Children are not born with theology motivating their thoughts and behavior.  They are born with a predominantly clean slate as far as cultural and religious conditioning goes,  They have a foundation of human genetics and our history as human beings advising their biology and instinctual perspectives, but the majority of the conscious teaching comes first from mother, then dad, and the rest of the family group.

There have been stories of children just learning to talk who have reported of having internal conversations with God, or Jesus, depending on the religious bias of the family.

Does this prove the existence of God?

Well, hardly, but it sure proves the existence of a strong family conditioning being impressed upon the receptive and open baby’s developing consciousness.  At that early age youngsters are quite susceptible to magical thinking and to  having disembodied voices speak to them and for them to have imaginary friends, or real dolls that they carry on complete conversations with.  This is the power of the word in an innocent, developing mind.  Without enough experience, context, a d mature intelligent perspective, we can be captured by the illusions that words can create.

I intuited quite early that words have access to imagination and knowledge built in, and can extend far beyond the word, or sequence of words, spoken.  As an adult I learned that each individual word is a hologram to the whole of our human language, just like each human being is a hologram to the whole of humanity. Looking back now, I have seen the incredible capacity of the human mind to not only represent the real world with words and internal imagery but to also create false realities while remaining utterly convinced of their truth even in the face of non-supporting facts.

I can remember as a young boy around four years of age having a doll named Percy who spoke with me at times. It even spoke to me once over the telephone. Percy was to me what God was to other innocent children, a reassuring voice that would speak to me and remind me that I had value. I almost had my sister convinced of it, as well, and she was six years old at the time.

Illusions can take the whole mind hostage if not recognized and reined in early. In some of the early times of my life, before my addictive cycles, I carried with me a sense of isolation, depression, and a strong feeling of generalized anxiety. From 1971 through 1987, as a practicing alcoholic and drug addict, and mentally ill human being, I lost most of my remaining freedom of choice. I belonged to the death wish core group of Americans who lived lives of desperation,  addiction, suicidal ideation, and mental illness. We all sought an early death, either by our own hands, through our addictions, or by the poor health and relationship decisions that we continued to make. Many of us could see the insanity of those still claiming for themselves good mental health, while the choices of those supposedly healthy people of the world continued to bring the promise of destruction to our planet Earth. While we contemplated our end, we witnessed a world in its collective march toward suicide. The story of Armageddon, as both an individual and as a collective event, becomes very real to those trapped by their illusions of powerlessness, helplessness, and despair.

We are the loosely knit tribe most susceptible to the oppression by others, and the repression of ourselves. We are the prime candidates for political and religious propaganda. We may seek a new tribe that gives us a sense of safety and purpose, even if our anticipated benefits come at the expense of other innocent people or groups. We have become limited caricatures of ourselves, as we continue to play to stereotypes that those in power have thrust upon us. We do not have the emotional and spiritual intelligence to discern what is true and what is false about ourselves. The stories that continue to be told to us keep us connected with an extremely limited view of our people, all the while keeping us disconnected from our true natures and more realistic stories of ourselves.

If you tell a lie often enough, you are prone to start to believe it yourself. All of the internal defense mechanisms engage to support the story and maintain the lie’s existence and the corruption that living a lie creates. This is how lies can become part of our nature. Be careful out there, the world and our minds can be a dangerous place. Unlike television sitcoms, where the programs have the potential to resolve the contrived issues before the ending of the episode, life carries our issues for prolonged periods, sometimes whole lifetimes, if we do not find a way to dislodge our lies and our stories of disease and dysfunction from the cells of our bodies and our consciousness.

There is no freedom to be found, if we do not first see that we are trapped. Pay attention to all of our stories, many of which have created quite a mess to sort through. Constantly question reality, search for available facts, and learn not to unconsciously accept statements from authority figures. Many times reality is only someone else’s opinion about what is, so a cautious, probing mind is required to maintain or re-establish personal integrity, healing, sanity, and reason.

If you were a real “GOD”, and your life was characterized by ultimate self-awareness, would you not want to create everything that is in your image as the best possible manifestation that it could possibly be?

And, if you were the creation of this “ultimate creation energy”, would you not want to aspire to be just like your “parents”?

So to look at young children as proof that God is real would be magical thinking, as well.

What do you see when you glance into the mirror?

A body?

A mind?

A projection of your woundedness, or a reflection shaped by the judgments you carry?

Or do you glimpse something far deeper, the essence of who you truly are?

