"Michol the daughter of Saul, looking out through a window, saw king
David leaping and dancing before the Lord: and she despised him in her
heart."
Love comes into expression on earth only through man, or else it does not
appear at all. It is through persons that the higher potential of earth can be
realized and shown. Therefore, do not aspire to what is merely active in the
realm of nature. Do not aspire to the level of creatures and elemental
processes. Do not aspire to the mediocrity and subhumanity of the sinful man
with his adventures of the wordly way of life.
Rather, be inspired, clean all the memory programming away. Be instructed
by the Spiritual Master Yeshua, the True God-Man. Be inspired to incarnate
love, ecstasy in the Holy Spirit, divine communion in the eucharist that is
Yeshua, radiant life in hours of prayer and silence, and all the excellence of
man in Gods company. Transcend yourself in Gods love for you, he who dies for
you and gives His love through His blood on the cross. And fulfill the man in
Christ.
1. Often we are self-possessed, the
eternal adolescents. We are contracted upon ourself at the heart. This
willfulness is automatic, unconscious, fallen nature, bereft of the
feeling-intelligence we have in the Spirit. The swedish priest Schartau called
it the "sorrow of sin".
Therefore, we are weak-willed, unable to transcend the self through hearing
the word of God, continuous prayer, self-surrender in faith.
Whithout Yeshua we are a problem. Whithout God we turn self-divided. All
our alternatives contradict one another. We always are at war with the parts of
our own experience. We are contracted upon the various functions of our own
body-mind, which we identify with, instead of with our true Spirit in God.
Whithout God we are in shock, rolex replica sale suddenly
existing as separate beings, unable to discover the Truth of God's household (1
Tim 3:15) In that household, which is the living Church we find origin, help,
and and divine condition.
The problem of people whithout God's company is emotional dissociation. The
body-mind or psycho-physical being, our earthly vehicle, is automatically
tending to contract upon itself, to be differentiated from all experiential
phenomena, to possess and fill its emptiness and lack of the holy Spirit, with
the objects of all experience, to protect itself with all sorts of knowledge,
to separate itself from the mysterious emotional demand of all relations and
events, with family, with friends, with brothers and sisters in the faith.
2. The strategy in life whithout the
centre of Yeshua becomes the avoidance of relationship, the avoidance of free
emotional association with all beings and events. Each function of the human
body-mind is sinfully tending toward emotional dissociation from experience.
Dreams and concepts abound, striving makes life full of efforts, and always the
experience is not enough. And the root-effort in all forms of psycho-physical
dissociation is an emotional and psycho-physical contraction from the living
God, the all-pervading life-principle, the living happy Being that is the
Truth. And this truth, as 1 Peter says, is the divine condition of the body-mind in
Christ, the parttaking of divine nature.
When we do not enjoy life in Yeshua we generally are mysteriously committed
to self-possessed emotional dissociation from the holy Spirit. And, therefore,
we are cut off from all experience since all experiences, states, events,
relations, and all beings are arising as spontaneous manifestations or
modifications of the creative Gods living energy, the radiance or light from
Yeshua, the light that He displayed on the top of Tabor.
3. The light of Christ is the matrix of all
forms of appearance and "matter." In Him all things are begun, He is the living
Word.The heart of people whithout faith, unawakened individuals, secular
people, is actually chronically disturbed, contracted upon itself, dissociated
from divine life, the way and the truth that Yeshua is. Help, salvation and
origin of love is missing in their lives, and we have all been there.
Therefore, man whithout faith is chronically disturbed and missing out on the
good life.
St Brigit of Sweden talks about this. Christ is like a brimstone of fire
hitting a rock. Not only the rock becomes fire, the olive trees nearby -- that
is our souls -- turn into fire. The dry surface of the stem and the branches,
our dry dissociated hearts, takes on fire and all the fat marrow inside start
living in the fire of Christ. We become life in Him.
