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Margaret Paul, Ph.D.

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Believing in God vs. Knowing God

Posted: 07/18/11 01:05 PM ET

Are you ready to move beyond your belief in God -- or your belief that there is no God -- and learn to know God?

When I was growing up, none of my friends or relatives had a personal relationship with God. None of them knew God. My parents were atheists and didn't believe in God, and, while my religious grandmother (who lived with us) believed in God, she certainly didn't know God. Her God was a projection of whoever judged her as she was growing up.

Through the 43 years of my counseling career, I've worked with many religious people who believed in God, including ministers and gurus, but who had no personal relationship with God.

Believing in God and knowing God are two totally different experiences.

When bad things happen, belief can be shattered. I cannot tell you how often I've heard clients say to me, "How can I continue to believe that God is here for me when [a loved one died, lost a job, illness and so on] happened?" Or, "If there is a God, then how could He have let the [hurricane, earthquake, fire, rape, mugging and so on] happen?" Or, "If there is a God, how could he have allowed my father to sexually abuse me?"

For some reason, most people who believe in God but do not know God seem to think God is a "person" who should be able to stop bad things from happening. When you know God, then you know that God is spirit and is always here to help you manage the challenges of life but cannot stop those challenges.

When you know God, you have a direct experience of the love, power and wisdom that is God. You know that God is the creative intelligence of the universe and that it is impossible for God not to be here for you.

You cannot know God from your left-brain thinking mind, and you cannot know God when you are in your ego-wounded mind. Knowing God occurs naturally when your frequency is high, which happens when you are in the intention to learn about what is loving to yourself. You know God when your heart is open to learning about love and truth.

Since my parents were atheists and my grandmother's God was not at all compelling to me, I had to find my own way. Being a fairly practical person, I could not just "believe" in something that I could not see or touch. As a young child, I had a deep sense of inner knowing, but living with my parents and grandmother taught me to disconnect from this inner knowing. By my early 20s, anxious and depressed, I was desperate to know God.

Over the years of my spiritual search, I had momentary experiences of grace that encouraged me to keep searching for a way to have a direct and personal experience of God. It wasn't until Inner Bonding® was gifted by God to me and the co-creator of Inner Bonding, Dr. Erika Chopich, that I discovered how to experience direct, two-way conversations with God. I think I was fortunate that I bypassed belief in God and went directly into knowing God, because I didn't have false beliefs from any religion to overcome.

Knowing God is a huge comfort. Knowing that I am a co-creator with the creative force of the universe is deeply empowering. Knowing that God -- the creative intelligence of the universe -- is responsive to my thoughts and feelings is deeply motivating to me regarding keeping my thoughts and feelings on what is in my highest good and the highest good of all.

Are you ready to personally know God? You might want to take our free Inner Bonding eCourse to start this process. Your devoted Inner Bonding practice will eventually give you this experience. Of course your ego-wounded mind may come in at any moment to discount your knowing, but the more you listen to your spiritual guidance, the less power your wounded mind has to get you off track. It is deeply empowering to know that you are never alone!

 
 
 

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Are you ready to move beyond your belief in God -- or your belief that there is no God -- and learn to know God? When I was growing up, none of my friends or relatives had a personal relationship wit...
Are you ready to move beyond your belief in God -- or your belief that there is no God -- and learn to know God? When I was growing up, none of my friends or relatives had a personal relationship wit...
 
