To Know and To Love.
Friday, November 26, 2010 by the BCth
To honour and love God and one's fellow creatures - mineral, plant, animal, or human - is the totality of the law. If we do not know ourselves, how can we know others? How can we know God?
To see ourselves in others, not as projections of ego, but as individual expressions of the same essence of God. All that endures is God, all else is but the ever-changing dream in the imagination of God.
To know is to perceive directly. We do not perceive; we are too caught up in chasing our thoughts, from past to future to past again. Fantasy, delusion, worry, regret, interpretation through the filter of the unknowing, conditioned mind. Or we are embroiled in sensation, craving pleasure and avoiding pain. Identifying as the content of our mental, emotional and physical experience, instead of as what we truly are. Thus we enslave and imprison ourselves and are tossed about by outer circumstances and our unconscious drives. Truth as it can be perceived exists only in the present.
To make the unconscious, conscious. This is the beginning of the alchemical work. The proper study of man is man himself. What lies hidden within him. Observing, without bias or judgment, one's actions, feelings, thoughts, and motives. Passionless understanding. Accepting, and accepting responsibility.
This writer is a fool, as are all common men. The only thing keeping him from being a perfect ignoramus and an imbecile is his flickering recognition of the fact that he does not know, does not perceive, only thinks, feels, senses outwardly, and foolishly parrots the thoughts of others without real understanding. Even were this not the case, you would be a fool to assume otherwise. Anything he says must be tried and proven first. And if you know directly, you have no need of his words at all.
What we might call "knowledge" is not given. It is earned. Through suffering and striving. Through patience and labour. And even then it is only one's own subjective experience. True knowledge surpasses all this, all the efforts of man. It is timeless. It is priceless. It is to perceive what is. How shall we who are blind and deaf, perceive?
We are blind and deaf because of the thick miasma and dirt of illusion and sin that covers us. So many are comfortable with this condition, they seek to preserve it and deepen it. You who desire the sincere and loving, all-illuminating truth, must not be so complacent as these. You have your work cut out for you.
Purification. Cutting through the illusion, casting off the sin. This requires brutal honesty and total commitment. Yet it is not merely the work of the separate little you, capricious and weak. It is the work of God within you. The divine will, the divine intellect, the divine love.
With God all things are possible.
God is within you, and you are within God. Rejoice and give thanks, for it is God who created you, God who sustains you, and God who will transform you in ways you never imagined. Life and death, night and day. One eternal Being.
To see ourselves in others, not as projections of ego, but as individual expressions of the same essence of God. All that endures is God, all else is but the ever-changing dream in the imagination of God.
To know is to perceive directly. We do not perceive; we are too caught up in chasing our thoughts, from past to future to past again. Fantasy, delusion, worry, regret, interpretation through the filter of the unknowing, conditioned mind. Or we are embroiled in sensation, craving pleasure and avoiding pain. Identifying as the content of our mental, emotional and physical experience, instead of as what we truly are. Thus we enslave and imprison ourselves and are tossed about by outer circumstances and our unconscious drives. Truth as it can be perceived exists only in the present.
To make the unconscious, conscious. This is the beginning of the alchemical work. The proper study of man is man himself. What lies hidden within him. Observing, without bias or judgment, one's actions, feelings, thoughts, and motives. Passionless understanding. Accepting, and accepting responsibility.
This writer is a fool, as are all common men. The only thing keeping him from being a perfect ignoramus and an imbecile is his flickering recognition of the fact that he does not know, does not perceive, only thinks, feels, senses outwardly, and foolishly parrots the thoughts of others without real understanding. Even were this not the case, you would be a fool to assume otherwise. Anything he says must be tried and proven first. And if you know directly, you have no need of his words at all.
What we might call "knowledge" is not given. It is earned. Through suffering and striving. Through patience and labour. And even then it is only one's own subjective experience. True knowledge surpasses all this, all the efforts of man. It is timeless. It is priceless. It is to perceive what is. How shall we who are blind and deaf, perceive?
We are blind and deaf because of the thick miasma and dirt of illusion and sin that covers us. So many are comfortable with this condition, they seek to preserve it and deepen it. You who desire the sincere and loving, all-illuminating truth, must not be so complacent as these. You have your work cut out for you.
Purification. Cutting through the illusion, casting off the sin. This requires brutal honesty and total commitment. Yet it is not merely the work of the separate little you, capricious and weak. It is the work of God within you. The divine will, the divine intellect, the divine love.
With God all things are possible.
God is within you, and you are within God. Rejoice and give thanks, for it is God who created you, God who sustains you, and God who will transform you in ways you never imagined. Life and death, night and day. One eternal Being.
