by Tom Laughlin

Men and women cover the globe scouring everywhere they can to find God. People everywhere hunger for a personal experience of God, the “Treasure Impossible to Attain.”
  Sadly few are lucky enough to learn that the Living God is right under their nose, right inside of them, hidden in what at first appears despicable and repulsive, our faults and defects.
  The personal experience of God – the real Living God, not a poetic, lovely abstract of God -- is to be found in our dark side, our shadow, starting with our Personal Negative Shadow, all of our faults, defects, weaknesses, and deficiencies.
  The fact that every human being is created with a dark side that one is ashamed of and is afraid will be found out, is not an accident, not a flaw of nature, an aberation, but was deliberately created by an all wise nature, All Mighty God, for a specific purpose.
  For it is only by our first becoming conscious of our shadow, especially our most heinous faults and weaknesses, and redeeming them, i.e., transforming them into the positive strength, virtue, talent, or ability standing behind the fault, that we develop the Veiled Deity in our soul, God hidden in our unconscious.
  Using our intellect to understand not only that we have a shadow, but why we have it, and to further learn and then understand all the components of our shadow, starting with our Personal Negative Shadow, is the indispensable and only way to find the real God. “No one comes to the father except through me,” said Christ crucified, and no one comes to God except through the Shadow, and the crucifixion and humiliation an individual feels when the ego – like Christ -- discovers it is not as wonderful and all powerfuls as it wanted to believe it was, and wanted other people to believe it was, but is crucified by the discovery of this whole inferior destructive side of the personality.
  Human intellect alone cannot provide the understanding needed for an individual to first discover one’s shadow, and then have the courage to take responsibility for it, and the wisdom needed to transform it, which is why the Superior Intelligence of God joins the individual’s human intellect in discovering the Shadow and redeeming it. Without the grace and light of God, the individual alone could not transform this natural work of art, could not transform the Shadow and the chaos it creates, into the celestial nature of the “quintessence,” the life giving essence of Heaven, i.e., into the Greater Personality lying dormant in the unconscious, which is nothing less than the Divine Personality of God Himself.
  God is potentially contained in this chaos which is a compilation of mass confusion in our daily life created by all of our complexes rolled into one unconscious controlling force in our life, and the only way that we can personally experience God and incarnate God into our human life is by diligently – daily – applying our mind to discovering, understanding, and transforming all the negative complexes in our shadow so that the Living Thing hidden in our soul, God, can become a Living Reality in our life.
  Only by facing and transforming one’s shadow, one’s most despised part of the personality, can one find God and personally experience God.
  (This meditation was printed under both Meditation and God/Religion and Spirituality.)