Christianity Refreshed
St Paul told the Corinthians “And I, brethren, could not speak unto you as unto spiritual, but as unto carnal, even as unto babes in Christ. I have fed you with milk, and not with meat: for hitherto ye were not able to bear it, neither yet now are ye able”. (1) There is meat in plenty in this website, and it may be that some who can only take milk will not be able to accept it. I ask them to leave it alone. It is not for them. It is not for them either to say that others should not have meat.
St Paul also said “For ye have not received the spirit of bondage again to fear; but ye have received the Spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father” (2) and
“But when the fullness of the time was come, God sent forth his Son, made of a woman, made under the law, To redeem them that were under the law, that we might receive the adoption of sons. And because ye are sons, God hath sent forth the Spirit of his Son into your hearts, crying, Abba, Father”. (3)
Although this is the best milk there is, it is milk still. The prologue to St John’s Gospel says something rather different. He says concerning Jesus “But as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name: Which were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God”.
Take away the glorious poetry, and what is left is that they were born of God.
In the Pauline vision therefore, we are distinct from God, and are enabled to call him “Abba” by grace. We were not sons, but have been adopted, so now we count as sons.
St John says we are born of God, which means that we are of God by nature. The author of “The Cloud of Unknowing” says “That thing that is so had by kynde is nerer to iche a thing then that the whiche is had by grace” or an entity that has a quality has it more firmly, more closely, if it has it by nature than it does if it has it by grace. In Clifton Wolters’ translation “the natural endowment of a thing makes it basically more akin to eternal things than that which is given it later by grace”. (4) Taking this out of the author’s context, those who know that they are born of God have a surer knowledge of their sonship than those who think that they were adopted as sons by grace.
I do of course have some quarrels with St John. As God is eternal, his sons are eternal. God never started, so neither did his sons. It follows that they could not become children of God. They already were. Jesus was well aware of this when he said “Before Abraham was, I am”. (5) It follows that nobody could give them power to become children of God. That Jesus gave them power to realise that they were children of God, I could well imagine. The Gospel of Thomas concurs: “When you understand yourselves you will be understood. And you will realise that you are Sons of the living Father. If you do not know yourselves, then you exist in poverty and you are that poverty”. (6)
The things that are said about Jesus, that he is a saviour, that he was a sacrifice for sin, that he was God incarnate even, in any sense in which we are not, are untrue and divisive, for sons need none of this, but the things he said himself are of the greatest interest.
Some Christians may feel that in saying these things about Jesus I have followed the path in “Pilgrim’s Progress” which runs parallel with the straight road for a time and then diverges by degrees until it runs in the opposite direction, but I say that I have travelled in a straight line. It is orthodox Christianity that has become less and less credible, for the reason given. Moreover, by concentrating exclusively on the supposed office of Jesus, and ritual representations of that office, it has been possible to ignore what he said.
Who are the children of God then? How do you distinguish them from other people? These are absurd questions. God is eternal, and mighty and these attributes are shared by his sons. It is impossible that some human beings should be sons and not others. That means that everybody is a son of God, and you in particular! Here is the end of all religions that divide humanity into saved and lost, or first and second, like St Paul with his “to the Jew first and also to the Greek”. (7) It is also the end of any political pretension, for no party or movement can think it is eternal, but every human is.
God as a separate entity has led Job a merry dance, and in response to his questioning questions him in return: “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth…when the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy?” (8) Job repented in dust and ashes, but a more adequate response would have been “I was there of course. Where were you?”
You can see yourself going up in a glass sided lift. Periodically a floor passes and falls beneath your vision. Eventually you come to the floor of the separate God, and you face each other. Perhaps to your surprise you find that you are the stronger. For whatever his provenance, he is an entity. You are not. Your body is an entity, so is your soul, but you are not. So the lift continues on its journey, and the floor disappears forever from your sight.
The milkiness of Paul consists of thinking of God as someone else.
What is sonship then? Would I not have first to say what He is like whose sons we are? There I run into a difficulty. All possibilities are in Him, and as soon as I try to say anything, I limit my apprehension of the possibilities. I have already used a masculine pronoun, which is an obvious case in point. I have said “mighty”, which cuts out appreciation of the possibility of working in weakness. I have said “eternal” which might be taken to mean an infinitely long duration of terrestrial time, and says nothing of the infinite fullness of a moment, or the expanding possibilities of living in many or all times simultaneously.
You see that I have discounted Jehovah. He is far too particular. Male, angry, partial to one nation before others, requirer of sacrifice, requirer of genocide, willing to visit plagues on a nation and to drown their army in order to appear great, spiteful to Moses, and Damner of everybody who is not a Christian. What I have to say is not in addition to such notions. It replaces them. Ann Owen wrote in a letter: “The whole of the Old Testament worries me – there is so much violence, and often people are commended for being violent, lying, devious, dishonest – and the Lord Jehovah is worse than all. He is consistently shown to be a tetchy old man, jealous, unforgiving, everything most unlike Jesus…The older I get, the less I believe, & the more firmly I believe it”.
More subtly, I have spoken of a being, who therefore may or may not exist, and must exist if at all against a background such as the possibility that he does not exist, or the ability of the person to decide the question, or to have a boundary where the being ends. If the background exists, then something exists which is other than God, and if the boundary exists, then there must be something outside God, neither of which I am willing to allow.
To put it another way, you cannot meaningfully speak of something that cannot be otherwise than it is. What have you said if you say that something is how it is? You have no basis for having spoken. You have wagged your lips to no purpose. I have precisely this problem with praise. People in the psalms are always telling others to praise the Lord, but nobody does it themselves. “God, you are very good”. Wagging!
If there are two or more possibilities and you assert that one of these possibilities is the actual one, you have said something meaningful. Whether it is true or not is the next question, but my attempt at praise has not even got this far. It is meaningless. As C S Lewis said, “God has no opposite”. In truth praise is more likely to be an expression of amazement at a discovery or emotional involvement than the ascription of an attribute: O Lord, thou hast searched me, and known me. Thou knowest my downsitting and mine uprising, thou understandest my thought afar off. (9)
If humans do try to speak of God, as we try very hard to do, absurd results can ensue. Anna said that Mister God is empty. I have been in a surrounding of great emptiness, and I have written about how God has withdrawn to make room for others to grow up into God, and how he aligns his will with ours, effectively withdrawing his will, and St Teresa says he has no hands but ours, so I find Anna’s statement meaningful and true to experience. I say that in the Last Form resides all fullness, which I consider to be a grand and noble statement, but it is the opposite of Anna’s, which I have just endorsed.
So having reduced myself to silence before God, at least at this level, and having emptied the word God of all meaning, I am in no hurry to fill it up again, so it would seem that the Omega Course must end before it has started. Sonship of an empty concept has little to excite interest. But if sonship is really true, then I can look at the experience of being a son, and see what can be deduced from that. Two considerations encourage me to take sonship seriously. The first is Jesus, saying “When you pray, say ‘Abba’” Our Father. (10) The other is the story from my own history, which I told above.
I start by asserting that we live on many levels simultaneously. We are body, soul and spirit, or we can talk of seven levels, one and two corresponding to body, three to six corresponding with soul, say the psychic realm, heart work, the spiritual source of that which can be addressed by the intellect, and the spiritual experience of us as individuals respectively, and seven with spirit. All the levels are expressions of spirit, without a great divide between body and soul, so I could describe level seven as pure spirit, except that that implies impurity in the other levels, which is not necessarily true, so I will call it spirit, and let the spiritual nature of all the other levels be implicit.
The experience of sonship is to experience all seven levels at one time or another. In order to do this, it is necessary to clean up one’s act, as every writer on this subject has said before. First I have to demolish the sense of sin. We are bowed down with this, and it is nothing to do with sin. Jesus said “Be perfect even as your heavenly Father is perfect.” (11) What a cruel thing that would have been to say if he had not thought it was possible.
“Whosoever is born of God doth not commit sin; for his seed remaineth in him: and he cannot sin, because he is born of God”. (12)
“For if our heart condemn us, God is greater than our heart, and knoweth all things. Beloved, if our heart condemn us not, then have we confidence toward God”. (13)
When I had a sense of sin, I thought this meant “Our heart ought to condemn us, and if it does not condemn us, then we have prideful and terrible self-confidence in opposition to God” It doesn’t mean this, but what it says, that it is possible for our hearts not to condemn us, and for us to have confidence towards God. Christians assert that sins can be forgiven. “As far as the east is from the west, so far has he set our sins from us.” (14) Then if we have just received forgiveness from our sins, is it not possible to think that for one second at least, before we start our posturing again, we are free of sin? Then why not two seconds? And is it true that every imagination of the thoughts of our hearts is only evil continually? (15) Is it not rather the case that our hearts are neither black nor white but “streaky”, and wouldn’t we be best advised to work on this basis, untidy though it be theologically? If we think of earthly fatherhood, the relationship is permanent, based on ever present natural fact. The son might do wrong things, but forgiveness of these does not constitute the fabric of the relationship. Neither does the father need a sacrifice to enable such forgiveness. The son is the son always. The father is pleased to see his son, because he loves him.
