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CONTEMPLATIVE PRAYER, THE HOLY SPIRIT
AND THE DEEP THINGS OF GOD
LESSONS IN CHRISTIAN MYSTICISM
INTRODUCTION TO THE LESSONS
My Godfather is a parish priest, which of course means that I am catholic. When he asked me to be his spiritual director, I wrote him a letter describing a few of my contemplative prayer experiences. I wanted him to know in advance what he could expect from the Holy Spirit should he choose the path that Christian mystics like St. Teresa of Avilla and St. John of the Cross had walked. Another parish priest visiting from out of state read the letter and asked if I would expand on it so that he could use it as a study guide for a course in Christian mysticism and contemplative prayer that he was about to teach. These lessons are the result of that request.
I have included many quotes from the Church Fathers and later contemplative saints. I hope that those who read these lessons will ponder the nature of their one experience in God, what they are trying to tell us about it and perhaps start to personally research their writings.
I wish to thank both priests for giving me the opportunity to serve. Lmr
I personally believe and please keep this thought in mind. It is what St. Justin Martyr wrote:
“Whatever is true belongs to me as a Christian.”
FIRST SET OF LESSONS
An introduction to contemplative prayer
I do not know if these lessons are what were expected from the priest who asked me to write them. Probably not but they come from my heart which is the most that I have to give. Actually, as of this latest addition to the lessons it has been forty years since my initial experience with the Holy Spirit and I sometimes wonder if there is an intellectual bone left in my body. There is an odd thing that happens when we become open to the Holy Spirit: Our hearts keep opening and our judgments about people and circumstances keep falling away.
I don’t care if you believe that we are physical bodies only or if you believe that we are souls in physical bodies or a combination of the two.
I feel that it is totally unnecessary to know true nature of the soul before the Holy Spirit brings us to the direct experience of the true nature of the soul.
I don’t care if you believe that God is a big person in the sky watching every little thing we do or if you believe that God is an ocean of consciousness watching the play of creation not caring about anything that we do.
I have done my very best to find and research the truth of early Christian history but I don’t care even if my understanding of Christian history is wrong.
I don’t care if you believe that Jesus is God, the son of God, or just a nice guy.
What is more important than this is that over the years I have come to realize that the Holy Spirit doesn’t care about any of these things either.
The Holy Spirit does not require that any of us understand the end before it takes us to the end. As Christians, all that is necessary is that we open our hearts long enough each day so that the Holy Spirit can take us to the deep things of God culminating in the direct experience of the presence of God within the soul.
This is the path of the Holy Spirit that Jesus left for us, that except for being kept alive in a few monasteries these last two thousand years has been lost to mainstream Christianity.
I will explain.
A BRIEF CHRISTIAN HISTORY
In my opinion, we can lay the loss of so many original Christian traditions and understandings and the influx of understandings and traditions that did not come from original Christianity at the pagan Roman emperor Constantine’s feet (AD 274-337) or if not him directly, the church officials of his time that he controlled, for he gave them the power to do what was done to Christianity over the next couple of hundred years.
Most everyone who has read anything of Christian history knows the story. As a pagan Roman general, Constantine saw a vision of a cross in the sky and he used this symbol as his standard when he won the battle with another Roman general that made Constantine emperor over the eastern Roman empire.
No one really knows what this vision was but I suspect it was the large meteorite that landed two hundred or so miles north of Rome dated to that exact time. The display that a large meteorite causes very well could have been interpreted as a cross in the sky by someone of the period. At the time, every comet, every eclipse, every natural disaster was considered an omen from God.
Regardless of what it was, and although he didn’t even become baptized as a Christian until he was about to die many years later, when Constantine first became emperor (AD 306) he took on Christianity as the states religion and although he was not a Christian himself, he formed a council to organize Christianity according to how he thought it should be organized.
Before this time Christianity was wonderfully diverse. It seemed that every ethnic group and nationality looked at who and what Jesus was with their own unique view. The Nag Hammadi library found in 1945 is an example of this diversity. There were still mentor disciple relationships like the apostles had with their disciples and becoming open to the Holy Spirit and having it take them to the deep things of God was still being taught through these relationships.
Well, Constantine was having none of this diversity and as emperor he had the power to do something about it. He Romanized Christianity; that is, he took a diverse faith with many factions that at its heart stressed a one to one relationship with God and spiritual insight though the guidance of the Holy Spirit and turned it into a singular faith that said that the Church was Gods’ representative on earth and everyone had to go through it to be saved. Forget about personal experience; that was for priests. Over the next couple of hundred years, the now centralized Church killed, exiled or silenced any Christian who wouldn’t toe the line. They burned all of the esoteric writings they could get their hands on as well as any writing not approved by the hierarchy of the Church. There went the master-disciple relationships, personal knowledge of the deep things of God and personal guidance through the Holy Spirit. Just believe as the Church tells you and toe the line and you will be saved. This was a perfect way for a pagan Roman emperor and later Church officials to have power over the masses and that was all it was about. There went most any mainstream Christian’s change of learning about a one to one relationship with God for the next thirteen hundred years.
A few hundred years ago, with Martin Luther (1483-1546) and the protestant reformation things began to change just a little. As protestants, Christians could now have a personal relationship with God and the standard became “Believe in Jesus and you will be saved.” For the most part the Romanized structure of these new church organizations stayed pretty much the same. For the vast majority of Christians, this is how it still is to this day. Most have no idea of early Christian spirituality or that a far deeper and more personal relationship with God is possible. At least the protestant members were allowed to read the bible for the first time in over a thousand years.
It is understandable that the new protestant organizations would keep the same Christianized pagan holidays and Romanized beliefs about Jesus etc. For the most part, they had no way of accessing the writings of the first Christians; the writings before the Romanization of the Church. The translations weren’t done and if they were done they were stuck in some obscure library where they were not accessible. Today all you have to do is run a search on Google. You want to know when the belief in the rapture started, just run a search. THEN, and more importantly run a search on one of the early Christian scholars views who wrote something before the time of Constantine. That will give you the early Christian view. The Christian scholars before Constantine were second and third generation Christians. More than anyone later, they knew the teachings of the apostles.
Take St. Clement: (150-211, pre-Constantine scholar) During or upon his conversion “He set out from Greece and travelled through southern Italy, Palestine, and finally Egypt, seeking everywhere the society of Christian teachers.” (Quote from a biography.) The logic baffles me when some religious organization 2,000 yrs after the fact can dismiss everything this saint and those like him have to say because their writings are not in the bible. Who better to know what was taught by the apostles than those taught by the apostles? The school where St. Clement became bishop was founded by the apostle Mark.
