The Light in the Woods

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.

1/19/10 Inspirations             The more I experience God the more I would need to know in order to do Him justice. I can’t explain the unexplainable, yet this is exactly what a believer is expected to do. This is a world where all you have to do is show skepticism and you appear to have wisdom. But those who have wisdom of Reality — that is, a world more attuned to the Creator than to what He has created – tend to remain silent and waiting.

The first thing you learn when you become truly enlightened is that there is a God and He is in control. You may object to feeling like a pawn in a chess game, but if you do you’re reacting with your ego whereas God is dealing with your spirit. To be spiritual is to be fully free; to accept God’s control so that you may exercise your free will from within the condition that truly responds to human free will — God’s desire to show love and be loved.

This cosmic consciousness is the key to true joy and deep peace. To a humanist happiness for all is a noble cause; to a mystic it is an inheritance from God. It takes acknowledgment of divine control to attain real peace; it will not come about through human desire for it to be so. But our free will can be used to accept recognition of God as Creator and to guide our actions toward working from within God’s master plan.

This master plan cannot be known except generally – the specifics are left to the mind of God, which we cannot probe deeply enough for now. But this is how creation works best; with enough mystery to encourage our participation in God’s plan, and enough knowledge to accept the wisdom of its Creator without question.

As each individual is blessed with mystic perception the fire spreads even more quickly. One day all will grow to abandon ego and embrace spirit – at this point the world can end at last, and we may all awaken into true life of perfect joy in the full presence of God.

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.

12/19/09 Inspirations               When it comes to the things of God, how much can we human beings really know? What portion of what our ancestors said is really true? Given what we know of the history of mankind, and through our own experiences of human nature, what are we to believe?

As in everything pertaining to the mystical life, the first thing necessary for reflection is to put God first, ahead of worldly considerations and human input, because through this door lies only what God desires for us to hear. That means mystics, because they come from many beliefs, must as always pare down dogma and build up intuition. As we honor the Creator, we honor His methods, which are shaped to the individual and are varied beyond our comprehension. Our trust is in God’s word to us and through others with God’s inspiration in our spirits.

Remembering that Devotional Mysticism is an attitude of worship and not a religion itself, we must also remember that it is a practice open to all faiths, all denominations, and all individuals – excluding no one, as does God. Many mystics are Christians, and many non-Christian mystics believe in Jesus. Because of the varied interpretations God gives us, a discussion of Jesus and mysticism, to be relevant to all mystics, starts out simplified in the masses and will be built upon by the individual from within his own belief system.

A mystic interpretation may be that in Jesus God was saying “I will meet you where you live. I will come to you; to be among you and within you. In doing this, I will show you the things that I admire so you can follow my wishes through your free will. I will show you that if all in this life is not pleasant, you can look with joy to your own resurrection. From My manifestation on your level – separated as you are from Me by deception – you will find I’m a loving God, a merciful God; dedicated to you even when you turn your back on Me. I teach you compassion for others; I show you your own weaknesses so you too can be merciful to My other children. I bring you the promise that I will keep coming to you asking for your love — being pleased anytime you show it and merciful anytime you don’t. In other words, I have the capacity to communicate with you, and I do it in many different ways – ways that conform to what you can relate to. You call these manifestations of Myself by the names that mean something to you – Son of God, nature, Jesus, miracle, inspiration, Holy Spirit, co-incidence – because if my glory is beyond you I can have no real meaning for you. I am first your Creator, and I care for you in many ways while you’re away from me. Nothing pleases me more than that you would wait patiently for me with total confidence, see what I am to you, dedicate yourself to my will, and most of all love me with all you have.”

The important thing is that God can speak to us as Jesus and we will hear a powerful message. Christmas is a perfect time to reflect on this message in awesome wonder that God can and does put all His love into mankind despite what mankind can do.

12/10/09 Inspirations              Given infinite time and resources, can science ever know everything? In even one small area, if we knew all there was to know, what we’d want to do with such knowledge would far surpass the ability of our hands to work or the Earth to supply the raw materials to take us from knowledge to usefulness. But beyond that – would we be comfortable, or even survive, without the mystery that keeps us striving and thriving?

I hope that we accept with gratitude the knowledge that is doled out to us. I hope we never despair to think that we’re not meant to know everything. Most of all in this matter, I hope we welcome that there will always be a mystery to life, a quality that cannot be supported by facts.

The cloud of unknowing is a gift; not a curse. It gives us something to aim for and something to occupy our minds. It assures us that no matter what we achieve, we can always become even more excellent. It keeps hope alive, and yet it keeps us humble to know we cannot have this knowledge without asking for it. It gives us joy whenever the fog of unknowing lifts a bit and lets in the tiniest ray of light.

There will come a time when we are gone from this Earth and no longer need knowledge in order to experience satisfaction. Until then, we need the mystery that keeps us centered while we wait for the promise. In keeping with the tenets of the subject of science, I haven’t mentioned God in this piece so far, but there isn’t anyone reading it who doesn’t know in their hearts that God is what this article, as well as the mystery of life, is about.

With the stupendous achievements we’ve experienced in science and technology, what would normally seem miraculous becomes commonplace. Supernatural miracles do not behave this way – they are usually not meant to prove a point so much as to enlighten our lives with joy. They appear when we are ready and receptive; that’s why they are not recognized by everyone or accepted by everyone in the same degree. But the best part is that they never become commonplace, because God has at His disposal infinite ways of communicating His miracles. We are blessed if we understand this, because the mystery keeps us looking. The next week, the next day, the next hour or the next minute may display something wonderful if we are watching.  Though we strive for knowledge, we thrive on mystery.