There is no theology of the fall in this website, certainly not in a moral sense. Our tumbling down the levels is obvious enough, and I once thought that this was equivalent to falling into sin, but it is not so, as perfect goodness is available at every level. We can see perfect brooks, clouds, dandelions, starlings, zebras, daffodils and trees. I should say that a perfect tree has a healthy root system, a strong trunk, and an evenly developed crown. The odd mark due to insect activity in no way diminishes its perfection. Have you seen the perfect bodies, wonderfully fit for their purpose, appropriate to the age of the wearer, each one different from every other, with diverse glory for men and women and each with a beauty of its own? Of course not. They need to buy somebody’s product for that! We can experience a perfect sunset, perfect moments in relationship, perfect thinking, perfect apprehension of aspects of the Divine, and perfect union, perfection at all levels in short. There are some created things like slugs that appear to me to be unpleasant. I do not know whether this is a failure of vision on my part or whether the act of creation was delegated to entities of divergent qualities of goodness and aesthetic sense. It does not in any way negate the assertion that perfection can be found at all levels. As it says in Desiderata, “You are a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here.” It is no sin to exist. The doctrine of the fall seeks to impose moral opprobrium on us, to say not only that we are bad, but that we cannot help ourselves to be good. Even worse, it asserts that there is a gulf between God and us, and that He is angry with us. I do not see this doctrine written in nature. Julian of Norwich could not see it either: “In God may be no wrath”. (16) “There is a Godly will in man which never assented to sin”.(17)
You may have all sorts of turbulence going on under your skin. This is not sin. You may have an ill-defined ever present sense that you are not good enough. Good enough for what? And who says so? Resist this. If you allow this feeling house room, that is sin in itself. It is telling a lie. Churches eagerly latch on to this feeling, and inform us that we are sinful, which we feel all too readily, but we are not.
So having rid ourselves of a sense of sin, our hearts begin to sing. St Paul tells us to make melody in our hearts to the Lord.(18) You cannot tell your heart to do anything. When it is happy, it begins to sing all by itself. Paul clearly knew this experience. Sin is not something to fight against. It is simply the least attractive option. You don’t want to go shoplifting, or to murder people or any of these things. You can walk with God as Enoch did, so why should you want to walk in any other way? (19)
“Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us” is not the threat of a bullying potentate, rather it is spiritual law. It is one of the few passages in the bible that require no translation or interpretation. Unforgiveness is like a sack which you are carrying on your back. You are too heavy to see the upper levels. You are blighting your own life. I saw a television programme on this subject once, and most of the contributors had forgiven. Their peace and stature could be seen on their faces. One woman had not forgiven, and her face was pinched and drawn. One lady had real difficulty with forgiveness. Her behind had been blown off by a terrorist bomb. The injury was shown and it was pitiful. The problem was the total lack of relationship between the terrorist and the victim. There was no remorse, no awareness of identity, nothing. She did what she could, and her courage was moving and profound. Some things can be forgiven by simple choice. More than you might think can be forgiven by making a decision to forgive when it is against your surface will. For heavier work, you can pray to God to be given forgiveness. The heaviest work of all is to bear the injury as a cross. This can be done retrospectively, for past injuries. One further method is to talk it over with a friend who listens carefully.
You might have some ingrained weaknesses which you would like to be without. You can work on these. The Holy Spirit will help in the work of cleaning up. He may play the dustman himself and take away the rubbish. If I describe some of my own rubbish, it might not apply to you, but you might recognise it all too well. “It’s not fair”. “I haven’t got enough time or money”. “I can’t”. “I’ll try”. “Poor me”. “I’m not good enough”. “I’m cringing with embarrassment”. “I am offended”. “I’m angry”. “I’m hurt”. “I resent that”. “I am important”. (This one is subtle! You don’t matter at all, though you think you do, that is to say this stuff and whatever faculty is experiencing it doesn’t matter at all. It won’t even survive you. You yourself matter infinitely, but you will never be aware of that when you think you are important in this way) “I am hurt so much that I cannot forgive”. “I am such an important person that I should not forgive”. “They don’t deserve to be forgiven”. “I am better than the other chap”. Or these: “Don’t get mad, get even”. “It’s not that simple”.
There is a subtlety here. To admit to anger or any of these things in an experience of self knowledge or counselling is healing and good. When you are experiencing them they limit your vision very severely. In the Catholic terminology, for you these are deadly sins. They are the products of what is sometimes called self. You have to be rid of self. It is no loss. It is a liar through and through.
The ego has not got to be destroyed. It is a necessary faculty, to enable us to live in the world. It is like a car that I own. It is useful, but obviously it is not me. It would be a very funny car if it thought it was me, or God almighty as it is apt to do. No. It should not be destroyed, for it is useful, in its place. The setting of it in its place is a major work and absolutely necessary. This is what George Herbert spoke of where he says “he doth convert and bring my mind in frame”. (20)
Nor is it possible to destroy the ego. All that happens is that it reappears in another form, possibly a less attractive one. Nor is it sensible. The aspects of sonship that one most longs to experience are at a higher level than that of the ego, so the job in hand is simply to attend to what the ego cannot encompass. You cannot achieve this by will power. Firstly you haven’t got enough! Secondly, will power is an operation of the ego, and to exercise willpower puts the ego at centre stage and probably inflates it too, when all you want to do is to attend to something else. Thirdly the ego cannot be used to destroy itself. It will not nor cannot nor should not do it. So by no means are you to die to self, but it is absolutely necessary to die to self!
So the work in hand is to attend to the faculties that are higher than the ego, and to ignore any posturing or interruption, and if that isn’t possible, to nudge the ego aside gently and as often as necessary.
Do not strain and push to know heavenly secrets. There are none. It is like a car again, in another sense. There is nothing secret about a car. You know how it works. You are welcome to try out any car, examine it at will, buy one, have the keys in your pocket, drive it at your pleasure. But not if you are six years old. Then you strain and strain to see over the fascia, with no success, and if you should get the car to start, disaster looms. St Teresa also says there are no secrets, in different words: “Ah Daughter, how few are they who love Me in truth! If people loved Me, I should not hide my secrets from them…” (21)
“Jesus said: Recognise what is right in front of you, and that which is hidden from you will be revealed to you. Nothing hidden will fail to be displayed”. (22)
By doing these things gently and over a sufficient length of time you will become aware of your spiritual senses, which you had all along, but did not know of them, nor of the things that they can sense. You will become aware of your soul. You will see that it has its own most vehement desires. So strong are these that you have little doubt of success. It is like finding that you have a most powerful ally, or rather, it is it. For once the bible is literally true where it says “Like as the hart desireth the waterbrooks, so longeth my soul after thee, O God” (23) and “My soul hath a desire and longing to enter into the courts of the Lord.” (24) You never told it to long so greatly. You used no will power. The ego is altogether outclassed at this level. It is a much coarser faculty, useful for other matters, but not here.
You may wonder that I have not mentioned meditation. You certainly need a forum for doing these things. You may find meditation essential. Certainly much can be learned and experienced in meditation, or contemplation as it is called when you do not meditate on any subject, but I do not say that it is the forum that will enable you to get to where you want to be. It may enable parts of you to reach high levels, but not all. As I said above, all the levels, including the physical, are expressions of spirit, and you can experience spirit therefore, right here in the physical. This is what Brother Lawrence discovered, with his pots and pans, and St Teresa with her spinning wheel. So it is here in the physical that you are as aware as you currently can be of the various levels. It is here in the physical that you get rid of the rubbish. It is here in the physical that you experience the great goodness of God in his creation. It is here in the physical that you are in contact with true things, for it reflects yourself back to you. It is in the physical that you gently and persistently slide past the ego, and keep it in its place. It is in the physical, though you may not know it now, that you will reach journey’s end, and it is in the physical that you operate with your newly irradiated consciousness, lifting your body and soul, and as far as I know, the whole created realm in the process.
The reason why you may not need formal meditation is that the upper reaches of the soul take an outing on their own initiative when they judge it best. All you need to do is let them, so none of this: “Don’t be silly”, “Concentrate”, “Attend to the real world”.
Equally spontaneous are experiences when it is painful to be you. You don’t know why. It is not remorse for sin, for you are not aware of any. All you want to do is to read a book or watch television, anything to distract yourself. It is best to accept the pain. It is not over-severe, and it may be the prelude to a level seven experience. This is the only ascetic practice I recommend, and even that is accepted not sought.
Here is a varied, even miscellaneous collection of soul material. Often it happens that if one person has experienced something, another finds it interesting and helpful, nevertheless all souls are different, and it may be that none of this is for you.
If you need it, a very powerful prayer is “Help!” Another is “I am here”. This is obvious enough, but to pronounce it brings all the resources available to you, human and Divine, to bear on the situation. I do not say that this is anything automatic. Rather, you use all the consciousness at your disposal and all the centredness, and those resources that you are not aware of are present as well.
Somebody went to get petrol at a garage. He wasn’t sure, but he thought he had been given £1.00 too much in the change. It was dark, cold, windy and raining, and there was a big queue at the window and he was in a hurry. He stood around helplessly for a little while and then drove away with the £1.00 in his pocket. At once he felt a powerful feeling of being loved. He knew the unconditional love of God, but this brought it home in a very immediate way.
A very good exercise is to opt. It doesn’t have to be a major issue. You could choose what you will wear, or what you will have for breakfast, or what you will do in the next hour, or even whether you will raise your right arm in the air or not. The feeling induced by observing your power to choose is absolutely delicious, and you can see that neither God nor the whole host of heaven have the slightest idea how you will opt. All times are present to God, of course, but foreknowing and foreordaining are very different things. The purpose of this exercise is to show you the part of your self that can choose, which leads to a marvellously enhanced sense of self. If you think this exercise is foolish and unnecessary, you have a great deal to be thankful for.
