Lord, make me a channel of thy peace;

that where there is hatred, I may bring love;

that where there is wrong, I may bring the spirit of forgiveness;

that where there is discord, I may bring harmony;

that where there is error, I may bring truth;

that where there is doubt, I may bring faith;

that where there is despair, I may bring hope;

that where there are shadows, I may bring light;

that where there is sadness, I may bring joy.

Lord, grant that I may seek rather to comfort than to be comforted;

to understand, than to be understood;

to love, than to be loved.

For it is by self-forgetting that one finds.

It is by forgiving that one is forgiven.

It is by dying that one awakens to eternal life.

Amen.

Reading this everyday (even multiple times a day) with the Jesus prayer and epicletic "Come, Holy Spirit" prayers*...can be helpful for remembering God.    And when you think about "the life of faith", it seems like that's all it really is: growing our "hearts" into consistently remembering God's Presence, "seeing" God in all things.

But to remember God...we must forget "ourselves."  The "false self" must utterly die.  The love of the world (realm of egoic desire and sensory self-definition) is antithetical to love of the Father (uncreated kenotic heartedness).  Basically, this means we have to escape the pull of our own tendencies for concious and unconscious self-orientation...that can grow into outright conditioned self-idolatry...which binds the ego-periphery into "biological hypostasis" of some type. God's commandments, (Loving the UNSEEN Uncreated Creator, Loving the SEEN neighbor as oneself ) are the cure for this...but can only be given to the humble spirit that realizes it's need for empowerment by God.  It's not the well that need a physician, but the sick...right?

Anyways...Constant remeberance of self in despair (ego-vortex of self-experience, self-reflection, and ego-centric "world creation") will LEAD TO increased forgetting of God...and accordingly, God's World and God's Presence in God's World.  (Adam actually trying to hide from God. )  This will invariably happen to the human "prosopon" in our sinful, fallen world...and forgetting of God WILL occur...

UNLESS...

our very innermost sense of selfhood...our deepest sense of "who I am"... is INEXTRICABLY RELATED TO God, making rememberance of self completely inseparable from rememberance of God (and vice versa).  Basically, this is the bi-polar assymetrical relationship between the empowered, created human spirit (and it's ego-periphery) and the Uncreated Holy Spirit of Christ-the-Logos.  [Digression: Maybe this is why names were important for Abraham's descendents.  When your ego-identification has God as it's premise, that goes a long way to help condition the mind to always think about God.]

Once a person's created localized sense of "I am" is truly BELIEVED to be insepably linked to the Uncreated, Non-localized "I Am"...they become truly "superhypostasized" (some would call this "individuation" ) becoming authentically existing personal beings who "see God" and are, thereby, free from nature.  One knows in one's spiritual bones that "whoever is united with the Lord is one with him in (S)pirit."

To lose our false sense of selfhood (I am "this")...is to gain our true personhood (I am in I Am)

It's to self-give and self-forget...that we may ever receive and remember God.  And, in so doing, reveal the divine life in the created order, mediating between Creation and Creator, in our simple fully human (meaning Holy Spirit empowered/lead) existence.

"Whoever finds their life will lose it, and whoever loses their life for my sake will find it."

Make sense?

*Come Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of your faithful and kindle in them the fire of your love. Send forth your Spirit and they shall be created. And You shall renew the face of the earth.

O, God, who by the light of the Holy Spirit, did instruct the hearts of the faithful, grant that by the same Holy Spirit we may be truly wise and ever enjoy His consolations, Through Christ Our Lord, Amen

Post Edited (One Love) : 11/6/2008 7:07:05 AM (GMT-6)

This looks JUST LIKE "Hypostasization", right? 

...

De Beausobre experienced the Presence of the Holy as that which grounded her selfhood beyond her context of nothingness. Thus, she experienced the fourth dimension of human being that is always intuitively present; in her case, it was manifest directly, or "revealed" in the face of nothingness, was transformed and the whole matter became redemptive.

--------------------

Post Edited (One Love) : 11/6/2008 7:39:55 AM (GMT-6)

Post Edited (One Love) : 11/6/2008 7:49:34 AM (GMT-6)

Post Edited (One Love) : 11/6/2008 7:59:59 AM (GMT-6)

...let me find this quote...Oh, yeah.  Evdokimov again...