On the nature of the soul: Are we a soul in a body, are we a body with a soul, or are we a body that is the soul that perishes at death to be resurrected later? OK, you want the early Christian pre-Romanized view and not your churches Romanized dogma. I ran a test for these lessons and ran a search on (Origen of Alexandria view of the soul) He was a pre-Constantine Christian scholar who lived from 185 to 254 AD. It took 37 seconds for me to find Origen’s views. I ran the same search with St. Clement and it took a few seconds more but less than a minute to find his views.
I know, I got off the subject but finding the truth of things has always been important to me in my own beliefs and I thought you ought to know how to do it. If you are comfortable with your beliefs and don’t care of their origins; wonderful. The Holy Spirit doesn’t care at all.
Anyway, for a few, things began to change in Christian spirituality in the 1960’s. This is when the first yogis began coming over to the West talking about the deeper and more personal relationship with God that was possible. This is how the next part of the story goes and I have no reason to believe that what I have been told it isn’t true. All of these students were flocking to this famous yogi’s retreat, you know, the Beatles guru and on the way they had to pass by, I believe, a Trappist monastery. Many stopped to ask directions to the yogi’s retreat or to go to the rest room or something like that. A couple of monks looked at all this crowd going right by their doors and knowing that Christianity had its own history of a deeper and more personal relationship with God, decided to teach about it openly. Forty years or so ago they formed Contemplative Outreach and here we are at this time in the history of our faith. A few now practice contemplative prayer. It is not quite like paradise returned: No one seems to have the power of the Holy Spirit that the first Christians had but even so it is a new beginning and perhaps those with the power of the Holy Spirit will come in time. Also realize that those who experience the deep things of God will never make up a very large portion of a main stream religion. Investigating the deep things of God is just too hard of a path for the average person: Too many hours needed; 3 hours a day for twenty years or so to make any substantial progress. And most would not be willing to go through the spiritual cleansing process that the Holy Spirit puts the devotee through once they become open to the flowing of it within: One in a thousand of those in a main stream religion might be on the inner path, one in a million who will come experience divine consciousness as soul and few to none of these with the power of the flowing of the Holy Spirit of the early Christians. That’s where we are.
Anyway, please understand that this brief history you’ve just read is my own study of the facts. I don’t belong to an organization that has laid out anything for me or whose agenda I need to follow. I think what I have written is accurate and that is all I can say. I don’t have an agenda of my own to push either way. The truth of it either way does not affect my own personal relationship with the Holy Spirit.
A DIFFERENT VIEW
It is not quite as easy to find the actual underlying truth of a belief as just running a search on a pre-Constantine Christian scholars’ views and I did not mean to sound simplistic. Just because someone was taught by an apostle or even the fact that an apostle himself believed something doesn’t make it so. New doctrines are always wrapped in the context of old belief systems.
A modern example would be all of the societies that the catholic church is in. If you take Haiti where voodoo has a strong influence you will find that the old voodoo beliefs and rituals are not that different under Catholicism. They just have new names. The same thing is true in Peru with ancestor worship and the leftovers of the Inca civilization that the Spanish decimated: New doctrine wrapped in old beliefs. It is that way in every society the Church has gone into and it was no different with the Romans and Christianity. They just wrapped Christianity around their old rituals and beliefs. The modern day view of the nature of Jesus and the Christmas and Easter holidays as examples.
Jesus was born and taught the deep truths of the Holy Spirit in a Jewish society and it was natural for his followers to wrap his teachings within a context of experiences and beliefs with which they could relate. It always happens that way. It’s how we humans are. An example of Jesus’ time might be the belief of many sects that man was born sinful and that only those Jewish people who overcame their sinfulness would be saved when God destroyed a sinful world. Each new wrapping does not change the deep truths, only the way they are presented, only the surface of things. Just understand that the modern Christian belief system is a belief in the teachings and nature of Jesus that was first wrapped by Jewish beliefs, then the Jewish context was later wrapped in a Roman belief system and this Jewish wrapped by Roman context is always wrapped in each society’s culture and previous beliefs that Christianity has gone into around the world.
Each wrapping may or may not be true when viewed in and of itself but still when viewed as a whole, they help each of us to relate to the original teachings in our own way and all of the cultural and sectarian diversity of Christianity around the world is beneficial. Diversity is simply the natural play of the Holy Spirit in the physical universe. The strength of any system, whether it is biological, social, political or religious comes from its diversity. Besides this fact, we souls are born into this physical universe to interact. The worst thing I can think of is for everyone to look the same, everyone to be taught the same, everyone to be of the same sect, everyone to have the same view, everyone to worship the same way or everyone to experience the deep things of God the same way.
Underneath all of the diversity that rests on the surface of Christianity are the deep things of God that rest in the depths of our faith and do not change. This is where Jesus’ gift of the Holy Spirit to all of us comes into play. As I wrote earlier: Jesus’ gift to us, the gift of the Holy Spirit doesn’t care about any of the diversity on the surface, only the depth of the openness of each individual’s heart.
THE ESOTERIC TEACHINGS OF THE EARLY CHRISTIANS
Mystics of all faiths have traditionally taught the truth of God according to each student’s individual level of understanding. In every society throughout the history of mysticism the deepest truths have only been revealed from mentor to disciple when the disciple was capable of understanding the truth being given. It is obvious from reading the scriptures and writings of the early Christians that the prophets, and also Jesus and the early Christian mystics closely followed this tradition. Considering the society of his time, Jesus gave good reason for this.
He said: “Do not give what is holy to dogs or toss your pearls before swine. They will trample them under foot at best, and perhaps even tear you to shreds.” (Matt. 7:6)
Jesus had to be careful with giving too much spiritual information too soon to his own disciples. He said: “I have much more to tell you, but you cannot bear it now.” (John 16:10)
The apostle Paul followed the same tradition. He wrote: “Brothers, the trouble was that I could not talk to you as spiritual men but only as men of flesh, as infants in Christ. I fed you milk, and did not give you solid food because you were not ready for it.” (1 Cor. 3: 1,2)
Origen writes: “But for those who are wise he has always the higher teachings, which are given only to those who have proved themselves worthy of it.”