I do not think that it is necessary or useful to be too delicate in conscience. You may be so concerned with matters of conscience that you forget who your father is. Also I doubt that living in this world is best performed with a tender conscience. It must be implacable in ridding you of the rubbish as described above, but perhaps not over particular about things that are experienced in the daily round. An example is Gerald Priestland bribing a telephone operator so that his call would be connected. When you are experiencing the higher levels, you may be bothered by something in conscience that would not have bothered you at all in the normal course of things. You cannot fool your conscience. If you go against it here, you will go to a lower level or a lower aspect of this level, where you are more comfortable with the decision that you made. You can return to the higher level later.
The mystics all tell of spiritual consolations and how these are not to be sought, nor relied upon. If they come from deep within, it is nearly impossible to suspect them. In any case there is no way that you are going to be satisfied with any consolations. The reason is that you have a dim but insistent sense of the extraordinary quality and worth of the thing that is at your centre, deep within, and you want an answer to this! No matter who offers you a consolation, it is blander, lesser than that thing within, so not much of interest.
You might see the point of St Teresa’s exchange of hearts, and offer the same to God, so that you attend to his business, and He attends to yours. (25) You might pray with Julian of Norwich: “God of thy goodness give me thyself; for thou art enough to me, and I may nothing ask that is less that may be full worship to Thee; and if I ask anything that is less, ever me wanteth, but only in Thee I have all.” (26)
You could consider the doctrine of reincarnation, firstly because it is true, as shown in the work of Edgar Cayce, and Arthur Guirdham, secondly because it confirms that you are immortal intrinsically, not because you happen to adhere to the correct religion, thirdly it accords the soul the dignity that is due to it, fourthly because it shows that the state you have already reached in an advanced one, and you did it yourself, albeit with every imaginable help from the heavenly realms, fifthly because it explains incidence of genius, sixthly because it has a bearing on unmerited suffering and on differing worldly status, and lastly because it reassures you that the large amount of work you see you have to do does not have to be done all at once, which subtly enables you to relax and be more at ease and peaceful. Against this is the Emperor Justinian who declared the doctrine anathema, but as far as I know without giving any reason.
When I was reading everything I could find on reincarnation and the levels, (27) I found that books were available in the public library that were not available before or since. The reason they were not available is that they were always out on loan. I could see by the dates of the stamps that they were borrowed every week or every fortnight non-stop. This means two things, that some hidden spiritual process made them available to me when I needed them, and that there are a lot of people out there to whom these books are of interest. When you enter on the spiritual path, a great bell sounds in the heavens as it were, Bong! Helpers spring into action, and all the assistance you need, you will have.
I cannot tell you what you will experience with your spiritual senses You are on your own. God has no grandchildren, only children. So I finish now with things that concern the soul, and come to what the mystics call union. This is a gentle experience of great sobriety and peace, experienced in the depth of the spirit. It is a fleeting experience, but the memory of it is permanent, or rather the reality is permanent, and always was. It is the end of all exploring, all striving, all anxiety, all doubt. It is the white stone which the person received with his name inscribed which nobody knew but himself.(28) This imagery for once is extremely clear. The stone is permanent, pure for no sin can come anywhere near this level, it is his identity, and he cannot communicate it to anyone else. There simply are not words. It is gnosis. You are a Gnostic. People will say “agnostic” if you tell them, but it is not so.
I find it odd to call it union, for that speaks of two becoming one, but you only experience one. If you experience two, yourself and another, it is not union which is the state of the spirit, but some high experience of the soul. St Teresa’s white butterfly, that is her individual spiritual consciousness, died at union. (29) Don’t worry that your individuality is at risk. Soon enough you will be in the outside world again, and look, you are very much yourself, individuality absolutely intact, and in addition, now you know who you are. “Would it not be a sign of great ignorance, my daughters, if a person were asked who he was, and could not say, and had no idea who his father or his mother was, or from what country he came?” (30) Moreover, you know that the spirit is in union permanently, whether you are experiencing it or not.
Here is part of a magnificent passage from The Cloud of Unknowing. (31) It is typically lucid, and typically it contains long sentences. I include it because I disagree with it, but it is so clear that my answer is clear too.
“Whenever you feel your mind occupied with no kind of physical or spiritual thing, but only with the substance of God as it is … then you are above yourself and under your God. You are above yourself because you succeed in coming there by grace where you may not come by nature, that is to say to be made one with God in spirit and in love and in accordance of will. You are beneath God because although it may said in a manner of speaking that in this time God and you are not two but one in spirit – so that you or another who feels the perfection of this work on account of this union may truly by witness of scripture be called a God – nevertheless you are beneath him. For he is God by nature without beginning, and you that once were nothing in substance and in addition when you were by his might and his love made something, wilfully with sin made yourself less than nothing: only by his mercy without your desert are made a God in grace, united with him in spirit without parting, both here and in the bliss of heaven without any end. So that though you are one with him in grace, yet you are very far beneath him in nature”.
Obviously as regards levels one to six we are far beneath him in nature, except that he informs all these levels with his presence and shares our experience in them, so he is beneath us. Underneath are the everlasting arms. But as regards level seven, and he is specifically talking of union, for one thing to be above or beneath another implies two things, and only one is experienced. What is more, I don’t see how you can say you were once nothing in substance, because as regards level seven, you never started. You always were. What is more, we did not make ourselves less than nothing with sin, because a person who is less than nothing cannot exist, also sin can affect our sonship in no way whatsoever, though it does catastrophically affect our awareness of it. What is more, it is irrelevant whether it is by mercy and grace and irrelevant whether it is without our desert that we are made a God in grace, united with him in spirit, because God is not made, and there is no such entity as a God. What is more, just as morality with its shoulds and oughts plays no part in this work, neither does desert. What is more, the effect of this passage is to depress, to make one feel diminished, less than one is. If this is for humility, to keep the ego in its place, I assure you, you will by grace have put your ego in its place and kept it there for a long time before any of this means anything to you, so it is misplaced. Also you need all your power to do this work. You cannot leave any of it behind, saying it is humble to think that something else is greater than you. I meet up with him again when he says “in spirit without parting, both here and in the bliss of heaven without any end."
Perhaps he was correcting Meister Eckhart: "A great authority says that his breaking through is nobler than his flowing out; and that is true. When I flowed out from God, all things said: 'God is'. And this cannot make me blessed, for with this I acknowledge that I am a creature. But in the breaking through, when I come to be free of will of myself and of God's will and of all his works and of God himself, then I am above all created things, and I am neither God nor creature, but I am what I was and what I shall remain, now and eternally. Then I received an impulse that will bring me up above all the angels. Together with this impulse, I receive such riches that God, as he is 'God' (separate) and as he performs all his divine works, cannot suffice me; for in this breaking through I receive that God and I are one. Then I am what I was, and then I neither diminish nor increase, for I am then an immovable cause that moves all things" (32).
But Meister Eckhart needs no correcting. Our author writes from experience, in which he is an authority. It is not clear why he dipped temporarily into the world of dogma, which is words only.
The same author in his Book of Privy Counselling is absolutely clear that you can only be aware of one, not two in this state, also that it is infrequent and transient, and that it cannot be attained by your own will. He also affirms that it is not necessary, desirable, possible or reasonable to try and stop yourself existing:
“And then, when you covet so single-mindedly, not to unbe – for that were madness and contempt of God – but to forgo the knowledge and feeling of your being (which must always be if God’s love shall perfectly be felt as it may be here) and see and feel that in no way may you come to your purpose, for there will always follow and go with your doing a naked feeling of your blind being, be you never so busy (unless it be any seldom short time when God will let you feel himself in abundance of love) which naked blind feeling of your being will evermore press above you, between you and your God, as will in the beginning the qualities of your being between you and yourself: then will you think it a very heavy and altogether painful burden of yourself. Yes! Jesus help you then, for then you have need.” (33)
Here is St Teresa on union. “I went to the place where I am in the habit of praying in solitude, and with extreme recollection, began to speak to the Lord in that silly way in which I often speak to Him without knowing what I am saying; for it is love that speaks, and my soul is so far transported that I take no notice of the distance that separates it from God. For the love which it knows His Majesty has for it makes it forget itself and it thinks it is in Him, and that He and it are one and the same thing without any division, and so it talks nonsense”. (34)
“Let us now come to the most intimate part of what the soul experiences in this condition. The persons who must speak of it are those who know it, for it cannot be understood, still less described. As I was about to write of this (I had just communicated and had been experiencing this very prayer of which I am writing), I was wondering what it is the soul does during that time, when the Lord said these words to me: ‘It dies to itself wholly, daughter, in order that it may fix itself more and more upon Me; it is no longer itself that lives, but I. As it cannot comprehend what it understands, it is an understanding which understands not’” (35)
“The Lord appears in the centre of the soul, not through an imaginary, but through an intellectual vision (although this is a subtler one than that already mentioned), just as He appeared to the Apostles, without entering through the door, when He said to them: ‘Pax vobis’. This instantaneous communication of God to the soul is so great a secret and so sublime a favour, and such delight is felt by the soul, that I do not know with what to compare it, beyond saying that the Lord is pleased to manifest to the soul at that moment the glory that is in Heaven, in a sublimer manner than is possible through any vision or spiritual consolation. It is impossible to say more than that, as far as one can understand, the soul (I mean the spirit of this soul) is made one with God…” (36)
Remarkable though it may seem, you can forget all this. Forget your identity. Forget that you ever experienced union. It is certainly part of your work to retain this awareness as you go about the world. You can forget through tiredness, or tension, or uncertainty, or any number of things. Here is a way of recovering your awareness: as you are God in this place at this time, though you have forgotten it, you say, with diffidence perhaps, but firmly, “God is experiencing tiredness in me”, or “God is experiencing uncertainty at this time in me” or even “God has lost his memory!” You will find that as God has shared your experience, you will very soon share His again.