It is not difficult to see that the mystical state transcends one's creaturely condition, through our participation in the divine. God is nearer to man that man is to himself; and life in the divine is more supernaturally natural to man than life simply in the human. In one who is baptized, Christ is an inner reality. This is the antinomian experience of nothingness and or absolute being. Although the gap of the ontological abyss is not eliminated, Being overcomes it by His presence: "By nature, I am a man, and god by grace."  A being, coming from nothingness, lives the conditions of the divine life. God transcends His own transcendence: "He appears suddenly, and without confusion, becomes one with me...My hands are those of an unhappy creature; I move my hand, and my hand is all Christ" (St. Symeon the New Theologian). Through such a descent--the parousia of Christ in the soul--the soul is formed in His image: "There is God, there are the angels, there life and the kingdom, there light, there the treasures of grace, there are all things." [From note: St. Macarius] This is what John of Damascus calls "the return of what is contrary to nature to what is proper to it."

One more...

"Secondly, it follows from this that Christ as Creator-Logos is to be envisaged, not as on the outside, but as on the inside of everything. It is a frequent fault of religious writers that they speak of the created universe as if it were an artifact of a Maker Who has, so to speak, produced it from without. God the Creator becomes the celestial Clock-maker Who sets the cosmic process in motion, winding up the clock, but then leaving it to continue ticking on its own. This will not do. It is important to avoid such images as the divine architect, builder or engineer, and to speak rather in terms of indwelling (without thereby excluding the dimension of divine transcendence). Creation is not something upon which God acts from the outside, but something through which he expresses Himself from within. Transcendent, He is also immanent; above and beyond creation, He is also its true inwardness, its 'within.' "

Bishop Kallistos of Diokleia

Post Edited (One Love) : 11/6/2008 8:11:09 AM (GMT-6)

Lotsa quotes. (Don't forget!  "Essence" is analogous to what we'd call "Spirit" )

-----------------------------------------------------------------

Our true nature is Essence. Essence and personality are not separate: personality exists in, and is made out of Essence. While we have a personality, it is only a part of the totality of our true Self. Most of the time we are entranced by our personality and do not remember our Essential nature, or who we really are.

...

We gradually learn to disidentify with the personality and to identify with our Essence, our true self. This, of course, requires that we be able to recognize our Essence and to distinguish our personality trances from it. We cannot accomplish this by judging, disliking, or trying to get rid of the personality. In fact, those very desires and attitudes are part of personality and are not characteristic of Essence. When the personality is seen in its proper context, its true function reveals itself.

...

At the beginning of our transformational work, it is easy to feel frustrated and overwhelmed. It is also easy to begin to see the personality as an enemy that must be defeated since it is, after all, the repository and residue of so much "baggage" from our past, with all of its hurts, damage, and disappointments. When we are tempted to think this way, it is good to realize that the personality is not separate from us—in fact, it is an important and legitimate part of ourselves: the problem is simply that we mistake the part for the whole. Personality depends on our identifying with certain states, feelings, thoughts, and reactions even though whenever we do so, we experience ourselves as less than the totality of who and what we really are.

The spirituality of the Enneagram does not divide us into good (Essence) and bad (personality), but simply recognizes that when we are identified with our personalities, we forget that there is much more to us. The personality has the function of closing us down so that we can feel more defended against a threatening and uncertain world. At one time in our lives, in childhood, this response was adaptive and necessary. We had to identify with whatever qualities we found in ourselves in order to defend ourselves more efficiently and to find our place in the world.

But if we were able to stop identifying with our personality right now, who would we be? What would guide our actions? Who or what would be speaking in us? If, all of a sudden, the "autopilot" that directs many of our actions is no longer in charge, how would we be able to live?

There are no predetermined answers to these questions since we are not talking about finding a better formula or more rules to live by. We are talking about transformation—changing our state of Being—which requires being aware in the present moment. This inevitably leads to learning how to interfere with our habitual patterns, which in turn entails some degree of discomfort. But if we are willing to allow this discomfort, we can suddenly emerge from the tangle of reactions, plans, self-images, and tensions that constitute our regular life and realize that we are here. We exist. We are real. When we experience this recognition, it is like walking out of a fog bank.

Of course, learning to be more present is an art and takes practice—in fact, that's what spiritual practices are about. They help us cultivate awareness so that we can become more present to our lives and the miracles which are unfolding around us at every moment. Because the personality operates "in the dark: and depends on tension and identification, when we become present, it cannot operate in its usual automatic way and the deeper qualities of our heart, mind, and body—our Essential nature—manifest themselves. In this state, we see reality more clearly, and when we are in touch with reality, truth governs. In the land of truth, there are no contradictions, no conflicts, no hindrances, and no fears. But first, we must learn to be present.

