Connection

This evening I was reflecting on a time when I was living in Flagstaff, AZ and made my last visit with my father who was living in a facility in Chapel Hill, NC. He had advanced Alzheimer’s so he could not communicate with cogent complete thoughts or sentences and did not know I was his son. During that visit we went for a short walk down one of the hallways in the facility and had an in depth, complex conversation we could not have had. In that conversation he clearly knew who I was in the spirit plane. We had stopped in front of a print of a harbor, the open ocean and several sailing vessels of various sizes and types. Immediately when we stopped I felt a shift in consciousness and a deeper connection with him. I also felt surrounded by love. Our conversation was about the symbolism of that print and what it meant for each of us. As that conversation ended we went back, sat down and I felt a shift back to this reality and a change in our connection. The love was still there. He looked at me and said "It’s stopped" and I replied "Yes it has". He then asked "What do we do now?", to which I replied "You take a nap before dinner and I’ll go back to AZ." It was an amazing experience during which we each shifted to a different reality than our normal one. "You belong to two worlds do not miss the invisible one while you are busy with the visible one. Cultivate your vision, learn to see the realities which your eyes miss.. Look through the world that is seen and discover the realities which it suggests and implies." (Rufus Jones)

Results

I have been a devoted practitioner of various spiritual activities for years, decades in some cases and, as a result, I now feel connected to "all that is" all the time, I have one foot in the eternal and one in the present, I have great joy and I carry out my daily activities from within a "bubble of love". It’s a great way to live which still requires discipline. My joy is surprising from a worldly perspective since I am disabled, in pain much of the tine and approaching my seventieth birthday. I think I’ll keep doing what I am doing! "I will talk about only five sources of spiritual nourishment which I have known as among the chief sustainers of my life: the companionship of other seekers, the pleasures of solitude, the satisfactions of obedience the support of prayer and worship, and the gifts of joy." (Lacey)

Practice

In Nourishing the Spiritual Life, Paul A. Lacey writes "I take the spiritual life to be a life of which aims to discover human wholeness, the integration of all aspects of our humanity - body, soul, mind, emotions - and the connection of the self to all of creation." I spend most of each day in an effort to maintain harmony and balance within and between my "body, soul, mind, [and] emotions including exercising, eating carefully, meditating, connecting with others and connecting with the force I call God. I am also very aware of my connection to all things. It is a very vital and fulfilling way to live.

Point Of View

Today I was reading about concerns over the possibility of a nuclear exchange and the hopes of the Trump administration to reduce restrictions on a limited exchange. When I take a limited, short term or temporal view the possibility and what that could mean for this planet and the people on it, I feel very disturbed. On the other hand, when I take a long term or eternal view, I can sense that everything is fine. Both seem true to me. In my life I lived within a period of "darkness" for many years before moving into the "light" of love and God. "I [George Fox] saw the infinite love of God. I saw that there was an ocean of darkness and death, but an infinite ocean of light and love which flowed over the ocean of darkness. In that also I saw the infinite love of God; and I had great openings"

Meditation 2

Yesterday I spoke of "the warm and powerful feeling of God or unconditional Love" that I focus on when I meditate. I meditate on that feeling at least once a day and often several times. I have realized that the feeling is a part of me that was, previously, undeveloped and is now growing. I make use of that feeling during exercise, for physical healing, when working with spirits and in my relationships. There is a lot of power there. Power that helps me in everything I do. "Few things — no things that I know of — are so completely and effectively restorative as the discovery that this World of the environing Spirit is verily closer to us than breathing and is charged with the resources of Life for which we pant."(Rufus Jones)

Meditation

Yesterday Maria, my wife, and I went to a local park and took a short walk through the brambles of a fallow field down to the bank of the Patuxent river. Once there I joined with the plants, animals and forest, told them how magnificent they were and meditated on the warm and powerful feeling of God or unconditional Love, a feeling near but just below my heart center that I was shown during my sweat lodge experience. It was a wonderful, joy-filled experience. I allowed that feeling to grow and then broadcasted it. "The very fact that such a mighty experience [mystical worship] as this is possible means that there is some inner meeting place between the soul and God; in other words, that the divine and human, God and man, are not wholly sundered."(Rufus Jones)

Life's Process

I have had several contacts in the last few days which have reminded me of several important guiding principles. Some of those are that God's Love is absolute (no sign of duality) and unconditional (no levels of love, pleasing or displeasing, judging or any other variation for any reason, just love) and much stronger than anything of human origin. If I encounter anything other than that, it is human, not God. Another is that I need to respect and not try to alter someone else's life process out of Love for them and because I do not truly understand their process. "Some course of action which seems so clearly to be leading to disaster may contain a twist of fate which lifts it to success. That accident whose cause was so apparent may have had an inner meaning we cannot see. That sudden death which we think could have been so easily avoided with greater consciousness may not have been the tragedy it appears. The man who died may have been needed elsewhere. We simply do not know. Scientists discover and theologians affirm; but faced with the mystery of life and death we know almost nothing. We can learn from the experts, but our experience may not fit their theories and it is our experience and our experience alone that we should trust."(Claremont deCastillejo)

Spiritual Path

Other than my exercising and regular household duties, I spend most of my time in activities of service to others or working on my own spiritual condition. I also do a lot of self care but even then minimize distractions from spiritual pursuits. I watch one or two movies a week and prefer fantasies of various types finding that I get enough realism in my daily life. In all of this I never lose track of the fact that my primary goal is to develop my spiritual condition. I am quite aware of how easy it is to become involved in worldly pursuits and lose track of my goal. "The most awful calamity which can befall our Religious Society is not a split in the unity of organization, not a loss of social prestige, not persecution by civil authorities, not loss of all our wealth. It is rather the subtle, unseen, slow, everyday weakening of our testimony and practice of absolute devotion." (Kilpack)

Joy

Every morning, at dawn this time of year, I go out the back on our deck and experience the "joy of being" along with all of the other plants and animals. The air is usually chilly and full of the moist smells of the beginnings of spring. Birds are just beginning to sing the spring song. I carry that joy and Love with me during the day. I distinguish between joy and pleasure since I have access to joy but cannot do many of the activities associated with pleasure, things like dancing, snow boarding, running or long walks in the woods. There are also many pleasurable activities that I can do such as eating or sitting in the woods but the pleasure is short-lived while the feeling of joy lasts. "Seek not pleasure neither of body nor of soul. This too is a gift, eluding those who seek it, seek God, for He alone is able to give joy, which is infinitely finer than pleasure.

Growth In Love

This morning we had a meeting of our reading group in which we are reading and discussing Healing The Heart Of Democracy: The Courage To Create a Politics Worthy of the Human Spirit, by Parker J. Palmer. He takes a very loving and spiritual approach to democracy which, as I mentioned this morning, many people are not ready for. The recent election and our now president demonstrate that people are continuing to embrace their dark or shadow sides, including judgmentalness, anger, racism, materialism and selfishness. These "urges", as John Yungblut calls them, are part of all humans and, often, part of our movement or growth to a more loving and spiritual approach to life on this planet. "It was the revelation that not only might good be wrought from the darkness of the unformed abyss, the unconscious, but that part of the very energy of the evil urge in man, if one would but wrestle with it, as had Jacob with the angel, would yield its own peculiar blessing." It is my hope that we can continue without destroying the earth we depend on. "It is not that the demonic forces within the unconscious are not capable of destruction and disintegration. It is rather that within the mystery of the conjunction of opposites their sting can be drawn, their poison drained, and their very energy harnessed to realize a more profound individuation.