I should like to quote at length a beautiful passage from the Book of Privy Counselling (37) which speaks of these alternating states of apparent well being and desolation and of how the actual union is permanent. My modest modernisation may manage to preserve some of his alliteration:
“Many great storms and temptations perhaps shall rise at this time and you have no idea where to run for help. All is absent from your feeling, common grace and special. Do not be over fearful, although you think you have cause, but have love-confidence in our Lord, as much as you can at this time, for he is not far away. He shall look up perhaps very soon and touch you again with a more fervent stirring of the same grace than you ever felt before. Then you are all whole and good enough in every way as you think, while it lasts. For suddenly before you are aware, all is gone, and you live barren in the boat, blown with blundering, now hither, now thither, you don’t know where or whither. But don’t be abashed, for he shall come, I promise you, very soon, when he pleases, and doughtily deliver you from all your dolour, far more gloriously than he ever did before. Yes! And if he go, afterwards he will come again, and each time, if you bear it simply, he will come more gloriously and joyfully than the other times. And he does all this because he will have you made as pliable to his will spiritually as a soft skin glove to your hand physically.
And since he sometimes goes and sometimes comes, therefore doubly in this double work will he privately prove you and work you to his own work. By the withdrawing of your fervour, which you think is his going, though it is not so, will he properly prove your patience. For know thoroughly that though God sometimes withdraws this sensed sweetness, these fervent feelings and these flaming desires, nevertheless he withdraws his grace in his chosen not at all. For certainly I may not believe that his special grace may ever be withdrawn from his chosen who have once been touched with it, unless deadly sin were the cause. But all this sensed sweetness, these fervent feelings and these flaming desires, which in themselves are not grace but tokens of grace, these are often withdrawn for proving our patience, and often for many other spiritual benefits for us, more than we imagine. For grace in itself is so high, so pure and so spiritual that it may not be felt by our sensual part. The tokens thereof may, but not it. And thus sometimes our Lord will withdraw your felt fervour both in enlarging and proving of your patience, and not only for this reason but for many others, which I do not set down here at this time.”
Of course if there were another he, his efforts to manipulate our will to his would be sinister, and would have to be resisted totally. But it is you, your higher self, that aims to express itself more precisely and fully in the world, so the process is not to be resisted, but welcomed.
Sometimes it feels like the morning after a party. You feel glutted, weakened, at odds with the day, with all the used glasses to attend to. You cannot see that you could ever have entertained a worthy thought, and as for spiritual experience, what is that? What is happening is that the experience at level seven spills over to the spiritual senses of level six, and they have a lovely time, as they would. That is the party. But then they start to think that they are experiencing level seven, that at last they have got it sewn up, which is not the case. Level seven reality brings itself to bear on the situation, and that is when you have the morning after and the washing up.
Concerning prayer, you are not in the business of asking prayers, but of answering them. The way it works is that what is in your heart happens. For this reason it is well for you that your heart only contain good things. It is no use trying to tell your heart what it should pray for with your head. Your heart has its own reasons. It is a powerhouse. In this way you can get rid of bullies who oppress you. That will certainly be on your heart! You solemnly assert that they are not fit to be in charge, which is the truth. Sooner or later, they will go. Also you radiate outwards to the whole world and beyond. In this way you are doing unknown quantities of good to the world, far more than you could do by writing to your MP.
You might think that you ought to be doing more for world peace, in the light of your awareness of level seven. This is a snare. The world is as it is because people have made choices. It is not your business to unmake them for that would negate free will. You might be worried that you haven’t performed any miracles. I would ask you in that case whether you have in fact been involved with any circumstance in which you have been conscious of level seven which did not turn out perfectly well.
Here I shall tell you of a young girl called Surekha who worked for me until she left to go to University. She was always cheerful, always smiling. Once the section was having a meal together, and I asked her the secret. She said she was a very simple person. This gave my curiosity no satisfaction, but nevertheless answered me in full.
I mentioned a dream above, where I asserted miserably that our free will is limited because we are pushed around by every Hitler there is. We just have to take the blast of their bombs. I have heard stories of providential rescue from peril, but being particular incidents, nothing general can be deduced from them. There will be plenty of stories where no rescue was effected. So was I right to be so dejected about free will? Thinking about it, I don’t have the free will to decide whether I will be blown up or not. The people who made the bomb can decide that. It is their free will. Part of the scandal is that they do not know me, nor the value of the earth. My mouse mat at work shows a view of the earth from space, with the moon in the foreground. Do they really want to change the state of the beautiful blue and brown and green and white living earth to the uniform grey pockmarked dead condition of the moon? Do they not realise that they would be dead too? As for being killed, I would have been just as dead if it had been an arrow or a ballista bolt or a bullet. All that this means is that I take the short way to the Celestial City, like Faithful in Pilgrim’s Progress. To remember this is my choice. The blindness of the people who thought they could gain anything by killing me is much to be pitied. They have a long way to go, and their action will greatly have hindered them. Though they don’t know me or care, I know. To remember this is my choice. I don’t see that I have the free will to choose that a drunken driver will not mow me down, or that some yob with a knife might not find my presence objectionable. They have made their choices. These reflections make me feel worthless, seeing that I can be killed so casually. To remember my infinite worth is my own choice.
The scale of death that results from bombs is a scandal. Why are we not outraged at the huge number of deaths that have already occurred in war? Instead we wear our poppies with pride. There is no such entity as a collective man whose death is unimaginable. There are only individuals, whose death is all too imaginable. Each one has his choice how he will regard the threat. It is a scandal that the earth, the beautiful earth, my home, should be jeopardised by stupid men who cannot see what matters and what does not. Like me, the earth is spirit and immortal. Her body is physical, and I expect to see the end of it sometime. I do not give anybody permission to destroy it before its natural history has run its course. Free will means that they can regardless. It is my choice to remember my immortality and that of the earth, and not to think of purveyors of bombs more highly than they deserve. What can they do? What is their awesome power? They can steal the overcoat of my body before I have finished with it. Much use may they have of it! I will not need it where I am going, and where I long to be.
And now having shared my thoughts on the earth, I have to let you know that they are not worth very much. Why should you be interested in my thoughts? They are only on level five. I had been wondering what I should do. Perhaps I can help in the development of the earth, I thought. This is a worthy task, even if I never become famous as I should like. I concentrated on this for some while, and look! I found that my awareness of level seven had become a belief and a memory. Now that I have had sight of it again, it is self-evidently of far greater moment than any thought concerning the earth.
The author of the Epistle of Privy Counselling fell into the same trap, setting up a marvellous intellectual construct concerning faculties of the soul, and the estates of sinners, actives and contemplatives. Having brought it to a triumphant conclusion, he says most endearingly “Lo! Here many wordes and lityl sentence”. (38)
I should give a note of warning against misinterpretation of the words of this website. Your ego likes to play the tyrant, to think it is at the centre, to sit on the throne, to boss others around, to play God in short, so if you take these words with your ego, behold your God! The humility of God, the willingness to serve us and to give us space in which to move, the worship he gives us, the honouring of our decisions, the array of levels will all be unknown to you. I should also warn against any expectation of short cuts. I cannot say that you will not go the whole way in minutes, for there is no distance to travel, but it may take decades. Nevertheless this is the end of the section. There is nothing more complicated than what I have described.
1. 1 Corinthians 3:1ff
2. Romans 8:15
3. Galatians 4:4ff
4. Cloud Chapter 38
5. John 8:58
6. The Gospel of Thomas 3b, Translated and annotated by Stevan Davies: Darton Longman and Todd 2003
7. Romans 1:16
8. Job 38:4,7
9. Psalm 139.
10. Luke 11:2
11. Matthew 5:48
12. 1 John 3:9
13. 1 John 3:20ff
14. Psalm 103:12
15. Genesis 6:5
16. Showings, or Revelations of Divine Love, Chapters 13, 46
17. Showings, or Revelations of Divine Love, Chapters 37, 53
18. Ephesians 5:19
19. Genesis 5:24
20. Hymn “The God of love my Shepherd is”
21. Life Chapter 40
22. The Gospel of Thomas 5. As for note 6
23. Psalm 42
24. Psalm 84
25. Interior Castle, Seventh Mansions Chapter 2
26. Showings, or Revelations of Divine Love, Chapter 5
27. Chapter 5 above
28. Revelations 2:17
29. Interior Castle, Seventh Mansions, Chapter 2
30. Interior Castle, First Mansions, Chapter 1
31. Cloud, Chapter 67, modernised.
32. Sermon 52 in Meister Eckhart, Harper Collins Spiritual Classics
33. Epistle of Privy Counselling, bound with the Cloud in Early English Text Society no 218, p 157
34. Life, Chapter 34. This passage is suggestive of St Teresa’s use of the gift of tongues, but is not conclusive.
35. Life, Chapter 18
36. Interior Castle, Seventh Mansions, Chapter 2
37. As for note 33, p167
38. As for note 33, p164
St Paul also said “For ye have not received the spirit of bondage again to fear; but ye have received the Spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father” (2) and
“But when the fullness of the time was come, God sent forth his Son, made of a woman, made under the law, To redeem them that were under the law, that we might receive the adoption of sons. And because ye are sons, God hath sent forth the Spirit of his Son into your hearts, crying, Abba, Father”. (3)
Although this is the best milk there is, it is milk still. The prologue to St John’s Gospel says something rather different. He says concerning Jesus “But as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name: Which were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God”.
