BOOK CLUB: WEEK SIX
Delving into THE MYSTIC JESUS
Welcome back to the Book Club for THE MYSTIC JESUS: The Mind of Love...
Here are the pages for Week Six, pages 144-175, the end of Chapter Three and beginning of Chapter Four.
This week we consider the spiritual dynamics of crucifixion and resurrection. We examine how these symbols relate to everyone’s journey through life, seeing how fear nullifies and destroys us while love restores us to our right mind. Recognizing the deeper metaphysical meaning of these dynamics, we understand not only Jesus more deeply but ourselves more deeply as well.
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Soul Growth
Spirituality is not something to be practiced sometimes. It is the existential meaning of every moment. The spiritual journey is continuous and practical. It is a moment-by- moment decision-making process: How do I choose to look at a situation, who do I choose to be within it, and what do I choose to do?
Life is about not just what happens to us, but also who we choose to be in the space of what happens. Every situation is designed by an intelligent universe specifically for our soul growth, by definition presenting us with the opportunities to play life either from a place of love or from a place of fear—from forgiveness, positivity, and contribution, or from blame, negativity, and victimhood.
Every moment we make the choice. We make it either consciously or unconsciously, but every thought represents a decision, and “All thinking produces form at some level”* (T-31). That is how powerful we are, and how responsible we are for our life experience.
The life we live is a reflection of thoughts we chose to think before this moment. Our lives begin to change when we choose to think differently now. The spiritual journey is a transition from who we used to be and the life we used to live, to who we would rather be and the life we would rather live. No one and nothing can decide for you the thoughts you choose to think.
The world would tell us there’s no road map, nothing but a random universe in which the highest good is to do whatever we feel like doing, or would make us the most money, or would get us whatever it is we think we want. Nothing is a more limited mentality than such a purposeless perspective.
Living our lives in service to a higher purpose is the only road to happiness, because it is the reason we were born. What the ego posits as freedom is not freedom, but license; it is a prison of our own making. Following Jesus, serving the Will of God, trying our best to be loving means serving the desires of our own true self.
The Pillars of a Well-Lived Life
The three principles we hold on to as we walk the spiritual path are these: faith, love, and service.
Those are the pillars of righteousness, or “right use-ness” of the mind. But even more than that, they are our powers. They are the use of the mind in ways that lift us above the normal limitations of the mortal world.
Who among us has not seen things come together when harmony exists among the players in a system, and things fall apart when anger and negativity prevail?
Our faith that anything is possible in the presence of love, our faith that forgiveness will always interrupt the ego’s tyranny—these are our powers when we let miracles light the way. The Holy Spirit is the motivation for miracles and conduit for miracles. He is never not available to show us where they are. “I am not absent to anyone in any situation” (T-116).
The world can be a miraculous place, and in many ways it is. We hold our children, we fall in love, we build communities. It’s all there. But the fear-based thought system that dominates the world is like a sword of Damocles that hangs above us all. The fate of our world literally hangs on whether or not we can stop attacking each other, attacking the earth, and attacking ourselves.
We need faith that it’s possible for us, and for the world, to change.
We need love to dissolve the layers of fear that saturate the world.
We need a consciousness of service to make sure we will.
As we increase our ability to embody the love that is the truth of who we are, we begin to attract mighty companions into our experience. We meet people with whom there’s an almost mysterious sense that we were brought together for purposes higher than our own. We’re no longer driven to achieve what we perceive to be our separate goals, but instead we’re driven by a desire to collaborate with others in creating collective changes to the world in which we live.
The idea that we go to work to make money, to gain power, or for any other purpose dictated by a consumer-driven culture begins to take second place to a more meaningful yearning: to create the good, the beautiful, and the holy. And to create those things with others.
The intentional nature of the universe applies not only to our individual lives but to our relationships as well. We are drawn to people with whom we can heal and with whom we can create more than we could have created on our own. This is the regenerative energy of Christ that is emerging in the world today. Yes, the ego’s wiles are still a danger to us all. But the sense that God is active, that the spirit of rebirth is upon us, that Jesus walks on the water even now, is palpable as well.
He is order in the midst of chaos, he is wisdom in the midst of confusion, he is the love that casts out fear. Jesus is in you and me and all of us, by whatever name we call him. In moments of despair we need but call, and he will hear, and he will answer. The times ahead might indeed be challenging, but we will not be alone.
Love will prevail, for God always gets the final say. What is completely up to us, to be determined by the exercise of our free will, is how long it will take to get there—and how much suffering must occur before the dawning of the light. In the Talmud it is written that in the midst of the darkest night we should act as if morning has already come. For in a way it already has.
Hallelujah. Praise God. Amen.