THE END OF THE BOOK AS WE READ IT
We are writing a work in progress, whose end rests with us always as we travel, forever open and unpenned.
The effect of our teaching: Mullah Nasruddin called the townsfolk to prayer, then scurried down from the minaret and ran off. “I sang so searchingly, I want to hear how far the sound carried!” So we have our self-concerns, our trepidations. When we leave the door open, our self-judgment is cleared away by the breath of compassion. God depends on us as we depend on It, It raises up whatever’s needed from the reeds and puddles.
The Sufis explain that true teachers will keep profiling the same principles over and over until, when they begin on something, the students will know what they’re about to say. Only then has their knowledge been actually transmitted.
Meanwhile, the Kotski Rebbe said: Anything can be copied except the truth, for once it is copied it’s no longer the truth.
As in viewing the hills, we get ever-new perspectives, for the principles roam free beyond the words, an endless treasure.
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Beloved, through Grace and surrender we can begin to be turned:
We all can start to turn to the quiet within ourselves and without, for a few moments.
We all can start to let God’s love in, even when we can’t become quiet, or can’t love ourselves every time we fall down.
We all can start to serve as conduits for divine love. We all can start to pour out the love and forgiveness and understanding we want for ourselves.
We all can start to secretly recognize the Messiah as the identity of every being whom we meet.
We all can start to give humble service to God appearing.
And by the by, without desire for a return, there will descend upon us such “a blessing, that there will not be room enough to receive it.”
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The statement of truth is God seen from afar, the first step in our ongoing. There is no knowing a principle except we make contact and live out from that principle, for God is ever in action.
We find scattered pearls of wisdom and practice them. A later step is to string them on the necklace. We reach further on the path as we recover more principles of truth. We know God as not of this world, as Beyond-form, and go a distance. We know God both as beyond all things, and as this world of form at Its growing edge, and we go further. Within our enemy we find divinity, we experience the divine normality of healing miracles, we go yet further. We recognize the need for our human phase, honor it, allow holy compassion and love to teach our specific lessons of living, and journey on and on, deep into our spiritual Home.
Metaphysical Principles and Some Key Points
This summary can remind us of Principles and some of the themes we’ve been studying:
God Is Being. Nothing Exists.
God Appears As the universe, As you and me.
This is a spiritual universe, Consciousness formed.
Desirelessness: In surrender, in seeking only Me, all spiritual good is drawn out.
Unobtrusiveness: With humility, we don’t talk about this at all, unless God brings someone to us explicitly asking.
Non-resistance: There is no power but God, and so God is not a power. All is well.
Contemplative inquiry on a principle serves to lead us to Receptivity.
Meditative contact, the faceted jewel: Healing work; morning meditating; grace before meals; communing with Nature; compassionate and forgiving, reconciling, and loving meditation; praying for our family; witnessing the Real World in peace.
Giving and receiving: The self-sustaining infinitude within flows out through me and back to me, forging new friendships.
Impersonalizing, universalizing: The outer picture of someone holds no opposing power, only assistance, and isn’t even personal to him, or to his impersonal sacred center.
Miracles: Their purpose is to open our shell, not change a powerless picture.
We act with common sense, and we only walk on water when we’re supposed to.
From the physical or psychic levels of awareness, we reach the Spiritual plane.
We create the universe to love and be loved, in ever Greater Love.
Being Is everactive, the world is its arena of Becoming.
Among the ways we build from No Thingness: Everything is its own opposite; and simply, God As us puts complementary opposites (which balance to zero) into free play.
The balancing sine waves of Nothingness: We use them to create these impossible things, these metaphors, in Operation Bootstrap: Unrolling time from an instant; forming 1, 2, and 3; receiving, then giving; making the sense of solid reality, relationships, the two sexes, succeeding generations, and so on. All are needed, all within total Oneness.
Buddha’s middle path: It runs along the staff of the caduceus, synthesizing pairs into paradox.
We have complete freedom, and aren’t corralled by any material-seeming mechanism we use
for our unfoldment. We uplift each evolving scene to a way station, then bear it onward.
The universe is made up of metaphors, indirect while expressions of our boundlessness.
The outer things we sense are superimposed upon the currents of the Invisible.
We find the nature of our origin revealed in the treasury of Nature, divinity below us as well as above.
Our mass psyche acts as a servant, major domo, both in haltingly groping its way, and in translating divine intention into revelatory metaphors.
We will to forget our Identity as holy No Thingness, and live as humans with the sense of separation. We’re the growing edge of God, unfolding As the Renewed World.
The spiraling out of the circle: From a repeating rut, our vistas suddenly open wide.
We invent the sense of choice. Entering the Renewed World is our choiceless choice.
Human and spiritual awareness are equally holy visions. Higher truth is the truth of our choiceless choosing, is the vision that our worldly work is bringing through.
The caduceus of learning: the middle path is raised between our “good and bad” dreams. Our difficulties don’t arise accidentally, we use them to grow into the greater love.
Our problems are homework problems, impersonally divvied up, with each of us needed.
Each of our problems marks the birth pang of a virtue coming into expression.