Presence in prayer, in the company of God, is then our fundamental
responsibility, and it is literal and deep love of the His presence as your own
life. We must surrender to His life in order to be truly ourselves, full of
Life, full of Him. This life-current is the Holy Spirit, the divine light and
grace whereby we may be transfigured and made new in Him. We become one with the living and
eternal reality.
4. But we may be thus renewed only if we
transcend all emotional contraction of the self and, instead, rest as Love,
rest in the life flow of the living Person that is God in Yeshua. It is an
emotional conversion to life that heals our dis-ease. And one who is thus
converted by faith will naturally extend his enjoyment of freely-circulating
life. His or her ways of striving and effort will disappear, sinfulness will
heal. Life will be healthy, intimate, content.
5. Right and loving emotional submission
to Christ in every moment, permits transformation of the enervating emotional
and general psycho-physical contractions. And right emotional submission to the
the life of Christ in you in every moment, is for ever the basic form of
spiritual or religious practice. You never really need more on earth. Save the
refinements for purgatory and His love will work with you. Whithout it,
however, your are more or less lost on the waves of the mediocre and afflicted
world. Being in prayer you will find life as true ecstasy, radiant release into
God. It heals by degrees the self-contraction or ego-obsession that separates
us from life, from the grace and the Person of God.
The practice of heartfelt devotion to live God-conscious in relationship to
Yeshua is the true and perfect way of life, what the early Christians called
the Way. It is the only path that realizes the fundamental understanding that
all your searching for change must come to an end. During the entire effort of
your seeking you are emotionally turned away from the event of existence as it
actually is in God. You are never in any moment emotionally satisfied, almost
constantly looking for something meaningful. In order to be free of this
negative, reactive disposition, you must realize what this gesture of emotional
dissociation is altogether.
6. You will instead become responsible
as the heart, live from the heart, the emotional, feeling core of your being.
You don't use theology or ratiocination. You stay in the heart as prayer with
Him. Everything else follows from this practice, and everything that is
necessary for your existence and your spiritual practice will thus be revealed
to you by grace from Yeshua.
Believers turn to a lot of different practises. But fundamentally there is
one practice, one basic discipline -- Yeshuas presence. Contrary to common
presumptions, including the academic ploddings, about religious and spiritual
life, that practice is not to seek for God. And of course God does not need our
seeking, or praying, or ascetic practises. The fundamental practice is to let
Yeshuas presence confront and transcend this emotional dissociation right now,
and in every present moment. It is to surrender to God as the One living
me.This is already prepared by Him and ready to enjoy.
7. Companion of one's heart, loving
spouse -- that is Yeshua, and you just rest and allow that condition of
surrender to be the condition of one's life. A good muslim surrenders in prayer
five times a day, but you must live in that surrender as your condition. Thus,
we are no longer Life-negative or heart-negative, but persists in love, moment
to moment. In order to be happy, you must know that you have complete freedom
to love and to be at rest in every moment.
Yet our whole life has been an emotional refusal of all experience, of God,
of relationship, of the sacred radiance of our existence. The Lord Yeshua has
to form our souls as iron is fashioned on an anvil, using limitations and the
weight of suffering as fire in the work -- as St. Madeleine Sophie Barat had
it. He wants us to be alive in Him but we have typically been contracted upon
ourself with emotional force, and no amount of thinking, will-power,
considering, experiencing, reading, desiring, exploiting, and manipulating
ourself in the world, can really affect that contraction. No awakening of the
kundalini or zen kensho or the third eye or the baptism of the holy Spirit, or
the bhavas of bhakti, effectively touches it. It has nothing to do with these
efforts, even though they are dear to us.
You can have baptism or anointing or zen satoris or kundalini experiences
until you are yawning with boredom, yet you will not have touched this
emotional recoil at all. You still don't live from the heart, where Yeshua can
live in you. You tend to think of yourself in terms of your limitations -- your
thinking, emotional reactions, bodily sensations, wishes and desires. You
pursue your religious life as well as your ordinary life while thinking of
yourself as an actor or a person defined by those limitations. You have little
certainty about anything beyond that.
