The Light in the Woods

3/29/09 Spiritual Presentations      Today something happened that made me realize what up till now I only suspected. I can get so wrapped up in spiritual matters that I’m oblivious to what’s going on around me.

The phenomenon had started out a while ago with someone telling me something while I was being attentive to God; me acknowledging it and then later on having a memory of acknowledging something but being clueless as to what it was. All this accompanied by the feeling that I could never hope to pick the memory out of the air because it never really nestled itself in my brain in the first place.

Now, I’m no spring chicken and I know a certain amount of mental distraction might be normal for me, but then I graduated to this thing where I would instantly feel like I was asleep as soon as I began to pray. It’s almost as if when I start to talk to God my brain shuts off everything else in order to keep the lines of communication open. It isn’t real sleep because I’m aware of words and ideas into and out of the oblivion without any feeling of actual transition. In real sleep it usually takes awhile to get there, and when I wake up I’m instantly and obviously in a new state.

Today the oblivion happened while I was fully aware and functioning. I was writing and reading and when I got up to stretch, I realized my husband was being awful quiet and he hadn’t been in and out of the cabin as he would be normally. He wasn’t downstairs and there was no smoke coming out of the workshop chimney. Then I did experience a small spark of memory – I think I did hear a snowmobile start up but must have instantly dismissed the consequences of that. I looked out and saw that one snowmobile was missing. My husband had gone somewhere, maybe even told me he was going because he normally does, and most likely he had waited outside the window so we could wave goodbye to each other like we always do. The reality of what took place is lost somewhere in a fog, and the meaning of that makes me uncomfortable. My husband must already have been wondering about me — I had turned down an invitation to dinner with friends we really wanted to visit. This is God’s day for me and I must honor it better than I have been doing lately, but this will be a rare thing for one of us to go visiting without the other and my mental fog adds to the strangeness of the situation.

Of course, no one else understands the implication of my needs when I’m immersed in God because I don’t talk about it. From my studies I realize it’s possible to get unbelievably wrapped up in God – I just never thought it would happen to me. It goes to show that God has ways we don’t understand because of our human weaknesses.  We need to welcome His ways even when they make us seem foreign to ourselves and cause us to look odd to others. We must allow ourselves to follow the ways we are inspired to go, as long as they are good and right within our spirits.  I pray for the ability to discern properly, and the understanding of my friends and family when I act on my convictions. And I pray not to fear the effects of this course toward union with God, but see them as appropriate to me because they are designed by God Himself.

3/29/09 Spiritual Presentations          Once again I experience a day when what I’m inspired to write in the morning is taken up exactly in my later readings; perfectly co-ordinated with what God had already just presented to me.  What is there in this except a miracle designed to remind me to have faith in God’s plan and the fortitude to honor that plan no matter what reservations I or anyone else may place on it?

So I offer this prayer of gratitude: Thank you Lord for moments of miracle; for clarity of your purpose and the reminder that my spiritual enlightenment is important to you. Only a loving Father would send out constant reminders of boundless support even when the child doesn’t know it needs it. As I delight in the proof of Your love and attention, give me also the means to share it. This is what I want more than anything; I know that if this is what You want as well, Father, then this is what will be. I take Your miracles as proof that my acceptance of Your influence in me is pleasing to You. Thank You for the visible affirmation of our mutual love.

And as if to put an exclamation point on the end of a proclamation, the same coincidence happened again this afternoon. I know that I’m more likely to catch insights on Sundays, when I’m left enabled to gear myself for them, but I would have recognized this miracle any day for its outstanding insistence.

3/29/09 Insights from Study           It’s amazing to understand how thoroughly Jesus changed man’s relationship with God. The step from sacrifice to love was a giant one that could only be made by God the Messiah. By taking all sacrifice in the name of sin upon Himself and letting it destroy His worldly presence, and man’s sin along with it, Christ took away man’s need to sacrifice himself. In its place, Jesus assured that man no longer need to fear God, but to love Him, and then He proved this by His resurrection.

Before Jesus took our sin away with Him, we didn’t realize it could be done, and man could not feel worthy to love God without sacrificing something to Him. But Jesus took away that need because He took away our feelings of unworthiness. He purified us and set us in front of God so that we might feel His love.

