Posted: 4/8/2014 | Spiritual Growth	Comments
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In the beginning of the Ten Commandments, God first says to Moses: "I am the Lord thy God," and then says, "Have no other Gods before me."

This First Commandment has great meaning from many perspectives.

To begin with, God is announcing, I AM the One.

From one perspective, the announcement and First Commandment refer to knowing that from a certain level of consciousness, all is one. “I AM,” YHVH. There is no other God but Oneness. All of life is whole and inseparable.

“Have no other Gods before me,” can have several meanings. From the perspective of the One, there is no other “God” to have but the “I AM.”

From another perspective, “Have no other Gods before me,” refers to not using things, addictions, or other people to distract us or take our attention away from God and the Wholeness that is ever-present. People can misguidedly take a small part of life as the totality of life. We want to be mindful that we’re not putting anything between us and God. Which could be many things—goals, love, approval, people, hard and soft addictions, or anything else that blocks our knowing that we are held in the deepest sense by the ever-present God, Oneness, Wholeness. We don’t want to get confused and make the myriad of life’s distractions more important than Reality, the Supreme Being, or Beingness. For then we feel dissatisfied, lost, empty, always searching for that which is right here.

God is both personal and impersonal. We can have a relationship with both, for both are aspects of the same Beingness. We, too, are simultaneously an individual and part of the One. So our relationship with God, and all others, will reflect that.

In my book, Your Ultimate Life Plan, I speak of the view of Wholeness, or God, from the perspective of The Four Dimensions of Consciousness. From each Dimension, God will be experienced differently. In the first dimension, the Action-Physical Dimension, it feels as if God is out there, somewhere, very far away, hidden, and not where you are. In the second dimension, the Formation-Emotional Dimension, you experience God as out there, but also inside of you, as the realization dawns that we’re all made of “God stuff.” From the third dimension’s point of view, the Creation-Mental Dimension, we are creating something from nothing and are at the threshold of all that is manifest and un-manifest. From the fourth dimension, the Emanation-Spiritual Dimension, there is nowhere that God is not. It is the reconciliation of opposites. From this deeper interpretation, the well-known Jewish prayer, the Shema, embraces unified conscious-ness and teaches the wholeness of life: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One.” God and this universe are one, and we are an integral part of this Wholeness.

What does the First Commandment mean to you? Your comments make a difference for us all.

photo credit Janaka Dharmasena via FreeDigitalPhotos.net