8. Therefore, I recommend no efforts to
awaken religious experiences, but put all our attention to allow Him, always
present Yeshua, to be our continous nature and condition ! He already died for
us, it's over. In the course of such spiritual practice of rest and simple
waiting on God, internal love force may be awakened as holy Spirit. But this is
regarded and dealt with in quite a different manner by God.
Yeshua is the Cure of the loveless heart, for your thinking consciousness.
You feel physical desiring with great certainty, but the idea that there is a
conciousness of God that influences you or that is fundamental to your every
and single breath is relatively alien, or at best occasional.
9. You think about God, and you feel
that some day you will make up your mind about whether or not there is really a
God in the way you think, or according to some fancy theology. But what do you
think you will do differently then? Look at the people who claim to have found
God -- they do not seem to have changed very much, do they? They were
depressed, now they seem gleeful. But are they with God? Are they
God-Conscious, moral, compassionate, wise, sane, fearless, and spontaneously
happy ? Most of them still feel chronically loveless in their seeking. Always
on the lookoute for more. New pastor, new congregation, new theology.
So we must enter into a presumed association with God as the intimate,
heartfelt lover or life, the Companion of your life. The creation of
relationship with God certainly is a great gesture. It is the only cure of the
loveless heart and of the whole life of suffering. Abide in that !
10. In the process, you become quite
open to natural association with a simplicity of existence that you have not
previously taken into account. You begin to recognize that apart from your
frantic, self- possessed religious or irreligious secular consciousness, in
which the mind is not released into God and the brain is not relaxed in the
Spirit life, apart from this obsessive, thinking pattern of mind that you
typically dramatize, there is a humble and practical wisdom, known for ages but
not in the market. It does not engage in the thought process, nor in systems of
faith, nor in doctrine, nor in institutions. Perhaps you also suddenly realize
that others have it, quite apart from conventional paths. You become sensitive
to thoughts and intuitions for which you previously have had no sensitivity.
When you begin to presume life in simplicity and silence an loving
association with God, observations of the world have new significance for you.
Perhaps you were not noticing previously the birds, the fishes, the flowers and
the clouds over the sky, things like that. Xiaomin, the chinese peasant girl
who wrote over 900 hymns in the Caanan Hymns, preferred lonely hours with the
sheep, in the fields, at the river. She was in Company. Things of nature now
seem very remarkable, as if endowed with intelligence and personal energy.
Things simply do begin to happen. Small signs of spring coming and somehow you
know summer is near. This is hopeful living in Him.
11. Whithout God's company we are trying
very hard to acquire a dimension of mind and knowledge, even literal practical
knowledge, from or with the thinking mind itself. But the mental mind is only a
program for running memories in this vehicle, an instrument we got from God to
be maintained wisely. If you can relax your thinking mind into the rest and
stillness in the Father, who is prior to thought, intuitions and even love for
all living beings will appear in your patterns of thought and emotion. A more
humble and direct understanding will come into consciousness by grace.
You will also notice then that your life is changing, by virtue of this
same heartfelt listening to the Father, that Yeshua educates us about and
recommends to trust at all times. Association with the Well of life.
Just as you observe changes in your consciousness or mind, in which new
dimensions appear spontaneously and intuitively, you also notice that your
vital, physical life, your ordinary life of desiring, is beginning to change
somewhat too. You become much more easygoing, silent, at rest, humble, more
capable of choosing to do something and actually doing it. Positive, comforting
and interesting things begin to happen to you. You don't need the bustling
crowd anymore, nor the proper hectic social life.
12. Thus, the heart is the primal center
of consideration. Everything that is body and mind is actually the emanation of
the Elohim, the complete love-life which we identify only via the heart.
Radiance, schekina,love, prayer in silence with less contraction into
self-possession, and less fear. These effects of the holy Spirit must appear in
your heart as you know that you are not the bodily, emotional and mental
processes, but the Spirit in God-reality itself.
