The Instruction Manual for Receiving God
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About this ebook
What would it feel like if you realized that from the very beginning, you were designed to look for, to find, and to receive God? That you were designed to awaken to reality? How would it feel to know that this would definitely happen in your lifetime, because you were made to accomplish this very thing?
Rather than encouraging us to seek God, Jason Shulman believes we need only make ourselves available to receive God, who is always present and awaiting us. In The Instruction Manual for Receiving God, you will encounter the presence of God through 108 seed passages —profound and insightful statements that are meant to unlock your mind and open your heart. Shulman offers generous reflection of each seed passage, illuminating the depth and meaning of its precious message.
Reading this book is like entering a personal sanctuary where you will:
- Experience complete liberation—the act of being truly human
- Feel the constant rain of compassion washing over your spiritual life and receive the sacred blessings that are endlessly offered by reality itself
- Learn practical ways to connect to the Divine each and every day
Here, Jason Shulman offers contemplations that access the reality of God, who is always knocking at the door of our hearts, and whose voice is always speaking. Whether read cover-to-cover or opened to a random verse for inspiration, The Instruction Manual for Receiving God is a book readers of all faiths will cherish and return to time and again.
Jason Shulman
Jason Shulman is one of the world's leading teachers of personal healing and spiritual awakening, a rare combination of a modern Kabbalist who has also received Buddhist Dharma transmission. He is the founder of A Society of Souls, a school based in New Jersey that is dedicated to awakening the human spirit. He is also the author of Kabbalistic Healing: A Path to an Awakened Soul and numerous monographs.
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The Instruction Manual for Receiving God - Jason Shulman
life
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The words in this book were first spoken—in a different form—to my students, and it is to them that I first direct my gratitude. Our spiritual lives together, searching for and finding Reality and God, are the truest contents of this book.
I thank my wife, teacher, and companion, Arlene, who came up with the idea for this book.
My thanks also go to people who are no longer with us: Rebbe Nachman of Breslov, Dogen Zenji, Ramakrishna, Ramana Maharshi, and the many others who have been an inspiration to me and have helped me explore all the dark and light places of life. I thank Norman Trager for his steadfast help and enlightening insight, and Terry Horwitz, who has given me first-hand knowledge of the Divine Mother. I am also grateful to the authors of the Prajnaparamita Sutra, the Flower Ornament Scripture, the Zohar, and all the other sacred texts that have proved to be diligent and precise guides to seeing the truth of existence.
My thanks to Nancy Yeilding for her sensitive editing of my text, and to Nancy Pollock, Joan Brady, Alex Gordon-Brander, Tom Schneider, and the Reverend Carol Bamesberger for their support and efforts to get this text to the public.
My additional thanks go to the staff at Sounds True: Tami Simon, Kelly Notaras, Karen Polaski, Haven Iverson, Beverly Yates, and all the others who are dedicated to an openhearted approach to publishing.
Finally, I thank the rolling hills of New Jersey, the pitch pine forests of Truro, and the wonderful town of Provincetown, Massachusetts, all of which always sound a call to return to my humanity.
INTRODUCTION
There are many books that tell us how to find God. But the truth is that God is not lost or hiding. In fact, it is the actual, continuous, omnipresence of God that is so hard for the human mind to fathom.
We always look in the wrong direction: toward someplace else, toward something mysterious and far away. We try to recapture something that we believe we had years ago in childhood or something that we read about in spiritual books. We try to improve our hunting skills so that we can capture an elusive God, a God who does not want to be found.
But God is not missing or elusive or invisible. It is we who need to make ourselves ready to receive God, who is always knocking at the door of our hearts, whose Voice is always speaking, whose Heart makes our hearts beat, and whose Breath is the world.
Receive God.
We are the only thing that stands in the way of this ultimate action, this greatest desire, this end point that is also our beginning.
Why do we stand in the way? What you will find on the pages of this book is an exploration of the trail of our resistance to seeing things as they are, which includes the fact that God is always present and accessible to us. It is a step-by-step, sequenced walk through the territory of the human heart, with its great longings and its great limitations. It seeks to show how these limitations—through the grace of God—are always less than the power of the Truth itself. God, Jesus, Amida Buddha, Allah, enlightenment—whatever we call this Calling that calls to us from within our very body and from the world outside ourselves as well, always stands at the crossroads of every moment of life and death, offering us the answers to the great puzzle of being alive.
The Instruction Manual for Receiving God is for everyone. You can be Jewish or Christian, Muslim or Buddhist. You can even be an agnostic or an atheist, because the proof of the holiness of life is in the day-to-day encounters we all have with what is now, what went before, and what will be. It doesn’t matter what we call this holiness or what we consider its source to be. It is a felt and real thing.
This book is for all humans who want to become more human. It is for all beings who want to better understand the intrinsic happiness that existence itself offers. To find this intrinsic happiness, we must understand what seems to stand in the way.
Scientists now know that each snowflake is actually a combination of several ice crystals, each formed around a tiny particle of soil. Without their microscopic bits of earth, these celestial creations could not come raining down on us to cover the landscape in quiet and white.
The human ego is like that particle of earth, a condensation of the particular within the great expanse of the universe. It is what the beauty of this world is made from. Without it, the entire journey from separateness to oneness would not be possible. The dynamics of human life would disappear. Seeing and being seen would never arise. Brokenness and healing would never come into being.
The origin of suffering is the existence of the ego, as Buddha said. But this statement is often misunderstood to mean that the ego needs to be eliminated, transcended, or in some way—spiritually or not—discarded. Nothing could be further from the truth.
To be separate, to have a consciousness that rides in a body that begins to grow toward death from the moment it is born—and to know that this is true—is the beginning of the existential suffering all beings share. That—along with poverty, earthquakes, tsunamis, illness, and other tribulations—is part of what it means to be human. Buddha knew this, and he did not mean to say that the disappearance of the ego would cure these troubles.
However, along with these difficulties, we tend to elaborate and improvise. In an effort to secure a completely safe future for ourselves—an impossibility, of course—we actually create additional suffering as we try to stop the world in its tracks, sensing the end of our separate existence at the end of the line.
The human ego—our sense of separateness—is not negative in and of itself. The cause of the additional suffering we all are prey to is the unhealthy ego, the ego that only knows separateness and that tries to maintain this separateness in the face of a much subtler truth.
However, when the sense of a separate self is understood for what it truly is—God’s expression of beauty and the vehicle for the journey home—even the existential suffering becomes more bearable.
This book does not encourage false forays into imaginary worlds where there is no suffering of any sort, where some magical notion of spirit has whitewashed reality into a palatable dollop. Instead, the words in this book seek to awaken you to the truth of God, that perspective and level of integration that allow you to be separate and one with the universe at the same time. It seeks to put life into perspective and to make our lives something worth