The Light in the Woods

2/23/10 Inspirations          Politics is the ultimate reality show – hype disguised as the real thing. We watch it because it’s real enough to be thrilling and fake enough to be safe. The trouble is we never seem to learn that when politics makes its own reality it takes on a life of its own; the power-people can twist things whichever way they want them to be, and that is the basis on which they make laws. And how they love to make laws! When there’s an opportunity to make another law, if the facts don’t support it other facts must be manufactured.

The same can be said about any facet of life on Earth – politics, religion, science, finance, health, history – the power-people decide reality, and present it to the rest of us as truth so there’s no conflict in their control.

When I think about the fraud on us that might never have been revealed if not for a brave few, I can’t help but think of the deception that is not discovered and how we’ve formed our beliefs on it. I get to the point where it’s wiser not to believe anything anyone tells me, but the yammering is so intense I would have to retreat into an empty cave to get away from it. What good am I in an empty cave? Are we really put on this Earth to be good to one another? If we are, why is power so historically oppressive?

Maybe we do all need an empty cave; one containing an empty chalkboard on which to write only what we can believe for sure. There in the depths of quiet we may have a chance to capture truth and reality. There where there’s only one Power we might begin to receive what we really need to know and something we can really believe. There where we live on only what we’re given without striving on our own, we become humble enough to see clearly what is necessary for us to see.

Mystics enter this empty cave of contemplation whenever they can. With no distraction and no voice other than The One Who Knows, the empty chalkboard receives truth direct from Reality. The hard part is for the mystics to retain this truth and this focus on reality when they leave the cave to return to the world. But that is precisely what keeps the mystic going back to contemplation – the intrusion of a discordant world that never seems to fit right. The more the world yammers at us, the more mumbly it sounds and the clearer God’s voice comes through. That’s the Power I can believe, the Truth that’s without conflict, the Reality that feels right, the Light for which I long.

12/30/09 Insights from Study                   If you want things to focus for you spiritually, consider how much human knowledge you have in your brain; clear that out completely in moments of contemplation and give room to let God-knowledge fill your head. You cannot understand the limitlessness of God-knowledge until you temporarily throw out your dependence on your own intellect.  What you know of the world takes over and limits what you can know of heaven. Trapped by issues of time and space as it is, your brain doesn’t use but a fraction of what it could.  If you mentally remove thoughts of sense and emotion and place yourself sincerely at the will of God, you make your mind receptive to what is divinely possible. Don’t hold back out of fear of evil or delusion – these are worldly functions from which God protects those who invite Him in.

12/10/09 Insights from Prayer             I go alone to a quiet place to talk and listen to my Creator. This is exactly where I’m supposed to be. No fear, no doubt, no despair, no guilt – just doing what God means for me to do. This is the way it is in the Reality of heaven; for this reason I am at peace here. I am content with what I have because I turn my face toward the thing of real importance. If enemies pound at the door I don’t hear them here in my cocoon of safety. If there are corners where I, the temple of God, haven’t swept properly, I acknowledge this and immediately dismiss it. For here and now I exist only to honor my God by receiving His love and offering my own to Him. I go away refreshed, and I don’t grow faint from the clanging and screeching and wailing and shrieking of the world, so satisfied am I with the promise for that world that is the thing I hear above all else.

10/1/09 Reflections               It’s hard for us to just be. It’s natural to be cooking dinner, be preparing for a meeting, be disciplining a child, be checking out what’s on TV. But in the midst of life as we live it, everything we do is constantly measured by what came before and what will come after. We never seem to just be.

If you were suddenly snatched up from your place on Earth and plunked down on Mars, you would be forced to live in that present moment because Martian past and future is meaningless to you. The present is all you would have and it’s there you would live. In such a situation, where you are stripped of all faculties of intellect, will, and memory, it becomes just you and your Creator and the very moment that is existing. Is it any wonder that this is the situation which is conducive to communication with God?

We make this escape, sometimes unconsciously, by projecting ourselves into a scene far removed from reality. A driver in rush-hour traffic may longingly imagine being instead in a field of gently-waving grass, where all that needs to be done is to “just be”.

If we’re lucky, we have an actual place we can go to hide ourselves away from activity – a quiet garden, a forest trail, a dark closet smelling of cedar. In these places we experience life as it is without us or the cares that move us. If, for example, you are gazing at a rock in a stream, you might realize that the rock exists only in the present. It doesn’t change its being no matter what goes on with the rest of the world. Financial needs, political mayhem, mental meltdown, the next terrorist attack – the rock will still be there where God put it, doing what God asks of it. What a wonderful thing if I, with my free-will capabilities, would choose to be as complacent as this rock!

For mystics, the retreat that recharges our living in the present is contemplative prayer. Here we place ourselves in front of God and away from the things of the world, receptive to God’s input far from the distractions of time and space. Here, with no action of our own, we exist as God would have us; totally attentive to him and doing what we are supposed to do.  It’s a liberating feeling to be pleasing God, and what we get from this prayer we can take back with us to our everyday lives so that we are in effect praying constantly.