Mysticism is all about feeling that love is the new covenant of one purpose for God and man. Religions still insist on fearing God and sacrificing ourselves in a deal to have our sins forgiven – a bid to avoid hell. In Mysticism, the state of spirituality has room only for love of God and gratitude for the divinity He has gifted to us.  Anything we do out of love and gratitude is possible from respect for God, not fear of Him, and from joy in His free gifts, not labor to earn them.  Jesus displayed a right-relationship with God, and earned that same chance for us. We only have to practice living in God’s presence to be attuned to Him. Anything more restrictive takes away from the realization that what we need is what we already have.

3/29/09 Insights from Study         Mysticism is a simple concept: a mystic is attuned to God.

Can you seek to be a mystic? Yes and no. There are things you can do to place yourself in the right attitude to be receptive to God, but the fruition of your mystic principles is a gift from God like everything else, and appears only if it fits God’s plan.  So if anyone might be a mystic and mystic intuition can’t be gotten just through striving for it – what’s the big deal?

The big deal is that not hearing God’s call is a sad tragedy common in this world. The tragedy is that the world could be a better place while we wait for reality. The sadness is that we put so much energy into things other-than-God, and those things are inferior.

The message is so simple we dismiss it – surely what pleases God the most must be harder, more painful and more elusive than this! But difficulty, suffering, and striving are worldly, human hangups that are not necessarily virtues in God’s reality. Real virtue is acceptance of God’s plan and a willingness to let God do one’s living through Him.

In this way we become attuned and united to God. What happens beyond that we leave to God’s means, whatever they may be; safe in the knowledge that we cannot fail with God in our corner, and in fact many wonderful gifts are stacked there.

3/28/09 Inspirations               God’s will is that all men come to know the ecstasy of loving Him. God’s plan is what must take place in order for that to happen. God’s will is joy and peace; God’s plan involves the trials and suffering necessary to get there. Back before sin, God’s will and man’s will were unified, and the joy and peace man was created for was a state of being; not an option. But man’s will separating him from God’s will, against God’s wishes, brought sin into reality and recovery from sin necessary.

God’s plan — to return us to the ecstasy of loving Him. It’s His will, and it will be done. Perfect union of our will and God’s will can never exist again on Earth because of sin, but the more we abandon our wills to God, the closer we come to perfection on Earth, and the more enjoyable our journey. God wills that when our spirits leave the Earth they will leave imperfection for perfection. To deny this is to not properly understand the fall of man or the resurrection of Christ.

Sin is unacceptable and must be renounced by God. Once invited in by man, all of Earth must be affected by sin. That’s why Earth is not Heaven; why pain exists. We must realize that the worst of our suffering is being stopped by God out of His mercy for us. We must realize how through Jesus God has made sure not one of us will be lost. Though worldly imperfection must go on, through God’s mercy there’s hope for a stop to our suffering. We have been assured to live again as we were created to live – God sacrificed Himself in order to make it so.

It isn’t so because we “accept Christ”. Christ made it so because that was God’s will. Our will has nothing to do with our resurrection. How arrogant we are to dictate who God meant to save and who He didn’t. Christ didn’t sacrifice Himself in order to save some of us and not others. Our free will doesn’t extend to the power to limit God’s master plan. Our sins are not powerful enough to ruin God’s plan, because none of our sins are unforgivable by God.

That’s why there can be no hell — God didn’t create it because He didn’t will it. What we call hell is what we experience in earthly imperfection. Because of sin we can’t escape trial and suffering, but God has promised that this won’t last beyond death; if we understood the life and death of Christ that would be clear. But that understanding is fogged over by the human need to have a hell in order to keep ourselves in line while we are on Earth. We do this because we over-emphasize the importance of the world; we over-emphasize the importance of the world because the world is all we know for certain. But that doesn’t mean there is nothing else certain. To God, this world has become an aberration. His plan remedied that because that is His will. Our clinging to the notion of hell must disturb God greatly.

3/24/09 Insights from Prayer                 Sometimes I feel like the greatest sinner of omission there ever was. I try to be sinless in my actions, but my inactions scream out their evil. What is it that I’m holding back from God? Why doesn’t He just tell me, rather than make me figure it out for myself? How do I push my ego aside completely when God counts on me to present His inspirations to those who are waiting for them?

