Practical Principle

I am the least religious minister that you will ever find.


While that is as bold a statement as it is impossible to prove, I believe it to be true. 


I am in no way anti-religion. As I have previously shared, I grew up in a religious home that I now know had no spirituality. I state that from a factual place with no judgment behind it. The Evangelical church provided more for me than I could possibly include in one blog post. While many see Christianity as a path to salvation, it was not the theology that saved me. It was the community, the connections, and the frequent reason to be out of the house. 


I am not saying that I had no religious experience in my church of origin. I had an underlying movement of energy that I knew was greater than the theology. Even in my youth, I did not mistake the map for the destination. A foundation was being built. It is an important part of my current spirituality. I am forever grateful. I needed the theology to transcend it. It was and is archetypal. It is a series of patterns that I continue to dance with. No enemies here. No anti-anything. The church was a home when I badly needed a home.


As a young adult, I was led to a radically different thought system that was initially harder to grasp than the one year of Greek I took in college. The thought system was metaphysical, symbolic, metaphorical. While I was baffled, I was also mesmerized and irresistibly drawn to the ideas, concepts, and Principles. They were seductive. I could not get enough of these strange teachings. I knew that I had found a new home. Not necessarily in a congregation or church. It was the Truth that felt like home. It carried an unmistakable resonance that I knew I was born to learn, embody, actualize, and teach.


I began attending a Unity congregation in New York City. I went every Sunday. I began also going to weekday classes. I read literature voraciously. I could not get enough. 


One day I got up in the morning and I felt as if a switch had been flipped within my mind and consciousness. I began to see life through a metaphysical lens. I began to sense the bigger picture, the broader perspective in my own life and in the world. It was a new prescription. A new sense of “God” and of myself. This metaphysical lens did not deaden me or dumb down my emotions. It heightened my awareness. It made me more present to what was happening in and around me. I felt more alive. More connected. More engaged. More consciously contributing by how I was relating.


This was a quantum leap in consciousness. It felt like something greater was happening within me, almost in spite of me. I could feel a movement that was like an inner GPS. It was always available and active. Always. I at times became willful and would ignore it. Yet I knew it was always there. It guided me perfectly, even when I momentarily doubted it. 


I began to recognize it as Spiritual Principle being made practical within me. 


My life and how I live it has never been the same. 


What most people think of as an objective God to get to I feel as a living Allness to embody and actualize. This Allness is Law and It is Love. It is Intelligence and It is Principle. It is an orchestration of Divine Order. It is ultimately What we are as Essence beings in human form. It is dynamic. It creates from center to circumference. It is, in theological language, the Word made flesh. It is Spirit becoming form. 


Spiritual Law and Principle do not care about our opinions of it. It operates flawlessly via our thoughts, feelings, words, and beliefs. It is the active Allness within us doing what it does. Principle is always Principle. Law is always Law. As we learn to pray this Principle-Law into being it becomes the prayer made manifest. We do not need to pray for something that somehow isn’t. We are invited to pray what in Essence already is. As we do, Principle, Law, Divine Order brings the prayer into manifestation. It does this without effort or force. Our task is to pray and then to not interfere with the Cosmic order of how Principle naturally unfolds. 


So, this least-ever religious minister is suggesting to you, dear reader, that you stop praying for something you think is missing. Stop casting your eyes into some far-off heaven in hopes of convincing an up their God to grant you what you seem to lack. There is nothing lacking in All consciousness. Cease praying for, and amplify praying the Thing Itself. Pray the Principle in order to make it practical. 


From my perspective, we have too much theology and too little application. We do not need more information. We need more integration. We have within us the Power to change our consciousness and so to change the world. 


The Allness is within us for we are within It. Principle is part of our nature, as is Law. These work ceaselessly and relentlessly. It is never that they are not working. Our troubles come from misusing them. We misuse Law by not using it with Love. Love propelled by Law transforms everything. That is Principle then made practical. And a belief in religion is truly optional as Law becomes Love as me. 

