NAVIGATION 4

p. 206-212

One of the many reasons for attraction to works like this  is not only do they offer wonderful and inspiring ideas, but they also offer spiritual experience—and this is what we all hunger for—it is what much of what traditional religion did not give us.

Carl Jung went so far as to say, "One of the main functions of organized religion is to protect people against a direct experience of God.”

I think we have all heard enough of people talking about someone else’s experience of God. 

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The ego is a drama queen. It dies and dies and dies, and then comes back again, but each time it dies it decides that this is the “big one”—so we can experience trauma whenever surrender happens. The trauma lowers in intensity as we become less identified with the personality self. It does not go away, it simply becomes less relevant as you continue to realize who you think you are/and who everybody else thinks you are is not terribly important.

“You are a vessel for spirit. You are precluded from that experience by the personality ego self, who decides what you should be for you. So that is the death, or the transition, that you are going to undertake. It’s going to be about the release of the false self to allow your own light as the Christ consciousness to manifest through you fully. This is joyful. This is a course of wonder for all of you. And it is a process of acclimation and decision, as we have thus far described to you. But death of the personality self at the level that we are discussing must be understood simply as a transitioning and a re-appropriation of who you think you are.”

Oftentimes in scripture and in other sacred texts people’s names are changed after a powerful event. This is a metaphor for an inner transformation, but it is also an indication that the person can no longer be attached to the old identity—Jacob became Israel; Saul became Paul; Cephas became Peter.

In a way, we are being asked to share the same name—the Christ Self, and now there is little or no distinction between us. Imagine what that would be like!

“Everybody is the Christ manifesting in different ways.”

“To be the Christ means to be in the frequency of the Christ consciousness and to manifest the Self at that level. That is very, very different than deciding that you are the one doing this and that you can lay claim to that as a title at the exclusion of anybody else. When you do that, you are making yourself special and you are in your ego.”

As the book suggests over and over, this is not an ego trip, no one is more “special” than another. 

Mother Theresa said it beautifully,  “I can do what you can’t do, and you can do what I can’t do, and together we can do great things.” 

The last section here helps us make a distinction between feelings, knowing and experience.

When our feeling/emotional self is aligned with our spiritual experience that can be a huge rush, a tremendous high, and I think that is a glorious thing. It is quite easy and seductive to become attached to the feelings, and when the feelings are not there, we can think the spiritual experience is not there either. We might think as Paul did that he “did something wrong” to lose the connection. 

The connection is still there, he just wasn’t feeling it.

Now, this is a difficult thing, and I’ve experienced this many times. The feeling of being high, being connected, being loved, begin held in grace, light, etc. can be a marvelous thing, and I love it, but there can be a dark side to all of this.

For instance, there are gong to be times when I do not feel close to God, does that mean I did something wrong? Does that mean God is not close? 

I remember that ridiculous expression that was going around a few years ago, “If you feel far away from God, who moved?” What garbage. God doesn’t move, nor can you move away from God. You can feel distant, but that does not mean that you are.

Your feelings are real, but they are not necessarily the truth. 

So enjoy the feelings while they are there, but know the deeper and real part is the knowing you have inside of you of the love and presence and closeness of God. Your feelings are NOT a barometer of this truth. 

All of us have experienced times when we did not “feel” like loving someone, but we also realized that just because we didn’t feel like it, we could still love and be loving. We did not let our feelings get in the way of our ability to express our truth.

PEACE