And: “I have not yet spoke of the observance of all that is written in the Gospels, each one of which contains much doctrine difficult to be understood, not merely by the multitude, but even by certain of the more intelligent, including a very profound explanation of the parables, which Jesus delivered to “those without” while reserving the exhibition of their full meaning for those who had passed beyond the stage of exoteric teaching, and who came to him privately ‘in the house.’”
Origen wrote in ON FIRST PRINCIPLE: “The scriptures have a meaning not only such as is apparent at first sight, but also another, which escapes the notice of most men. For such is written in the forms of certain Mysteries, and the image of divine things. Respecting which there is one opinion throughout the whole Church, that the whole law is indeed spiritual, but that the spiritual meaning which the law conveys is not known to all, but to those only on whom the grace of the Holy Spirit is bestowed...”
Origen wrote in ORIGEN AGAINST CELSUS, this response to the Roman emperor Celsus’ charge that Christianity was a secret organization teaching half truths to the masses. He wrote: “But that there should be certain doctrines, not known to the multitude, which are divulged after the exoteric ones have been taught, is not a peculiarity of Christianity alone, but also of philosophic systems in which certain truths are exoteric and others esoteric.”
St. Clement of Alexandria writes: “those who are still blind and dumb, not having understanding, or the undazzled and keen vision of the contemplative soul, must stand outside of the divine choir. Wherefore, in accordance with the method of concealment, the truly sacred Word, truly divine and most necessary for us, deposited in the shrine of truth, was by the Egyptians called “adyta”, and the Hebrew ‘the veil.’ Only the consecrated were allowed access to them.”
And again: “He who has been purified in baptism and initiated into the little mysteries becomes rife for the greater mysteries for the gnosis, the scientific knowledge of God.”
Jesus: “said unto them, ‘Unto you is given the mystery of the kingdom of God: but unto them that are without, all things are done in parables: that seeing they may see, and not perceive; and hearing they hear, and not understand.’” Mark 9: 33,34
The brief summary of quotes that you have just read took me ten years of reading (pre-internet) the early Christian writings to come to a conclusion about. There were two levels of understanding in the early Church. An exoteric understanding for the masses and those new in the faith and another esoteric understanding for those who had progressed far enough in the faith to be ready for it. It is the most natural way to teach. A physician needs to go to kindergarten, grade school, high school, college, med school and then serve an internship to be proficient. You don’t teach med school materials to kindergarteners. It is no different with the deep things of God.
One of those esoteric teachings was how to become open to the Holy Spirit and let it take us to an understanding and direct experience of the deep things of God. The tradition is written about in the writings of those monks who lived in the monasteries where the tradition was kept alive. It is called contemplative prayer.
Jesus said: “Whenever you pray, go to your room, close the door and pray to your Father in private.” (Matt. 6:6)
One of the Desert Fathers, the 3rd century monk Abba Isaac, wrote this commentary on the tradition spoken of at Matt. 6:6: “We need to be especially careful to follow the Gospel precept which instructs us to go into our inner room, and shut the door so that we may pray to our Father. And this is how we can do it.” “We pray in our room whenever we withdraw our hearts completely from the tumult and noise of our thoughts and our worries and when secretly and intimately, we offer our prayers to the Lord.” “We pray with the door shut when, without opening our mouths, and in perfect silence, we offer our petitions to the one who pays not attention to words but looks hard at our hearts.” “We pray in secret when in our hearts alone and in our recollected spirits, we address God and reveal our wishes only to him in such a way that the hostile powers themselves have no inkling of their nature. Hence, we must pray in utter silence to insure that the thrust of our pleading be hidden from our enemies who are especially lying in wait to attack us during prayer. In this way, we shall fulfill the command of the prophet Micah, ‘keep your mouth shut from the one who sleeps on your breast.’”
A text used in many monasteries in the 5th century, written by Dionysisus the Areopagite and called THE HIDDEN KNOWLEDGE OF GOD, counsels: “in the earnest exercise of mystical contemplation, you leave the senses and the operations of reason and all things that the senses or reason can perceive, to the end that you raise yourself by this unknowing to union with Him who is above all being and all knowledge,”
We can call the methodology what we will but the truth is that experiencing the deep things of God is as simple as being quiet (for enough time each day and enough years) and following the natural impulse of the soul to know it’s true Self as what it truly is.
“We are not forced to take wings to find Him, but only to seek solitude and to look within ourselves.” (St. Teresa of Avilla, 1515-1582)
And again she writes: ...” in such spiritual activity as this, the person who does most is he who thinks least and desires to do least: What we have to do is to beg like poor and needy persons coming before a great and rich Emperor and then cast down our eyes in humble expectation.”
The catholic monk Thomas Keating (born 1923) writes: “Let thoughts come, let them go. No annoyance, no expectation. This is a very delicate kind of self-denial, but it is more valuable than bodily austerities, which tend to fix one’s attention on oneself. Waiting for God without going away, giving the usual time to prayer, and putting up with what goes on in the imagination are the most effective practices for acquiring true devotion. The observance of them will lead to a complete change of heart.”
Evagrios the Solitary (born 345), in On Prayer writes: "When your intellect in its great longing for God gradually withdraws from the flesh and turns away from all thoughts that have their source in your sense-perception, memory or soul-body temperament, and when it becomes full of reverence and joy, then you may conclude that you are close to the frontiers of prayer." "Stand on guard and protect your intellect from thoughts while you pray. Then your intellect will complete its prayer and continue in the tranquility that is natural to it. In this way He who has compassion on the ignorant will come to you, and you will receive the blessed gift of prayer." "You cannot attain pure prayer while entangled in material things and agitated by constant cares. For prayer means the shedding of thoughts."
St. Hesychios the 5th century monk, in On Watchfulness and Holiness writes:
"... When there are no fantasies or mental images in the heart, the intellect is established in its true nature, ready to contemplate whatever is full of delight, spiritual and close to God."
"We should strive to preserve the precious gifts which preserve us from all evil... These gifts are the guarding of the intellect with the invocation of Jesus Christ, continuous insight into the heart's depths, stillness of mind unbroken even by thoughts which appear to be good, and the capacity to be empty of all thought."
"Because every thought enters the heart in the form of a mental image of some sensible object, the blessed light of the Divinity will illumine the heart only when the heart is completely empty of everything and so free from all form. Indeed, this light reveals itself to the pure intellect in the measure to which the intellect is purged of all concepts."
