A Clear Shining Light



Pressence



For my burfday a soul friend bought me a deck of cards. This was a deck called "The Christian Prayer Deck." Each day I am invited to shuffle these cards and select one. This morning the selected card read:-

"Merciful Lord, Enlighten me
with a clear shining inward
light, and remove all darkness
from my heart. Repress my
many wandering thoughts."

Thomas A Kempis (13810-1471)

This is a lovely invitation but the last line is not, to this writers thinking good psychology.  Repression of many wandering throughts tends to push them into the very darkness of the heart which Thomas A Kempis is asking to avoid.

You are not going to become a clear shining light through the repression of your many wandering  thoughts.  The wandering throughts are to be silenced but not repressed.  It is through silence that the mind becomes still and you create a heart space where you can be still and know the pressence of I AM.

Simply witness the wandering thoughts without repression or indulgence and the mind will begin to become still and there is then the invitation to be and to express the beauty of your at one ment with the clear shining light of the One Mind.

Return to Oneness

In "A Church not made with Hands" Micheal Roden writes

Christianity, like mysticism, begins with the inner individual and ends when that individual returns to Oneness. No one can really mediate this for a person. No particular group can claim exclusiveness on Oneness. It must be an individual and profoundly personal experience, and yet it rises well beyond any sense of separate self.

The Christianity of a Church made with hands tend to mistrust the mystic. Mysticism places experience of God at the center of ones life. It does not place the belief in God at the centre of ones life. Mystical experience is direct experience. It is certain and does not involve doubt. Why is this. It is because the doubter as a separate sense of self disappears and all that is left is knowing (which isn`t the same as knowledge).

Return to oneness is At One Ment. It is to transcend that sense of separateness which in my last posting I referred to as the experience of orginal sin. Again, to remind you, none of this implies in any way that you should feel guilty. Guilt locks you out of the Kingdom that is the promise of the Master Jesus.

Sinner YES or NO

When I was young I was advised by those in authority that I was what was called, " a sinner." My heart and my head rebelled. Along with this revelation (if that is what it could be called) was the implicit idea that I ought to feel somehow wrong and should feel guilty about this fact.

Fourty five years later do I still feel this way. The answer is a very definite, "No I do not." If you were to ask me, "Are you a sinner Tony?" the answer would be "Yes I am and no I am not." In order to understand this pardoxical answer you would need to know my personal definition of what the word sin means.

To say you are a sinner is to say that you feel separate. There is no need for you to feel guilty about this. You belong to a collective called humanity. This is a fact. Human beings think themselves as being in a body that is born, lives in time and space and then comes to an end when the body dies. This for most people is not something they doubt or even ever question. This, however, is what is sin. In this respect, you are a sinner just as I am a sinner.

I don`t feel guilty about this. For me it is a fact of living on this planet. Except that I long for more. I have a holy longing to feel beyond this sense of separateness which makes me feel distant from that source of Love given many names. One of which is God. This is in no way some kind of punishment. It is the evolution of consiousness in form.

To move beyond being a sinner one atones. One becomes AT ONE MENT.

This is a spiritual experience that Jesus Christ invites one into here and now. It isn`t intended that you feel guilty. It is intended that you claim your birthright of joy. You don`t do this through beating yourself up in anyway. This only adds to the sense of separateness that you feel you already are. Guilt will not take you into the higher reaches of consiousness. It will lock the door to the Kingdom that Jesus Christ invites you into living, not when you die, but right now.