Deep down I know I’ve been gifted with a healthy self-disregard, but duty requires action, and action looks like accomplishment even when I know it’s the result of God’s power only. My response tends to be inaction — if I do nothing I can remain humble, and God’s work through me remains pure. Then the disquiet arrives — I’m not doing enough!  If I keep bending back and forth looking for the right course on which to remain, might I not break from the strain? 

Dear God, in contemplation it’s easy to put myself in Your hands. I ask that I remain the object of Your generosity so that I may have plenty to give to others. But then when I lift my head, get up, and leave my place of prayer, I begin to feel that there’s something I should be doing to make things happen. For all my acceptance of Your work in me, I still feel incapable of any steps I must take myself, or of even discerning what those steps are. Is this my sin of omission? Or is it evidence of a small piece of human pride tainting the perfection of Your work? Either way, Lord, help me overcome my self. If I rely on myself too much, help me hold back. If I need to be doing more, help me know it and advance Your plan.

3/19/09 Inspirations              Don’t be afraid of the essence of God that’s within you. Don’t let people tell you that you can only be either a sinner or divine, knowing that you would never be prideful enough to claim divinity under the misperception that this would make you feel equal to God. No, the spark of divinity is not something we gain by overcoming sin – it’s a state given to us by God that permeates our spirits. It’s already there, but it is mystic – our sin has ruined our perception of our own divinity to the point that we can’t see it. But God sees it, and wants us to see it too.

It isn’t the amount or scope of our sin that makes us hopeless, it’s buying into the fallacy that God is the only divine being, and divinity cannot tolerate sin. It’s because we have God’s divinity within us that we can have a union-relationship with God, and it’s because we have the right to a relationship with God that we are interiorly motivated to be uncomfortable with sin and appreciative of virtue. The fact that we often set this aside for sensory satisfaction doesn’t change our makeup and therefore we always have hope.

Some religious would like to deny the existence of God’s divinity in the human spirit, but if we deny that, we lose sight of ourselves as gifted by God; our only alternative is to believe we can earn divinity by what we ourselves do. God became Christ to tell us we have been gifted with the right to a relationship with God, and that sin will not take that inheritance away. Mystics remind us that by accepting and acknowledging our divinity we welcome our unitive relationship with God, attract His further gifts of perception, abhor the sins which cloud that perception, and partner with God to bring the joys of this right-relationship to anyone else we can. We can do this only because God’s essence dwells in us – we are His children; made in His image. He will not forsake us even if we sin against Him. And we can’t be free of our divinity even if we deny it.

3/13/09 Insights from Study      If you haven’t read or heard about the 1957 Ayn Rand novel, Atlas Shrugged, it is in short a treatise on what happens to society when faith clashes with reason and need clashes with productivity. Faced with the fictional ascendancy of socialism over capitalism, the world discovers that if you take from the producers to give to the non-producers extremely enough, all are brought down to the same level of mediocrity and stagnation.

The novel is getting an underground boost of revival lately because it’s a bit prophetic of current economic and societal trends, but there are a couple of basic flaws in the theory which cheapen the message.  Ayn Rand lumps people into two either/or camps without conceding that it’s possible for the staunchest capitalist to be generously compassionate and the staunchest socialist to favor Mother Teresa tactics over Robin Hoodlumism.

But the worse flaw is that the author doesn’t give God a place in her philosophy or in the hearts of her characters. Nothing else she says can remain unskewed because she’s left out the most important factor in the human condition – the input of its Creator. In the war of worldviews Rand’s protagonist, John Galt, sees only the power struggle between human factions, as if human power had any meaning other than the power the Creator allows.  Because Galt does not attribute anything to God, those of us who attribute everything to Him see the lack of meaning in what’s important in Galt’s world.  Galt’s “mystics of the spirit”, which he so scathingly decries as one cause of the ruin of human progress, have no resemblance to any mystic I know about. 

True mystics don’t want to gain power. They know where the source of their force lies, and they know this grace will be vested in whatever interest God sees as fit. Humans do not go it alone; societies don’t need to rise or fall on the basis of human greed. If more of us would give deference to God’s plan there would be no need for either/or philosophies. Battles would be pointless if we allowed ourselves to welcome God’s work in us, and no one would need to show up for the war.

