Sunday is Message Day on the blog. Monday through Friday we look at contemporary events and day-to-day occurrences at the intersection of Life and the New Spirituality…but on Sunday, we reserve this space for a specific teaching derived from the material in Conversations with God
This week’s message: THE LAW OF OPPOSITES
“In the absence of that which you are not, that which you are is not.”
With this single sentence, given to me in the very first Conversations with God book published in 1995, I was introduced to the Law of Opposites.
I didn’t understand what was meant by that sentence when I first saw it come off my pen and most people with whom I have shared this wisdom do not “get it” the first time they hear it. Let’s look at the statement again and delve into its meaning.
“In the absence of that which you are not, that which you are is not.”
This sentence is very powerful. For me it is one of THE most powerful and illuminating statements in all of the Conversations with God material – and that stretches across nine very important books.
The sentence means that we live in a world of relativity. Everything here is experienced relative to something else, and when there is no “something else,” there is no ability to experience what is being experienced.
The world of relativity provides us with a container, or a context, in which we can hold everything. Outside of that container or context nothing…

…has any meaning – or, more correctly, it doesn’t have the meaning we have given it. It has a new meaning, depending upon the new container with which it is held.
Let me give you an example. The idea of “up” and “down” has a certain meaning within the context of our experience here on earth. Travel away from the earth, however, and that idea suddenly has no meaning, because the container within which we held it has changed. The early cosmonauts and astronauts discovered this very quickly as soon as their rocket ship left the planet and soared into outer space. They were the first humans to have their context of life changed in this way.
I remember how they sent messages of awe back from space, noticing with wonder that “the sun is not ‘up’ anymore. It’s over there on the left. And we don’t look ‘down’ at the earth out of our starboard window. We look ‘up’ at it. Or are we looking sideways? There’s no way to know.”
Today this is old news, but to those very first space travelers it was a radical rearrangement of their Contextual Field – the container within which they held everything, and from which they created meaning.
Conversations with God tells us that the entire universe is our Contextual Field. This field provides for us Points of Reference allowing us to produce Perspectives that create our reality. In the absence of such points of reference, we cannot experience the reality that we are experiencing.
Let’s use one more example. Suppose there was no such thing as “short.” Could there then be any such thing as “tall”? If everything in the world – every person, every object, every blade of grass – was exactly six feet tall, would the idea of “height” even be possible?
The answer is no. Therefore, if the greatest desire in your life was to experience yourself as six feet tall, and if everything else in the world was exactly that height, you could not experience yourself as six feet tall, no matter how badly you wanted to. If you really wanted to experience yourself as being six feet tall – I mean, if this were really important to you – you would then pray for something, anything, to show up as what you are NOT. Only in this way could you notice and experience what are ARE.
Now let’s look at our statement from CwG. It says that “in the absence of that which you are not, that which you are is not.” Using the example above, this means that in the absence of that which is NOT six feet tall, that which IS six feet tall is NOT. In other words, because everything is six feet tall, nothing is six feet tall, because the very measurement of “six-foot tallness” is impossible.
Yet God has created a splendid universe within which we do not have to worry about such things. In God’s universe – which is a gigantic Contextual Field – all possibilities of everything we could wish to know or experience exists, precisely because its opposite exists.
This context forms what CwG calls The Realm of the Relative (as opposed to the Realm of the Absolute), and that is the realm within which we live.
Now what this means to us in a practical sense is that the opposite of everything we could ever wish to know or experience exists somewhere in the universe. And our soul – which is connected to all of that – knows this. It has the ability to call forth this opposite energy or experience, and will do so the moment we earnestly wish for anything. Our soul does this in order to produce a context within which we might experience what it is that we desire.
This phenomenon, this process, is spoken of in CwG as The Law of Opposites. It states that the moment you make up your mind any anything, everything unlike it will come into the space.
The Master is one who knows this. That is why the Master accepts all exterior effects as perfect expressions of the universal law of life. The Master never complains about what is showing up in life, because the Master understands perfectly that everything that is being experienced by the soul is being drawn to the soul BY the soul in order that the soul may know itself as Who and What it really is.
The Law of Opposites does not mean that we are required to experience in the moment-to-moment of our own lives the opposite of everything we seek or desire. Book 3 in the CwG original trilogy makes it clear that as long as the opposite effect appears somewhere in our universe, we can experience the effect that we wish to experience right here, right now.
All we have to do is know about it. That is, we must be cognizant of it. We must be aware of it. That awareness can even reside in our memory. That is, if we remember an event or an effect that is opposite to that which we wish to now experience, that is context enough within which to experience the effect we now choose.
That is why rituals like those used by many religions and organization, and memorials like the Holocaust Memorial found in many cities, are so important. These experiences and expressions allow us to hold in consciousness what we wish to know in order that we may produce a context for New Creation to occur.
All of this, you should know, happens automatically. The soul does this without our asking it to. This is part of the Process of Creation itself, and occurs without our conscious direction.
What all of this comes down to is this: the next time something unwelcome occurs in your life, welcome it. Embrace it and bless it and do not resist it or condemn it. What you resist persists. Surrender to the Process of Creation and the Law of Opposites, and know that Life Itself is creating for you a perfect context for perfection itself to be experienced in, as, and through you.
In other words, as Richard Carlson put it so blithely and so well:
Don’t sweat the small stuff. And it’s all small stuff.