"To human beings it seems hard and difficult to still the mind so that it rests from all thoughts. Indeed, to enclose what is bodiless within the limits of the body does demand toil and struggle, not only from the uninitiated but also from those experienced in inner immaterial warfare. But he who through unceasing prayer holds the Lord Jesus within his breast will not tire in following Him, as the Prophet says (cf. Jer. 17:16.LXX). Because of Jesus' beauty and sweetness he will not desire what is merely mortal..."
"... the delighted intellect delights in the light of the Lord when, free from concepts, it enters into the dawn of spiritual knowledge. By continually denying itself, it advances from the wisdom necessary for the practice of the virtues to an ineffable vision in which it contemplates holy and ineffable things. Then the heart is filled with perceptions of infinite and divine realities and sees the God of gods in its own depths, so far as this is possible. Astounded, the intellect lovingly glorifies God, the Seer and the Seen, and the Saviour of those who contemplate Him in this way."
The Desert Father, Abba Cronius writes: "If the soul is vigilant and withdraws from all distraction and abandons its own will, then the spirit of God invades it and it can conceive because it is free to do so"
All of these quotes are from different monks from different monasteries in different centuries describing the same two thousand year old tradition of contemplative prayer. Contemplative prayer is not something from outside the Christian faith but the very prayer form by which the first esoteric Christians (Those ready for the deeper teachings.) and those later esoteric Christians who have followed could open themselves to the Holy Spirit and have it take them to an understanding and direct experience of the deep things of God culminating in experiencing the direct presence of God in the soul. It has never been practiced by the mainstream Christian and probably never will be but for those who wish to directly experience the Holy Spirit it is and has been the traditional Way of our faith.
AN EXPLANATION OF THE PROCESS
I am not as eloquent as the monks that I have just quoted, not even close but from my own forty year experience with it, I will try to describe the mechanics of this ancient prayer form and why I practice it as I do. First, there isn’t one magical thing about this type of prayer. For me it has always been one of the most natural things I have ever done. I have to admit that my experience with it is not the norm and I don’t even do it exactly like those teaching it say to do it and I certainly do not describe the mechanics of it like anyone I have ever read but you know, each of us is unique and whatever you do needs to be done your way or for me my way, as the case may be.
Most learn contemplative prayer, practice 15 to 20 minutes twice a day for a few years and enjoy the peace and comfort of the process and then in a couple years or so start having (what I would call) minor inner experiences. They might hear the Spirit inwardly or have intuitive moments and are happy with that. I just have a different view of things and put in 3 hours a day, 6AM to 9AM each morning. First, I do an hour and a half of a breathing exercise similar but not identical to the one practiced by the Eastern Orthodox monks for over a thousand years. It is designed to encourage the flowing of the Holy Spirit throughout the nervous system, cleansing it in preparation for the higher states of consciousness to come. Then I end with an hour and a half of the contemplative prayer exercise that has been practiced by the Roman catholic monks for almost two thousand years. I guess that makes me a really old school Christian but the main thing is the exercises work for me.
The Holy Spirit resides in each of us, good and evil alike. It is God’s finger of creation and the enlivening power of all living things. Its activity within is what makes living things different from rocks. It is also its activity that makes humans different from the animals around us. The Holy Spirit is always here in our hearts, (actually the intuitive part of the mind), waiting to take us to the deep things of God.
If a person wants to be a professional musician they will generally put in hours and hours of practice each day for years. They are literally forming the brain cell connections necessary for them to be aware of tones and rhythms most are not aware of. The brain scans that have been done on professional musicians demonstrate that their brains in that area related to music are more fully developed and actually larger than with the average person.
They did the same type of scans on taxi drivers in London, where the drivers have to be able to remember every street in the city as well as everything related to those streets and found that in those drivers the part of the brain related to memory was more developed and larger than with the average person.
It is no different with the Holy Spirit and God. The awareness of both the Holy Spirit and God are innately within every human on this planet. In order to become aware of both, just like a professional musician, we need to put in enough practice time to create the necessary brain cell connections to make the awareness of the Holy Spirit and God a continuous part of our lives. There is nothing supernatural, nothing magical about any of this. Bringing the spiritual into the physical is a brain cell thing. That’s it. That’s all there is to it.
If we were born perfect, say with the genetic profile of Jesus or the spiritual impulse of his soul, we would never have to practice anything. The underlying impulse to develop the brain cell connections to experience God would already be there. All that we would have to do is grow up enough for our nervous system to make the connections and we would be continuously aware the Holy Spirit and God in our hearts for the rest of our lives.
To me this is what the story of Adam and Eve was really about: The soul’s loss of the continuous awareness of God and through using the power of the Holy Spirit, Jesus coming to give us a way to bring it back.
Look, I know that it is more complicated than what I have just stated: The interaction between the Holy Spirit, the spiritual body, the nervous system, the soul and physical body. The technical details of the interaction of the Holy Spirit and all this and the deep things of God that I have experienced are explained in the full set of lessons not in this introductory set of lessons. The full set of lessons are written for those who are already having inner experiences, who need technical answers for specific problems. I have tried to write this introductory set of lessons for those with little or no inner experience or understanding of this path and I also know that in the rest of these introductory lessons for many I am just about to say too much.
FINDING THE SPIRIT WITHIN, a personal experience
In a loving family atmosphere, as each child’s nervous system comes to mature, the natural inclinations that are born of that soul begin to surface. These inclinations will guide each soul on its own path in life. Those who are born with a natural inclination for becoming open to the Holy Spirit in varying degrees and times in their lives often come to the realization that they see more deeply into the nature of God and soul than others. I don’t see that a natural inclination for experiencing the Holy Spirit is much different from any other natural inclination, like music or art or mechanics or math. All of these natural inclinations are no more than brain cell development. Having a natural inclination for the Holy Spirit might be one of the more rare natural inclinations but it doesn’t make anyone better or more special than anyone else; perhaps just being born with a little different view than most. It is still nothing more than the programming that we are born with, just ask someone like Mozart, writing music at 5 yrs old and such. Although I have not talked about the underlying spirituality in being born as we are, regardless of the motivating factors, it is still just a brain cell development process.
And it doesn’t matter which side of religious dogma you stand on. The vast majority of us are not born with a strong enough relationship with the intuitive part of the mind to experience the Holy Spirit spontaneously and need some way like contemplative prayer to establish the relationship. If you believe in the story of Adam and Eve as it is written, then we lost our spontaneous awareness of the Holy Spirit and God and Jesus came to earth to give his followers a way to get it back.
