09-07-2018, 02:06 AM
This is a queer passage to read out of context, and so I offer it. Or, rather, and so it is offered through the agency of consciousness.....
I think I was still in high school when I had occasion to be invited to take a tour of a Trappist monastery. While there, we came across some visiting Buddhist monks from Korea and I was struck by how expressionless they were, how seemingly devoid of personality. At that stage of life, to me this display of dispassionate spiritual emptiness was simply repulsive. I actually felt threatened by it. Perhaps I still do?
Um, I mean, perhaps feelings of worry and threat appear across vista of a self-aware field of babbling consciousness?
http://www.llresearch.org/newsletters/is...998_4.aspx Wrote:Each of you has come to feel comfortable with imaging and ideating the self as a spiritual being. Each of you is awake in a land where many slumber. And so to each of you there are special opportunities both for service and for pain, and spiritual pride is a distortion which each seeker becomes aware of in a subtle way, over time. It is that which remains when the fears have been shaken up and the cave has been left. It is the distortion or fault peculiar to those who have worked the hardest to realize who they are, and where they are going, and whose they are. So let us look at the possible way to work with this dynamic of spiritual pride.
Within this instrument’s spiritual system, pride, like envy, greed, lust, and sloth is considered more of a vice than an actual sin, a kind of excess of a good thing. It is good to be humble, and yet one can justly be proud of one’s good works, one’s good habits, one’s ethics, one’s conduct. When one is attempting to do everything that one can to live a good and holy life, one is peculiarly apt to feel some pride in one’s self. Now can you see how that feeling is a separator between the self and the world about the self’? It is based upon the assumption, which is an illusion, that one is responsible for the self and at the base of be self one is one’s self. This is a sticky, sticky point, and we would ask you to look closely at this matter of identity, for as long as there is self there will be pride in self or a feeling about self that does separate one from another. If one is still thinking that one is still living one’s own life, one is not yet beyond spiritual pride. This instrument is aware that she is not beyond spiritual pride and has often said that this is the one vice that she cannot find a way to remove from her personality, for even though she attempts to work on her humility she has a pride of self that thinks self is right. There is a righteousness there. There is an inherent lack of eagerness to taste other souls’ flavors. There is a desire to retain some boundaries, some uniqueness of self which is completely understandable in an illusion where there is no way to discover in any way that can be proven that one is not separate, that one is not, at base, one’s self. And yet we say to you that as far as we know, at base there is only the One Great Self, that Love which is reflected in each of the Creator’s children which each of you is.
As long as you think that you have a self that you need to defend you shall be working with spiritual pride, and so entities for the most part are working with this no matter how persistently and purely and devotionally they have sought for truth year after year. Yet still there is the sense of “I” am searching. “I” am looking. “I” am seeking to become the best that “I” can. Conversely we have found that coming into a fuller awareness of self is actually a process of subtraction, simplification, and elimination of things from the defended self until finally the self is empty and the barriers are down. Is this safe to do within your density? No. Not at all, not in the sense of the preservation of the physical body, or the spiritual body within incarnation.
I think I was still in high school when I had occasion to be invited to take a tour of a Trappist monastery. While there, we came across some visiting Buddhist monks from Korea and I was struck by how expressionless they were, how seemingly devoid of personality. At that stage of life, to me this display of dispassionate spiritual emptiness was simply repulsive. I actually felt threatened by it. Perhaps I still do?
Um, I mean, perhaps feelings of worry and threat appear across vista of a self-aware field of babbling consciousness?