Take away the glorious poetry, and what is left is that they were born of God.
In the Pauline vision therefore, we are distinct from God, and are enabled to call him “Abba” by grace. We were not sons, but have been adopted, so now we count as sons.
St John says we are born of God, which means that we are of God by nature. The author of “The Cloud of Unknowing” says “That thing that is so had by kynde is nerer to iche a thing then that the whiche is had by grace” or an entity that has a quality has it more firmly, more closely, if it has it by nature than it does if it has it by grace. In Clifton Wolters’ translation “the natural endowment of a thing makes it basically more akin to eternal things than that which is given it later by grace”. (4) Taking this out of the author’s context, those who know that they are born of God have a surer knowledge of their sonship than those who think that they were adopted as sons by grace.
I do of course have some quarrels with St John. As God is eternal, his sons are eternal. God never started, so neither did his sons. It follows that they could not become children of God. They already were. Jesus was well aware of this when he said “Before Abraham was, I am”. (5) It follows that nobody could give them power to become children of God. That Jesus gave them power to realise that they were children of God, I could well imagine. The Gospel of Thomas concurs: “When you understand yourselves you will be understood. And you will realise that you are Sons of the living Father. If you do not know yourselves, then you exist in poverty and you are that poverty”. (6)
The things that are said about Jesus, that he is a saviour, that he was a sacrifice for sin, that he was God incarnate even, in any sense in which we are not, are untrue and divisive, for sons need none of this, but the things he said himself are of the greatest interest.
Some Christians may feel that in saying these things about Jesus I have followed the path in “Pilgrim’s Progress” which runs parallel with the straight road for a time and then diverges by degrees until it runs in the opposite direction, but I say that I have travelled in a straight line. It is orthodox Christianity that has become less and less credible, for the reason given. Moreover, by concentrating exclusively on the supposed office of Jesus, and ritual representations of that office, it has been possible to ignore what he said.
Who are the children of God then? How do you distinguish them from other people? These are absurd questions. God is eternal, and mighty and these attributes are shared by his sons. It is impossible that some human beings should be sons and not others. That means that everybody is a son of God, and you in particular! Here is the end of all religions that divide humanity into saved and lost, or first and second, like St Paul with his “to the Jew first and also to the Greek”. (7) It is also the end of any political pretension, for no party or movement can think it is eternal, but every human is.
God as a separate entity has led Job a merry dance, and in response to his questioning questions him in return: “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth…when the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy?” (8) Job repented in dust and ashes, but a more adequate response would have been “I was there of course. Where were you?”
You can see yourself going up in a glass sided lift. Periodically a floor passes and falls beneath your vision. Eventually you come to the floor of the separate God, and you face each other. Perhaps to your surprise you find that you are the stronger. For whatever his provenance, he is an entity. You are not. Your body is an entity, so is your soul, but you are not. So the lift continues on its journey, and the floor disappears forever from your sight.
The milkiness of Paul consists of thinking of God as someone else.
What is sonship then? Would I not have first to say what He is like whose sons we are? There I run into a difficulty. All possibilities are in Him, and as soon as I try to say anything, I limit my apprehension of the possibilities. I have already used a masculine pronoun, which is an obvious case in point. I have said “mighty”, which cuts out appreciation of the possibility of working in weakness. I have said “eternal” which might be taken to mean an infinitely long duration of terrestrial time, and says nothing of the infinite fullness of a moment, or the expanding possibilities of living in many or all times simultaneously.
You see that I have discounted Jehovah. He is far too particular. Male, angry, partial to one nation before others, requirer of sacrifice, requirer of genocide, willing to visit plagues on a nation and to drown their army in order to appear great, spiteful to Moses, and Damner of everybody who is not a Christian. What I have to say is not in addition to such notions. It replaces them. Ann Owen wrote in a letter: “The whole of the Old Testament worries me – there is so much violence, and often people are commended for being violent, lying, devious, dishonest – and the Lord Jehovah is worse than all. He is consistently shown to be a tetchy old man, jealous, unforgiving, everything most unlike Jesus…The older I get, the less I believe, & the more firmly I believe it”.
More subtly, I have spoken of a being, who therefore may or may not exist, and must exist if at all against a background such as the possibility that he does not exist, or the ability of the person to decide the question, or to have a boundary where the being ends. If the background exists, then something exists which is other than God, and if the boundary exists, then there must be something outside God, neither of which I am willing to allow.
To put it another way, you cannot meaningfully speak of something that cannot be otherwise than it is. What have you said if you say that something is how it is? You have no basis for having spoken. You have wagged your lips to no purpose. I have precisely this problem with praise. People in the psalms are always telling others to praise the Lord, but nobody does it themselves. “God, you are very good”. Wagging!
If there are two or more possibilities and you assert that one of these possibilities is the actual one, you have said something meaningful. Whether it is true or not is the next question, but my attempt at praise has not even got this far. It is meaningless. As C S Lewis said, “God has no opposite”. In truth praise is more likely to be an expression of amazement at a discovery or emotional involvement than the ascription of an attribute: O Lord, thou hast searched me, and known me. Thou knowest my downsitting and mine uprising, thou understandest my thought afar off. (9)
If humans do try to speak of God, as we try very hard to do, absurd results can ensue. Anna said that Mister God is empty. I have been in a surrounding of great emptiness, and I have written about how God has withdrawn to make room for others to grow up into God, and how he aligns his will with ours, effectively withdrawing his will, and St Teresa says he has no hands but ours, so I find Anna’s statement meaningful and true to experience. I say that in the Last Form resides all fullness, which I consider to be a grand and noble statement, but it is the opposite of Anna’s, which I have just endorsed.
So having reduced myself to silence before God, at least at this level, and having emptied the word God of all meaning, I am in no hurry to fill it up again, so it would seem that the Omega Course must end before it has started. Sonship of an empty concept has little to excite interest. But if sonship is really true, then I can look at the experience of being a son, and see what can be deduced from that. Two considerations encourage me to take sonship seriously. The first is Jesus, saying “When you pray, say ‘Abba’” Our Father. (10) The other is the story from my own history, which I told above.
I start by asserting that we live on many levels simultaneously. We are body, soul and spirit, or we can talk of seven levels, one and two corresponding to body, three to six corresponding with soul, say the psychic realm, heart work, the spiritual source of that which can be addressed by the intellect, and the spiritual experience of us as individuals respectively, and seven with spirit. All the levels are expressions of spirit, without a great divide between body and soul, so I could describe level seven as pure spirit, except that that implies impurity in the other levels, which is not necessarily true, so I will call it spirit, and let the spiritual nature of all the other levels be implicit.
The experience of sonship is to experience all seven levels at one time or another. In order to do this, it is necessary to clean up one’s act, as every writer on this subject has said before. First I have to demolish the sense of sin. We are bowed down with this, and it is nothing to do with sin. Jesus said “Be perfect even as your heavenly Father is perfect.” (11) What a cruel thing that would have been to say if he had not thought it was possible.
“Whosoever is born of God doth not commit sin; for his seed remaineth in him: and he cannot sin, because he is born of God”. (12)
“For if our heart condemn us, God is greater than our heart, and knoweth all things. Beloved, if our heart condemn us not, then have we confidence toward God”. (13)
When I had a sense of sin, I thought this meant “Our heart ought to condemn us, and if it does not condemn us, then we have prideful and terrible self-confidence in opposition to God” It doesn’t mean this, but what it says, that it is possible for our hearts not to condemn us, and for us to have confidence towards God. Christians assert that sins can be forgiven. “As far as the east is from the west, so far has he set our sins from us.” (14) Then if we have just received forgiveness from our sins, is it not possible to think that for one second at least, before we start our posturing again, we are free of sin? Then why not two seconds? And is it true that every imagination of the thoughts of our hearts is only evil continually? (15) Is it not rather the case that our hearts are neither black nor white but “streaky”, and wouldn’t we be best advised to work on this basis, untidy though it be theologically? If we think of earthly fatherhood, the relationship is permanent, based on ever present natural fact. The son might do wrong things, but forgiveness of these does not constitute the fabric of the relationship. Neither does the father need a sacrifice to enable such forgiveness. The son is the son always. The father is pleased to see his son, because he loves him.