7/8/09 Reflections        What does it matter if you don’t get what you want during a dream? When the dream is over it doesn’t matter what you did in it; the dream isn’t reality. What pain could you not bear for a few seconds if you understood eternity? Take a look around and remind yourself – this is all going to pass into oblivion for me; it will mean nothing then, and it really has very little of the meaning I give it now. How much more peaceful our lives would be if we could truly understand this phenomenon in the here and now.

We are conditioned by the limitations of our physical senses and the makeup of our brains. If it didn’t happen there, it didn’t happen to us. No wonder we have trouble figuring out that the world is just not that important – nothing but worldly matters passes before us. We have nothing else with which to compare our experiences, and we have probably been taught that our supernatural senses are unreliable and somewhat sleazy.

Yet like in any dream-state there is that overtone of confusion – there is something that calls to us that we can’t quite answer because it’s out of our realm of experience. We feel, however, that if we do not grasp this we will always yearn for it. In life on Earth, this thing we yearn for is the grace of the Creator. In some deep corner of what we are, we know there is One and that our lives are dependent on Him. Very few of us will experience Him even though all of us can. We just don’t know how to give ourselves over to faith that completely; we are out of our element when we try. We get distracted by the things that we have placed ahead of the Creator.

Mystics encourage you to try to communicate with God. They understand that what He has for you is superior to what you can get for yourself. They want you to place yourself outside and a little above what you think of as life now; to project yourself into real life; the life with God that is coming. Until then, the journey can be so much more pleasant because God does not want for you the trials and sufferings of this dream world if He can reach you an easier way. Because nobody knows God all that well, the next best thing is to clear the mind into a blank slate, resting our thoughts long enough to let God’s come through.

Only after God’s grace is distributed should you explore what His message to you concerning the world asks you to do. The main thing is to learn to push the worldly dream-state aside and let God give you the glimpse into reality He is aching to have you experience. With that as the light at the end of the tunnel, you will do more and do it more easily on the journey home.

6/19/09 Insights from Study         When you put God first, you have nothing to fear because the thing you care most about cannot fail, and the things that can fail are not your greatest consideration.

In such simplicity it’s easy to concentrate; that’s why mysticism leads to contemplation. In contemplation we put ourselves in quiet reception of the mind of God. We draw within ourselves in order to block out the distractions of anything that is not God. This is a mental clearing away, so as to concentrate on the one true thing – God’s love and care.

It’s not as if we have to do this in order to receive God’s message for us; if God wills it, His message will come to us no matter what we do or don’t do. But contemplation is prayer – it not only puts us into the mindset to receive the essence of God with our supernatural senses, it also serves to remind us that we have a loving God who welcomes our communication with Him. Through this prayer we feel the satisfaction of our seeking out the truly important, and in the simplicity of this prayer we’re open to understand whatever God chooses to give us – like white chalk on the clean slate of your open spirit.

If all you have is a minute of quiet and solitude, give God that minute. You will be surprised at how eager God is to reach out. In the middle of chaos, you can still receive God, for He is present always and everywhere. You can make a big difference for yourself it you will ask for the grace to feel God in your life despite life’s chaos and distraction. Even “Lord, have mercy!” is a prayer straight to God’s heart.

You must understand that where God is concerned there is no formula or ritual. He knows you perfectly, so the slightest acknowledgment from you is sufficient to please Him. Let God into your consciousness whenever you can, and the answer to everything will be there waiting.

5/10/09 Insights from Study       Far from being an anomaly, mysticism as a method of Divine communication is the normal state of creation. In mysticism we gain knowledge and grace not through the senses but through the infusion of the Divine Mind into the spirit. This is how communication must be done after death, when there is no body to host the senses. It was the way we were created to receive God’s words, before sin and the need to rely on materialistic senses that resulted from this sin. And intuition infused from God is the natural language He speaks to His creatures other than us, for they never had the free will to sin and distance themselves from God as we have done.

To get back to our first language is a principle of devotional mysticism, and to do it we bypass the senses to bring ourselves to the spiritual state where the language of contemplation still reigns. We can communicate directly with God in our original language when we direct our thoughts away from our bodies, our senses, our “world beyond Eden”. It’s unnatural to worldly selves, but to our inner selves it’s as warm and familiar as returning to a quiet, peaceful house at the end of a hectic day of negative emotion.

In our pride we’ve relegated our first language to the junk heap of stuff we don’t need because human ambition is to be self-sufficient. In our self-regard it’s we who must be heard; not God. And we must be heard in our own way; not God’s.

But for those of us who perceive that what we have around us is not reality, it makes sense to speak with Reality in the language Reality speaks. We go somewhere quiet, distance our minds from the world, nestle our selves into the inner place where God dwells, and silently wait for Him to affect us. We are home at last – with our Father, listening to His familiar voice. We can’t say how it happens – that understanding is one of the many things we have lost – but we are content in God’s desire to speak to us in the pure way for which He created us. This we can do only when we think to begin our journey back to Him, for until we start on this road we haven’t understood we have somewhere to go. We should be ever thankful for this opportunity, for even though it’s available to all, few will pick up on the journey and listen to the Guide.

