All the negative energy in the universe can be understood in terms of resistance.

In the field of electricity, the measure of resistance is an Ohm. One Ohm of resistance produces one volt and one amp, both a measure of the flow of electricity. That’s important, because it enables us to reduce and control the amount of electricity. Do you know what we use to reduce the flow of electricity? It's called a resister. If we were'nt able to control the flow of electricity, we would not be able to use it. It would fluctuate in unstable ways that would basically blow up or burn out anything we attempted to power with it.

We need precisely 110 volts of electricity for most household appliances, with a few using 220 volts. Electrical resisters, measured in Ohms, allows us to generate that constant, consistent flow. These resisters are called transformers, because they either step up or step down the flow of electricity to a desired amount. When electricity arrives at your house, it can be as much as 700,000 volts in the primary line on the pole. That’s enough to blow up your house. To reduce it to a manageable amount, a step-down transformer reduces that 700,000 volts to two 110 volts lines. That’s a big transformation, but necessary in order to make electricity usable.

The same is true with the energy of the universe.

The quality and usefulness of that energy can be understood in terms of resistance.

Remember my illustration about the flow of reality as a river of data? In that illustration the river was divided down to a small, manageable amount in order for to be able to handle and use it? Just like electricity, we do this through resistance. We are all our own little resisters, transforming the energy of the universe into small, manageable amounts. This is the process of negative transformation, because it reduces the flow of God to us for the sake of our own control.

There is no shame or judgement in this. It’s what we have to do to keep from drowning in that vast river of data. But we must understand, both how this process fractures reality, and how it separates us from the great, boundless love of God.

We talked about that effect in the last discussion in terms of self-referential boundaries of protection. The irony is that our separation from this flow of love produces the very dysfunction of trying to protect ourselves from the lack of that love in the world around us.

Our resistance to the infinite flow of God-energy in the universe becomes our greatest problem, which leads to all kinds of negativity. It's the armor we wear, both to shield us from the negative energy of others, and the infinite energy of God.

While this armor does reduce spiritual energy to a small trickle, it really doesn’t protect us from others negative energy. All we can really do is numb ourselves, so we don’t feel it so strongly. Our coping mechanisms for all the chaos in the world don’t reduce that chaos, they just disable our ability to feel it, which only adds to the chaos. Our ability to harm others unaware is part of the problem. It’s like a kind of empathic leprosy.

In order to come back to life, fully engaged in a self fully powered by God, we’re going to have to step back our resistance one Ohm at a time.

We might imagine that resistance is something that happens to us, from outside us. That stance can place our focus on everything happening around us, and what we need to do about it, instead of focusing on our inner life.

I have three young kids, who have little to no filters. They seem to express everything they feel, think, and experience. They have no resistance to their own flow of energy. In general, I love that about kids. You seldom have to guess what’s going on inside. But that can also create a toxic environment. It seems someone is always getting on someone else’s nerves, and someone is always screaming at someone for doing something they didn’t like. But adults are no different. We don’t feel things any less, we just learn ways to disguise or bottle such emotions. We can become quite sophisticated in how we manage and manipulate our own emotions, and those of others. But hiding is no better.

Can you imagine if we all acted like little kids, just blurting out everything we think and feel all the time. Civil society, it seems, is just our dysfunctional ability to hide from ourselves, and the true essence of energy inside us. We spend most of our lives trying to deny what is inside, instead of truly learning to deal with it, and see it transformed in positive ways.

When we are open to the flow of love, nothing else in the whole world can block it for us. This is the foundational truth of reality. No one can take us out of the flow of love except ourselves. As long as we are focused on everyone else as the source of our broken experience of love, we will never solve the great dilemma of that broken flow, for ourselves or any one else. The beautiful part of this truth is that there is nothing standing in our way to experiencing that flow, except ourselves.

As long as the problem is someone else, or somewhere else, then we are powerless to fix it. But we try. We can spend our whole lives trying to fix the world around us, and never see that the problem is in us. It’s frustrating and depressing to try and solve this problem in everyone else. It not only puts us in a place where we must attempt to control everyone else’s bad behavior, it actually feeds the negative energy of contention and violence at the root of this behavior, because me oppressing you with my “good” values is part of the problem, not the solution. But when we turn that effort towards ourselves, then things can change.

But this doesn’t mean we take the same approach of trying to force our good values on ourselves either. It means we must surrender that pursuit altogether. We cannot get into the flow through resistance. What we must do is learn to stop resisting altogether.

We create our negative experience in the world by resisting reality as it’s happening to us. We do this by trying to control, manipulate, guide, direct and create reality. Resistance comes from our unwillingness to accept that we cannot will anything into existence.

The world is moving all around us quite apart from us. We can choose to either get into the flow or resist it. We cannot choose what the flow is. Every time we choose to resist what is happening around us, we experience the negative flow of that resistance.

Start paying attention to your inner experience and see if this is not true. When you get upset, frustrated, angry, indignant, prideful, depressed, anxious, and fearful, can you see that it is not because something “wrong” has happened in the world, but because you are trying to push against something happening in the world. You are saying "no" to reality. You are trying to unmake or undo something that clearly will not allow for that. So, the result isn’t a reversal of what happened, or the aftereffects. The result is the dissidence of our push back against reality. All negativity comes from the schism created by our fracturing of reality inside ourselves. Reality itself is not altered. We are altering ourselves against reality, by operating as though we should be able to determine what happens. We are resisting reality. And this makes sense, when we are disconnected from the flow of reality as a God who orders all things for our good.

We must come to see that all negativity begins and ends in us. That is the first step. Then we must begin to release the resistance we have towards reality. We must admit our powerlessness over reality and see this kind of resistance as the source of our negative experience. As we step back from the action of resisting reality, we create the space within ourselves for God to begin to reveal Himself. This takes a step of faith.

Before we can see God move, we must cease from our movement. Before we can even begin to experience God's reality, we must stop trying to make reality for ourselves. It is the dance of surrender. As we step back from control, we create the space for God to step in.

Everything is ordered by love and for love. We just need different eyes to see it. But as we step into that space of surrendering our will, we can begin to see a larger vision of just how all this works. We begin to see that even our greatest suffering is part of a bigger plan, meant to draw us into the flow of God’s love, not the evidence that we are out of it. Suffering simply reveals our resistance. But as we begin to stop resisting, we will experience less and less suffering. It is this growing experience that gives evidence to the belief that God is there, really is good, and has designed the world to operate in the flow of Love.