12/6/09 Inspirations                Belief or disbelief in God is probably the most analyzed issue in the world. It is of interest to everyone, it crosses national boundaries, it transcends the political, it concerns many parts of our lives, and it’s an emotional issue to anyone who has it brought out into the open. We all have an opinion about God, even if our belief system beyond that might be confusing and incompletely analyzed.

Even among those who believe in God, there is diversity of opinion, or maybe it’s better to cite a diversity of emotion. There are different gods, different paths to the same God, differently perceived attributes of God, different scriptures, different beliefs as to God’s interaction or disinterest in human affairs, and many other differences that make each of us unique.

I believe in the Creator because there’s no other alternative that I can find. We know next to nothing of all there is to know, so it stands to reason that somebody knows, and that somebody must be very powerful, because we are here. All we see for certain is that we are the most advanced civilization on Earth that’s ever been, and we did not and cannot create a planet, let alone the universe.

In mysticism, the theology is that God may make something of himself knowable if it fits His design, but as soon as we know something about Him we also come to understand how extremely far we are from even scratching the surface. This brings us reverence for the awesome work of God, and hope that when we return to Him we will be sharing in His greatness.

It’s as if someone were to put a pinch of sand under a microscope and tell you to count to see how many grains there are. No sooner do you come up with a number than they put a spoonful of sand in a bowl and request the same thing. Now you’re uncomfortable, because the job is hard and the hours are long. But you do it — and then they come in with a cup of sand on a plate. As you start in counting, you think of the Sahara and the nature of mathematics.  Even though more are being made as we work, there are a finite number of grains of sand in the desert yet an infinite supply of numbers with which to count them. In other words, the job is possible, but we can’t do it. We feel that God, on the other hand, is powerful enough to know the number of grains of sand in the universe. To mystics, this is a cause of great joy; not despair.

Yesterday I heard the results of a poll of those who believe in God. The question was: how big a part of your life does religion play? I’m sure everyone who answered the poll came up with a reasonable answer. But think about the question very carefully; mull it over a bit in your mind. Is anyone really qualified to say? Isn’t God the only one who actually knows?

11/15/09 Inspirations           Spirituality attends to the “rightness” of the way we are when we are wrapped up in God. Religion tells us we please God by following the rules of “rightness”.

This example of the difference came to me: A spiritual woman was so immersed in the things of God that she was seldom moved to look at herself in a mirror and didn’t feel that putting on makeup was important to her. So without giving it much thought, she didn’t wear makeup.

A religious woman was taught all her life that wearing makeup is a sign of wantonness and self-adoration, so she didn’t wear makeup because she believed to do so was to sin against God.

Both women were of a mind to do the right thing, but this “goodness” in the spiritual woman was an effect of abandonment of self to God while this same “goodness” in the religious woman was reached by adherence to law.

If you are waiting for me to tell you the spiritual woman’s way was more pure than the religious woman’s way, you need to hear about the third woman in my example. This woman belonged to a religion that didn’t put forward any tenet at all on the wearing of makeup, but the only time she wore makeup was at church. Why? Her thought was that all week long she sweated and toiled for the sake of keeping body and soul together. On Sunday she was going to church to worship her Creator and wanted to make herself look and feel special for the occasion.

And I don’t know for sure, but it seems logical that there are places in the world where a person doesn’t feel they’ve honored God properly if the ritual didn’t include full body makeup.

We really confuse ourselves when we allow ourselves to judge “goodness”, especially when we move beyond self-examination and into the realm of judging others. That’s precisely why I do believe in the purity of motive that comes with spirituality, even if religious and plain old secular “goodness” is fine as well. It’s because in spirituality we immerse ourselves in God first and exude goodness because we’ve taken on His attributes. We are good because God is good; not because God has given us rules to follow and we’ve followed them.

The less self-interest there is – when our own goodness surprises us – the more evident that we treat goodness as a gift from God instead of as a reason to be rewarded for our own work.

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?

11/9/09 Inspirations           God has everything. But there is one thing to have that is meaningless if not received from someone else. God would like to be loved. That is why He created us in His image – with free wills so that we can voluntarily love Him. For what good is love if it is mandated instead of freely given? Even if you’re God, love has to be received to be meaningful.

Here on Earth, the distortion of reality is the result of free wills used for other purposes than to honor God. But that makes the love potential all that much more significant, because our love for God can come through above human weakness and human suffering, without which there would be nothing for love to overcome.

When we come out of this coma of life on Earth and enter the reality of heaven, we will love and honor God without question, as divine beings. But here and now, love for God does not come so easily; here our humanity takes hold of us and demands all we’ve got. How specially it must please God then, when we freely volunteer to love Him despite the strikes against it! This is love in the extreme; valuable because it comes from self-willed creations who can and, indeed, are of a nature to withhold it.

To mystics then, this is the greatest privilege and the focus of life itself – to honor God by loving Him. Despite all it might take to get to that point, the commission is simple — all we do is honor our Creator by loving Him. Rites and groupings and dogmas and scriptures are redundant, because we know how to love God without all these things. To love God is, after all, what we were created for.

In this we embark on a journey that will not fail, for the moment we decide for God, all His power and knowledge is at our disposal in the measure that we allow ourselves to ask for it and to put it to use. And one spark of love sent to God is returned in a totality we can’t even grasp, but know in our hearts is how reality will feel when we reach it at last.