There is no theology of the fall in this website, certainly not in a moral sense. Our tumbling down the levels is obvious enough, and I once thought that this was equivalent to falling into sin, but it is not so, as perfect goodness is available at every level. We can see perfect brooks, clouds, dandelions, starlings, zebras, daffodils and trees. I should say that a perfect tree has a healthy root system, a strong trunk, and an evenly developed crown. The odd mark due to insect activity in no way diminishes its perfection. Have you seen the perfect bodies, wonderfully fit for their purpose, appropriate to the age of the wearer, each one different from every other, with diverse glory for men and women and each with a beauty of its own? Of course not. They need to buy somebody’s product for that! We can experience a perfect sunset, perfect moments in relationship, perfect thinking, perfect apprehension of aspects of the Divine, and perfect union, perfection at all levels in short. There are some created things like slugs that appear to me to be unpleasant. I do not know whether this is a failure of vision on my part or whether the act of creation was delegated to entities of divergent qualities of goodness and aesthetic sense. It does not in any way negate the assertion that perfection can be found at all levels. As it says in Desiderata, “You are a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here.” It is no sin to exist. The doctrine of the fall seeks to impose moral opprobrium on us, to say not only that we are bad, but that we cannot help ourselves to be good. Even worse, it asserts that there is a gulf between God and us, and that He is angry with us. I do not see this doctrine written in nature. Julian of Norwich could not see it either: “In God may be no wrath”. (16) “There is a Godly will in man which never assented to sin”.(17)
You may have all sorts of turbulence going on under your skin. This is not sin. You may have an ill-defined ever present sense that you are not good enough. Good enough for what? And who says so? Resist this. If you allow this feeling house room, that is sin in itself. It is telling a lie. Churches eagerly latch on to this feeling, and inform us that we are sinful, which we feel all too readily, but we are not.
So having rid ourselves of a sense of sin, our hearts begin to sing. St Paul tells us to make melody in our hearts to the Lord.(18) You cannot tell your heart to do anything. When it is happy, it begins to sing all by itself. Paul clearly knew this experience. Sin is not something to fight against. It is simply the least attractive option. You don’t want to go shoplifting, or to murder people or any of these things. You can walk with God as Enoch did, so why should you want to walk in any other way? (19)
“Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us” is not the threat of a bullying potentate, rather it is spiritual law. It is one of the few passages in the bible that require no translation or interpretation. Unforgiveness is like a sack which you are carrying on your back. You are too heavy to see the upper levels. You are blighting your own life. I saw a television programme on this subject once, and most of the contributors had forgiven. Their peace and stature could be seen on their faces. One woman had not forgiven, and her face was pinched and drawn. One lady had real difficulty with forgiveness. Her behind had been blown off by a terrorist bomb. The injury was shown and it was pitiful. The problem was the total lack of relationship between the terrorist and the victim. There was no remorse, no awareness of identity, nothing. She did what she could, and her courage was moving and profound. Some things can be forgiven by simple choice. More than you might think can be forgiven by making a decision to forgive when it is against your surface will. For heavier work, you can pray to God to be given forgiveness. The heaviest work of all is to bear the injury as a cross. This can be done retrospectively, for past injuries. One further method is to talk it over with a friend who listens carefully.
You might have some ingrained weaknesses which you would like to be without. You can work on these. The Holy Spirit will help in the work of cleaning up. He may play the dustman himself and take away the rubbish. If I describe some of my own rubbish, it might not apply to you, but you might recognise it all too well. “It’s not fair”. “I haven’t got enough time or money”. “I can’t”. “I’ll try”. “Poor me”. “I’m not good enough”. “I’m cringing with embarrassment”. “I am offended”. “I’m angry”. “I’m hurt”. “I resent that”. “I am important”. (This one is subtle! You don’t matter at all, though you think you do, that is to say this stuff and whatever faculty is experiencing it doesn’t matter at all. It won’t even survive you. You yourself matter infinitely, but you will never be aware of that when you think you are important in this way) “I am hurt so much that I cannot forgive”. “I am such an important person that I should not forgive”. “They don’t deserve to be forgiven”. “I am better than the other chap”. Or these: “Don’t get mad, get even”. “It’s not that simple”.
There is a subtlety here. To admit to anger or any of these things in an experience of self knowledge or counselling is healing and good. When you are experiencing them they limit your vision very severely. In the Catholic terminology, for you these are deadly sins. They are the products of what is sometimes called self. You have to be rid of self. It is no loss. It is a liar through and through.
The ego has not got to be destroyed. It is a necessary faculty, to enable us to live in the world. It is like a car that I own. It is useful, but obviously it is not me. It would be a very funny car if it thought it was me, or God almighty as it is apt to do. No. It should not be destroyed, for it is useful, in its place. The setting of it in its place is a major work and absolutely necessary. This is what George Herbert spoke of where he says “he doth convert and bring my mind in frame”. (20)
Nor is it possible to destroy the ego. All that happens is that it reappears in another form, possibly a less attractive one. Nor is it sensible. The aspects of sonship that one most longs to experience are at a higher level than that of the ego, so the job in hand is simply to attend to what the ego cannot encompass. You cannot achieve this by will power. Firstly you haven’t got enough! Secondly, will power is an operation of the ego, and to exercise willpower puts the ego at centre stage and probably inflates it too, when all you want to do is to attend to something else. Thirdly the ego cannot be used to destroy itself. It will not nor cannot nor should not do it. So by no means are you to die to self, but it is absolutely necessary to die to self!
So the work in hand is to attend to the faculties that are higher than the ego, and to ignore any posturing or interruption, and if that isn’t possible, to nudge the ego aside gently and as often as necessary.
Do not strain and push to know heavenly secrets. There are none. It is like a car again, in another sense. There is nothing secret about a car. You know how it works. You are welcome to try out any car, examine it at will, buy one, have the keys in your pocket, drive it at your pleasure. But not if you are six years old. Then you strain and strain to see over the fascia, with no success, and if you should get the car to start, disaster looms. St Teresa also says there are no secrets, in different words: “Ah Daughter, how few are they who love Me in truth! If people loved Me, I should not hide my secrets from them…” (21)
“Jesus said: Recognise what is right in front of you, and that which is hidden from you will be revealed to you. Nothing hidden will fail to be displayed”. (22)
By doing these things gently and over a sufficient length of time you will become aware of your spiritual senses, which you had all along, but did not know of them, nor of the things that they can sense. You will become aware of your soul. You will see that it has its own most vehement desires. So strong are these that you have little doubt of success. It is like finding that you have a most powerful ally, or rather, it is it. For once the bible is literally true where it says “Like as the hart desireth the waterbrooks, so longeth my soul after thee, O God” (23) and “My soul hath a desire and longing to enter into the courts of the Lord.” (24) You never told it to long so greatly. You used no will power. The ego is altogether outclassed at this level. It is a much coarser faculty, useful for other matters, but not here.
You may wonder that I have not mentioned meditation. You certainly need a forum for doing these things. You may find meditation essential. Certainly much can be learned and experienced in meditation, or contemplation as it is called when you do not meditate on any subject, but I do not say that it is the forum that will enable you to get to where you want to be. It may enable parts of you to reach high levels, but not all. As I said above, all the levels, including the physical, are expressions of spirit, and you can experience spirit therefore, right here in the physical. This is what Brother Lawrence discovered, with his pots and pans, and St Teresa with her spinning wheel. So it is here in the physical that you are as aware as you currently can be of the various levels. It is here in the physical that you get rid of the rubbish. It is here in the physical that you experience the great goodness of God in his creation. It is here in the physical that you are in contact with true things, for it reflects yourself back to you. It is in the physical that you gently and persistently slide past the ego, and keep it in its place. It is in the physical, though you may not know it now, that you will reach journey’s end, and it is in the physical that you operate with your newly irradiated consciousness, lifting your body and soul, and as far as I know, the whole created realm in the process.
The reason why you may not need formal meditation is that the upper reaches of the soul take an outing on their own initiative when they judge it best. All you need to do is let them, so none of this: “Don’t be silly”, “Concentrate”, “Attend to the real world”.
Equally spontaneous are experiences when it is painful to be you. You don’t know why. It is not remorse for sin, for you are not aware of any. All you want to do is to read a book or watch television, anything to distract yourself. It is best to accept the pain. It is not over-severe, and it may be the prelude to a level seven experience. This is the only ascetic practice I recommend, and even that is accepted not sought.
Here is a varied, even miscellaneous collection of soul material. Often it happens that if one person has experienced something, another finds it interesting and helpful, nevertheless all souls are different, and it may be that none of this is for you.
If you need it, a very powerful prayer is “Help!” Another is “I am here”. This is obvious enough, but to pronounce it brings all the resources available to you, human and Divine, to bear on the situation. I do not say that this is anything automatic. Rather, you use all the consciousness at your disposal and all the centredness, and those resources that you are not aware of are present as well.
Somebody went to get petrol at a garage. He wasn’t sure, but he thought he had been given £1.00 too much in the change. It was dark, cold, windy and raining, and there was a big queue at the window and he was in a hurry. He stood around helplessly for a little while and then drove away with the £1.00 in his pocket. At once he felt a powerful feeling of being loved. He knew the unconditional love of God, but this brought it home in a very immediate way.
A very good exercise is to opt. It doesn’t have to be a major issue. You could choose what you will wear, or what you will have for breakfast, or what you will do in the next hour, or even whether you will raise your right arm in the air or not. The feeling induced by observing your power to choose is absolutely delicious, and you can see that neither God nor the whole host of heaven have the slightest idea how you will opt. All times are present to God, of course, but foreknowing and foreordaining are very different things. The purpose of this exercise is to show you the part of your self that can choose, which leads to a marvellously enhanced sense of self. If you think this exercise is foolish and unnecessary, you have a great deal to be thankful for.
