Grace vs Ego

Where heavenly grace and true charity enter in, there neither envy nor narrowness of heart nor self-love will have place. Divine love conquers all and enlarges the powers of the soul...There is no more troublesome, no worse enemy of the soul than you yourself, if you are not in harmony with the spirit.

--- The Imitation of Christ, Thomas a` Kempis

 I have been observing people all of my life, as you likely have too. There are some who quietly go about doing good, no fanfare, no applause required. There are others who want attention and praise for every little thing they do.

Rereading  The Imitation of Christ, I noticed he saw that too. The above quote us one of quite a few of his comments along that line. His point being when we do do things from a spiritual place in us, it's between us and God. It's not for public attention, not from narrowness of heart or a testimony to self-love, not for some manipulative motive.

His point that covers it all is - if you call yourself a Christian, your job is to imitate Christ, leading you to become Christ-like. Pay attention to the life of Christ. Eliminate from yourself anything unlike Christ.  Cease doing things that are unChrist-like. Keep attuning yourself to God, until you are continually aware of The Presence of The Most High. 

Most people are not willing to do the work internally. They seek short term entertainment and ego strokes instead. They live shallow lives.

 Ask yourself which one are you aiming towards? Is your life goal to live on the surface to public acclaim? Is your life goal to see how close to The Presence you can live and be; to see how much good you can do; to be loving, forgiving, and kind? Your choice makes all the difference.

Mind In A Box

 The past couple of days I have been having ideas about closed minds waft through my mind. I got images of the old cartoon, "Joshua In A Box," where he tried and tried to get out of a box. When he relaxed and leaned on the wall of the box, his arm just went through and then all of him, then he created a new box.

A closed mind may expand a tad, but then closes again in a slightly bigger box. There is an underlying need preventing freedom of thought and inquiry.  It could be different for different people. It could be an ego thing, where there is need to be "right" at all costs. It could be fear of the unknown. It could be some lingering echoes from long ago. Or....

I see it in all areas of life. Diehard whatever - political party (mine only others WRONG), religion (mine only, others evil), prejudices (my group only, others dreadful), hatreds (like only certain people, others skum), etc.  Sure, it's irrational, but the closed mind can't/won't see or acknowledge that, declaring everyone else who sees it differently to be nuts.

The longer I live, the more I learn, the more I realize I know so little in relation to the whole. Science has  only unlocked a tiny bit of knowledge. History and archeology keep fining new things. Every area of honest inquiry expands ad infinitum.

Spiritual life is my main focus this life. I know that the Divine is Infinite, so not fully knowable. Anyone who says they know the full religious perspective is fooling themselves and often is combative in their insistence that their way is the only way.

No matter what religion, the close-minded ignore input that disrupts their frozen theology.  People have been on earth at least 200,000 years. The longest any current religion has been on earth is about 4,000 years, plus there are older religions we know about that are no longer practiced. We have evidence that our even more ancient ancestors had spiritual inclinations. They left drawings and items of worship that have been found and continue to be found. They had wisdom and connection to something More.

Our smug modern religions, insisting they are "it" ignore humanity's long relationship to the Divine. I suggest, because the Divine is Infinite, no one knows everything there is to know. No one religion has cornered the market on spiritual truths. 

Yet, if we look closely, there are some consistent ideas that thread through them all. No matter who or when someone touches the edges of the Divine, they find some of the same things. They make up different myths and stories and rituals about what they think they know, but there are similarities, if you look closely. 

That's not to say that you and your religion are wrong. It's just to remember, there are many paths to the same God. Let us honor the path we take and others take. Let us cease arguing and fighting and be what our religions call us to be - to become Christlike, Buddhalike, etc. To be lights of love and kindness and blessing and peace. Let there be peace in our hearts and therefore in our world.

Trying to Get On God's Good Side

 Eckhart criticizes the “merchant mentality,” and he applies his criticism to religious practices, “fasts, vigils, prayers and similar good deeds of all kinds” — if “people do these things so that our Lord may give them something,” they are merely merchants. For “truth doesn’t long for any kind of commercial deal. God does not seek his own interest.” --- Meister Eckhart, A Mystic Warrior For Our Time by Matthew Fox

While all the things he mentions are fine in themselves, the motivation behind is not necessarily so. There is a difference between doing something as a manipulation and doing it because that's who we are in our inner self. The appearance may be the same, but in essence it is not the same.

It occurs to me that we can't con God. For our whole being is known to the God in Whom we live and move and have our being. 

How I see it is that our job is to heal our cracked egos, delve deeply, and become thoroughly in tune with the Infinite. No artifice. Who we are becomes light and love, pure and awake, loving because we are in fact love, light because who we are in fact is light. The inner kingdom shows up in the outer, for that is all there is, falsity dissolved into nothingness.

The Master told us this. The kingdom of God is within you... You are the light, don't hide it...love...forgive endlessly...

 

IQ, EQ, & SQ.

 This morning I awoke with the idea of SQ. We know of I.Q., short for Intelligence Quotient. Those with high I.Q. are very smart and can understand very complex tnings. Those with low I.Q. are often called "slow." We've somewhat recently heard of E.Q. that is Emtional Quotient. Those with high E.Q. are good with people, are empathetic and understand. Those with low E.Q. just don't get it. (These are very abbreviated explanations, but you can look them up if you want detail.)

This morning, as I lay in bed half awake, S.Q. came to me, or Spiritual Quotient. Those with high S.Q. include the great Avatars, the mystics, those who walk with God, who have moments in their lives when they awaken to all tnings spiritual. Those who have low S.Q. don't have a relationship with God that they are aware of, or are filled with superstiionand fantastical beliefs. They often "believe" in mutually exclusive ideas and are not aware that they cannot both be true.