If you believe in evolution and nothing of religion, then mankind’s brain is just now evolving to a point of becoming aware of the force behind creation and we need to work on getting the awareness more fully. If this is where you are then at least believe that Jesus was a man who experienced the awareness of infinity and the force that brings it to mankind, whatever you want to call it and that he gave a way to his followers for them and the rest of humanity to experience the infinity of existence.
Either way it’s the same thing for us. We need to do something if we want the direct experience of the Holy Spirit and God in our lives, whatever you want to call these things. Those who are born with a natural inclination for experiencing the Holy Spirit are born with it in varying degrees and still need to do something to bring the experience more fully into their lives.
The people we call psychics are those born with a natural connection with the intuitive mind and they may or may not understand anything of the nature of God and soul. At birth, they have not been chosen by God or the devil but upon growing up they have turned their intuitiveness outward whereas the mystic turns it inward to God and the Holy Spirit.
I have explained about psychics because when I was five my aunt and uncle had asked a locally famous psychic in Las Vegas about their sister and her family. They were told that two of her sister’s children were going to grow up to be normal people but the middle one, me, was going to be different or have a different view of life, or have a different experience of life, or something like that. That’s fine but what’s odd to me is that when they told my parents about the prediction they also said they could not tell them the whole of the prediction and couldn’t tell them why they couldn’t tell them the whole of it.
Since it was about me, I have wondered, what could be, in the future for child, so grandiose or terrible that you can’t tell the five year olds parents the whole of the prediction. Different is the only word my mother had. Over the years of my childhood, my mother had asked my aunt and uncle about the prediction several times but was always given the same answer: We can’t tell you the whole of it and we can’t tell you why we can’t tell you the whole of it.
I don’t really think it was that I was going to be a terrible person because it was quite evident that I was well liked by my aunt and uncle, even spending a couple of my whole summer vacations from school with them. And I do take bugs out of the house instead of killing them. Except roaches. I hate roaches. But grandiose, I can’t even relate. I don’t guess I will ever know the truth of it. Both my aunt and uncle had passed away before my mother even told me about the prediction. Parents are wonderful like that. Here’s a prediction so dramatic that the whole of it can’t be told to my parents and I’m not told about it until it is impossible for me to find out for myself what it was. Talk about adding a little mystery into one’s life. I know that I was born with a natural inclination to experience the Holy Spirit and a deeper view of the nature of existence than most and that’s all that I know.
When a young man, one afternoon, I felt drawn to look within; I don’t know why. Without really knowing what I was doing, I simply closed my eyes and was drawn to look behind the darkness of my mind. It just felt like something was in there waiting for me. Go figure. With each exhalation I imagined that I was falling deeper and deeper into the ocean of darkness before me. Suddenly I seemed to fall inside myself and as this happened a stillness, a quietness of mind began to creep over me. My face began to feel wooden; my body lost all physical sensation and became numb; I became lifted, with my mind becoming still and crisp and light and so much more aware than normal and as this happened the beautiful golden light of the Holy Spirit wrapped itself around me, filled my awareness and brought a comfort and peace I had never known. It seemed to fill everything within and without and permeated the very essence of my being, lifting me above my normal intelligence and awareness.
It is difficult to explain. But if you can imagine the difference between normal thinking awareness and the fog that a person might wake up in when they have not had enough sleep, it would seem the same distance between this still, crisp, light expanded awareness and the heavy normal thinking awareness I had always known. The cognitive ability of this new expanded awareness coupled with the peace and joy brought by the light of the Holy Spirit was simply incredible to me.
I rested for a short while, absorbed in the golden light of the Holy Spirit but as soon as I started to mentally analyze the Holy Spirit, you know, trying to be absolutely rational about the whole thing, I dropped out of the intuitive awareness and the Holy Spirit mysteriously faded away. As I left the intuitive awareness and dropped back into my normal thinking awareness, it felt just like the description I had read of it a few years later: “As if putting on soiled clothes.”
I had just had the most wonderful experience of my life: AND I WANTED IT BACK! The next day, trying to experience the same golden light of the Holy Spirit and intuitive awareness that I rested in the day before, I again looked behind the darkness of my mind for the Holy Spirit. With each exhalation I again imagined that I was falling through the darkness of my mind into it. For the second time my body went numb, my mind became still, I became lifted into the light, crisp mental state that I later learned was the intuitive awareness that the prophets and early Christians experienced when having their visions. The golden light of the Holy Spirit wrapped itself around me again and filled my mind with the same peace and joy I had felt the day before. And this is how my journey to find the deeper things of God began; being lifted into the intuitive part of my mind, wrapped in the Holy Spirit’s arms not understanding anything but the wonder of it all.
There is a wonderful thing about the Holy Spirit and its bringing of the intuitive awareness that takes us to the deep things of God. This part of the mind is further away from the subconscious than normal thinking awareness. This is why, when experiencing intuitive awareness, everything feels so light and crisp and clear. When you considered that intuitive awareness is the platform upon which the Holy Spirit takes us to the deep things of God, this light, crisp, more fully aware state is really a blessing. As I said earlier, fully developed, it is the platform for the Holy Spirit revealing the visions and prophecies and such of the prophets and early Christians.
It is just that normal thinking awareness is not very reliable. Normal thinking awareness is tied part and parcel with the subconscious. All of the pain, all of the misemotion, all of the irrationality of our lives is in the depths of the subconscious mind while the rational mind simply rests on the surface of all this mess. There is continuous interaction between the two. Everyone views everything through the clouds in their minds. There is no clear view of anything. From the depths, the subconscious spins off mental whirlpools of misemotion, irrational attitudes about people and circumstances, bizarre religious beliefs add infinity that control people’s lives. Because we are not aware of where our irrational views and feelings are coming from we think that this is who we are but the truth is, this subconscious activity is not that far from having an outside influence telling us what to do, think and feel.
An over simplified example might be an infant being bitten by a dog. The infant grows and becomes an adult not remembering the incident but hating dogs for the rest of her life, even the nice ones. A more realistic example of subconscious influence might be the hatred and bigotry against others that is heaped upon some children by their parents. These mental impressions can be so powerful that they stay with a person their whole lives. This is how it is done when the bible says the sins of the fathers are visited upon their children from generation to generation.
