You are made in the image and likeness of God. Now this you have always understood, for
this, too, you have been taught. Yet you are mistaken about what My image and likeness is.
Thus have you been mistaken about what your image and likeness can be.
You imagine that I am a God who has needs—among them, the need to have you love Me.
(Now, some of your churches have sought to describe this as not having a need for your
love, but merely a desire for it. It is simply, they say, My desire that you love Me, but I will
never force you to. Yet is a “desire” not a “need” if I am willing to torture you for all eternity if I
don’t get it? What kind of a desire is that?)
And so, being made in My image and likeness, you have called it normal to experience the
same kind of desire. Thus have you created your fatal attractions.
But now I am telling you that I have no needs. All that I am within My Self is all that I require
in order to express all that I am outside of My Self. This is the true nature of God. This is the
image and likeness in which you are made.
Do you understand the wonder of that? Do you see its implications?
You, too, are without needs. There is nothing that you need in order to be perfectly happy.
You only think that there is. Your deepest, most perfect happiness will be found within, and
once you find it, nothing exterior to your Self can match it, nor can anything destroy it.
Oh, boy, the old happiness is within sermon. Excuse me, but how come I don’t experience
that?
Because you do not seek to. You seek to experience the grandest part of your Self outside of
your Self. You seek to experience Who You Are through others, rather than allowing others
to experience Who They Are through you.
What did You say? Would You say that again?
I said, you seek to experience Who You Are through others, rather than allowing others to
experience Who They Are through you.
That may be the most important thing You ever said to me.
It is a fairly intuitive statement.
What does that mean? I don’t know what that means.
Many of life’s most important statements are intuitive. You know that they are true before you
know why or how. They come from a deeper understanding that transcends evidence and
proof and logic and reason and all those tools with which you try to determine whether
something is true or not—and thus, whether it is important. Sometimes you know something
is important just from the ring of it. It has the “ring of truth.”
All my life I have believed what others have said about me. I have changed my behaviors,
altered who I am, in order to change what others were saying about me, and change what
they were telling me about myself. I was literally experiencing myself through others, just as
You’ve said.