 Enjoying the blog? You'll love the book!Original Faith is available online at Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, BarnesAndNoble.com, and Target.com and is also available by special order at your favorite bookstore (ISBN: 978-1-934611-00-5). About the Author
About the Book
I have an M.A. in religious studies from the University of Chicago Divinity School and an M.Ed. in counseling from the University of New Hampshire.
Tell us what you think using our contact form.
Previous Posts
Blog RollNew!
Saturday, June 28, 2008Spiritually Present/AbsentWhere no “you’’ exists apart from where you take your place in the wide world, there is no one to be offended and no one to be afraid.
Posted by Paul at 3:34 PM Permalink
|
 |
||
 |
 |
||
16 Comments:
I'm trying to speak here about experiencing our identity differently. In writing the book, I found this the most difficult thing to put words to. In a way, I spend the whole book working into it.
Maybe another way to briefly suggest it is to point to how we literally and in fact come into being and continue to exist integrally to being itself or Being itself - a larger or greater context.
It's possible to come to experience this fact of nature as our primary identity.
You young people...
we are a part of big picture. we in no circumstances can truly define it all alone......
but that does not mean that we are not valuable....... the day we undertsand that everyone is important and learn to respect things in their natural form we would truly be happy and that happiness will bring us security....... and that day we will love and live :)
Although I understand that the language needed to address this seems to suggest a tension or even contradiction between these two, I don't think that such a contradiction exists experientially - and that in fact, "losing our lives to find them" leaves us better and not less prepared to "love others and love God."
Maybe it's just that no one's even in remote danger of completely misplacing their ego here in life as we know it! The problem, it seems to me, is in the opposite direction - that so many people so narrowly identify with selfish interests that we've become a real danger to ourselves as a species.
I am very excited about the concept of unity, or as you see of reading in your book about seeing our identity differently.
Though increasingly I feel connected to all of creation in One Love, I have not reached, and don't expect to reach (don't even want to reach) a state where there is no one to be offended and no one to be afraid. It sounds too much like Nirvana or brain-death. For then surely there would be no one to be joyful either.
One day there will be no "I". As long as there is "I" there is my body, and I have cause to feel fear because fear is the message sent to the "I" by the antennae of the body for its own protection.
For now, I think my reply to My Thoughts and Crystal pretty well applies. On fear, I'd add that I don't think there's any danger of completely losing that either, but that it can be felt with much less depth and agitation.
In general, I'd say that's what it's like - that the egoistic self isn't experienced as unreal or gone, but it becomes less of a reality than the experience of the self-in-context, so to speak.
Of course that's always what it is--our choice and our moment.
Hmm... you're getting the book... I should wait till you've read, and then my view on this would be easier to talk about.
Post a Comment