5/8/09 Spiritual Presentations          I’d had a headache for over a week, brought on by neck muscle problems. It wasn’t killing me, but the aspirin I had to take was going to cause harm eventually. Plus the longer constant pain goes on, the more I fall into a pit of despair. Last night I asked God to comfort me because I had had some bad news earlier, and I prayed that if He gave me relief from my headache I would take that as a sign that I was handling the bad news in a way that pleased Him. Instantly I relaxed and I did feel better and was able to fall back asleep.

This was in the early morning hours. When I got up for the day I thought that I wouldn’t be surprised if the headache was back, because things that happen in the night usually seem more dramatic than they do in the daylight. Finding I really did have no headache, I praised God in my wakeup prayers. It felt so good since the disappointing news had shot down royally something I had asked God for that I thought would bring Him glory, and I needed His special comfort then. And I was quite surprised that having specifically asked for a sign, I actually got it. I had assumed God would not appreciate being tested that way.

By the time of my morning devotions, doubt had already started to creep in. Could I have been having headache respites all along and put that in the back of my mind in favor of a miracle? Did I ask for a sign that God was still with me despite my recent setback, or did I just ask to be relieved from the headache? Did the headache go away just because talking to God relaxed me? Could the miracles I witness be proof only that I can control my pain using my mind? Or is pain itself a delusion I can let go of?

The point comes to me now – in any scenario I can think of, it’s actually God doing the work no matter how much input there seems to be on my side. It doesn’t matter how the headache came to be gone; the headache and the healing are both works of God designed for my benefit. Same with my bad news – what I wanted was not meant to be, but sometimes life’s hurts illustrate how blessed it is to go to God for comfort.

Here’s the thing about asking for a sign, and why I think God uses signs sparingly — we are never totally satisfied or fully convinced. I ask for a sign from the Divine, I get it, and still I doubt. For a person who believes with such certainty, my disbelief is enormous. This is a good lesson for me – to take what I’m given as proof of God’s love; to know that His ways are mysterious for a reason; to learn to heighten my belief by accepting everything as from God; to hold off judgment of others’ disbelief when my own is lurking stealthily beneath the surface. This lesson was worth the headache and could be the real sign for which I was searching.

4/15/09 Inspirations         You can never truly believe in God if your thoughts are too much in the world. If you limit reality to what you can witness, you will of course give no credence to what you haven’t witnessed. A goldfish in a bowl could be forgiven for not believing in spaceflight – that doesn’t mean there’s no such thing as spaceflight.

A good exercise would be to sit quietly and imagine how different life would appear to us if we knew we were just one planet among billions of others. We would feel small and useless but for one thing – once you have faith in God you automatically see how He is mighty enough to have a personal love for each and every inhabitant of the universe irregardless of how many there are.

Those who cannot see beyond life on Earth are destined to suffer hopelessness in some degree which may at any time turn into despair. At this time, they are aware they have nowhere else to go because beyond themselves there is nothing. What once seemed like freedom now seems like aimless wandering.

And so when the trials of the world remove your joy, expand your vision to include the mind of God, where there is an endless supply of joy. You will not understand it, but once you feel the enormity of the mind of God, you’ll be comforted in knowing that what you witness here is not all there is; that “all there is” is a concept bigger than mankind and therefore more hopeful than what we can experience outside of faith.

Faith is far from a crutch used as a prop for our purposeless existence — it’s an expansion of our supernatural senses, always approaching the Divine Mind. It’s acknowledgment of a positive force from a mystic source, drawing us to see what It sees, the message being that there’s no need to fear that for which only the Creator is responsible.

4/12/09 Inspirations                         It’s not for the reasons you may think . . .

I’ve read my Bible as a historical treatise; I enjoyed that, but it didn’t seem relevant. I’ve read it as the holy word of a God we can’t come close to understanding, and was frustrated by the mystery of it all. I’ve read my Bible literally and felt that anyone who could swallow that stuff was mighty gullible. Then I quit reading my Bible myself and listened to Bible commentators, whose interpretations made a lot of sense overall, but never touched me personally.

But after I set my Bible aside and wasn’t looking there anymore, I was hit hard by the gift of spirituality. Knowledge and grace came flooding into my spirit. Conviction and elation filled my days. Intuitions and miracles paraded before me. I found out that God was not at all like what the Bible writers said, but all about what they inferred. In other words, what God is saying to me between the lines of my Bible is the same thing He’s saying to me in contemplative prayer, where I know Him as well as He wishes to be known by me.

Now I can pick up my Bible at any place, and because God has touched me personally and I have welcomed His gifts, I find seeds of reflection scattered everywhere, and the realization comes easily and clearly. Like birchbark in the presence of a match, words of my Bible are a catalyst for what I already have been taught by God. Put together, the effect is explosive, sure, and predictable.