"Thy will be done in earth as it is in heaven."
Enable us to know, as in heaven, so on earth, God is omnipotent, supreme.
"And Jesus called a little child unto him, and set him in the midst of them, And said, Verily I say unto you, Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven."
"Spiritual sense, contradicting the material senses, involves intuition, hope, faith, understanding, fruition, reality."
What a beautiful thing spiritual sense is! And how important it is as a way to understand how to pray.
But sometimes we forget to get past the intuitions of good that come to us. We don't notice them enough. We don't acknowledge their value and power. We don't move to the next step: HOPE! EXPECTANCY!
Notice how children - when they know something good is coming - absolutely clamor with expectancy! Their joy is contagious. They pester you non-stop until they have what you've promised them.
Isn't this exactly how we should pray to our Father-Mother God? with that intense expectancy of good coming our way?
And notice too how a child will treasure a hoped-for gift. Once it's received, they'll take it with them everywhere, telling everyone about it, showing it to their friends. They might even sleep with it!
Do you do that with your prayer? Do you so joyfully receive that inspiration that you wrap yourself up with it and joyfully take it with you everywhere you go? even sleep with it?
If so, then you're exercising your childlike spiritual sense. And that leads you to understanding - reason as well as revelation. Then can fruition - results! - be far behind?
Hasn't your child-like joy lifted you a little higher where you see the clouds "melting into such thinness" that you begin to see that God has always been with you, always there caring for you, always bringing you the intution, the thought, that you need to take the next sure step?
And with your hand in God's, like a child walking safely with his parent, you see His reality is always already present. Right where you are. Whole, healthy, holy. Just like God made you. His image and likeness. His loved child.
Approaching spiritual sense with that childlike expectancy and faithfulness makes your desires, your prayers, agents of awakening.
"Desire is prayer. And no loss can occur from trusting God with our desires that they may be moulded and exalted before they take form in words and in deeds."
Desire is prayer - a prayer that awakens you to the answer already here and now in fulfillment: God's will is already done in you, as you, for you, in completeness, in Life, Truth, and Love.
May your childlike heart receive this gift with joy - and act on it! And even sleep with it!
Showing posts with label fruition. Show all posts
Showing posts with label fruition. Show all posts
Monday, November 16, 2009
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.
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.
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 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.
Wednesday, May 6, 2009
Spiritual sense and prayer
"Spiritual sense, contradicting the material senses, involves intuition, hope, faith, understanding, fruition, reality."
Intuition is the seed of desire, of prayer. Intuition speaks wordlessly to your receptive heart. It says "this is the way, walk ye in it, when ye turn to the right hand, or when ye turn to the left." It nudges that seed-of-desire in you into an awakening feeling that something wonderful is actually possible. This gives you hope.
And Hope is not just some vague wishful thinking. The Hope that God gives you is much more solid than that. The Hope God gives you is expectancy. And expectancy is what opens that seed of prayer. Expectancy is what knows - when the night is darkest - that the dawn will come. Hope is what carries you from indulging fearful thinking into risking prayerful thinking. Hope is a glimmer of "knowing before seeing." And when Hope reaches up from the light of spiritual intuition, it is never blind. Hope right now sees the flower in your sprouting seedling prayer.
Faith, which is Hope-put-into-practice, nurtures and supports the growth of your seedling prayer. Practicing your Faith by being faithful to your expectancy over and over and over again - strengthens your Faith. Practice teaches you what works and doesn't work, what's true and what's not true, what's real and dependable and what's false and worthless. All that practice builds your Faith-muscle! And that helps your prayer grow straight and tall, blossoming into:
Understanding. And when you actually now understand your desire, your prayer, you are awake to it. You are aware of it's real meaning. Your eyes are opened, and your mind is alert, and your practice is more sure and confident than ever. You shed the driftwood dreck that might have been sticking to your prayer - tossing aside the cheap imitation answers, seeing through this misleading sidetracks, ditching the counterfeit solutions. And so your experience the beneficial results of your prayer. You demonstrate through your intuition, hope, faith and understanding, what is spiritually true. You experience something new. You feel something solid and good and wonderful. Your prayer just naturally ripens into:
Fruition. And why? Because trusting God with your desire always bears fruit. And what is the fruit of your prayer? It is always:
Reality. Yes. Reality.
You can reach this point in an instant, an hour, or a lifetime. But time doesn't matter because even right now desire is alive in your heart. And this desire, viewed rightly, is always God stirring in you, drawing you closer, awakening you to who you really are, awakening you to your likeness to Him, your at-one-ment with Him, declaring what's really true: you are God being.
Rejoice then in God as All-in-all, and you as His perfect and complete image and likeness: pure, healthy, whole, and holy. This is who you always have been and always will be. And most importantly, this is who you are now.
"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.