Rev. Taylor E. Stevens • May 1, 2025

User-Friendly God

By Rev. Taylor E. Stevens • March 9, 2025
I did not grow up with a user-friendly God. If you have read my two previous blog posts, you will know I have taken on the impossible task of putting into words what is far beyond words. It is the primary challenge of what I have done for the past thirty years. I use words, concepts, and images to describe the indescribable. I paint word pictures of what ultimately cannot be seen. I try to energetically convey what is essential and yet invisible. As challenging as it is it is also the dynamic that continues to deepen and to open me to a more mature and engaging spiritual life. I am grateful for the challenge regardless of how frustrating it can sometimes feel. It is within and from the Essential that I live and so express. I spend the largest part of my days opening to creative ways in which to share what I find so alluring and transformative. I grew up in a religious home with almost no spirituality. I was taught about an up and out God that had little felt relevance to my actual experience. It was conceptual without being personal. This religion gave me the impression that something or someone was always watching and judging me as less than good enough. I could never measure up. I was told that this super God loved me, yet I was also taught of a cruel and murderous God who savagely tormented “his” creations. I could not reconcile theology with a whispering of something bigger and greater in my heart. I felt as if I were being lied to. That these fear-based fables were far from the truth that I sensed in my heart and throughout creation. I suspected that it was ignorance that was being preached from the pulpit. An ignorance that wasn’t inherently evil but that carried devastating consequences. As I have said before I felt like the God being portrayed had a personality disorder. Confusion filled me as I felt drawn to and yet repelled away from this “God” of the church. The crosses that filled every space were accusatory. I shuttered at every glance. I took it personally, even as a young child. That “old rugged cross” was indeed an emblem of suffering and shame. I did not have a user-friendly God. And so, I again seek to capture with words my experience of going from what I described above to what I live in now. It was not an easy or comfortable journey. It was arduous. It was a rumble. I gave up many times, only to be drawn back into my own internal fray. It was a burning passion that I grew to know as my primary purpose. I discovered I was here to go from the torment of theology to the triumph of a transcendent spirituality. While there remain occasional wafts of the old thought system, I can honestly say that a delivery has occurred. A personal salvation. A quantum leap in consciousness. In simplistic terms: I have grown up. I have grown up experientially from a theological God to a reality I choose to call ALL. That was the topic of my first blog post. From God to ALL has been the most transformative experience of my lifetime. It has been an internal quantum leap that has changed everything. For me there is no God above except that is everywhere present. It is ALL of creation, which includes me. That was the topic of my second blog. To simply those two missives: ALL Is. I Am. I am a living expression of Allness, here to be the All in All. Everything that ALL is, I am. All is my Essence. It is what I am at the deepest level of my being. All is always becoming within and as me. I am evolving up and forward as All. It is my most authentic why. I think of it and feel it as an “All Call.” Why I am is to answer the All Call within me. That is my purpose. And my purpose is empowered by All. And so, once again I seek to capture in words what is so ethereal, contextual, ephemeral and yet is moving within me in very real ways. It is All Power made personal in my inner experience. It is Infinite, and yet intimate. It is “Almighty,” and yet already within my heart as every beat. Every breath. An image that feels vital and alive for me is that I am a personal wave in the Sea of All. Everything that is the Sea is also in the wave. In my fascination with myself as a wave I forget I am part of the Sea. I identify with being a wave. I look at other waves, seeing them as separate as I see myself. I experientially crash into them, losing touch with the Allness that is ever present in every wave. Stormy or still, the Sea will always be the Sea. When this lifetime of being a wave ends I will resolve back into my natural state of “Sea-ness.” Me-ness is in fact Sea-ness. All is. I Am. Sea is. Wave I am. I smile typing these words as I feel a realization that Divine oceanography is for me more valid that most theology. Right now, I have many high waves of experience in my experience. There are moments I admittedly feel pretty seasick. Yet I remain aware that everything that is happening is happening within the Sea of Allness. I remain aware that at my core I am that Allness. I know that my personal sea will calm once again. For me that is an unmistakable reality. It is for me to surf the waves that are ultimately me, finding calm in knowing that I will always be the Sea. I share these images and these meanderings as they are part of what has given me a now “user friendly God.” The fear-based fright inducing theology of the past is just that: the past. While I personally don’t call “God” “God,” I trust you will feel my heart. When I say “user” I trust you will understand that I mean practical, personal, intimate, internal, reliable. I have learned to use the Laws of Allness to co-create a more hospitable atmosphere in which to dwell. Those Laws are not to be feared. They are to be used. I will elaborate on that in a future missive.  While I did not grow up with a user-friendly God I have grown into One. It has taken many trials and many seeming errors. And yet where I reside today is so very worth the effort. And I relish the chance to share my journey with all of you.

