Monday, February 24, 2020

An Honorable Partnership: Feb 22, part II


Floor Tiles, Royaumont Abbey

Another in the series of intermittent posts from my immediate daily practice.


What does it mean to form an honorable partnership with God?

Honor conveys the impression of a great esteem or the highest respect. This relates directly to Swedenborg’s question of what we love the most. If what we love the most is ourselves, that's all we'll ever have. There's no need to form partnerships with others, to have real relationships, if one loves oneself first and above all other things; if I think I am everything, I leave no room for God.
Perhaps it's self evident, but this one simple fact explains precisely how sociopathy works, and why so many people are like this.

Anyway, it's not the intention to list and categorize the world’s ills here. The aim is to discuss what it means to form this honorable partnership with a higher principle.

Unless we can sense God, truly sense God within, as a substantial and physical part of our presence, all we have our theoretical and psychological promises about God's existence. Of course these may convince us to think about God is real and to think that we honor him, but that is like being with one's lover and imagining an embrace, instead of actually embracing one another. Anyone who has felt love clearly understands the difference between these two. What we need to do is embrace God, and that is done physically and with feeling, not through the intellect.

If and when we sense God as a physical presence in us, then we instantly know how much higher and more perfect He is that anything we can imagine. This is the point at which we begin to honor God; and it is from here that we can begin to form a partnership and to serve Him.

One of the secret meanings of Gurdjieff's comment to Ouspensky that everything is material is concealed in this teaching of God’s physical presence.


In a certain way, once God's actual presence is felt through sensation and feeling, even God becomes material – as He in fact is. And even though it, like everything else including ourselves, is a creature of this level, it is the most valuable creature one could have, because with it one knows God is real. One doesn’t need the theories about it anymore. All of that is discarded at once.



May you feel God's presence alive within the deepest parts of your Being today.

Lee

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