We are defined by love, by emotionaland obvious self-transcendence. Nothing
less than this heart practice in God is true or sufficient. We are willing to
do all kinds of things, even to go into long periods of seclusion for wordly
pursuits and to deprive ourselves of bodily comforts and pleasures. For what?
Just more self-obsession. But the heart of Yeshua is an easy yoke, a release
into life. We will engage in no more self-manipulative pleasures or pusuits.
Some of those practices are creative in an ordinary worldly sense, but they are
not this practice of the heart.
13. Most of us have not committed
ourself to the practice of love, or emotional association with God and all
existence. We are still committed to emotional dissociation as of Him. We
constantly go for our own pleasures and become surprised when we rediscover God
once more after some hurting. Emotional dissociation is selfpossession, inside
religion our outside of it. We treat everything in a carnal way, even God, even
in beautiful liturgy. Karl Barth warned us all of the predictability of our
services to a dead God in his 1918 writing on The Book of Romans.
If you would transcend the this carnal mind, you must deal with the
emotional gesture of the being from moment to moment. Transcendence or
dissolution of identification with body, emotion and mental programmes is not
entirely an emotional matter. But it is also much about emotion, since emotion
is the response, as it was for David, not only when he danced, but in many of
the psalms. Thus, there is no true perspective until love appears, until there
is self-transcendence via emotional sacrifice of the body-mind to God, the
living Personality of Avinu meaolam, our Father.
14. You must choose this sacrifice, this
loving gesture. If you will choose it, if you will make this emotional
commitment, then all experience becomes divine, even the most trivial of
moments, yes even the moments where you are miserable and awkward. You are in
His hand, while doing it. You are "doing your own being" as Ram Dass said, but
it in His doing, the living Torah, not a self-possesed drug trip. Instead His
Comfort to the point of ecstasy and heartfelt gratefulness for everything in
God. This is to "see" God truly.
The ecstatic relationship to Me, we hear Yeshua say through the Gospels, is
the key to practice. Do this heart-practice in relation to Christ with
heartfelt attention, and use yourself as the earthly and also spiritual Form,
to enter into the sacrament of Communion in every hour of the waketime day.
Come every day into union with the Personality of God! In this way
God-Communion can be realized very simply. All the elaborations of spiritual
life follow from this natural devotion, which ultimately includes all of mind
and all the good mysteries of existence.
15. You who enter this truly inner
Catholic Church are literally entering a fire, the fire of the Presence of God,
like the brimstone St. Brigit of Sweden talked about, both now and later on in
the love furnace of Purgatorio. If most people are just mediocre, immature
people, unprepared for Communion -- have compassion with them, you belong to
them, anyway, sinner as you are ! No one can boast with anything except in
Yeshuas mercy. Pray for them that they should pray for you!
It is enough to engage in normal prayerful daily practice of the Christian
life, but you have to accept the fieriness of life in Christ. Look at the fire
in the eyes of the young chinese, who stand hours upon hours in worship in a
barn or a stable, just to burn in faith ! That is the fire of faith ! We can
not dissociate from it, because it is love for the Bride that is His Church --
that is, you and me. If you tend to dissociate emotionally from the spiritual
power of divine love, from the life and presence of the Lover, from the divine
presence, then you also prevent the spiritual process from manifesting in your own life.
As long as you have emotional problems and are identified with the vehicle
of the bodily, emotional and mental state, you cannot realize any more of the
spiritual process than the ups and downs of feeling disturbed and feeling
consoled. You must come to the point in your practice where the living Yeshua
is completely obvious to you, even bodily, moment to moment -- walking,
standing, sitting or reclining.
16. We are bags of passions, always
fools, so we cannot expect God to purify us at every level. Whenever we meet
with some obstruction, some tightness, some stress, some tension, old memory
program will run us, some old mental obsession will get the better of us. Don't
be so surprised ! Just work on that obstruction with prayer and meditation for
years and years and trust in Yeshuas promise of paradise, given to the criminal
on the cross beside him. We all are in the position of that criminal! Thank you
for positioning us!
