The Light in the Woods

3/8/10 Insights from Study              I love the Bible parables that remind us that when we have everything there is to have, we don’t need to strive or begrudge. And we do have everything we need, plus much more, when we embrace the loving presence of God in our lives. All it takes to believe in our blessings is to be willing to recognize that it’s only faulty perception blinding us to what we have been provided.

We are stubborn though; it’s hard to believe that what our senses tell us is true is true only in a dream; not in Reality itself. The world seems so concrete to us – it must be real. But the real world is beyond Earth, beyond senses, beyond human intelligence and perception. No wonder it’s hard to believe.

But it’s to our great advantage to believe, because with belief comes intuitive perception whereby we appreciate God’s desire for us to have the best of everything. Only then can we be content; to aspire to spiritual peace. Most of us wait until we die, and so waste our time here on things that don’t matter in Reality. Mystics die to the world on purpose, recognizing the love of God we all receive; recognizing it in such a way as to experience a little bit of heaven here and now without the wait.

In the parable of the Prodigal Son, the father tried to explain to the good brother that all the family has belongs to the good brother anyway; the bad brother can’t take away anything of value and so is not to be hated out of jealousy.

In the parable of the Vineyard Workers, the owner tried to explain that wages are wages; having once agreed to what will be accepted as payment, there is no need for any worker to begrudge what another one gets.

So often we think of life as a race — all this does is make sure we push others out of our way. So often we expect fairness out of all of life’s workings – God does not countenance fairness in His dealings with us because we cannot understand and cannot therefore judge His plan. Life is not an all-or-nothing proposition. Life isn’t a popularity contest or a system of rewards we can count on. Life doesn’t run smoothly on greed — not the greed of the “haves” and not the greed of the “have-nots” for what the “haves” have. A smooth life consists in something much greater than what we traditionally hold dear. When we strive for what will really satisfy us, we find that we look to accept the love of God that reaches out to us constantly. In this endeavor, nothing aspired to on the lower plane can approach, and the favors of the Holy Spirit we wouldn’t think of trading away.

If we take our individuality seriously and place our emphasis on a personal relationship with God, we are more apt to accept His work done in His way. There are so many little things that will not bother us in the least when we dedicate all we have to God’s plan for us. And we have a better relationship with others when we are not always trying to outdistance them on the path to fully appreciating God’s love.

2/28/10 Inspirations                  Meditation, contemplation, scripture study, litany and liturgy – all processes done to remove the world from our thoughts long enough to bring the Creator to the forefront are things good for peace of mind. But to acquire pure inner peace that lasts because it becomes the nature of our spirit, this is the ultimate comfort state.

We begin by ascribing all that is to God. We see Him as a loving God, ever merciful and ever forgiving. Only this kind of God makes us worthy of this kind of love. Then we acknowledge that if we give over our lives to God first and foremost, we will not only honor Him but gain for ourselves knowledge and grace through a new perception of His ongoing gifts to mankind. We will see too the nature of God’s reality – the kingdom to which we were born and still wait for our faulty, worldly perception to catch up to.

We live assured of pure joy, and we catch glimpses of this waiting reality. Through God’s loving attention we get heightened sensory input triggered by seeing the things around us in a fresh, God-toward way. The more attuned we are to things that are important to God, the more willing we are to receive these gifts from Him, and the more adept we are at appreciating them.

This, finally, is how we maintain a constant inner peace – by armoring ourselves against worldly strife with our focus on the bliss of reality that’s being covered up by worldly influences. When we recognize the joy of God, we immerse our spirits in Him to the point where we can exist happily even within the stress of our daily lives. This is inner peace, available to all.

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.

2/5/10 Reflections                    The knowledge we need of God is in us. Our hearts beat and our lungs exchange air without our intellectual input, and our minds apprehend God in the same way.

Lately, science is pin-pointing where in the brain that function resides, just as it has found the core location of other brain functions. This is good in that it admits the universal awareness of God we experience. But prideful man will probably interfere with this as in other things, and no doubt some megalomaniac will eventually mandate that the “God center” of an infant’s brain be deactivated at birth as a matter of course. Which all goes to show that while Creator-awareness is a normal function of a human being, Creator-knowledge must come to us in other ways; ways which science and megalomaniacs can’t touch.

