Today's Meditation:

Why do we get so attached to the things that have been passed down to us from generation to generation over the course of many, many years?  Why do we so often see the words of some guy who wrote 1,000 years ago as somehow more valid than our own thoughts?  If God is everywhere and omniscient, as most of us believe, no one in the history of the world has been any closer to God than you are right now.  If that's the case, trust yourself!  Trust your thoughts and your urges and your ideas, for you are a wonderful creation who is living right here, right now, just like the rest of us.

It's a shame that we don't give ourselves more credit, and that we stay tied to the thoughts and beliefs of people who came before us.  When we do so, it keeps us from exploring our own inspiration in order to develop our own beliefs that we can live by.  And any time we try to live by someone else's beliefs about what our lives should be like, we do ourselves a great disservice; we keep ourselves from growing and learning from our own mistakes and successes.

We've been given the gift of a great deal of history that we can learn from, but that history should help us to develop ourselves, not keep us chained to the beliefs and thoughts of people who didn't have the advantage of many years of the development of newer thoughts.  Athletes improve over the years because they learn from those who came before them and they add their own training and performance techniques to what was there already.  An athlete who doesn't do so stays at the same level always, rather stagnant, never progressing.

Our spirits call us to grow and to listen and to trust ourselves and our God, whatever we perceive God to be.  No one ever has been closer to God than we are, right here, right now.

Questions to ponder:

1.  What sorts of things might make you think you're further
away from God than other people might be?

2.  How would feeling closer to God affect your life?

3.  When God speaks to you, do you listen,
or do you filter it through the beliefs of others?

For further thought:

Today's Quotation:

Some have narrowed their minds,
and so fettered them with the chains of antiquity
that not only do they refuse to speak save as the ancients spake,
but they refuse to think save as the ancients thought.
God speaks to us, too, and the best thoughts
are those now being vouchsafed to us.
We will excel the ancients!

Savonarola