If you are not truly listening to another and tuning into the reality and depth of their inner experience, you will become abusive. Then the other person is merely an object to you, simply there to meet whatever you express as your needs. They are no longer human – someone you can be discovering and learning to love. That is why knowing self – discovering the universe inside yourself – is so important. Carefully examining your own interiority with grace, you will undoubtedly find things worth exploring and redeeming. The same must be true about all the other flesh sacks walking around. We all contain multitudes.
The Whole Goal
The whole point is intimacy. When we are doing all of this work turning inward, it is just to know what’s really inside ourselves. The benefit of knowing what is really in there is that you will be able to share your authentic self with someone else – what you really think and feel and are. So all this plumbing the depths is not just navel-gazing narcissism. It takes some time, patience and finely-tuned attention to really find and draw out the nuances of what is in there. And you will find something important if you do it. Read More
Noah Gundersen – Oh Death
Lean into Darkness
And just when you feel like you have reached the blackest, sickest darkness, that is the time to lean in even further. When God feels out of reach, your only move is to become still, keep your ear to the ground and wait. The waiting itself will change you. And the answers are somewhere there in the dark and stillness. Read More
Your Many Deaths
If you do it right, you will suffer many deaths in your lifetime. And if you do it right, each one will bring you closer to your real self. Believe it or not, everything that is happening in your life is working to bring about these little deaths, which will peel back the layers of your false self and allow the truest form of your being to emerge. Really your “false self” is just all the forms of you that existed before this and which must be shed, like a snake repeatedly sloughing off its skin. Other people may not even notice how you have changed, but you will feel like a new person, freshly alive in a new way (born again). It’s just the newest form of you – and you are destined to do it again. Read More
Typhoon – The Sickness Unto Death
Old man in a rocking chair
You wake up, you’ve been living alone
After all these years
Surrounded by these shards of mirrors Read More
God Is Outside Church
Do not be mistaken: God is not contained within the church – inside its walls or any of the structures the church has put forth to try and capture God’s essence. God may be there at the church building if you carry God there with you inside yourself. Or God may be noticeably (or not so noticeably) absent. God comes and goes as God pleases, so there are many places you might find God. Read More
Practicing Presence: Internal Models
Meditation helps us access and internalize the good in the universe, letting it expand within us and become a resource we carry around all the time. The way we first learn to do this internalizing of any kind of presence is through our relationships with others. The people around us when we are growing up help us form some initial internal framework of what people and reality are like. We learn others are harsh and scary or that there is great good in the world – maybe both. We then carry around these internal representations and they “help” us interpret all the other things we experience. They also help us form “rules” or “models” we unknowingly consult while interacting with the world. This all happens most of the time underneath our conscious awareness, so these internal models are having an effect all the time without us knowing it. Read More
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