God does not require you to believe anything. He/She/It is All That Is- the profoundly loving conscious foundation of reality that has given you the opportunity to make choices, including the choices about what you believe. You are not punished for making the wrong choices or for believing this thing or the other. Countless reports from the other side (NDEs) reiterate this.
Love, on the other hand, is paramount to our reason for being here. We do always inevitably experience the results of our choices- whether they be loving, or unloving. The true nature of our intent is never hidden from God. We often tell ourselves that we have loving reasons for doing things, but often our motivation is rooted in fear rather than love.
Being able to successfully navigate this phenomenon sometimes requires taking a hard look at what one believes. This is because belief often rises out of the need of the ego to protect the individual (or group) from their fears: fear of the unknown, fear of powerlessness, fear of worthlessness, fear of death. This is not always the case, as often beliefs can be used to root and motivate a person in loving action as well. Beliefs can be profoundly valuable- and oftentimes necessary- to many who seek to rise above the brutal nature of our world, to grow spiritually, and to seek God. But the beliefs themselves are not the “active ingredient.” The active ingredient is the quality and direction of one’s intent: whether it be motivated out of genuine love, or selfish fear; whether it is pointed toward God, or to self. When one seeks God truly, God always responds, regardless of the physical metaphor or form used by the individual. The consciousness is primary; the symbols used by it are secondary.
It is very important to recognize that many are not ready to question their beliefs to their foundations. That is totally acceptable! Re-establishing a lifetime’s worldview can be an incredibly personally destructive process, and many simply do not need such a radical belief-overhaul to successfully pursue their relationship with God (whatever they call it). Do not try to push over someone’s apple cart with new ideas when they are not ready- rather, respect and uphold each person’s place and beliefs. The spirit will always work with each individual as they are ready, and the individual will always eventually utilize their actual experience to grow in their own way.
Others, however, can benefit greatly by permitting themselves to examine the nature of their beliefs so as to throw out what does not serve love and so as to better understand their own “next steps” on their genuine spiritual walk. Oftentimes the individual is greatly benefited by releasing old fear-based ideas such as the ideas of condemnation, group favoritism, shame, and sin. Such ideas are, in fact, OK to release when the individual is ready- because in the larger consciousness system, belief itself is not fundamental. Genuine Love, however- that is the stuff universes are made of!
A Walk in the Physical 
You can appreciate how it’s a little difficult to reconcile the “brutal nature of our world” with your contention that there is a loving God. It’s almost a tiresome point, but I am yet to hear a cogent rebuttal without some resort to grand metaphysical claims that are conveniently impenetrable to “mere mortal intellects” or to nebulous, unverifiable points like “spiritual amnesia” or “the veil”. If anything, reality seems like it’s designed to maximise pain, simply because if there was any more pain than there is, life wouldn’t be able to perpetuate itself. The worst of all possible worlds in Schopenhauer’s words.
Your point that reality is a video game is somewhat moot to those who have lost millions of loved ones in annihilating grief to this Covid virus, or to imperialist wars, or gang rape, murder, paedophilia or childhood blood cancers. If God is All That Is (got to love those capitals), then God is concentration camps, Gulags and the ever present threat of nuclear war. Somehow that conveniently gets ignored by some folk who desperately try to numb their cognitive dissonance to the collective trauma inflicted by evolution.
On the other hand, evolutionary biology for e.g. seems to be more rigorous and coherent: we’ve barely evolved beyond primates (leaving aside the question of how and why the cognitive evolution happened), therefore we’re in essence chimps with an ego, developed some minutes ago in Deep Time terms. Therefore, our behaviour (surprise surprise) is mimicked by our closest ancestors, who are vicious and territorial, just like humans.
You can appreciate why the Gnostics believed that this reality was an error, or that in modern allegory there are bloodthirsty machines that feed off our bio energy and harvest us in vats.
My contention is not to be an irksome atheist here, I plead my ignorance on most matters, and I find you to be an excellent communicator, but it seems to me like your entire worldview is predicated on your OBEs, which is to say, an irreducibly subjective, supersensory experience that not everyone has had the gift of, and which amounts to no more than “trust me, I know what’s going on”.
Thank you for your talks and writing.
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Thank you for your comments sir! Yes I can appreciate the immense difficulty of the reconciliation.
First, I don’t want anyone to just “trust me.” It cannot be your reality if it isn’t your experience. Because consciousness is first, it must be your experience- there is no other way. This is one reason why I recommend meditation as a method of actual rigorous investigation (of what one really is- awareness itself- versus what one is not- the thoughts). Until one actually experientially gets a glimpse of one’s deeper awareness itself, the thoughts and meaning we spin about Earth and (naturally) get lost within can paint one hellish picture (as you have above).
That personal knowing of awareness itself, beneath all thinking, is more important than any conceptual consideration. But meanwhile, since you and I are thinking right now, this is for the intellect: Pain and suffering naturally occur in a free-willed system of form in which imperfect beings are making choices from fear, which are not in alignment with our native love and joy. The opportunity for choice making within a universe of form ultimately serves the expansion of lasting love and joy, even as temporary experiences of extreme pain are possible. The Being is (even more) extreme in its fierce love and creativity, such that even extreme experiences of pain can possibly be manifested for ultimately creative purposes. It can be very natural that we can’t see that from here when we are lost in the dream- or more accurately, when we are lost in the thoughts and meaning that we have bought into about it.
As for my OBEs or other non-physical experiences being “irreducibly subjective,” all things occur as they are known by consciousness. There is not anything anywhere that exists without some experience of it. That is true even of the apparently external environment of the objective physical world. Then here in the physical, we have come to equate truth exclusively with that which can be mutually verified in this objective reality’s environment and rule-set. But this apparently objective reality and its rule-set is just one tiny portion of what’s really going on. So it is a self-limiting premise to rely purely on the external objective content (of just this reality) for verification, and not to investigate experientially.
I will in no way claim the world is not full of an ocean of pain and suffering. It is because you and I have fear. Where we make choices from fear, we are just adding to the pain. There is something far greater than that pain which underlies the whole experience of pain. Since that “something” is not in the physical universe as some object or place, how else can I point to it in words other by saying sentences like this? I cannot.
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