There’s good and bad in all of man’s endeavors and all human philosophy. It’s in moderation that man most resembles His God, for the end game for God is happiness for all. One’s happiness doesn’t have to take away from another’s, since God is the provider and His provision is infinite. John Galt may have been right about the economics of the situation, but without the perspective of God’s reality over human reality, all human work, innovation, invention and profit become the goal in and of itself. God’s goal is not of this world, so we should never sell our souls for worldly gains. That would have been the better lesson for John Galt to teach the world.

3/8/09 Insights from Study               Mystic recognition of God and His infusion of knowledge and grace is like hearing a guitar or piano being tuned by an expert. Here you have a discordant sound, a scraping sense of “wrongness” not unlike what we experience throughout our imperfect lives in an imperfect world. The tuner makes a slight adjustment and the pitch changes up and down, but remains wrong to the ear. Then suddenly the perfect adjustment is achieved, the string hits the right note, we hear at last clearly, cleanly, in tune and full of the sense of innately knowing that the frequency is at last perfectly right. Sound is good at last – it fits our sense of appropriateness and brings satisfaction where before there was annoyance. Forever more, having experienced what the perfect pitch should be, even the slightest variation from perfection will be heard as discord and bring us an insistent desire for the relief of a return to alignment. The mystic principles encourage, the mystic process seeks, and mystic prayer welcomes God’s infusion of knowledge and grace into our spirits, bringing them in tune and decisively bringing about a sense of clarity and rightness into our experience. We don’t forget this feeling – we seek its perfection always, are instantly alarmed by any wavering off course, and welcome God’s actions in favoring us with the gift of being attuned to Him.

3/8/09 Reflections                Devotional mysticism is the state of recognizing and accepting a personal, loving relationship between you and your Creator based on your free will desire for it and the gift of God’s spirit infused into your own. It shows itself in your need to communicate often with Him in comfortable prayer, and results in your sense of God’s presence constantly supporting you throughout your daily life. Your inner senses are heightened and your body, mind, soul and spirit are together oriented toward God in such a way as joy becomes more familiar and the trials of life become more bearable. You attain a new humility that urges you to match your will to God’s, and a new obedience to accept God’s plan without question. You are more attuned to God’s reality than to the world’s, and you tend to put God first, ahead of worldly distractions and absurdities. You become conscious of a deep peace in your life that comes from knowing virtue and that you are pursuing a right-relationship with God. You attain a new hope for life everlasting because through mystic experience you have already seen a glimpse of what God has in store for you and know it is wonderful beyond expression.

In mysticism there are no rituals and no dogmas – the closest mysticism comes to religion is that there is a demonstrated progression described by those who have experienced this direct communication with God, studied by those who are called or who have already had these experiences and want to understand them from a human viewpoint. But with God in control, no such study is really necessary – mysticism is all about passively recognizing God’s work in you and your surroundings, and actively encouraging this recognition in others.

Beyond intuitively placing yourself in a position to receive and appreciated God’s knowledge and grace, there is no requirement; all work is done by God, or by God through you. Devotional mysticism often brings a person uplifting joy and satisfying peace, but there is no release from the imperfections of the world; rather the special gift of being better able to deal with it. This practice of the presence of God is the ability to peacefully occupy yourself with the comfort of God’s incomprehensible love irregardless of life’s conditions.

The mystic life may be supposed to be a return to the way you were designed to interact with God in a world before sin. As such it can’t be perfect before death to this world, but every mystical favor can be thought of as a small sample of eternal joy to come. Just because full knowledge and grace of God is hidden, or mystical, doesn’t mean a taste of it isn’t available to everyone. Though mystical experience is by its nature hard to describe, anyone who feels a spark of recognition in any of the various attempts to convey the feeling of mystic experience will recognize it at once. It’s familiarity is buried deep in our essence, waiting for the sludge of worldly wants to be purged from our spirits to make room for Godly things.

Mysticism often begins in a person’s religion but doesn’t show itself until that person becomes disillusioned with the human basis of religious belief. Mysticism transcends religion and takes over a person’s desire to instead listen to God directly. Spirituality as a whole is more inclusive in that it acknowledges that we are guided by God and His directives are vastly more varied and specific than human-guided precepts would allow.

Mysticism is beautiful in its concept, satisfying in its simplicity of virtue, and awesome in its potential. It represents the highest spiritual state for every child of God, because it showcases each one of us as a force of God’s goodness.