The first principle of great spiritual teachers is rather constant: only Love can be entrusted with Wisdom, or with Big Truth. All other attitudes will murder and mangle and manipulate truth for their own ego purposes. Humans must first find the unified field of love and then start their thinking from that point. This is the challenging insight of mature religion. All prayer disciplines are somehow trying to get head and heart and body to work as one, and that changes ones thinking rather entirely. The concentration of attention in the heart-this is the starting point of prayer, says St. Theophane the Recluse, a nineteenth-century Russian mystic. Any other handler of your experience, including the rational mind or even mere intellectual theology, eventually distorts and destroys the beauty and healing power of the Big Truth. The second principle is that truth is on some level always beautiful--and healing--to those who honestly want truth. Big Truth cannot be angry, antagonistic, or forced on anyone, or it will inherently distort the message (as the common belief in a punitive God has done for centuries). The good, the true, and the beautiful are always their own best argument for themselves, by themselves, and in themselves. Such beauty, or inner coherence, is a deep inner knowing that both evokes the soul and even pulls the soul into All Oneness. Incarnation is beauty, and beauty always needs to be incarnate, that is specific, concrete, particular. We need to experience very particular, soul-evoking goodness in order to be shaken into what many call realization. It is often a momentary shock where you know you have been moved to a different plane of awareness. This is precisely how transformation differs from the mere acquiring of facts and information. Whereas information will often inflate the ego, transformation utterly humbles us. In that moment, we know how much we have not known up to now, and still surely do not know! This is a good and probably necessary starting place. Love is luring us forward, because love is what we already are at our core, and we are naturally drawn to the fullness of our own being. Like knows like, and when we are comfortable in our true identity, as Meister Eckhart says, It is Gods pleasure and rapture to place his whole nature in this true place--because it is Gods own identity too. As an electromagnetic force, Infinite Love is drawing the world into the one fullness of love. We will finally be unable to resist such overwhelming love. (Some saints even said the devil would be unable to resist it in the end.) So dont fight it, resist it, or deny it now. Love will always win. — Richard Rohr, adapted from Immortal Diamond: The Search for Our True Self
Posted on: Mon, 12 Jan 2015 07:27:45 +0000
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