If you take the two examples I gave times a million, that’s what down there in the subconscious. Every moment, every pain and emotion that has ever happened in our lives is in depths of the subconscious continuously influencing the normal persons’ attitudes.
The dissipation of these mental whirlpools is a natural part of the process of having contact with the Holy Spirit and the judgments and fears and irrational opinions that these subconscious mental whirlpools spin off will over the years drop away naturally.
One of the things that fundamentalists always throw at those who meditate is that meditators are opening themselves to outside (meaning the devil) influences. The opposite is the truth: In meditation the Holy Spirit lifts your consciousness further away from outside and subconscious influences. It’s the only way to directly and consciously experience God’s presence in our souls. You cannot experience God’s presence through the so-called rational mind which as I have just explained is actually not rational at all.
In those early days with the Holy Spirit, I soon learned that when my rational mind was active thinking about God, active thinking about experiences, active thinking about scripture, active thinking about thinking or anything else, the intuitive awareness that opens one to the Holy Spirit would and could not happen. I learned that it was only when became like an empty vessel and I would stop thinking and just sit silently looking behind the darkness of my mind and longing for and imagining that I was falling into God’s arms that an intuitive calmness would envelop me and I could experience the Holy Spirit. It is the only way that I know of to get far enough away from the subconscious and outside influences that will not allow and do not want us the experience the Holy Spirit, for us to experience God’s presence. The rational mind just hates being calm, loves going from one obsession to the next and outside influences; well, I am not even going to go there.
What I found that worked best for me in quieting my mind and focusing my attention on God is the prayer form used within Christianity from the beginning; which as usual, I had been using for a few years before I even knew it was a Christian prayer form. For me when my mind would not still, using the simple devotional word, “Father” was as if all of my longing for God was summed up in that very simple word. I noticed how much more quickly I dropped into the intuitive calm when using this method. At the beginning of each devotional I would slowly and heartfeltly repeat “Father” while I looked behind the darkness of my mind, with each exhalation imagining that I was falling into His arms. In short time I would drop into the intuitive calmness. When my mind started to become active I would return to repeating “Father” with each exhalation, again imagining that I was falling deeper into my Father’s arms. It’s not the word, it’s the devotional feeling behind the word. Often there is no word but just that feeling of devotion that I bring up again and again into my awareness. For me this method was spontaneous and has been the most natural thing to do and so I have stayed with it to this day. I don’t think there is anything miraculous in finding this prayer form spontaneously. It seems a natural progression of verbal prayer for those of a devotional nature.
THE WINGS OF ANGELS
A short while after becoming open to the Holy Spirit, I began to hear the creative power of it. There is a vibration within the light. I did not know it was going to be there. I just began to hear inner sounds and they eventually led to the pure vibration of the Holy Spirit. In Revelations the sound of the Spirit is described as the sound of many trumpets, in Ezekiel the vibration of the Spirit is described as the sound of the wings of angels. Both accounts are descriptions of what the Spirit sounds like when we are totally absorbed in it.
I guess the main thing I want to stress is that Jesus’ gift of the Holy Spirit is not an abstract concept that only saints come to understand. It can be seen and heard within all of good heart, no matter their religious affiliation.
By using your imagination with each breath to focus on falling into God’s arms we are giving the mind a process to focus on. We are knocking on God’s door, actively searching that we may find Him. From the very beginning, for me this has eliminated the worry of trying to quiet the mind, for the mind is given a process to keep it occupied. When properly focused on falling into God’s arms, the mind cannot wander. When the mind does wander we simply refocus on the process. When we experience the intuitive calm and rest in that awareness the process then becomes passive until and unless we want to do something specific with the awareness we are experiencing, which I will discuss next
SPIRITUAL GUIDANCE
By quieting the mind and resting in the intuitive calm for even a few minutes a day, we automatically become open to the guidance of the Holy Spirit. There is a simple rule. (Whatever we need to know and then carry with us into the calm will eventually bear the Spirit’s fruit of a new intuitive understanding.) As has so often happened in my spiritual life, I learned this principle by accident. A number of years ago I had wanted to write about looking out into the desert, seeing a little whirlpool of dust and realizing that this was similar to the nature of the soul and its relationship with God. I wrote a few pages about it but was not content with how they were written so I threw everything away. A couple of days later, while resting in the silence of my daily devotional, all of the material that I had written about suddenly came into my awareness. The few pages of lengthy insight had become a few paragraphs of very concise concepts. In the silence I had not been thinking about the subject and it was a total surprise when it all appeared so clearly. All that I did was to write it down as it was given. This might tell you a little about scripture.
While still within, near the end of our devotional time is an excellent opportunity to purposely contemplate our place in life. When we are still resting in the calm it is much easier to intuitively look into the many paths that present themselves to us. In the intuitive calm, we seem to be much more clear and free from the subconscious mental impressions that usually cloud our vision while in normal thinking awareness.
Often, the Spirit gives answers to questions we have not even asked. An example of this was when I was doing some personal research into the lives of the Desert Fathers. In order to bring the Spirit close, they would try to get their disciples to develop a deep sense of sorrow. They write that it is a sorrow you do not want to get rid of. I have always been sorry for my sins. (sort of) I have always rather hurt myself than another. But I have never understood why a person would want to go around in a state of sorrow, mentally beating themselves up over their sins. Feeling a little bit irritated, I put the book aside for my devotional time. I rested in the intuitive calm for a few minutes and then became lifted. Suddenly a sorrow poured through me that went all the way down into my bones. It was beyond feeling sorry for one man’s sins. It was like feeling all of the pain and suffering of the world at once. But as the light of the Spirit filled my mind, I could feel the grace of God extending to me. Oh, what sweet sorrow. Without the Spirit bringing the experience of it, I could have never understood.
ITS ALL ABOUT OUR HEARTS
Often, the Spirit gives answers to questions that we have not even asked. An example of this was when I was doing some personal research into the lives of the Desert Fathers. In order to bring the Spirit close, they would try to get their disciples to develop a deep sense of sorrow. They write that it is a sorrow you do not want to get rid of. I have always been sorry for my sins. (sort of) I have always rather hurt myself than another. But I have never understood why a person would want to go around in a state of sorrow, mentally beating themselves up over their sins. Feeling a bit irritated, I put the book aside for my devotional time. I rested in the intuitive calm for a few minutes and then became lifted. Suddenly a sorrow poured through me that went all the way down into my bones. It was beyond feeling sorry for one man’s sins. It was like feeling all of the pain and suffering of humanity at once. But as the light of the Holy Spirit filled my mind, I could feel the grace of God extending to me. Oh, what sweet sorrow. Without the Holy Spirit opening my heart so that on the level of my soul, I could feel beyond myself, I could have never understood.