God did not have to create the universe at all. His reality abides without it – always has and always will. The fact that He did create the universe implies a plan; a plan that takes place no matter how much humans interfere. Man’s need to experience God will not be impaired. What’s important is that we allow our full and certain joy of God-awareness however we can and in whatever ways God devises for our happiness. It’s hard-wired in us – what God desires is for our good, and what is good for us is what God plans from the beginning. Denying it gains us nothing, and denying it in others is impossible if the other person values a relationship with God. Need for God cannot be taken away, because it is supplied by God.

1/31/10 Reflections          I’ve been thinking a lot about the children’s ward lately — about how it tested my faith in God’s mercy plan, and how it returned me to my faith tenfold over the years through the deep peace of supernatural insight.

While visiting my brother, who was bedridden with multiple sclerosis and in a nursing home, it was necessary for my other brother and I to go to the office on some business. The home was doing some renovations, which made us have to detour through the children’s ward to get to the office. As we were admitted we were told walk straight through, not to interact, and to make as little as noise as possible so as to not disturb the children.

What I saw in the children’s ward is almost beyond description. There were small misshapen bodies in all sorts of contortions; blank expressions on faces that didn’t look like humanity so much as things closeted away until no longer needing care. Their beds or wheelchairs lined both sides of the hallway — as we walked the gauntlet of unspeakable aberrations, in the midst of what the coldest-hearted human would call insufferable, there wasn’t any noise; just the silence of tolerated existence.

When we finally got through the opposite doorway, I told my brother this was a real test of my faith, which depends on the love of God for all His creation. It did one thing, though – it caused me to keep coming back to reflect on what little I know of God’s reasoning, and how I can only believe that what He does He does for our good. Then slowly the lesson of the children’s ward was taught to me within my spirit, and has given me a deeper, more peaceful intuition of the working of God’s love than I think I could have ever had without the experience.

I see now that we cannot care for each other properly. No matter how dire the circumstances and how tirelessly we work for our fellow human beings, we cannot give them what they truly need. Only God can do that. The most dedicated nurse on the children’s ward can only comfort the bodies of the children, and help them remain emotionally neutral.

Their bodies may be decimated, but who knows what they’re seeing inside? Only God can offer that comfort, and somehow I’ve come away with complete assurance that He does. Behind those distorted shells, could the children be experiencing the golden glowing joy of God’s perfect love as do those who have already passed on into His kingdom? If real meaning only exists in another world where God is the only god and our spirits gather Him fully and ecstatically, could those that are physically dependent and mentally unencumbered with worldly priorities be blessed with heavenly bliss here on Earth and unable to tell of it?

In fact, I’ve come into the knowledge that those children are experiencing the beauty of God the way God meant humans to experience Him — how we all would if our minds and bodies were disabled and given over solely to God’s care. In this condition of having nothing else, we enjoy the one thing we do have, unconditionally and without fail — the love of God.

Mystics are able to see the logic of their detachment from the world and negations of self-interest. To them the loss of selfhood is not debilitation so much as essential to experiencing something much better and closer to God’s desires. And those who study the Bible know well the scriptural plea for decreasing so they may increase, giving up all they have and following, taking no scrip for the journey, becoming like little children, the last being first, choosing the good part, letting them deny themselves, taking up the cross, losing their life for God’s sake, having their treasure in heaven, being poor in spirit, crying in the wilderness, the stone the builders rejected, casting in all they had, taking the lowest seat at the feast, seeking the kingdom of God, and entering at the narrow gate.

God should like us to be what we were at creation, before free-will and the sin and suffering that comes from it. For truth, that’s the state He has planned for us to return to in glory. Now, in the world, the independence we asked for has become a thing of strife. The only way to alleviate it is to allow ourselves to become totally dependent on God again so we may look upon His kingdom with joy and hope.