This question, on the surface, may seem simple—but its depths reach into psychology, neuroscience, and our shared spiritual experience. Projection, a concept often discussed as a psychological defense mechanism, extends beyond our interpersonal conflicts. It manifests in families, communities, religions, and even nations.

“All that you see is yourself.”

These words reflect an ancient truth, one that challenges our surface understanding of perception and the judgments we carry. Every reaction to another person, every assessment of what is “good” or “evil,” holds up a mirror reflecting our unexamined selves. What we fear most, the “enemy” we see in others, often turns out to be the unrecognized shadow of our own being.

Perception originates within each of us in a unique creative form. Yet, what you see “out there” is deeply intertwined with the narratives and associations you’ve built “in here.” Our inner world serves as a lens, shaping how we perceive reality. We have been assembling an internal model of reality since we were quite young, according to Piaget, and this is our unique creation and the glasses we must look through. Without self-awareness, this lens becomes clouded, chaining us to patterns of fear, projection, and misunderstanding.

Piaget’s theory of cognitive development provides insight into how early in life this process begins. He argued that children construct their internal models of the world stage by stage, using sensory experiences and interactions to assemble frameworks for understanding their environment. These models are not passive recordings of the external world, but active and creative interpretations that evolve into the schemas we carry as adults. It is through these schemas that we approach new experiences, often interpreting them through assumptions rooted in our earliest perceptions.

Furthermore, Piaget highlighted that as we grow, equilibrium between assimilation (integrating new information into existing schemas) and accommodation (altering schemas to incorporate new information) becomes essential. Without this balance, our internal lens can remain fixed, distorting our perspective of the world. For instance, a child who grows up associating discipline with rejection might carry this unresolved narrative into adulthood, projecting fears of abandonment onto authority figures or relationships. To recalibrate this lens, a process of both cognitive and emotional self-reflection is necessary.

God is this vast space within our minds, or within consciousness itself, that is not burdened with the illusion of duality.  All that God ” sees” is itself, for otherwise God would no longer be infinite, but just a fragment, which makes the proposition that an infinite God exists untenable,  if God exists it is infinite,  omnipresent, omniscient, and omnipotent.  That means whereever You and I are, God is.  God is everywhere, or God is nowhere, that is the decision that must be made by any mind contemplating the existence of God.  If God is everywhere, it would behoove me to understand this presence and its laws, so that I can maximize my potential as a spiritual being having a human experience.

Yes, in this perspective, we are all God, but still with training wheels on.

The other perspectives are a spectrum from disbelief to not committing to knowing, or agnosticism.  These “non-believers”, or, more accurately, unconscious practitioners of God consciousness, from the God conscious perspective, live predominantly by and through the laws of the family and culture they live within, unless they are anti-social creatures and/or suffering from grave mental disturbance.

So the question becomes:

How does the sincere searcher find and live through God consciousness?

If you want to be a monk, theologian or minister, you go to school for many years.  You are taught by those who already have sufficient knowledge of these subjects to give them cultural credibility.  The teachings you receive should give you sufficient educational foundation and social credibility that you might feel competent enough to get over the feeling that you are still an imposter, and not really competent in your own heart, regardless of what the church elders, the Papacy, or your peers might tell you.  Remember, they are all as limited as you are, while they live in their educated, conditioned minds.  They are all tied yo the whipping posts of their conditioned minds.

And the conditioned mind is not where God thrives.

The best we can hope for is that the education we have received about God and truth is not so pervasive and all-encompassing that it drowns out the real experience of God,

Joel Goldsmith, a spiritual healer of the Jesus as healer/miracle worker lineage, has taught that to find God, we must first practice the presence of God. There are three primary considerations.

  1. Though God is omnipresent, God’s thoughts, if there are such things, are not present in the mind of man, whose historical belief is that they are separated from God through sin or other twists of religious reasoning. So every day, every moment possible it is important to remember that wherever you are, God is.

  2. Human knowing is so limited and incomplete, yet most of us act as though we know what we are talking about.  Yet if God is omniscient, why don’t we take a pause each time we face something new, and rather than project our so-called knowns upon the mystery, perhaps God, or the pause, can reveal to us what it really is.

3.If God is omnipotent, whenever we experience our powerlessness as human beings, rather than attacking that which threatens us, or resigning ourselves to an unfavorable or self-destructive outcome, let us be quiet, and open up a channel where God’s infinite power can shine through.

After we practice the presence of God for enough time, we become God conscious, and the miracle of life is much more likely to make itself evident in our life, and all of life


Bruce Paullin

Born in 1955, married in 1994 to Sharon White