Seeking the God within

                        Seeking the God within           

Armstrong - myth comes to us not by thought but disciplined practice. For me, this is the heart of the matter. What is the disciplined practice? How can we, who practice, reach God not out there, but in the depths of our consciousness. The experience of the ineffable doesn't arise in us just because we

have the desire, although that is important. Just to add to this. We live in a society loaded with incoming information from all sides. This info results in thought after thought after thought, most of them useless. We have, though, become addicted to the media that feeds us and gives us the high. Coming to the deepest level of being requires a commitment to an inner life that does not exclude thought but sees thoughts for what they are and what they do. She says that the reduction of thought to silence is really what theology is about. Right on. However, allowing that silence to arise is also part of the practice, and what comprises that practice?

Abandon the modern appetite for certainty. I think this is where the argument I had with you over hope enters. Not only is life, itself, impermanent, but so is everything else in the relative world.

            Reminds me of some lines from TS Eliot:

I say to the soul, be still and wait without hope. For hope would be for the wrong thing. For us there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.

These point to being open to whatever comes and accept whatever is. We might as well since we don't know. The impermanence and uncertainty of life in all it's aspects remind us that thereis no other way to happiness or contentment.            Religion, spiritual life, as Armstrong points out, does not provide us with the answers but does enable us to live creatively, etc. in the midst of the uncertainty. When she talks about joy, peace, etc., she is referring, I think, not to ideas and thoughts but experience which can flow from thoughts. The true experience of anything is ineffable, can not be described. Like more modern poetry, the important element is not description, but the experience ones has when reading the poem, an indescribable experience. Again, she talks about engagement. The challenge in an age when we are more bombarded with ideas, etc. is how to....something religions needs to take seriously.

In the ultimate sphere, awareness of the ineffable God, more than hope, but faith that yes, there are moments when I can experience this "formless Awareness, or Presence. When she says again that religion is a practical discipline and its insights are derived from spiritual exercises,etc....I wonder what she advises for engaging in that discipline. When she asks, What is the question we ask - it's about what we desire most. That can really take us on a long, long journey.