In the children’s ward this has been done for them and they live in the perfect presence of God without effort. Only those who give too much credence to the world and how we perceive it will miss completely what I missed momentarily – that the only thing that matters is the love of God, and whatever state we are in that we can perceive this love the most is the best state to be in. In the measure that we can’t assimilate this, we suffer from our lack of perception. That, then, is true and needless suffering.

I’m not suggesting that those who take care of the residents of the children’s ward don’t provide a heroic service – the need for care of these children’s bodies and emotions is enormous, and I hope for the caregivers’ sake that part of their compensation is the feeling of being blessed to be near these special temples of God’s love. But I am confident that God makes up for suffering by opening up the spirit to supernatural consolation. And this, being the better part, is what God encourages for all of us by our offering of our very selves to Him — a disabling of the ego so as to make His love our spiritual sustenance.

Mystic vision is not apparitions caught by our human senses. Mystic vision is the ability to see things as God sees them; a gift given because we want it badly and allow it freely. Through mystic vision we are able to “know properly” — not the things of this world but the reality of this world as seen from a higher plane. This is a comfort not only to the residents of the children’s ward, but to anyone who can learn exactly what it is they are experiencing. What we can know of God comes down to one necessary specific – that when we seek God we see Him, because that’s what we were made for. And when we see Him we know at once that no matter who we are, or how we look, or what we have or don’t have, without His love we would be nothing and with His love we are everything.

12/24/09 Inspirations              When I was a child I believed in hell. You went there when you died unbaptized or in mortal sin; there was no hope – there you stayed for eternity. If you were baptized but in lesser-than-mortal sin when you died, you went to purgatory. This was a place of suffering where you paid for your sins, but also a place of hope because when you were purified you went to heaven. Your friends and family and even total strangers could help you get out of there and into heaven by praying a certain way, and if during life you did this and that you could build up indulgences that would be redeemed against your time in purgatory – a sort of time off for good behavior. Limbo was a kind of purgatory where unbaptized babies who knew nothing of sin were stored. Heaven was for the baptized who hadn’t committed any sins since the last time they ate a wafer blessed by a priest.

Later on, when I began to analyze my beliefs, little of this seemed plausible so in my feeling of having been duped, I went as far as I could the other way. I stopped believing in most everything. I still believed in God, but I had no relationship with Him because He was tyrannical and distant and the less I had to do with Him the safer I was. I didn’t have much trouble being good – for the most part I was a natural goody two-shoes who wanted to be left alone. I treated my neighbor as I wanted to be treated myself — I left him alone.

Then a little over five years ago God took me in hand; He showed me wondrous things and told me about Himself. I found out He was a loving God who was familiar with every aspect of me, because He lived in me and all around me. I found out how to recognize Him in His works. I learned that heaven is all there is and we’ve all been there all along – our perception has been so clouded we don’t experience things as the really are. There isn’t one thing I can do to gain or lose heaven – it is what it is and will not change. It is very, very good because it is what God made, and God wants only good for us.

Life on Earth is an exile – not from heaven but from our proper experience of heaven. For God’s good reasons we can only experience unreality here. It’s a dream, sometimes better described as a nightmare of our own making. We are causing our own thoughts to be fogged up. Somehow through our own free will we made our own delusion, and only direct knowledge and grace from God can be trusted. I haven’t been shown how this exile happened, except that it must have originated from God’s goodness. Life on Earth is in God’s master plan and not to be feared because God’s master plan only leads to reality, and God’s reality is wonderful.

So God’s spirit infused in me not only told me things outright, but showed me how to interpret other things with a view geared towards His will and the reality He made for us to live in. For instance – do my inspired thoughts make the Bible a pack of lies? No, God inspired others long ago just as He inspires us today. There is much to be gleaned of the inspirations found in the Bible, but it has to be ferreted out by means of my own personal inspiration from God in order to find in it what is meant to be found. We can look at our own times to see how truth gets battered beyond recognition – the government, the media, the education and justice systems are always rewriting history to fit their own agendas and spinning statistics to fit their own theories. The Bible is a holy resource that has been handled by human beings to conform to human needs, just as all inspirational literature is. It is not purely God’s original word – for that one has to look to one’s own spirit, where God’s truth is written. And why wouldn’t it be this way? God loves us and wants to deal with us directly.