Who Do You Think You Are?

By Rev. Taylor E. Stevens • February 25, 2025
Just typing the title words gives me a shame shiver up my spine. The question always came with a glare and a dare.

This Thing Called God

By Rev. Taylor E. Stevens • February 19, 2025
This thing called God stopped working for me a few decades ago. I realize for some that may sound blasphemous. If I were referring to the theological God of my upbringing it would indeed be just that. I would likely be struck down before completing another sentence. Which is part of the reason this thing called God ceased to work for me. I grew up hearing that “God” is love, and that God is a Big Guy in the sky that seemed to have anger issues and a major personality disorder. “He” was always smiting something or someone. “He” sent plagues, drowned Egyptians, and ordered a blood sacrifice in the person of “his” only begotten. From an early age this felt bizarre, savage, confusing, and just plain wrong. I was taught that we were made in the image and likeness of “God.” That only made sense in that many people are bizarre, savage, confusing, and behave in ways that are just plain wrong. And that perceptual shift was the beginning of freedom for me. The problem isn’t so much that “God” made us in “his” image. The problem is that we made “God” in OUR image. Humans throughout the centuries invented theologies composed of misperception, projections, and shadow beliefs. The Big Guy in the sky was comprised of all the parts we little people here on earth could not account for or tolerate. We could not reconcile human incongruities, so we cast them toward the heavens and made up a lower place called hell to counterbalance it. It was when this thing called “God” stopped working for me that I felt called to start working for something bigger than “God.” From “God” to Allness has been the greatest adventure and deepest fulfillment of my lifetime. It was a quantum leap in consciousness. It feels as if it took a lifetime and yet happened in a nanosecond. Allness is what I choose to now call Source. Source Essence All is the Infinite SEA in which everything lives and has its Being. It is only up and out because it is Absolute and everywhere present. “All” is in that sense both up and out and down and in. I am comprised of non-dual Absolute All which is Law, and which is Love. It is Infinite Intelligence. It has no personality and so no disorder. People who are out of touch with All will project out a God that is more human malfunction than what the Allness actually is. God is objective and All is subjective. God is an object, albeit a Super-object. It is a huge He that generations have sought to appease, please, get to, ward off, satisfy, sanctify. It is outside of humanity, mostly looking down upon. Subjective Allness is the permeating Essence of literally All that is. It is All intelligence begetting Itself as creation ever creating. It is within us and all around us. It is relational flow. In this realm It is All that is, yet somehow also more. It is Allness somehow always seeking to be more via Its creations. The best thing that ever happened to me spiritually is when “God” stopped working for me. The concept of God was too ill fitting. It was unattainable as an object. It was a big man figure that I could never get or feel close to. As a felt-sense experience of Allness began to move within and through me I realized I was already within what I had been seeking. My breath was the breath of All. The animating presence in my body was All. There was no big man to appease or please. All is Life. All of Life. My life. My living. My love. All love. So, I pray you can feel below and above my words. Feel the Allness that already contains you, me, everyone and everything. Breathe it. Feel it. Let it be free within you. When the concept of God stopped working for me a far greater reality opened for and in me. It is what I term All. It is filling my heart as I type these words. It is a felt-relating that moves as a mobius from my heart to you the reader. It is bigger than God. It is All that is.