• Making Room

    November 30, 2018

    Do I see how I fill up my life? Do I see how my time is stolen from me by habitual ‘doings’?

    Can I stop the momentum of my life and make room for communication with the Absolute?

    Each of us needs to find a way to invoke higher emotion in order to enter into communication with His Endlessness. Have you found yours?

    Could I recommend that you consider glorification?

    What is glorification? It’s a profound pleasure…praise, adoration and joy all rolled into one. The great thing about glorification is that it has no place whatsoever in ordinary life. Nothing merits glorification except the universal being. Therefore, I have not learned how to fake it. It has another advantage. It seems to me that the universal being likes to be remembered in this way…it brings out the best in Him…so He participates with pleasure.

    Beware of the standard prescriptions. I hear some of you say that you must learn to be thankful for all that you have been given. This is a frequent refrain in most spiritual schools. Has anyone here figured out how to be thankful? Can you turn it on when you think it is appropriate? Unfortunately, most of us can. I frequently pretend to be thankful in situations where it is socially expected. Furthermore, most of my thanks are directed at people and that’s just not the same as His Endlessness. But your experience may be different.

    I think every human has a note or tone that derives from the Absolute…His calling card to Himself, placed in you. There are many such qualities but there is probably one that you are most able to invoke because it is innately you. Following someone else’s direction on what this is for you is not likely to work.

    We do not make room for the Absolute if He is just an idea. Can you find something in common with Him, an inducement, a dart of pure pleasure which supports a relationship?

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  • His Endlessness (2)

    July 1, 2018

    I have said for many years that it does not matter what name or concept you use for God. What matters is what you feel about Him.

    People want to talk about God with the same frame of mind and setting of the nervous system that they would use to do the grocery shopping or figure out the Times crossword puzzle. This is nothing short of stupid.

    I speak to a beloved friend with a special feeling, a different tone of voice, a different countenance. In this way, the basis of our friendship is renewed. If I do not make this effort, the relationship is closed to me; in reality, it does not exist, it is something else, something unrecognizable.

    So it is with God. Thought of in one way, He does not exist to me. I am an atheist. But when I am in the right state to be engaged with Him, He becomes accessible. He becomes real.

    I have often said, ‘do not allow yourself to think about God when you are in the wrong mood.’ Use the mood you are in to do the things appropriate to it, or change your mood, do not try to talk to your beloved friend when all you can think about is your taxes.

    This is the problem with so-called logical proofs of God. The sort of thinking that examines things logically is not up to the task of proving His existence. All my capacities need to be awakened for me to be satisfied that He exists and then my speech will have many more dimensions than logic alone. It is not possible to house an elephant in a closet, and in the dark, the various parts of an elephant will be easily mistaken, as the story goes. To ponder His Endlessness, I need my best efforts at spaciousness and subtlety and even then I will be far short of the task.

    Bring together feeling, sensing and thinking. Look with great care. Search your heart. Stay with the search. You will find Him, however you have conceived and named Him. Faith is not belief and it is not blind, as the saying goes, it is the most perceptive of faculties.

    Rumi tells us of being in a caravan crossing the desert. At night, while encamped by the fire, he hears a man plaintively calling for his camel by name. ‘Have you lost a camel?’ Rumi asks of him. . ‘I feel I am missing a camel,’ the man responds, ‘and the more I call him, the more certain I am that I have lost my camel’. Rumi begins to think that he, too, has lost a camel. That is how it is for those who find that they are missing something dear to them. They begin to look for Him and call His name.

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