It was in the midst of scripture-abuse that God came down as Jesus. He set the record straight on what we were doing that was not conformable to God’s wishes. He demonstrated the joy of having a right-relationship with God by abandoning our will in favor of matching His. Jesus taught us how to live in prayer; to be prayer itself in our very words and deeds. He showed that the harshness of humanity seems very real to us the way we see it, but we will be resurrected from this bad dream and return our perception to the reality of heaven. He made an example for us by His very life – affirming that God’s spirit is here with us; that His inspiration is the only truth we have, and that only God’s knowledge and grace can be relied upon. If we need to know more, we can always come to God to ask.

Jesus proved that though we tend to focus on the wrong thing in this foreign environment, the right thing is always available to everyone and is as close as our own spirits, which God fills with Himself out of love for us. God wants us to break through the heavy curtain that separates us from Him and that keeps us from realizing the pure joy of our existence. His light does come through, encouraging us to take advantage of the kind of relationship Jesus identified for us, but we need to put forth the effort by letting God prepare our spirits.

We can know a bit of our joy which is hidden, and bask right here and now in the kind of glory that is ours in full after our own resurrection into reality. We were made for this and all God asks is to be asked to reveal it. Even with a right-relationship with God and direct communication with His word, we are still only works in progress and far from an all-encompassing insight into truth while we are in this world. But if we are sincere, obedient, and humble we can be Christ-like. When you think of the meaning of Christmas, you understand how it must satisfy God greatly when we are willing to be Christlike despite the nature of the world around us.

12/8/09 Insights from Study                The mystic process goes from detachment to discernment to abandonment to perfect perception – all being towards a unitive relationship with our Creator. The mind of God is vast; we can be of one mind with Him and still have room left for individuality. It’s often through our individual assignments that God has caused His wishes to be done.

We can’t know everything there is to know of the sin and imperfection that holds us back, but God does, and that’s why we turn all we have over to Him. Body, mind, soul and spirit – God purifies the whole of us though it isn’t necessary for us to know how. When our intellect, emotion, and will are served by God instead of used for lesser things, we have let go of human-control and aligned ourselves with God’s immanence, which is always there.

This is how it is in the reality we’ve forgotten through having to live this life. That’s why we have so much spiritual doubt here – our perception is flawed; we sense this and feel melancholy for the true-perception that is our life with God. Having become disassociated with God we can expect here on Earth only hints at the remembrance of our perfection, and those joys are available only through God’s love and mercy towards us. But with God’s grace we can offer up to Him the very things that are the result of man’s disassociation with God. We are moved to do this through divine insight and we use our own free will to gather God’s grace close.

Our estrangement from perfection shouldn’t be a cause for despair, because we know that we lead truly joyous lives with God in the dimension of reality. Though we can’t understand what that’s like now, when we open up our mystical senses – those attuned to how we really are – we can experience some of that joy even in this imperfect life. This is what mystics do, because in this direction lies the freedom for perfect worship of God the Creator. We always respond to goodness with joy and welcome. Pure worship is simple — we honor God when we desire to return to the state in which He created us.

12/4/09 Insights from Prayer        We are all in exile but we can stand anything when we keep our emotions centered on home. If we try to fit in with imperfection we will never be at ease, because we were made for better than that. When we put it all on the Creator we are consoled, for we know two things: He will act on our behalf perfectly, and He is honored when we give up our disordered priorities in favor of His perfect ones.

The world frightens us because it is filled with human-powered sin. It’s this sin, not the will of God, that causes us our agony. Whether it is we who are doing the sinning or not, we all suffer together because we must experience imperfection together. Sins committed, sins of omission, emotions unbridled, annoyances personified, addiction, prejudice, wanting what we don’t have, putting forth too much reverence for what we do have, making too much of ourselves – any sin we commit or weakness we give into is a sign that our spirits are in disorder. And no wonder – we were not made for this world at all.