As soon as the obstruction dissolves, suddenly that area of the body-mind
feels full in the Lord. The process need not be made difficult by virtue of
your own resistance. Much of what is difficult about the process is simply your
resistance, the fixations of your mind, the emotional reactivity, the conventional
street mentality, or church mentality, or tourist resort mentality, and the physical habits from early youth
that create toxic, enervated, negative bodily states.
17. The higher and spiritual love in God
is the conversion of the body into Holy Spirit energy and the conversion of
energy into consciousness. Most people who approach God generally, are only
considering the idea of the transformation of the body into occasionally loving energy, and such consideration does not
develop much. You shout, shiver and cry some happy tears for a while on the mountain top or in a vibrant church service, that is
all. To go beyond the mere development of energy in the nervous system,
therefore, to the realization of the transcendental reality of Yeshua, is the
meaning of agape.
The mechanical life that people develop through conventional
action-reaction in the realm of natural human psychology, creates obstructions
that do not easily disappear. We typically see how difficult it is for us to
move beyond the most rudimentary psychological and emotional problems. Christ
did a bodily translation into Light on the mountain and that is what he does
within us should we allow that letting go to be the end of our searching.
When you associate with His Light a fire starts within you, becomes as St
Brigit of Sweden says, a lamp to the heart. In this light the soul works away
her time on earth and allows the Grace to flow through the body, like fat and
pure oil in the lamp. It is not self-power. As Juan de Avila says: "Those who
think they can attain to holiness by their own wisdom or perseverance will
find how far from holy life they have strayed..." Grace in abundance comes with
true association, going where Christ leads us through his translation into
Light.
18. But we keep returning to our
problems. Our
commitments last a few hours and then we tend to forget all about them. Listen
sometime to people at the coffee hour after mass. That is where you really hear the truth about
conversion. We cannot fulfill this process while our loveless wordly adventure of tendencies
are still possessing us. We should cry, shake our heads in wonder and awe -- He
has saved us with His blood! We should whisper: "And can it be that I should
gain an interest in the Saviours blood? Died he for me, who caused His pain?
For me, who Him to death pursued? Amazing love! How can it be that You my God,
should die for me?" -- to use Charles Wesleys words.
Thus, you must practice with a will, from the heart. The heart is the key
to the practice of real or mature spiritual life. People tend to focus on the
dimensions of the mind or the body, the carnal dimension, and to lose the focus
of the heart.
19. Nevertheless, the principle of faith
is at the heart, and the fire of Yeshua is the very process of awakening from
self-obsession. That fire is
not situated at the menta lever, nor is it emotions. It is at the heart of our
being, at the place of Infinity, where we can hear the Word of God.
Therefore, if you are constantly struggling with
emotional problems and self-fascination, the true Bread of Life cannot be
effective in your case. When St. Brigit of Sweden answers the question why
Christ talks about goats and sheep to each side at the Judgement, she explains
that it is really about this incompatibility. Self-obsession effectively
hinders hearing of th Word. In Christ there are no separations, no goats or
sheep, but obsession with the world will cut you off from Life.
Only a rudimentary and ineffectual religious association is possible in
such a life that is characterized principally by cocneptual pondering and
emotional phasing. Transcending the phases and the destiny of this dissociation
is a requisite for entering into the true communion.
20. Spiritual life is meant for all
ordinary people who give ut selfwilled fascination with the world and surrender
their conceptual distance and their emotional problems to the Cross, and
thereby experience how to be given to the culture of the Lamb who takes away
the sin of the world.
Then they take up the Way, the Truth and the Life in its fullest terms at
every level for which they personally can be responsible. When they see the
body, the mental and the emotional as a temporary vehicle, a psycho-physical
mechanism that can hold the Divine Light and Force, then a new life will begin
for them.