It became so clear to me, and it made me want to find a way to awaken people to the possiblity, even the need, to raise their S.Q.  I felt a certain sadness for people slumbering, unaware of what life could be like with a higher S.Q. Then I was led to ponder, what would be ways to motivate people to want to do the things that would in fact raise their S.Q.?

Spiritual life these days takes a back seat to the media, to Smart Phones, to sports, to the internet, etc. Minds are colonized by excitement, by flashy pictures, by fast moving news, by politics, by celebrities, etc. 

I don'thave the answer yet. Spirit gave me the idea of S.Q. and a picture of the current state of life here on earth. So, I think ideas of how to motivate will be forthcoming.

Let's think on these things.

Underpinning of Modern Western Civilization

 The thinking of Spinoza from the 1600's has influenced great thinkers from his time onward. 

Einstein, when asked if he believed in God, answered that he believed in Spinoza's God. Basically, Spinoza equated God with nature. God is the energy that organizes and participates in the orderly expression of nature. There are inconvertible laws, such as gravity and even not yet known laws, that operate throughout creation.

One of the ideas he presented was that people flourish when they can question and think and discuss in freedom.  These ideas influenced the Enlightenment as well as our own Thomas Jefferson.

Currently, the freedom of speech that he declared as fundamental to our ability to flourish, is now under attack. Somehow we got polarized so that people are not free to discuss without fear of being cancelled, fired from jobs, and ridiculed. A small segment of society seems to have decided they know the truth, and they alone know. It is settled so that any discussion to the contrary is folly and even criminal.

We need to grab back our free speech, free thinking, free and abundant life of questing for understanding. I agree with Spinoza, we cannot flourish without it.

Have the courage to not allow others to stop the discussions of free people. Have the courage to hold a point of view that seems reasonable to you, and at the same time the courage to look at all sides and all points of view. We might learn something. There is more than meets the eye of any point we might see. There is always another way to look at anything. We cannot know all that is possible to know, but we can grow to consider as much as we can. Life is not either or. Sometimes it's both and.

The Brain and Beyond

 The psychical, that is to say spirit, seems immensely to outrun its organ and to use brain as a musician uses an instrument. The psychological studies of Henri Bergson in France and of Dr. William McDougall at Oxford make a very strong argument for the view that the higher forms of consciousness cannot be explained in terms of brain action and that there is no well-defined physical correlate to the highest and most central psychical processes. --- Rufus Jones

 The line -- spirit, seems immensely to outrun its organ and to use the brain as a musician uses an instrument, grabbed my attention this morning. I have seen and experienced this various times in my life. I have seen and experienced spirit inspiring me or others with new thoughts and ideas that had not been in our brains, but rather wafted in from a higher place. Spirit/Holy Spirit brings the dawn of new ideas, of guidance, of inspiration. It comes into and then through us, but it comes from More than us.

To get in position for more and more of this to happen, we need to make ourselves fertile soil. We need to clean out our consciousness of all negativity, fears, anger, resentment, unforgiveness, etc. We need to spend time with God in prayer, in reading, in contemplation. We need to do good works. We need to develop our spiritual muscle so to speak.

God, help us to be good gardeners of our inner soil. Lead us to be ever closer to You, to be Light and Love, to be who You had in mind when You created us. Help us wash away all in us that is unlike You. Help us release lesser things to fully embrace You. We ask this in the name of Christ and seal it with the ancient seal of faith and integrity, Amen, Amen, and Amen

The Christ Shift

 I have been thinking a lot lately about the shift in perspective in the New Testament, what it means to our own journey. I wrote some about this on October 14th of this year. 

It starts with the synoptic Gospels primarily telling about Jesus, teaching and preaching and healing in Galilee. They tell us some of what he taught and did. Then John shifts to add the Greek philosophy element and some Cosmic Christ ideas. Then we come to Paul's 7 authenticated letters (even though they were written first, they come after John). Paul jumps totally to the Cosmic Christ. Paul shows no interest in the historical Jesus, he only mentions Jesus 4 times.

The shift to the Cosmic Christ is one from observation to participation. We are called to participate in the Christ life, to put on and fill with that spiritual energy as we too become alive with the Spirit.

The shift is also portrayed by the Gospels' account of the Pharisees vs Jesus. They represent the legal, the authority, the dogmatic, the outer way to be religious. Jesus represents the Spirit way, the inner way that leads to a different outer way.  As Auguste Sabatier wrote a long time ago - Religions of Authority contrasted with the Religions of the Spirit.

The most meaningful things seem to be invisible to our eyes. From the tether of gravity that holds us in orbit, to the atom and quark, to the microbes, etc, even science finds the invisible the most powerful.

Those who have gone before have set up dogma about the shining light from Galilee. Augustine's dogma of original sin still haunts the hallways of seminaries and churches. As Rufus Jones said, "We have had fifteen hundred years under the dogma of original sin and total depravity, now let us have a period of actually facing our own souls as they reveal themselves, not to the theologian, but the the expert in souls... We shall also find that they are strangely linked up with that unseen and yet absolutely real Heart of all things who we call God."

The aspirational Sermon on the Mount can help lead us out of the prison of dogma. It lifts our souls to a grand vision of who and what we are called to be. It gives us a vision to aspire to, but which can not be totally reached. It calls out the best in us to strive to take on the brilliant teaching and bathe ourselves in the Mission of Christ, to rise up, to shine, to be as Christlike as possible. Matthew 5, 6, & 7 can transform us, if we take it as our way as it was Jesus' Way.