The bible says that the seat of our emotions is in our hearts. Of course, it is not our literal hearts but the heart center in our spiritual self that is the seat of the soul’s ability to feel beyond itself, to feel its humanity, the deep things of God and eventually the very presence of God within us. The whole spiritual process that Jesus left to us is nothing more than a war between our egos and our hearts and opening our hearts to the Holy Spirit and on each of our own individual levels, letting the Holy Spirit take us to the deep things of God is how this battle is fought and won or lost. There is no group effort here. Belonging to this organization or that doesn’t mean anything to the Holy Spirit. This is between each of us as individuals and God.
As I have repeatedly stated: The Holy Spirit is not concerned about the correctness of our beliefs. If we open our hearts to it, the Holy Spirit will eventually take each of us to the truth of all existence. It doesn’t matter where we start because there is only the direct experience of the one truth, the direct experience of the presence of God at the end.
THE HUMAN CONDITION
Each soul’s personality is formed and acquires its basic opinions about life and how it sees the truth of things by the circumstances in which it is born and raised. Our personalities and views of life seem etched in stone before we are even old enough to know if any of it is true or not. For most souls, if they are born of conservative parents, they will be conservatives. They will have a thousand perfectly good rationalizations as to why their conservative view is the only correct one. But if these very same souls were to be born of liberal, religious, nonreligious, other religious, racist, nonracist, nationalistic or pluralistic families they will be the same and also have a thousand perfectly good rationalizations as to why each one of these views of life is the only correct one. If we think about this basic human fact, we should realize that for most, our views of life are set by the circumstances of our birth and the environment in which we are raised and have nothing to do with the truth of anything.
The soul is not born into this world knowing its true nature. What we are all born with is individual personalities that give us our individualism but also a feeling separateness and isolation from everything else. The technical reason for this is that our egos are utterly incapable of feeling beyond themselves and the more tightly wrapped the soul is in its ego the less connected it feels with everything around it, the more right it feels in its own rationalizations and the less able it is in finding any basic truth outside of its own thinking processes, which have already been set in stone by the circumstances in which it is born and raised. This is the human condition that every one of us is born into. We have been thrown out of the Garden.
Be ye therefore perfect, the early Christian view
St. Clement, the bishop of Alexandria (150-215) speaks of the path as it was originally taught and of the condition of the existing Christian teachings in his lifetime. (A mere 150 years after Jesus) He wrote: “Another consideration shows us clearly how much of this early teaching has been lost. The church now devotes herself solely to producing good men, and points to the saint as her crowning glory and achievement. But in the older days she claimed to be able to do much more than that. When she had made a man a saint, her work with him was only just beginning, for only then was he fit for the training and teaching which she could give him then, but not now, because she has forgotten her ancient knowledge. Then she had three definite stages in her course of training-Purification, Illumination and PERFECTION.” THE STROMATA OF ST. CLEMENT.
St. Polycarp, Bishop of Smyrna (69-155) wrote in his epistle, chapter 7 that he hopes those he was writing to were: “well versed in the sacred scriptures and that nothing is hidden from you; but to me this privilege is not yet granted.” And continuing after relating what had been revealed to him, he wrote: “…though I am acquainted with these things, yet I am not therefore by any means PERFECT,…”
This use of the word perfect by St. Polycarp, perfection by St. Clement when describing the last stage of church training and how the word perfect is used in the gospels and the writings of Paul seemed odd to me when speaking of anything to do with the human condition. So I looked up the Greek word that is translated as perfect in the King James translation of the scriptures and this is what I found.
When the Greek word teleios is translated from the Greek scriptures of the first Christians into the English word, perfect, as we see it in the King James Bible, we have a meaning in English that comes to our minds: Usually flawless or if applied to a person, sinless. But Strongs’ concordance, the 1982 edition that I have, lists the literal meaning of teleios as used in the ancient Greek language as “completeness”. The concordance gives an example of a person who grows up, gets married and raises their children being considered “teleios” in the ancient Greek language. They would not be considered sinless as the English word perfect might infer but to have attained “completeness” in life. When referring to the soul, the first Christians used the word (teleios) with the esoteric meaning of the soul attaining completeness in God; literally feeling the presence of God in the soul, the awareness making the soul complete. I looked up every single use of the word Greek word telios in the Christian Greek scriptures, you know, what’s called the New Testament and what follows is a little of what I found.
With “teleios”, completeness of the soul in God in mind, listen to what Jesus said: “ If thou wilt be (teleios, complete in God) PERFECT, go and sell that thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come and follow me.” Matt. 19:21
“Be, ye therefore (teleios, complete in God) PERFECT, even as your Father which is in heaven is (teleios, spiritually complete) PERFECT.” Matt. 5:48 (That is, directly experience that the Father, completeness, is the fundamental nature of the soul.)
“The disciple is not above his master: but everyone that is (teleios, complete in God) PERFECT shall be as his master.” Luke 6:40 (That is, those who feel the presence of God in their souls will have attained the same awareness as Jesus.)
“I in them and Thou in me, that they may be made (teleios, complete in God) PERFECT in one;” John 17:23 (That is, the awareness of God in the soul can be awakened in the disciple through the master and they will literally be one in the awareness of the Father.)
And of course the scripture I have previously quoted by the Apostle Paul: “Howbeit we speak wisdom among them that are PERFECT ( telios, complete in God), yet not the wisdom of this world, nor of the princes of this world, that come to naught: But we speak the wisdom of God in a mystery, even the hidden wisdom,.... But as it is written, ‘Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him.’ But God hath revealed them unto us by his Spirit: for the Spirit searcheth all things, yea, the deep things of God.” (1 Cor. 2:6-10)
CONCLUSION
John [The Baptist] said: "He [JESUS] shall baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire." Luke 3:16
To finish walking the path that Jesus has given to us, eventually, the soul must be willing to utterly destroy itself: To throw every single thing it thinks it is into the flames. The soul that emerges from this usually lifelong process will have gone through the three stages of development that St. Clement writes about. (Purification) The opening of the heart and the trappings and cravings of the ego diminished. (Illumination) having the deep things of God revealed by the Holy Spirit. And (Perfection) coming to the awareness of the innate presence of God in its soul. At this point the soul will have literally been born again unto the Holy Spirit as a reborn spiritual being. (The actual meaning of the related scriptures.)