I do not think that it is necessary or useful to be too delicate in conscience. You may be so concerned with matters of conscience that you forget who your father is. Also I doubt that living in this world is best performed with a tender conscience. It must be implacable in ridding you of the rubbish as described above, but perhaps not over particular about things that are experienced in the daily round. An example is Gerald Priestland bribing a telephone operator so that his call would be connected. When you are experiencing the higher levels, you may be bothered by something in conscience that would not have bothered you at all in the normal course of things. You cannot fool your conscience. If you go against it here, you will go to a lower level or a lower aspect of this level, where you are more comfortable with the decision that you made. You can return to the higher level later.
The mystics all tell of spiritual consolations and how these are not to be sought, nor relied upon. If they come from deep within, it is nearly impossible to suspect them. In any case there is no way that you are going to be satisfied with any consolations. The reason is that you have a dim but insistent sense of the extraordinary quality and worth of the thing that is at your centre, deep within, and you want an answer to this! No matter who offers you a consolation, it is blander, lesser than that thing within, so not much of interest.
You might see the point of St Teresa’s exchange of hearts, and offer the same to God, so that you attend to his business, and He attends to yours. (25) You might pray with Julian of Norwich: “God of thy goodness give me thyself; for thou art enough to me, and I may nothing ask that is less that may be full worship to Thee; and if I ask anything that is less, ever me wanteth, but only in Thee I have all.” (26)
You could consider the doctrine of reincarnation, firstly because it is true, as shown in the work of Edgar Cayce, and Arthur Guirdham, secondly because it confirms that you are immortal intrinsically, not because you happen to adhere to the correct religion, thirdly it accords the soul the dignity that is due to it, fourthly because it shows that the state you have already reached in an advanced one, and you did it yourself, albeit with every imaginable help from the heavenly realms, fifthly because it explains incidence of genius, sixthly because it has a bearing on unmerited suffering and on differing worldly status, and lastly because it reassures you that the large amount of work you see you have to do does not have to be done all at once, which subtly enables you to relax and be more at ease and peaceful. Against this is the Emperor Justinian who declared the doctrine anathema, but as far as I know without giving any reason.
When I was reading everything I could find on reincarnation and the levels, (27) I found that books were available in the public library that were not available before or since. The reason they were not available is that they were always out on loan. I could see by the dates of the stamps that they were borrowed every week or every fortnight non-stop. This means two things, that some hidden spiritual process made them available to me when I needed them, and that there are a lot of people out there to whom these books are of interest. When you enter on the spiritual path, a great bell sounds in the heavens as it were, Bong! Helpers spring into action, and all the assistance you need, you will have.
I cannot tell you what you will experience with your spiritual senses You are on your own. God has no grandchildren, only children. So I finish now with things that concern the soul, and come to what the mystics call union. This is a gentle experience of great sobriety and peace, experienced in the depth of the spirit. It is a fleeting experience, but the memory of it is permanent, or rather the reality is permanent, and always was. It is the end of all exploring, all striving, all anxiety, all doubt. It is the white stone which the person received with his name inscribed which nobody knew but himself.(28) This imagery for once is extremely clear. The stone is permanent, pure for no sin can come anywhere near this level, it is his identity, and he cannot communicate it to anyone else. There simply are not words. It is gnosis. You are a Gnostic. People will say “agnostic” if you tell them, but it is not so.
I find it odd to call it union, for that speaks of two becoming one, but you only experience one. If you experience two, yourself and another, it is not union which is the state of the spirit, but some high experience of the soul. St Teresa’s white butterfly, that is her individual spiritual consciousness, died at union. (29) Don’t worry that your individuality is at risk. Soon enough you will be in the outside world again, and look, you are very much yourself, individuality absolutely intact, and in addition, now you know who you are. “Would it not be a sign of great ignorance, my daughters, if a person were asked who he was, and could not say, and had no idea who his father or his mother was, or from what country he came?” (30) Moreover, you know that the spirit is in union permanently, whether you are experiencing it or not.
Here is part of a magnificent passage from The Cloud of Unknowing. (31) It is typically lucid, and typically it contains long sentences. I include it because I disagree with it, but it is so clear that my answer is clear too.
“Whenever you feel your mind occupied with no kind of physical or spiritual thing, but only with the substance of God as it is … then you are above yourself and under your God. You are above yourself because you succeed in coming there by grace where you may not come by nature, that is to say to be made one with God in spirit and in love and in accordance of will. You are beneath God because although it may said in a manner of speaking that in this time God and you are not two but one in spirit – so that you or another who feels the perfection of this work on account of this union may truly by witness of scripture be called a God – nevertheless you are beneath him. For he is God by nature without beginning, and you that once were nothing in substance and in addition when you were by his might and his love made something, wilfully with sin made yourself less than nothing: only by his mercy without your desert are made a God in grace, united with him in spirit without parting, both here and in the bliss of heaven without any end. So that though you are one with him in grace, yet you are very far beneath him in nature”.
Obviously as regards levels one to six we are far beneath him in nature, except that he informs all these levels with his presence and shares our experience in them, so he is beneath us. Underneath are the everlasting arms. But as regards level seven, and he is specifically talking of union, for one thing to be above or beneath another implies two things, and only one is experienced. What is more, I don’t see how you can say you were once nothing in substance, because as regards level seven, you never started. You always were. What is more, we did not make ourselves less than nothing with sin, because a person who is less than nothing cannot exist, also sin can affect our sonship in no way whatsoever, though it does catastrophically affect our awareness of it. What is more, it is irrelevant whether it is by mercy and grace and irrelevant whether it is without our desert that we are made a God in grace, united with him in spirit, because God is not made, and there is no such entity as a God. What is more, just as morality with its shoulds and oughts plays no part in this work, neither does desert. What is more, the effect of this passage is to depress, to make one feel diminished, less than one is. If this is for humility, to keep the ego in its place, I assure you, you will by grace have put your ego in its place and kept it there for a long time before any of this means anything to you, so it is misplaced. Also you need all your power to do this work. You cannot leave any of it behind, saying it is humble to think that something else is greater than you. I meet up with him again when he says “in spirit without parting, both here and in the bliss of heaven without any end."
Perhaps he was correcting Meister Eckhart: "A great authority says that his breaking through is nobler than his flowing out; and that is true. When I flowed out from God, all things said: 'God is'. And this cannot make me blessed, for with this I acknowledge that I am a creature. But in the breaking through, when I come to be free of will of myself and of God's will and of all his works and of God himself, then I am above all created things, and I am neither God nor creature, but I am what I was and what I shall remain, now and eternally. Then I received an impulse that will bring me up above all the angels. Together with this impulse, I receive such riches that God, as he is 'God' (separate) and as he performs all his divine works, cannot suffice me; for in this breaking through I receive that God and I are one. Then I am what I was, and then I neither diminish nor increase, for I am then an immovable cause that moves all things" (32).
But Meister Eckhart needs no correcting. Our author writes from experience, in which he is an authority. It is not clear why he dipped temporarily into the world of dogma, which is words only.
The same author in his Book of Privy Counselling is absolutely clear that you can only be aware of one, not two in this state, also that it is infrequent and transient, and that it cannot be attained by your own will. He also affirms that it is not necessary, desirable, possible or reasonable to try and stop yourself existing:
“And then, when you covet so single-mindedly, not to unbe – for that were madness and contempt of God – but to forgo the knowledge and feeling of your being (which must always be if God’s love shall perfectly be felt as it may be here) and see and feel that in no way may you come to your purpose, for there will always follow and go with your doing a naked feeling of your blind being, be you never so busy (unless it be any seldom short time when God will let you feel himself in abundance of love) which naked blind feeling of your being will evermore press above you, between you and your God, as will in the beginning the qualities of your being between you and yourself: then will you think it a very heavy and altogether painful burden of yourself. Yes! Jesus help you then, for then you have need.” (33)
Here is St Teresa on union. “I went to the place where I am in the habit of praying in solitude, and with extreme recollection, began to speak to the Lord in that silly way in which I often speak to Him without knowing what I am saying; for it is love that speaks, and my soul is so far transported that I take no notice of the distance that separates it from God. For the love which it knows His Majesty has for it makes it forget itself and it thinks it is in Him, and that He and it are one and the same thing without any division, and so it talks nonsense”. (34)
“Let us now come to the most intimate part of what the soul experiences in this condition. The persons who must speak of it are those who know it, for it cannot be understood, still less described. As I was about to write of this (I had just communicated and had been experiencing this very prayer of which I am writing), I was wondering what it is the soul does during that time, when the Lord said these words to me: ‘It dies to itself wholly, daughter, in order that it may fix itself more and more upon Me; it is no longer itself that lives, but I. As it cannot comprehend what it understands, it is an understanding which understands not’” (35)
“The Lord appears in the centre of the soul, not through an imaginary, but through an intellectual vision (although this is a subtler one than that already mentioned), just as He appeared to the Apostles, without entering through the door, when He said to them: ‘Pax vobis’. This instantaneous communication of God to the soul is so great a secret and so sublime a favour, and such delight is felt by the soul, that I do not know with what to compare it, beyond saying that the Lord is pleased to manifest to the soul at that moment the glory that is in Heaven, in a sublimer manner than is possible through any vision or spiritual consolation. It is impossible to say more than that, as far as one can understand, the soul (I mean the spirit of this soul) is made one with God…” (36)
Remarkable though it may seem, you can forget all this. Forget your identity. Forget that you ever experienced union. It is certainly part of your work to retain this awareness as you go about the world. You can forget through tiredness, or tension, or uncertainty, or any number of things. Here is a way of recovering your awareness: as you are God in this place at this time, though you have forgotten it, you say, with diffidence perhaps, but firmly, “God is experiencing tiredness in me”, or “God is experiencing uncertainty at this time in me” or even “God has lost his memory!” You will find that as God has shared your experience, you will very soon share His again.
