discipline and the constant monitoring of what you are thinking, saying and choosing. You cannot any longer live unconsciously, just drifting along until the end comes. Now you live each moment awake and aware of everything you think, say and do and you know that you are totally accountable for all of it. The rewards of conscious living are beyond human comprehension. Are you strong enough? Do you want it enough?

It's very simple but it is certainly not easy! Tune in next week and we'll talk more about it.

God loves you so much and so do I!

Rev. Dore' Jacques Patlian

A Brief Guide To The Spiritual World

As I was thinking about the topic for this week's message, it occurred to me that just about all of us are pretty good at getting around in the physical world. We can understand what we can see, feel, touch, taste, smell as long it is "in the natural" or physical realm. When talk of the spiritual world comes up in conversation people almost always get uneasy, as if a taboo subject has been introduced. We are fairly comfortable with things of the intellect, but talk about the Spirit that created all that exists or the spirit that lives in each of us and we get uneasy and often leave the room!

Why do you think this is? I believe that it might be that people are uncomfortable about spirituality and the discussion of it because it strikes to the heart of who and what we are. It touches the very essence of our being and we feel vulnerable and exposed. It also brings up religious differences and these tend to pit us against our fellow humans. Discussion of religion or spirituality brings our differences into focus rather than bringing us into common ground. Of course, in our "politically correct" society we wouldn't want to offend, now would we?

Let's talk about what I believe is the Truth about the spiritual world. Physicists such as Steven Hawking, estimate that 98% of the entire Universe is non -physical or not yet formed into matter. (I define the spiritual world as all that is not yet in form - void energy)

At the center of this spiritual world is the Cosmic Intelligence we choose to call God. God is not God's name, it is the convenient word we in Western Culture use to refer to that Power that is beyond our intellectual understanding. We know its there, we can see the effects of this Power all around us, the glory of Creation on this planet and billions of others. The sunset, the blue, blue sky, the perfect temperatures for life, the exact chemical composition of the atmosphere that allows us to breathe; the perfect cocktail of amino acids that produced life here on earth - and most awesome of all - the exquisite double helix of DNA - the very building blocks of all life; these can not be the product of luck, fate or random chance.

There is some seriously advanced engineering going on here, far beyond our puny human abilities. Who or what is the cause - the First Cause of all of this? This Cause we label God, for lack of a better term. Some just refer to this great Mind as the Universe, some call it Divine Mind, some say Universal Mind, others call it the life essence of the Universe. Luke Skywalker and Obe Wan Kenobe of Star Wars fame just called it "The Force". That is as good a name as any!

Atheists and agnostics sometimes ridicule people of faith. They laugh at those who believe in a power of Creation greater than the puny human mind. They call us fools and gullible innocents. To me, those who cannot see the hand of a great Mind in the wonderful panorama of Creation all around us; who cannot see the exquisite order that permeates the Universe and all in it - they are the gullible ones.

Even scientists admit that today's scientific fact all too often becomes tomorrow's myth and legend as we advance in our knowledge. In contrast,Universal Truth is true now, 2,000 years from now and for all time. As I often point out to atheists and agnostics who wish to debate me, and they do love to debate; most of the greatest scientific minds of the past 600 years had a strong belief in a Great Power, a Mind beyond human comprehension, that was the Cause of all creation, the Prime Engineer of all that exists, the Great Lawgiver who created the Ordered Universe that we live in. Such men and women as Einstein, Von Braun, Madame Curie, Pasteur, Isaac Newton, Galileo, Copernicus, Darwin, Goddard, even Carl Sagan, the Sage of Modern Astronomy, all believed in a Power, a Mind behind all Creation.

These great men and women of science might not have all been religious church goers but all the true greats of Science reached out and "touched the Face of God" as they looked deeply into the Cosmos and explored its workings. They saw nothing but Order and Design in everything from a snowflake to DNA to the orbit and tracks of the planets and stars. They knew at their deepest core that all Creation cannot have been the result of random chance.

Does this mean that they bought the notion of the Sunday School God, the Old Man in the Sky in the White Robe on his Bench of Judgement writing in his book of Good and Evil Deeds? Of course not, and neither do I or any other Religious Scientist or thinking Christian. God is a Spirit, not a superhuman. God is an Essence of Life, not a capricious and cranky tribal God as envisioned in the Old Testament.

We live under a New Covenant, a new understanding of God as Love personified, of Intelligence that loves us because it IS us. We understand that God and humanity are partners in the sense that God works only through us, for us. If we are not a clear channel through which God can work, we will not experience the Grace of God working in our lives.

Our job is Faith - trust in things not seen - and acting on that Faith with the same certainty that we act on what we see and know in the physical world. Your faith in God and God's Laws should be of the same depth and certainty as your faith in gravity or in the Sun staying in the sky. Physical Laws and Spiritual Laws were made by the same Mind, the same Intelligence and can be depended on equally and trusted implicitly.

All of us understand that there are immutable and dependable laws that run the physical world. We do not expect a sack of cement dropped from a 10 story building to go up, we KNOW better! We do not expect a healthy baby to be born 4 months after conception, we KNOW that it takes nine months! We do not expect the sky to be green tomorrow, we know that it is blue, even if obscured for the moment by clouds. These things are the products of physical law - made by an intelligence.

So then why do so many otherwise intelligent people believe that the Spiritual World is governed by a God of caprice, whim, reward and punishment? Why do we believe in a God that plays favorites, cannot be trusted to act in a predictable manner but seems to blow hot and cold. Many believe that the Spiritual World is different, but it is not! It has been said that humanity cannot conceive of a God unlike itself and I believe that is a true statement. Most of us make an image of God that is like our image of us. Our God cannot grow bigger than what we think of ourselves.

