Sunday, June 28, 2009

Exploring spiritual sense and the Lord's Prayer

"Spiritual sense, contradicting the material senses, involves intuition, hope, faith, understanding, fruition, reality." - Science & Health, p. 298

God is unknowable to the physical senses, but He is immanently knowable to your spiritual sense.

And yes, you do have spiritual sense. Everyone does.

Your intuition tells you there is something real about Love - that is bigger than any person or thing, that if there really is a God, a conscious understanding God, then God must have something seriously to do with Life itself, with Truth itself, with Love - infinite Love - itself.

The material senses never communicate this kind of appreciation of God. The material senses only look at things. The material senses never look at thoughts. And the material senses aren't completely reliable, as anyone who as ever felt a wallet not actually in a pocket, or seen a mirage in the desert, can tell you.

But we all have a capacity to sense things spiritually.

The quote above, from Science & Health, gives you a great way to start thinking about - and exercising - your spiritual sense.

Start with something simple and kinda fun: try just listening to your intuition.
  • Does your intuition challenge you to be more awake, more active, more authentic to who you honestly are?
  • Does it inspire you to be generous, loving, unselfish, strong?
  • Does it motivate you to pray, to love, to be of service to others?
If so, then you're really on to something big. And if you act on it, your life will be transformed into something inspired.

If you don't, you'll probably just continue to dance to whatever easy sleezy lazy tune the material senses sucker you into.

It's always a choice.

So try this out: actually listen to your intution. Yeah. Right now! Listen to it! What's it saying?

If it's insipring you, then open yourself to hope!

And hope as in expectancy, not hope as in "wishful thinking." You know like the expectancy you have when someone you really love is on their way over to see you and you know they'll be arriving at any minute and you get yourself all ready and straighten up your house and then run to the window to watch for them - that kind of expectancy! That's the kind of expecancy that spiritual sense inspires.

And so then be faithful. Watch for your inspiration to bloom and grow. Wait for it. Work for it. And where does your inspiration lead?

Into more Life, more Truth, more Love. Embodied first in your thought, then in your actions, and then in your experience.

The material senses, and even just your old habits of thinking, will say "It will never come. It's useless. There's no point. This is stupid." But that's the old way of thinking and the old way of doing and it will never awaken you to the Life that is already at hand, to the Truth that demands your best, and to the Love that is already in your heart ready to be shared extravagantly!

And when you drop the old ways - and you will, either "through suffering or through Science" as Mrs. Eddy put it - your struggle and effort will blossom into understanding.

This always happens, just like the sun rising every morning.

Ever learn a new sport or start a new hobby? Isn't there a point where you move from the intuition that it will be fun, into the expectancy of that fun, to the practice (faithfulness) of developing your new fun talent?

And isn't there then usually a hard spot where you feel like you've hit a wall? THAT is the place where you're always tempted to just give up. BUT that is also exactly the place where you are about to make a huge new breakthrough into really understanding what you're doing.

If you give up, you quit and you never know how close you were to success. But if you push on, and you move to a completely new depth of experience. That is the exact same process with exercising your spiritual sense.

And when you make that breakthrough, you really begin to see some unexpectedly great results. They always unique to you. You will intuitively (!) recognize them. You will feel the newness and the growth and the challenge of continuing your progress! These are the result of your expectancy put into action, the reward of your faithfulness to the work you needed to do, the fruit of your maturing understanding.

And so you find your spiritual sense has shown you to a clearer, more awake, more authentic, more God-like you.

"For Thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, forever."
For God is infinite, all-power, all Life, Truth, Love, over all, and All.

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