Intuition is the seed of desire, of prayer. Intuition speaks wordlessly to your receptive heart. It says "this is the way, walk ye in it, when ye turn to the right hand, or when ye turn to the left." It nudges that seed-of-desire in you into an awakening feeling that something wonderful is actually possible. This gives you hope.
And Hope is not just some vague wishful thinking. The Hope that God gives you is much more solid than that. The Hope God gives you is expectancy. And expectancy is what opens that seed of prayer. Expectancy is what knows - when the night is darkest - that the dawn will come. Hope is what carries you from indulging fearful thinking into risking prayerful thinking. Hope is a glimmer of "knowing before seeing." And when Hope reaches up from the light of spiritual intuition, it is never blind. Hope right now sees the flower in your sprouting seedling prayer.
Faith, which is Hope-put-into-practice, nurtures and supports the growth of your seedling prayer. Practicing your Faith by being faithful to your expectancy over and over and over again - strengthens your Faith. Practice teaches you what works and doesn't work, what's true and what's not true, what's real and dependable and what's false and worthless. All that practice builds your Faith-muscle! And that helps your prayer grow straight and tall, blossoming into:
Understanding. And when you actually now understand your desire, your prayer, you are awake to it. You are aware of it's real meaning. Your eyes are opened, and your mind is alert, and your practice is more sure and confident than ever. You shed the driftwood dreck that might have been sticking to your prayer - tossing aside the cheap imitation answers, seeing through this misleading sidetracks, ditching the counterfeit solutions. And so your experience the beneficial results of your prayer. You demonstrate through your intuition, hope, faith and understanding, what is spiritually true. You experience something new. You feel something solid and good and wonderful. Your prayer just naturally ripens into:
Fruition. And why? Because trusting God with your desire always bears fruit. And what is the fruit of your prayer? It is always:
Reality. Yes. Reality.
You can reach this point in an instant, an hour, or a lifetime. But time doesn't matter because even right now desire is alive in your heart. And this desire, viewed rightly, is always God stirring in you, drawing you closer, awakening you to who you really are, awakening you to your likeness to Him, your at-one-ment with Him, declaring what's really true: you are God being.
Rejoice then in God as All-in-all, and you as His perfect and complete image and likeness: pure, healthy, whole, and holy. This is who you always have been and always will be. And most importantly, this is who you are now.
"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.
Thursday, April 23, 2009
The Lord's Prayer and Spiritual Sense
On page 16 of Science & Health with Key to the Scriptures, Mary Baker Eddy wrote: "Only as we rise above all material sensuousness and sin, can we reach the heaven-born aspiration and spiritual consciousness, which is indicated in the Lord's Prayer and which instantaneously heals the sick. Here let me give what I understand to be the spiritual sense of the Lord's Prayer:"
Mrs. Eddy also wrote: "Spiritual sense, contradicting the material senses, involves intuition, hope, faith, understanding, fruition, reality."
Since the Lord's Prayer involves spiritual sense to be truly prayed understandingly, then ask yourself:
When you pray "Our Father" - what does your intuition tell you about what that means? How hopeful and expectant are you to experience the Adorable One? How faithful are you to His kingdom already within you? Do you understand His will and abide by it, right here where you are just as it is in heaven? Are you experiencing the living Bread of God feeding you? forgiving you? leading and delivering you? Are you accepting the reality that God is the only presence, the only power, the only glory there actually is?
If so, then you are sensing the Lord's Prayer - the Mind of Christ - exactly as Mrs. Eddy did. And she said that the spiritual sense of Jesus' Prayer is one that meets every human need - no exceptions!
If so, then bow in that silent intuitive, expectant, faithful, understanding of Lord's Prayer, and expect to see that Prayer bear fruit, bringing you into the true understanding - and experience - of God's all-harmonious, healthy, whole, and holy reality. Here. And now.
Mrs. Eddy also wrote: "Spiritual sense, contradicting the material senses, involves intuition, hope, faith, understanding, fruition, reality."
Since the Lord's Prayer involves spiritual sense to be truly prayed understandingly, then ask yourself:
When you pray "Our Father" - what does your intuition tell you about what that means? How hopeful and expectant are you to experience the Adorable One? How faithful are you to His kingdom already within you? Do you understand His will and abide by it, right here where you are just as it is in heaven? Are you experiencing the living Bread of God feeding you? forgiving you? leading and delivering you? Are you accepting the reality that God is the only presence, the only power, the only glory there actually is?
If so, then you are sensing the Lord's Prayer - the Mind of Christ - exactly as Mrs. Eddy did. And she said that the spiritual sense of Jesus' Prayer is one that meets every human need - no exceptions!
If so, then bow in that silent intuitive, expectant, faithful, understanding of Lord's Prayer, and expect to see that Prayer bear fruit, bringing you into the true understanding - and experience - of God's all-harmonious, healthy, whole, and holy reality. Here. And now.
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