I should like to quote at length a beautiful passage from the Book of Privy Counselling (37) which speaks of these alternating states of apparent well being and desolation and of how the actual union is permanent. My modest modernisation may manage to preserve some of his alliteration:
“Many great storms and temptations perhaps shall rise at this time and you have no idea where to run for help. All is absent from your feeling, common grace and special. Do not be over fearful, although you think you have cause, but have love-confidence in our Lord, as much as you can at this time, for he is not far away. He shall look up perhaps very soon and touch you again with a more fervent stirring of the same grace than you ever felt before. Then you are all whole and good enough in every way as you think, while it lasts. For suddenly before you are aware, all is gone, and you live barren in the boat, blown with blundering, now hither, now thither, you don’t know where or whither. But don’t be abashed, for he shall come, I promise you, very soon, when he pleases, and doughtily deliver you from all your dolour, far more gloriously than he ever did before. Yes! And if he go, afterwards he will come again, and each time, if you bear it simply, he will come more gloriously and joyfully than the other times. And he does all this because he will have you made as pliable to his will spiritually as a soft skin glove to your hand physically.
And since he sometimes goes and sometimes comes, therefore doubly in this double work will he privately prove you and work you to his own work. By the withdrawing of your fervour, which you think is his going, though it is not so, will he properly prove your patience. For know thoroughly that though God sometimes withdraws this sensed sweetness, these fervent feelings and these flaming desires, nevertheless he withdraws his grace in his chosen not at all. For certainly I may not believe that his special grace may ever be withdrawn from his chosen who have once been touched with it, unless deadly sin were the cause. But all this sensed sweetness, these fervent feelings and these flaming desires, which in themselves are not grace but tokens of grace, these are often withdrawn for proving our patience, and often for many other spiritual benefits for us, more than we imagine. For grace in itself is so high, so pure and so spiritual that it may not be felt by our sensual part. The tokens thereof may, but not it. And thus sometimes our Lord will withdraw your felt fervour both in enlarging and proving of your patience, and not only for this reason but for many others, which I do not set down here at this time.”
Of course if there were another he, his efforts to manipulate our will to his would be sinister, and would have to be resisted totally. But it is you, your higher self, that aims to express itself more precisely and fully in the world, so the process is not to be resisted, but welcomed.
Sometimes it feels like the morning after a party. You feel glutted, weakened, at odds with the day, with all the used glasses to attend to. You cannot see that you could ever have entertained a worthy thought, and as for spiritual experience, what is that? What is happening is that the experience at level seven spills over to the spiritual senses of level six, and they have a lovely time, as they would. That is the party. But then they start to think that they are experiencing level seven, that at last they have got it sewn up, which is not the case. Level seven reality brings itself to bear on the situation, and that is when you have the morning after and the washing up.
Concerning prayer, you are not in the business of asking prayers, but of answering them. The way it works is that what is in your heart happens. For this reason it is well for you that your heart only contain good things. It is no use trying to tell your heart what it should pray for with your head. Your heart has its own reasons. It is a powerhouse. In this way you can get rid of bullies who oppress you. That will certainly be on your heart! You solemnly assert that they are not fit to be in charge, which is the truth. Sooner or later, they will go. Also you radiate outwards to the whole world and beyond. In this way you are doing unknown quantities of good to the world, far more than you could do by writing to your MP.
You might think that you ought to be doing more for world peace, in the light of your awareness of level seven. This is a snare. The world is as it is because people have made choices. It is not your business to unmake them for that would negate free will. You might be worried that you haven’t performed any miracles. I would ask you in that case whether you have in fact been involved with any circumstance in which you have been conscious of level seven which did not turn out perfectly well.
Here I shall tell you of a young girl called Surekha who worked for me until she left to go to University. She was always cheerful, always smiling. Once the section was having a meal together, and I asked her the secret. She said she was a very simple person. This gave my curiosity no satisfaction, but nevertheless answered me in full.
I mentioned a dream above, where I asserted miserably that our free will is limited because we are pushed around by every Hitler there is. We just have to take the blast of their bombs. I have heard stories of providential rescue from peril, but being particular incidents, nothing general can be deduced from them. There will be plenty of stories where no rescue was effected. So was I right to be so dejected about free will? Thinking about it, I don’t have the free will to decide whether I will be blown up or not. The people who made the bomb can decide that. It is their free will. Part of the scandal is that they do not know me, nor the value of the earth. My mouse mat at work shows a view of the earth from space, with the moon in the foreground. Do they really want to change the state of the beautiful blue and brown and green and white living earth to the uniform grey pockmarked dead condition of the moon? Do they not realise that they would be dead too? As for being killed, I would have been just as dead if it had been an arrow or a ballista bolt or a bullet. All that this means is that I take the short way to the Celestial City, like Faithful in Pilgrim’s Progress. To remember this is my choice. The blindness of the people who thought they could gain anything by killing me is much to be pitied. They have a long way to go, and their action will greatly have hindered them. Though they don’t know me or care, I know. To remember this is my choice. I don’t see that I have the free will to choose that a drunken driver will not mow me down, or that some yob with a knife might not find my presence objectionable. They have made their choices. These reflections make me feel worthless, seeing that I can be killed so casually. To remember my infinite worth is my own choice.
The scale of death that results from bombs is a scandal. Why are we not outraged at the huge number of deaths that have already occurred in war? Instead we wear our poppies with pride. There is no such entity as a collective man whose death is unimaginable. There are only individuals, whose death is all too imaginable. Each one has his choice how he will regard the threat. It is a scandal that the earth, the beautiful earth, my home, should be jeopardised by stupid men who cannot see what matters and what does not. Like me, the earth is spirit and immortal. Her body is physical, and I expect to see the end of it sometime. I do not give anybody permission to destroy it before its natural history has run its course. Free will means that they can regardless. It is my choice to remember my immortality and that of the earth, and not to think of purveyors of bombs more highly than they deserve. What can they do? What is their awesome power? They can steal the overcoat of my body before I have finished with it. Much use may they have of it! I will not need it where I am going, and where I long to be.
And now having shared my thoughts on the earth, I have to let you know that they are not worth very much. Why should you be interested in my thoughts? They are only on level five. I had been wondering what I should do. Perhaps I can help in the development of the earth, I thought. This is a worthy task, even if I never become famous as I should like. I concentrated on this for some while, and look! I found that my awareness of level seven had become a belief and a memory. Now that I have had sight of it again, it is self-evidently of far greater moment than any thought concerning the earth.
The author of the Epistle of Privy Counselling fell into the same trap, setting up a marvellous intellectual construct concerning faculties of the soul, and the estates of sinners, actives and contemplatives. Having brought it to a triumphant conclusion, he says most endearingly “Lo! Here many wordes and lityl sentence”. (38)
I should give a note of warning against misinterpretation of the words of this website. Your ego likes to play the tyrant, to think it is at the centre, to sit on the throne, to boss others around, to play God in short, so if you take these words with your ego, behold your God! The humility of God, the willingness to serve us and to give us space in which to move, the worship he gives us, the honouring of our decisions, the array of levels will all be unknown to you. I should also warn against any expectation of short cuts. I cannot say that you will not go the whole way in minutes, for there is no distance to travel, but it may take decades. Nevertheless this is the end of the section. There is nothing more complicated than what I have described.
1. 1 Corinthians 3:1ff
2. Romans 8:15
3. Galatians 4:4ff
4. Cloud Chapter 38
5. John 8:58
6. The Gospel of Thomas 3b, Translated and annotated by Stevan Davies: Darton Longman and Todd 2003
7. Romans 1:16
8. Job 38:4,7
9. Psalm 139.
10. Luke 11:2
11. Matthew 5:48
12. 1 John 3:9
13. 1 John 3:20ff
14. Psalm 103:12
15. Genesis 6:5
16. Showings, or Revelations of Divine Love, Chapters 13, 46
17. Showings, or Revelations of Divine Love, Chapters 37, 53
18. Ephesians 5:19
19. Genesis 5:24
20. Hymn “The God of love my Shepherd is”
21. Life Chapter 40
22. The Gospel of Thomas 5. As for note 6
23. Psalm 42
24. Psalm 84
25. Interior Castle, Seventh Mansions Chapter 2
26. Showings, or Revelations of Divine Love, Chapter 5
27. Chapter 5 above
28. Revelations 2:17
29. Interior Castle, Seventh Mansions, Chapter 2
30. Interior Castle, First Mansions, Chapter 1
31. Cloud, Chapter 67, modernised.
32. Sermon 52 in Meister Eckhart, Harper Collins Spiritual Classics
33. Epistle of Privy Counselling, bound with the Cloud in Early English Text Society no 218, p 157
34. Life, Chapter 34. This passage is suggestive of St Teresa’s use of the gift of tongues, but is not conclusive.
35. Life, Chapter 18
36. Interior Castle, Seventh Mansions, Chapter 2
37. As for note 33, p167
38. As for note 33, p164