THE FIRST COMMANDMENT
I am the Lord thy God, which have brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. Thou shalt have no other gods before me (Exodus 20:2,3).
Moses lived in Egypt over three thousand years ago, and he led some six hundred thousand people out of Egypt and through the wilderness. That is historical. But, Moses also stands for a faculty in yourself, and the things that Moses did typify your state of mind.
The mountain means prayer—the elevated consciousness. We are told that the general public were not allowed to go up Mount Sinai, but that does not mean that certain people were not good enough to go up. It means that if we want to go up the mountain—if we want to raise our consciousness, if we want to get closer to God—we must prepare ourselves by prayer. If we want to go up the mountain, we have to become a high priest spiritually and we must rid ourselves of our faults and weaknesses—otherwise we cannot elevate our consciousness and get our contact with God.
Moses had his revelation, and then he realized it as the experience that God and man are one. When he got that revelation, Moses brought back the laws of life, beginning with the First Commandment, as we call it..
What is the beginning of the First Commandment? I am the Lord thy God. Our trouble in our religious life nearly always is that we think, “In the beginning Me.” That is very human but is does not get us the revelation that Moses got. After affirming I am the Lord thy God… the First Commandment says thou shalt have no other gods before me.
The God that we most often put before the true God is the God called “me”. It is the self that most often replaces God as a false idol in our lives. When we learn to lay down the self and replace it with God, then we are truly putting God first, and putting no other Gods before the true God. When we replace the “me” with the “we”, the self with the selfless and the “I” with the “Thy”, we will be following the first commandment.
Practically everything in our physical existence pushes us toward the false notion of self as the ultimate being. That is why we must have a vigorous spiritual life including daily communion with God. When we pray daily, seek God in all things and follow God’s will, we are able to overcome the physical world and its false Gods. When we turn to God as the source of all we have and hope to have, put God first in our lives and act accordingly, each of us then can enter and live in the gardens God created for us. That is when our consciousness and God’s become one.
Putting God first,
Z gardener
Good Morning Garden 
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