Everyone will have a unique technique for achieving inner quiet. For some it might be a type of meditation. For others, the attitude you adopt during moments of prayer or worship will be perfect. A simple nuts and bolts approach is to consciously relax the tensions residing in the solar plexus and observe the effect on your mind. You might recognize the feeling of the heart opening as a result of the effort. Everyone will have a slightly different method and very different results. By doing this we are collectively accessing the field of energy called Love. Additionally we create an implicit offering to help each other via our unique access. Each of us can partake of our neighbors’ connection in those areas where we have a congruence of experience.
Recently, while riding the bus to town, an acquaintance asked me this question. “Are we part of nature,” he wondered, “or somehow beyond it, superior to it?” My immediate reaction was to reply that of course we are part of nature. As he sought to clarify his inquiry, I suddenly realized that I didn’t have an answer for him and said so. It seemed to me that his particular use of the word nature indicated that he was looking at the material universe as if that were the only reality. I couldn’t respond in that limited context. He was struggling to understand the failings of our world where many people act as if they were dominant over nature rather than participants within that domain.
Perhaps I should have responded that of course we are all a part of nature, the nature of God. If so, I might have gone on to say that the Universe is a structure of distributed Divinity. One purpose of that design, of particular importance to us, is to provide for the realization of new spiritual potentials through experience. That is our destiny. We are given life in the densest material shell into which personalities are introduced. Our destiny is a marvelous voyage from the fringes of a multi-dimensional expanding universe inward to the center. Along our journey we make incremental spiritual discoveries by reflecting Divine qualities and then making them real them through our actions as we gradually become perfected.
I could have gone on to say that if you could be lifted out of your material form and perceive your real spiritual nature you would see a more or less human outline of tenuous substance, a sort of radiant shadow. That is the spiritual body you are creating from your progress toward the Divine, even as you are living in a material form. It exists in the field of Love emanating directly from God for within that singular unified field spirit has form. Contained in that nebulous spiritual outline would be one solid white shining mote in the location of your current physical heart. It is a fragment of God given to be your own personal guide. It is also the conservator of your soul, the body you are building of the spiritual realities you have manifested. Peculiarly, although you would be completely aware of your sense of self as a seat of personality and consciousness, you wouldn’t seem to have any real substance just yet. Although your actions are building your soul, your own fragment of the Deity distribution holds it in trust for you. You have not yet merged with those other two aspects of your ultimate destiny. That eventual consolidation is what confers eternal life on the type of evolving creatures such as we who are born into the worlds of time and space. Eternal existence is a gift but you have to embrace that gift.
I didn’t say any of that although it was in my mind. People whose experience is limited to the material sphere often feel they need to dominate physical reality. Many suffer isolation from a sense of being locked in the limitations of their earthly forms. They may try excess material attachments, distractions or soporifics to alleviate that feeling of disconnection. The missing sense of union can only be discovered through spiritual exploration. If God is mentioned to someone living in spiritual dissociation, a demand for proof will likely be forthcoming. There is no material proof adequate for a skeptic. A sense of the absolute reality of The Creator only develops within a spiritual seeker as their connection to the Universe becomes firmly established.
The journey begins with inner quiet. It allows you to take the first halting steps of your odyssey by listening for intuitions and then learning to trust them. In general they are emotional in nature; that means they relate to the material universe and are communicated by feelings. Even so, the word intuition implies a deeper meaning. Paying attention to feeling is the tuition one pays for an internal connection to the larger universe. After the experience of intuition, realizations start to occur. They are the moments of enlightenment known as the “Aha!” moment or the light bulb going off.
If you analyze enough moments of realization you’ll discover that you can be a conscious participant in the process. By focusing your attention in a particular direction you expand your horizons with new ideas and experiences. The spirit of your intention such as creating beauty, truth or goodness is your umbilical cord to that unified field of Love through which enhanced values and meanings are reflected. Inner quiet allows your heart to open and to access that energy. Those moments accumulate to a point I think of as ‘critical space’, a sort of vacuum that draws energy reflected from a relatively higher aspect of Divinity. A surge of Love pours through you. It gladdens your heart and allows your mind to suddenly discern new and comparatively enlightened concepts and values.
The next quantum level of Universal communication is discovered in inspiration. Those experiences are similar to realizations but much more intense. They always seem to demand action. There is another significant difference between realization and inspiration. The experience of inspiration makes it clear that the energy is coming into you. You are clearly the recipient, not the source, whereas realizations may still seem to be generated from within the self. It is a very big difference for that is a practical basis from which to take the leap of faith that results in the full religious experience. In that case you actually touch or are touched directly by some aspect of the Divine. Religious experiences apply sudden and fundamental transformations to the recipients though it still takes a lifetime for the lessons of those events to be even partially realized.
Intuition, realization, inspiration and religious experience are part of a spectrum of encounters, which could be labeled Universal communication or perhaps spiritual communion. Any categorization is rather arbitrary but there are significant differences between the experiences. Intuitions are almost exclusively personal. Realizations are reflections of relatively higher levels of comparatively Divine minds to our own. The transmission medium is the field of Love. Inspirations are far more powerful and include the seeds of numerous future realizations. The religious experience requires a bit of faith. At first just the willingness to try is enough. Afterward that grain of faith grows increasingly toward absolute surety. That is how we can come to know God.
In a way I should be stop right there but there is one more point that is vitally important. Just because you have an encounter with Divinity, be it great or small, that isn’t the goal. It is only the beginning. You must act on the illumination you receive from those moments of communication with the Universe to give them spiritual substance. That completes the circuit between yourself and the Creator. Actions are the words of our conversation with God.
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Welles
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