The next time you struggle with visualizing God, think of a warm bright light illuminating from the center of your being. This is the Holy Spirit, the Indwelling God, shining from within you, present in you and present in every place in the Universe at the same time. God just is, always has been, always will be. The day you finally can let go of seeing God as a person and can see God as a loving benevolent Intelligence that operates through you, for you - that is the day that you will understand at last that every human being on this planet and every other we may discover, is God. God and you are ONE. God lives and moves and has its being through you and you receive your life through God. One cannot exist without the other.

Know that you are loved beyond measure, that you are treasured as a pearl beyond any price. You are a thought in the Mind of the Creator of the Universe. Is that not a magnificent notion?

You are never separated from the love of God but you can refuse to see the Truth about who and what you are. You have the power to draw the curtain of disbelief over the face of God within you but know this; God is still there waiting for you to awaken to your magnificence. You are given free will in order that you may choose your life, your way and your Light. This is not a dress rehearsal, choose wisely!

May God bless every moment in your life and may you become a conscious partner with God in the co-creation of Heaven on Earth right here and right now!

And So It Is!

God's Operating System

When I was a child I had a very difficult time understanding how God could allow all the bad things that happened to the Earth and her people. Why were thousands killed in an earthquake in Tokyo and hundreds dead of Hurricane Donna in the Gulf Coast? Doesn't God control all things, including the weather? Doesn't God care about what happens to his children? Why doesn't he protect us and keep us from harm?


When I would ask a minister or my mother's Rabbi friend, I would get a version of the "God works in mysterious ways" answer. This did not satisfy me and I did not believe in a God who worked that way. I thought: "Why have a God at all, if He is not going to take care of us?"


Now this bothered me because I remembered being healed of cerebral palsy through the power of Spiritual Mind Treatment (affirmative prayer) by my dear Mother who would not accept a crippled life in an institution for her baby boy. If she could do that, using God's power of prayer, then God must exist! Something just did not add up for me.


There must be a truth that I had not yet learned. Indeed, there was! My entire concept of God and how God operated was 180 degrees wrong! God is NOT a parent - God is a Creator and in this fact lies the entire error of our thinking. We are not God's children, we are God's Creations. You may ask, what is the difference? Well, If I am a writer and I create a novel I care not one bit who reads it or whether they are good or evil. I just care that they read my book. It is my creation and I care about it but I do not become involved in its distribution, sale or what happens to it after the sale. God creates us but allows us the gift of free choice - to create the life we can believe in and accept. Whether we know how the Law works, we create our lives according to God's Law - there is no other way to create anything. The trick is to learn to use the Law to consciously create our life the way we want it to be. We can stop being a passenger in the back seat of our lives and learn to drive the car! Do not think that we are alone and without help!

Now this does not mean that God is dead to us and is unavailable for help and direction. God is always available, never closes and is always ready to assist us in any way possible. How God does this is the key question. God does not meddle, or micro manage our lives. God uses the operating system of the entire Universe to empower us, to direct us and to support us. This operating system is the Law. God operates by scientific principle. God operates the same way each time, is predictable, and even handed. This fact is the greatest gift God could possibly give us.

God is not a human and is therefore not subject to human frailties such as favoritism, caprice or bad temper. God is a Spirit, the creative intelligence of the Universe; the author of the big bang, the designer of evolution, the engineer who designed the entire cosmos and everything in it.

God invented science, man just discovered it! God invented electricity - the universal power source of all creation, man just discovered it! God is the architect of the Universe and of everything that is in it. As a scientist, God has instituted immutable laws on both the physical and spiritual planes of existence. They always operate, they are totally dependable, they are totally impersonal - they work the same for the saint and the sinner.

We all know some of the laws of the physical world such as gravity; the law that states that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, the laws of thermodynamics and many others. These laws must be unchangeable and they must work every time for every one or else the entire planet would fly to pieces and all life would cease to exist. We can depend on gravity to hold us down upon this planet spinning dizzily through the heavens at 18,000 miles per hour.

So too we can depend on the spiritual laws that God has ordained for us to use in creating and managing our personal reality. Here are just a few: The law of cause and effect. For every thing that appears in our life (an effect), there is a cause. That effect can only be changed or eliminated at the level of the cause; fooling around with the effect cures nothing. This is the basic law of the Universe!

We see this effect fiddling every day in our culture. Doctors often fiddle with symptoms or the effects of illness but rarely cure the dis-ease. Why? Because they never address the cause of the disease. They look only at the physical world for the cause and the cause is always mental and spiritual. The mind and spirit must become sick before the body can exhibit the sickness. One day, physicians will treat the mind and spirit first while containing the symptoms with medicine or surgery. At that point, we will have true healing. What about cancer - a disease that touches so many lives today.

Cancer is made more probable by certain lifestyle choices like smoking but it is caused by long term sadness, grief, anger or bitterness. We poison ourselves with our anger and hurt and then look for a physical cause. Cancer is the body turning upon itself. It does this at the mind's bidding - of itself it can do nothing. The spirit and mind must be transformed and healed before the body can be totally healed. All healing must take place at cause - never at effect. We rearrange the "deck chairs on the Titanic" when we work with the effects. The cause was the hole in the hull and any remedy that did not address the cause was doomed to fail in the life of the Titanic and in our lives.

My life's work is to empower people by teaching them how to consciously and deliberately use the Law to create the life they want and deserve. Why not drive the car and get out of the back seat of your life! More next week!

AND SO IT IS !