Spirit Unfolding In and With You

A Spirituality of Transformation

Sep 3, 2009

Saying For Today: Then, the spiritual Path is the unfolding of what already is, has always been, will always be, in this moment of present awareness.

Welcome to OneLife Ministries. This site is designed to lead you prayerfully into a heart experience of Divine Presence, Who is Love. While it focuses on Christian teaching, I hope persons of varied faiths will find inspiration here. Indeed, "God" can be whatever image helps us trust in the Sacred, by whatever means Grace touches us each. Please share this ministry with others, and please return soon. There is a new offering daily. And to be placed on the daily OneLife email list, to request notifications of new writings or submit prayer requests, write to briankwilcox@yahoo.com .

Blessings,
Brian Kenneth Wilcox MDiv, MFT, PhD
Interspiritual Pastor-Teacher, Author, Workshop Leader,
Spiritual Counselor, and Chaplain.

Brian encourages support of the 4-Star Christian organization Compassion, which supports children worldwide; see www.compassion.com .

An aspirate came to the Master. "Master," he said, "I came here for you to help me find enlightenment." The Master said, "What's the problem?" "Well, I have not found it?" "What?" "It!" "And," asked the Master, "are you still seeking that It?" "Yes, of course!" "Then, that is your problem." The aspirate left angry, for he was determined to become enlightened.

*Brian Kenneth Wilcox

Likely, one of the more common mistakes for persons seeking a deeper walk in Spirit is to step out enthused, thinking this decision will guarantee escape from those aspects of the self that plague the self. One thinks this new venture offers a short-cut to inner peace and happiness. The cure-all becomes for one "spirituality." One begins to pursue enlightenment, oneness with God, the Ein Sof, mindfulness, ... This is the problem.

Thomas Merton applies this process I speak of in his words on contemplation. His assessment applies to the Spiritual Journey generally:

One of the strange laws of the contemplative life is that in it you do not sit down and solve problems. Or until life itself solves them for you. Usually the solution consists in a discovery that they only existed insofar as they were inseparably connected with your own illusory exterior self. The solution of most such problems comes with the dissolution of the false self. And consequently another law of the contemplative life is that if you enter it with the set purpose of seeking contemplation, or worse still, happiness, you will find neither. For neither can be found unless it is first in some sense renounced. And again, this means renouncing the illusory self that seeks to be "happy" and to find "fulfillment" (whatever that may mean) in contemplation. For the contemplative and spiritual self, the dormant, mysterious, and hidden self that is always effaced by the activity of our exterior self does not seek fulfillment. It is content to be, and in its being it is fulfilled, because its being is rooted in God.

*Thomas Merton. The Inner Experience. Edited and with an Introduction by William H. Shannon.

In spiritual practice and inner Revelation, we discover the source of lack of fulfillment and joy. Our seeking these things reveals to us the source of their experiential absence: the "problem." What is that? The "culprit" is the self that chose to be spiritual to find the fulfillment, joy, and other "spiritual" goods longed for.

Here is the essential dilemma. The finding of the Good cannot be found by the source of the lack of It. The false self - the exterior self - cut off from the Source, cannot find the Good, True, and Beautiful in the Source. For that self itself is the process of being cut off from the Source, in Which abides all Good - and seeking from that self that has no connection with the Good eliminates the potential of what can come through only the connection. The connection is Love, or Loving.

When do you know you are in the True Self - the experience of being One with the Divine? We experience this in the moment the self is experiencing itself - now the True Self, for in Union - as already fulfilled by being what it already is, by virtue of what it is and not trying to be - to become - and already has all it needs within Oneness in God, in Love.

Then, the spiritual Path is the unfolding of what already is, has always been, will always be, in this moment of present awareness. You can have no more or less of God now than at any time in the past or future.

Spirituality moves us from a focus on believing in the Divine to being transformed into the Divine, by the Divine. Yet, even this is contradictory, for how can one be transformed into That he or she already is fully in - but the knowing of that Union is not know as is fully?

Does this mean we have no sense of Otherness in our awareness? Like we are brain dead, or lose our personal identity in one Great Being? Not necessarily? Rather, what we knew of the self and God is enfolded in a higher awareness, not lost:

As spirituality evolves, it transcends "belief in" an objectified mythic creator deity. Integral spirituality is sometimes identified as transcending theism [God as other, "transcendent"] and arriving at pantheism [God in all things; all things in God], which is the view that divinity is both immanent (in the world) and transcendent (beyond the world). Ultimately, Integral spirituality transcends old ways of relating with God, it re-includes transformed versions of all ways of relating to God that are even fuller, richer, more intimate and profound. Thus, among the free expressions of Integral panentheism is a higher form of theistic mysticism.