This world is what our lives look like when we look at them wrong. God created us for perfection and so that is what we are. But God allowed us to reject Him, and we pay for it by being blind to the reality of our perfection. We are in exile; this doesn’t feel right to us at all. We’re missing something and most of us don’t understand that it is the perfect relationship with God that we’re craving. That’s why our spirits feel as if they’re never contented.

We can’t bring our spirits back to perfection here, because “here” itself is imperfection. This world is only the medium of misperception which is the result of our disassociation from God. It isn’t real, and that should be a comfort to us, to know that one day we will again have perfect vision of reality. Until then there is only hope.

What makes the world of exile bearable is God’s mercy, and His power of consolation available to us when we ask for it. Each experience of worldly beauty gives us a glimpse of promise – God’s word that He is present and wishes to remind us of the joy that reigns where we are headed. When we see this beauty, we ought to immediately connect to the Creator who brought it about. The more we think of God, the more hints He gives into our immortal existence, and the more hopeful we are. God answers the confusion and suffering we experience in this world with better perception of the beauty and perfection that is our real life. The more we honor God the easier we see through our exile and into our reality, and the less anxiety we will have with our earthly, temporary trials when we recognize the joy that is to come.

11/22/09 Insights from Study              The way the world destroyed Jesus is the way it tries to destroy those who avail themselves of Jesus’ blessings. There are those who think of this life as all there is and because of that they live only for worldly desires. These people despise the thought of the real life to come, because they assume preparing for it would mean giving up their Earthly ways.

When they encounter someone who ascribes to a higher plane of spirituality there is resentment and a need to test this focus. There are many forms of persecution, and the more secular the society, the more extreme the justification for the persecution.

Buy my spirituality cannot be realized by anyone other than me and God. It cannot be measured in worldly increments and cannot be tested against worldly standards. You can kill me to prove that God will not save me, but God might not have worldly purposes in mind when He saves. The realm of reality to which I go is not a place where you can follow me, and so you’ll never know the results of your test.

It was not the death of Jesus that enlightens us to God’s design so much as His resurrection. If you do not see beyond this world, you cannot reasonably test someone who does; you will not recognize the promise of the resurrection unless you yourself experience it. Your persecution of the spiritually-minded will be counter-productive because it only validates the righteousness of those you persecute.

11/12/09 Inspirations              Imagine if there was no such thing as time or space. You would look out on the world from where you stand and say to yourself — ”This is what is. What is here and now is everything there is, just as it is.”

That’s the way things are in Reality – in God’s kingdom, the world as it is without the scales that cover our eyes. In God’s kingdom, this eternity – life without time or space – is the beautiful sum of God’s love. But to us, infinity is frightening because we have become used to the illusion of time and space, and we cannot really imagine existence without them.

And so we try to imagine heaven but fail in that we keep returning to the earthly measurements of time and space. “OK, so there’s heaven and it’s wonderful and it never ends. Except, everything must have an end!” No, just when you’ve expanded your mind to include a life that goes on forever, you’re already imagining the end that must come. You circle around infinity, trying to both embrace and erase within your understanding the concept of endlessness, but you can’t do it, and this frightens you to the point where you can no longer contemplate heaven without unease. But you’ll be back, because as frightening and incomprehensible as eternity is, you would rather face it in consciousness instead of in the black and silent nothingness that would be it’s alternative.

This is why humans, all humans, are pre-programmed for trust in the Creator, whether we acknowledge it or not. We with our minuscule capacity for knowledge can only be immobilized by fear or comforted by faith.  Without this faith that something higher than we are will make everything all right, we are lost in our own home and afraid to leave it.

There are some who claim that when a person finds comfort in faith in God, that in itself is evidence of their delusion; in “real life” we don’t get what we want by wishful thinking, we get it by luck or hard work. But those with faith in God are functioning above and beyond this temporal, worldly life, and worldly measurements do not work there. On this higher plane we do get what we want by wishful thinking. It’s called prayer, and if we pray to be in sync with God’s master plan, we will of course be comforted. The mightiest prayer is “Lord, Your will is done – help me be content in that and I will have comfort in all things.”

The antidote for fear is faith. If you trust in the goodness of an all-wise and all-powerful Creator, what is left to fear?