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Welcome to OneLife Ministries. This site is designed to lead you prayerfully into a heart experience of Divine Presence, Who is Love. I hope persons of varied wisdom paths will find inspiration here.
Blessings,
Brian Kenneth Wilcox
MDiv, MFT, PhD
Interspiritual Teacher, Author
You are invited to join Brian at his fellowship group on Facebook – Inspirations for Living – Love, Joy, Peace.
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Enter this sanctuary time by settling down, becoming quiet, and breathing deeply some breaths. Remind yourself you are in the Presence of Love. This place you are entering, within, is the inner Temple, where you are One with God. You may wish to use a mantra, or prayer phrase, follow the breathing in-and-out, or witness the arising and falling of all around you as the manifestation of universal-God. Enjoy these moments of quietly settling and come out when you are ready.
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I have been asked what God is doing in heaven. I answer; He has been giving his Son birth eternally, is giving him birth now and will go on giving him birth forever. The Father being in labor, as a woman giving birth to a child, in every virtuous soul. Blessed, three times blessed, is the person within whose soul the heavenly Father is brought to bed in this manner. All she surrenders to him here she shall enjoy from him in life eternal. God made the soul on purpose for her to bear his one-begotten Son. His birth in Mary through the Spirit was better pleasing to God than his nativity of her in flesh. When this birth happens nowadays in the good loving soul, it gives God greater pleasure than his creation of the heavens and earth.
*Meister Eckhart, Christian Mystic.
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Lo, I am with you always means when you look for God,
God is in the look of your eyes,
in the thought of looking, nearer to you than your self,
or things that have happened to you
There's no need to go outside.
Be melting snow.
Wash yourself of yourself.
A white flower grows in the quietness.
Let your tongue become that flower.
*The Essential Rumi. Translator and Editor Coleman Barks.
Selections from “Be Melting Snow.”
Rabi`a's gifts to Hasan of Basra
Once the Sufi mystic Rabi`a sent Hasan of Basra three things. She sent a piece of wax, a needle, and a hair. "Be like wax," she said. "Illumine the world and yourself burn. Be like a needle, always be working naked. When you have done these two things, a thousand years will be for you as a hair."
"Do you desire for us to get married?" Hasan asked Rabi`a.
"The tie of marriage applies to those who have being," Rabi`a replied. "Here being has disappeared, for I have become naughted to self and exist only through Him. I belong wholly to Him. I live in the shadow of His control. You must ask my hand of Him, not of me."
"How did you find this secret, Rabi`a?" inquired Hasan.
"I lost all 'found' things in Him," Rabi`a repled.
"How do you know Him?" Hasan inquired.
"You know the 'how'; I know the 'howless," said Rabi`a.
*Fariduddin Attar. Tadhkirat al-Awliyya.
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To be the I, I am in God, I must die to the I, I think I am. The I, I am in myself is not the I, I am in God. This dying is facilitated by the practice of meditation and, finally, contemplation. Slowly, I come to see the person I thought I was, or had become as an overlay of my True Self in God, is an illusory self, a mosaic of experience.
This false self is the accumulation of past experience, positive and negative. This self struggles to love, for this I has been built much from the pain of past relationships. Yet, under that layer of Iness is the True Self.
Contemplation is the dissolving of the False Self, the rising of the pristine, edenic being that is the Self prior to experience, or outside experience. This True Self is always within experience, waiting to be welcomed back into awareness, to manifest healing and restorative Power.
For this spirit, is one with Spirit. In this True Self there has never been any alienation from God. Separation from God is an illusion, a social illusion created by masses of religious persons who have taught from the view of the false self, and most of whom never engaged a practice to allow the transforming Potency of the spirit-Spirit to arise to fully illuminate the life of the false self and its subtle strategies, including how this mosaic illusion will utilize religion and morality to fortify its fortifications and control over others in the name of God.
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What are traits of the behavior of the false self? What are traits of the action of the True Self? How do you engage spiritual practice for transformation of the false self and resurrection of the True Self in potency to heal, redeem, and restore? What happens when about 6 billion persons on one planet are living from the false self, not the True Self? What are the implications religiously of the above thoughts on false self and True Self?
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In all your seeking, what are you really seeking?
©Brian Wilcox, and OneLife Ministries. 05/01/2010
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*OneLife Ministries is a ministry of Brian Kenneth Wilcox, SW Florida. Brian lives a vowed life, as an Associate of Greenbough House of Prayer. He lives with his two doggie friends, Bandit Ty and St. Francis and serves as a jail Chaplain.
*Brian welcomes responses to his writings at briankwilcox@yahoo.com . Also, Brian is on Facebook: search Brian Kenneth Wilcox.
*You can order his book An Ache for Union from major booksellers.
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