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The First Step
H., What about God? I believe I have spoken of this issue many times concerning the need to establish conscious contact with God/Inner Teacher/Christ/Holy Spirit etc... In these last emails, I am referring to the FIRST STEP. This FIRST STEP entails directing your attention to those images, things, thoughts, readings, and relationships that can bring you further along in your quest to know God. In other words, if you say "I want to know God, or I want God to change me", but you spend all of your time and attention on things like TV, sports, mundane habits, bars, pubs, your job, etc.. instead of reading the Bible and associating with other spiritual people, then you're not going to get very far. Now there may come a point where God may give you a nudge or two, or three, but one must (at least initially) exert some effort to separate the wheat from the chaff in their life and direct their attention to the pursuit of their heart's desire (knowing God in this example). Otherwise it ain't gonna happen. Now if you say, yes but it will automatically happen if/when God wants it to happen - I would agree with you up to a point. But this attitude can also be used as an excuse to mask one's own feelings of fear, ignorance, or to mask the fact that one really enjoys and likes frolicking in the lower animal levels and doesn't want to give it up. The honest thing to do would be to admit one's fear, or ignorance, or the fact that they like to sin, instead of saying God will take care of it in due time. Of course God WILL take care of it, but it's a cop out to use this fact as a means of masking one's own baser motives. So if you don't want to take that FIRST STEP and choose to focus on that which pleases God, then just admit it, and don't try to always challenge an idea just because it wasn't quoted verbatim chapter and verse from the "Book". Yes it does take courage and strength to take that FIRST STEP, and yes it is necessary to come to some degree of realization that it is with God's help that we CAN take that FIRST STEP. But the whole process begins with a "Desire" to overcome some perception of limitation. And yes, one ultimately comes to the conclusion that they can't do it alone, that they need God's help. This is where the courage and strength come from - they come from God, not our own little personalities or little egos. It is with God's help that we can take that FIRST STEP. jc ____________________________ 28 Aug 2001 L. writes: > So, I would ask, what's the first step - from wherever we are now -
towards
What is it that you desire to do? :-) RL
>If you take my advice and read this little
Do you wish to give advice? RL
> > Why am I saying all this, you wonder? What is the next step, for
each of No wonder.
> If we knew how very few steps up the path we really were, we would blush for a few lifetimes ;).
One beneficial effect of ignorance.
> But we shouldn't quit treading the path. That would be impossible. RL ____________________________ L., My comments are [centered]. RL Advise: verb - to make someone aware of something. Do I wish to give someone a packet of information that they might not already have? You bet I do. How many people do I think will pick up on it and go buy or check out that book at the library? Only as many people as are ready to. How many people do I think will get a tremendous aha out of it? Only as many people as are meant to. This is much the same as Case writing the lessons. Or his books. L. I find nothing to disagree with. JN: Re: Dualistic thinking. All thinking is dualistic. All knowing is relative below the Supernal. Any state of consciousness which could be linked with the verbage "And god said" implies dualism. If one thinks they are doing "the will of God", they probably aren't - at that definite "moment". They are watching the replay of it, riding your ox backwards, so to speak. L. Dualistic thinking is like everything else. RL: No wonder. Doing or Allowing (non-doing)? Who sets the Goal? Duality & Paradox exhausts and ultimately paralyzes the monkey mind. What we seek, already is, here & now. Perhaps reminding ourselves of that in whatever we desire to be or do. Holding the paradox slows the grasping monkey mind, lowering resistance and allowing more doing without (personal) doing. No advice. I insist on your freedom. I want to preface what I have to say with the idea that I think you are a fine, fine person. And I regard your actions in the world with much concurrence of feeling. However, I think the idea that you stand in a "no advice" zone when it comes to others is a fallacy. I don't say this to hurt your feelings. I've been on your website, and much of your commentary, in letters to others, how you interact with your family, etc. is manipulative. It involves commune-ication and prose that will enable or foster a change of POV into a POV that resonates with where you're at. I hope you understand that what I mean here is "manas", mind, and manipulating, using the hand. I say this because if I were to say, sure, you would like to believe that you are constantly swimming the no-thing zone, would be to mirror back to you something that isn't in the mirror that I see. If I were more "artful" I could express it in a way that was less....obvious, and allowed you to see something that I put a "bug in your ear" was "missing", but I'm not as artful as he is. L. It is the dull knife which is dangerous. The "No advice" I insist on your freedom", is absolutely (mathematically) untrue. The best we can ever do, imho, is to understand what the desire is behind our ACTIONS. And continue to purify that. The Universe is the product of our communicating and inter-acting. The will and the love that Thelema refers to in it's highest definition is around and about and through us at every moment. That Christ said, I and the Father are One, meant that he understood the motivation behind his actions, and "I do nothing but the Will of his father" meant that he lived in a state of raising the left arm all the time, constantly purifying his motivation. L. I offer No Advice. RL, we are dancing and making love to each other, on this list, moment by moment. What's the desire behind that? What is the purpose, as far as we can understand it? Why do we wish to move, to express? What is this dance, or wanting to see ourselves as separate, clearly apart from the swimming teeming mass of sensation and flow around us? What is this desire of wanting to rejoin that "Other Half" or "rest of creation" and swim again in the sea of allness? L. What is this drive towards union? The human nervous system and brain, the cellular anatomy of the human being, at this "time" does not contain the necessary equipment to establish higher consciousness and maintain it for long periods of time, until fundamental changes are existent within every cell in the physical body. Our physical apparatus is, prior to this change, able to imaginatively intuit what it would be like to experience this state, and we can get glimpses of it, as our apparatus has brief moments of it. We shift from state of consciousness to state of consciousness, and fall in and off the razor's edge of the paradox again and again. This is nothing new. Case talks about it. He talks about our first glimpses of knowing, and thus, my comment on "if we knew how far from complete the work was in us in any lifetime, we would blush". L. If I knew how far I had to go I add this factoid, and the offering of the text about Gopi Krishna, to the melting pot of this list because I LOVE CHANGE. I AM AN AGENT OF CHANGE. The Lord of the Universe built me that way. L. It is what you want to do. I don't lie to myself that this desire of the One Life finds its expression within me. L. Is this a typo?
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