 
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HUFFPOST SUPER USER
galanos1
Reality & Life Is Less Then A Second Away
08:20 AM on 07/20/2011
{Part 2 of 4}
The second truth is technology, the conviction of false beauty, and the thesis on mystic god like need of appearance. The delusion of unparallel beauty. The fraudulent feeling from within humanity and the crystalizement of metamorphosis within the immediate space.
The scientific method is a logical destructive explosion. The truth of technology is a systematic crisis; it produces chaos on the knowledge and is problematic to life. And it has all the characteristics of a doomed seismic and melancholic reality.
Rarely produces rest, very rarely gives comfort, especially in our current days. For unknowing of the attractive that is the simple automatic use, it has produced the ugly, and the enslavement of unsteadiness into society.
Science has produced no steadiness at all, the truth of technology is absolute hyperactivity and anxiety of false positive truths
And we arrive at the third truth, religion.
Total chaos, thousands of religions, thousands of truths, a million idle gods.
Religion is the attempt by humans to solve of God with human insight.
We are not off coarse talking here about Christianity.
11:17 AM on 07/19/2011
I appreciate the main point of the article, that personal experience of divine is really what we're after vs. some mental apparition that is just theory. It needs to be said and hopefully there are those that this message relates to. I wonder if you could have given others a few tips on How to do this rather than indirectly point them to your website or how great your connection is. Seems rather self promotional.
---Comment on Unicorns....our communication of anything comes from shared experience. ask a blind person what the color blue is like... Some ideas might as well be complete fantasy (god) without a common element to bind people's understanding.
--- I will also suggest that while you may have contact with loving beings who are god like in their presence, that you are not really connecting with God. but I'm happy to argue the point.
--- lastly, gems of wisdom often fall on deaf ears and our greatest knowings that we treasure are no more than bird droppings to those who don't hear. They still need to be said.
05:16 PM on 07/20/2011
Dear Spirit Happy-You asked for tips on having a personal experience of the divine. Bizarrely, the way is to get out of the way. On the deepest level, we already have this experience but we have beliefs, formed by our early experiences, that keep us from having it consciously. This could be a belief that God does not actually care about us personally, or a belief that we have to be good enough (e.g., meditate long enough, be free of "sin", try hard enough, whatever), or that God is a scary, judgmental old man who could not possibly love imperfect us, or that we have to stop being ourselves and let God take us over, etc. The list is endless. Mine was that since I closed my heart growing up, I had failed some sort of test, that the test was that you got abused (in my case emotionally) and STILL kept your heart open. Of course that test came from my mother, not God, but I had to find that belief and see that the opposite was true, that who I really AM is a messenger of divine love. One interesting test of our belief system is to ask "If I were perfect, would God love me?" The experience of giving God joy by everything we do is one of connecting to the inner amazing light that was there all along by healing the beliefs that are in the way :-)
10:24 AM on 07/27/2011
Thanks for the responses Phyllis and Margaret, actually, I asked that question for others not for myself. To me thinking and applying meaning to things keeps us from knowing "god". emotion = illusion = blindness
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HUFFPOST BLOGGER
Margaret Paul
Author, co-creator of Inner Bonding®.
10:40 PM on 07/20/2011
The quickest way of connecting with your personal spiritual guidance is to move into a deep intent to learn about what is most loving to you and others. Spiritual love and wisdom exists at a higher frequency than we generally live at. Just because you can't see TV waves, doesn't mean they are not there. Likewise, you may not be able to see the energy of love and truth, but you can feel it or hear it when you are open to learning. Most people unconsciously choose the intent to protect against pain with some form of controlling behavior, which is what lowers frequency. When you open to learning about about love, you raise your frequency high enough to access the love and truth of Spirit.
09:24 PM on 07/18/2011
Are you ready to move beyond your belief that there are no unicorns -- and learn to know unicorns?
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HUFFPOST BLOGGER
Margaret Paul
Author, co-creator of Inner Bonding®.
07:44 AM on 07/19/2011
Why would you compare unicorns with the energy of love and truth that we live in? What do unicorns have to do with the energy that Einstein often referred to, that Edison often referred to? You have only to look at the beauty of a flower or the miracle of a baby to know that there is something beyond our limited minds. If your belief system is limited to what you can see, rather than extending it to what you can feel, then why would you bother reading this article?
08:34 AM on 07/19/2011
We have words for energy and love and truth: energy and love and truth. Why call it "God"?

"What do unicorns have to do with the energy that Einstein often referred to, that Edison often referred to?"

About as much as "God". What do Einstein and Edison have to do with it?

"You have only to look at the beauty of a flower or the miracle of a baby to know that there is something beyond our limited minds"

What, like evolution for instance?

"why would you bother reading this article?"

Why did you bother posting it in the religion section when you've repeatedly claimed you're not religious but "spiritual"?
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whirlpool
founder walnut tree congregation
01:35 PM on 07/18/2011
Is it possible to experience god while not believing in god? What if god is simply a numinous dimension in nature or a field of some sort and not personal or a being at all--how does that change the experience of god?
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HUFFPOST BLOGGER
Margaret Paul
Author, co-creator of Inner Bonding®.
07:38 AM on 07/19/2011
My experience is that God is a field of intelligence, love, and truth - not a being at all. I work with people all the time who have no belief in God, yet learn to access the love and truth that is available to them. They may not refer to this love and truth as God - they may refer to it as their guidance or their higher self. As they open to learning about love and truth, they eventually come to accept that there is a personal source of guidance, and they know that they are never alone. So, the answer is yes - you can experience God while not believing in God.
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whirlpool
founder walnut tree congregation
08:20 AM on 07/19/2011
Very nice answer. Thanks.