Forgiveness, Reconciliation, and Love reach us through Prayer. God loves, through us. Elements of such meditation: Recognizing, Impersonalizing; Compassion, and Love; Supreme Contact; and Action.
Holy loving partnerships within conscious Oneness: This is our close healing with our beloved Other, and is the fruitage of our meditation, widening into the End-purpose of our world.
The Principle of Reconciliation: Our only relationship is God’s relationship to Itself; acting on that. So no one is blessed unless everyone is blessed.
All things work together for good. The synergy of Being and Becoming isn’t predetermined, rather it unfolds as a storyteller improvises towards a happy ending.
God As us realizes every possibility with enormous plenitude, yet complete efficiency too.
Microcosm and macrocosm: 1. My body and life story condense the map and history of the world. 2. Any inner or outer fruitage of meditation equals the entire Renewed World. 3. A couple grows through the play of matched souls who are opposites too, and the transmutation of faults; the world advances the same way. 4. Prayer for our family merges into prayer for the world.
We honor this human scene. Nothing, no one is lost. All is redeemed, bright shining gold.
We are Life Eternal. Our personal sense of self is transfigured.
As The World Overturns, Overturns: Our higher Consciousness is reborn, the Renewed World of conscious Sacred Relationship within Oneness.
As prayer finds the Renewed World now, this Change is the Unveiled Present.
We continue prolific, evolving out forever.
Shalom: Great Peace, our completion already Is.
Again, the letter killeth. Our goal is not formulating statements, it’s God realization.
Row, row, row your boat. From one view, The Great Work of Creation. From another, life is a stream of beauties inexpressibly Being in No Thingness.
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Our work to the very hour of transition and beyond is to struggle over and over with our sense of separation, its thoughts, emotions, and events, and a million times to transmute them.
Dream: The greatest ballplayer is the one who’s heedless of the count. Always two
strikes, so what?
Never give up.
The last grains of rice stuck to the sides of the bowl are hardest to catch with the chopsticks. The branchings of the tree or the turnings of the ziggurat are smaller, finer, faster at the living end. We keep dealing with challenges. And while sticking to the path alertly proves supremely difficult, so does any ordinary, extraordinary living.
When we’re suffering our worst despair and most despising ourselves, our deepest wounds are our widest avenues to holy love. When we fall again, again, our vulnerability
leads us to yield to our all-embracing Self.
Hold on.
Why do we like adventure movies where the heroes escape from hopeless traps at the last second, only their personal struggle saving the world? Because this depicts our life exactly. Never give up! Hold on! That happy ending is assured, Is present.
Ready or not, we keep doing the work, staying available to admitting truth, unseasonably feeling our Oneness. We keep refueling at the Source, with our jubilance and anticipation the ready fruitage of our inner flow.
We unite with our Being that Is Now---we don’t judge the fruitage by appearances---we are eternal and can never be marred---nothing can harm or damage us, we can only help each other grow and flower. At the time we are lifted up, we drop apprehension and responsibility, criticism, self-criticism; we join each encounter with joyful expectation. We shed our desire and its flip side of fear, in quietness and in confidence. With all of our worry and effort it’s still so obvious we don’t provide for ourself, for everything fills with an infinitude of miracles and operates so beneficently.
A Benediction
We are gathering as mystics surveying the broad picture which becomes obvious as a mountain.
We originate as the living uncreated No Thingness, a thinglessness which creates every thing out of Itself. We had to forget our starting point to develop Sacred Relationship in Oneness and every other good thing, and we run through the downsides of every feature of our unfolding world, turning each to ultimate blessing. We have set up rules for our game and we’re in the midst of playing it.
Now we’ve discovered that we are released, not bound to the balancing-out of zero, not obliged to ransom life with death nor repay our karmic debts. There’s no bill, no advantage to gain, as we freely play together. Grace is the birthday Present we give ourselves. We’re opening out.
So we live our lives consciously dependent upon God and communing with our inner spirit, thereby revealing the miraculous and disclosing the oneness of Heaven and Earth. Opening to the everpresent enveloping Love, we scoop up all the past world to this moment in our arms, shedding compassionate tears for everyone, honoring and identifying with us all.
We dream yet in the womb but we’re ready now to awaken the material and psychic realms of this transitory vision, of this birth canal, save ourselves and bring everyone into our Renewed World of spiritual awareness shared.
The greatest false claim is not merely death (we get over any doubt right after dying), but the idea that we’ve never ascended so we’re never going to. Instead, we can look and see that a revolution is always happening in awareness. The time is always ripe for us as a world to complete our surrender to God’s exquisite timing, and then be reborn into our destined sacred life together.
In the deep waters of our meditation, we find again who we really are, we find again our one true darling.
From the fecund silence of our everbeing, the bridge of compassion is flung forth from alpha to omega, cherishing each and every body. The ocean is also the bridge. So we all swing round home again, a clear window now become a rainbow jewel. The homeyness the entire world reveals in that special late day light. The easy feeling of being joyfully beloved and loving the whole, here and now in overwhelming unity. From the holy of holies of our inner temple, new lives and loves spring always forth upon this verdant earth.
I am satisfied, awakening to Thy likeness.
Thank you for for Really Being Me.
Thank you for Really Being with You.