Quoted from the bishops of Smyrna and Alexandria, quoted from the gospels, quoted from John The Baptist and from the writings of the Apostle Paul, followed by Christian monks for the last 2000 years, written about exactly as I have found it to be and have tried to follow in my own life, this is the path that was available for those early Christians who chose to walk it and also those who have followed who choose to do the same.
It is not what we believe. It is not our religion. It is not how smart we are. It is not who we know. It is not our politics.
It is the openness of our hearts, our connectedness to God and to all that the one infinite consciousness extends: To humanity and all existence that will determine how long we are kept trapped in our ego wrapped world of thorns and thistles and barred from opening the Gate to the East and entering the Garden.
But there is a curious and wonderful thing that happens when the Holy Spirit enters the heart, we give ourselves over to it and it begins taking us to the deep things of God. The smugness in our own beliefs begins to disappear. The disdain for other beliefs that do not fit with our own begins to disappear. Eventually, as we give ourselves over to the Holy Spirit, we are not sure that we are absolutely right about anything. The only thing left that is absolute is the absolute majestic wonder of all of Gods’ creation and perhaps for others also, this single prayer that keeps repeating itself over and over in my mind: FATHER, DO WITH ME AS YOU WILL.
AN AFTERTHOUGHT
Perhaps, the first thing to come to your mind after reading the lessons so far is: All of the guys he quoted from were in monasteries. I live in the real world. How am I supposed to put in the hours necessary to walk the path as they did? You need to get real!
OK, I’ll tell you what I have come to think.
You can’t walk the path as a monk does it. I have struggled with this problem my whole adult life until I finally realized that living in the real world is not a problem for becoming a spiritual person but a blessing. (I never said it is an easy blessing.) You may have to be patient but I believe you can do it just as well if not better. Perhaps this single thing is what my whole life has been about. That we do not have to be in a monastery to live a spiritual life; not a self righteous or a pious one but a real and natural life, and still have an intimate relationship with the Holy Spirit: That living a normal life in this material world, struggling through our own inner demons and problems while caring for those around us, with eyes inwardly focused and sometimes not, can be a spiritual process unto itself.
The hardest steps on this path are the first ones, what St. Clement called purification, the opening of the heart and the diminishing of the ego, sainthood. Very few in the monasteries have every heard, seen or felt the flowing of the Holy Spirit within themselves. Those in monasteries and especially Church officials have ego problems and problems with opening their hearts just like everyone else on this earth.
The Church has its own, its spiritual directors etc. to help deal with these problems and we have this available but in addition, something better; life in the real world. We all start off in life self centered with our egos tightly wrapped around us and most of us are still ego oriented as we start to grow up. In the normal course of living, we mature, fall in love, get married and have children. All of a sudden our orientation in life is beginning to change. It’s not all about us anymore; it’s about those we love. Our hearts have begun to open and our egos have begun to diminish. We find that we have bills to pay but we don’t have the money and we learn to juggle. We work too much and sleep too little. We let things go for ourselves because there are more important things in life; the ones we love need shoes. Our kids get sick and are injured and our hearts break. We raise our children to be good people and struggle with their problems as we help them in school, with friends, with life. We try to help the world around us and in the middle of all this we try to maintain a spiritual life. It’s not all about you anymore and by the time you are ready to retire, life has beat down your ego to where you wonder where it went. In your bones you have come to feel: There is no them, only us and you feel as a part of life not apart from it. Look in the mirror. You will see the saint that is the hardest part of the path to achieve. And now: You have the humbleness, the experience, the years left and the freedom to fully experience the Holy Spirit and the deep things of God it brings.
I acknowledge that not everyone makes it this far, spiritually or physically. But the soul is eternal in God and if not here, then wherever God brings us we will still have eternal opportunities and time to grow spiritually. Also, illness and injury and premature death are a part of living in the material world. There is a randomness in living in this material world. Bad things sometimes happen to the very young and to very good people and we wonder why. But God has never forgotten a single soul and never will. Often we are unable to see the forest because of all the trees and have to have faith that each soul is eternal in God and never stops learning, or walking the path with Him. The good things and those things we need to learn that we or a loved one is unable to do or learn in this life will inevitably come in the life after. I think that it is harder on those left than on those who have left. If you do not believe in a life after, you shouldn’t be reading these lessons in the first place.
As long as we live in this material world, with all of the demands of the world, we need to do the best we can and should not mentally beat ourselves up just because we are not in the position to put in the hours of devotion our hearts desire. The point that I am getting to it is that there are natural stages to living and natural stages in walking the path to God and having a family and no time is one of them and there is no reason to needlessly worry or hurry ourselves over it.
With a family, the demands of living and the river of bills, most at this stage in life are lucky to get in twenty to thirty minutes twice a day in devotional time. But this will be the best period of your life to be humbled by the demands of living, to learn loving and devotion through raising our children and we might even find out that we are a part of the universe and not the center of it. All of this is tremendously important in living the spiritual path. The path is not somewhere we go but something we unfold within us.
When our children are grown, we have retired and have fulfilled our worldly obligations; it is the best time to fully concentrate on God and our relationship in Him. We will usually have fifteen to thirty years to share the Spirit that was shared with us and to experience the deep things of God. Your experience with living in the world and at the same time being a spiritual person opening yourself the Holy Spirit makes you much more valuable to this world than any monk in a monastery could ever hope to be. If we have done our spiritual best earlier in our life, we will have plenty of time to finish walking the path to God before we transcend this world.
By now we should have learned that material objects will come and go in our lives and that they do not bring lasting happiness. By now we should have learned that sensual pleasures are as fleeting as the wind and can offer no hope for lasting peace and comfort. By now we should have learned that relationships will come and go, that those we love cannot be eternally with us on this earth and that only God’s hand in the form of the Holy Spirit will always be here for us. By now we should be secure enough in our own beliefs and practices that we can see the golden thread of truth that guides all paths to God. For the rest of our lives we need to be putting in at least three hours a day in contemplative prayer and breathing exercises as I do or whatever spiritual practice that works for you. At the end of our lives, we need to take advantage of what precious time we have. Now it is all about you. When we retire from the working world is the time, our time for each of us and the deep things of God.
LM Richardson lmrichsn@yahoo.com
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