The personality is always composed of a small fraction of the total range of our potentials. It contains imitations of the real, more expansive qualities of our Essential nature which include joy, love, peace, compassion, strength, understanding, and many other priceless qualities. Moreover, our Essence awakens us to the beauty all around us—to the gifts of nature and the miracle of other people. In every moment, there are treasures and sources of delight, if we could only open to them. In the world of personality, we are too filled with our own projects and preoccupations, worries and hopes to notice the exquisite pleasure of being alive and the astounding variety of life.

But as we expand more fully into our Essential nature, our senses are awakened—seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching, intuiting. The world is more immediate and has a deeper impact on us; everything becomes more vivid and alive. We have all had moments in which a veil seems to have been removed so that the enchantment of even the smallest things touches us deeply. We experience the world once again with the innocence of a child, with all of the awe and mystery of life restored.

When we are functioning in personality, however, to varying degrees, our attention is caught up in imagination and is looking to the future or toward the past. Personality is always in some kind of reaction to the present moment. When we are functioning in Essence, we are grounded, present, and receptive to the moment. We see precisely what is necessary, and with exquisite economy, we are able to do it without unnecessary effort or resistance. We are capable, substantial, and real.

Further, because it is not what is real in us, but merely a construct in our minds, personality does not have any authority or power in itself. When we are lost in personality, it is not surprising that we often feel powerless, confused, and unsafe because we are basing our identity on an artificial construct. (If we are identified with something that is not real, then many things are going to be extremely threatening.) Our entire identity structure has been built up in our memory and imagination, whereas our true power and authority comes from our Essence, from our contact with the Divine. And yet, ironically, we fear and resist opening to that which is most real in us. When we trust in the process and give ourselves over to it, however, our authentic self comes forth. The result is real integrity, love, authenticity, creativity, understanding, guidance, joy, power, and serenity—all of the qualities we are forever demanding that personality supply.

The part of this process that is so difficult to understand is that we do not have to do anything to experience our true nature. The almost magical part is that our old personality patterns change without effort on our part in proportion to the depth of awareness that we bring to them. All we need to do is to stop identifying with the agendas of our personality. The effort is in waking up and letting go. The rest will take care of itself.

Thus, no matter how entranced in our personality we are, the amazing thing about Inner Work is that things begin to change rapidly as we bring awareness to the compulsive aspects of our personalities. The more we allow ourselves to feel the pain of our self-abandonment, the Essential qualities that we have been longing for begin to arise in us. The unfinished business of childhood begins to resolve itself in our psyches and our hearts begin to heal. When this happens, the ego matures and becomes a suitable "vessel" for further transformation. But until some degree of personality completion has taken place regarding the losses and vicissitudes of childhood, any spiritual attainment we have will be either fleeting or illusory.

Of course, the very fact of being receptive to spirituality can vastly accelerate the process of healing the deficits in our early development, provided we not use spirituality as an evasion for going through the whole healing process. And, by the same token, using the tools of psychology to heal the gaps in our development gives us the capacity to sustain spiritual states of consciousness. These two processes—the psychological and the spiritual—are therefore connected and need not be considered separate things; they are really stages in the full development of the complete human being.

From this perspective, saying that one is interested in spirituality but not psychology (or vice versa) is like saying that you want to learn to be a writer but are not interested in spelling or grammar, or that you want to be a doctor but do not care about biology. Psychology that does not address peoples' spiritual hungers is not going to lead to any complete and satisfying result. It is like climbing only half way up a mountain, or taking a dish out of the oven when it is only half-baked. We still get some benefits, but do not achieve the final goal. Psychology without spirituality is arid and ultimately meaningless, while spirituality without grounding in psychological work leads to vanity and illusions. Either way, disappointment and deception result. To be most effective, spirituality and psychology need to go hand in hand to reinforce the best in each other.

Another challenge is the common belief that to live in Essence is to have left personality entirely behind. This is not the case since both personality and essence are integral parts of each other, two sides of the same coin—the whole self.

...

As one becomes liberated from the negative aspects of personality, Essence becomes developed. Or, more aptly, the balance between Essence and personality shifts from personality to Essence until more of the self is living out of its Essence (that is, authentically, from the depths of its being). The personality remains ready to be employed as a useful and necessary tool, but only as an extension and expression of the deeper, essential self—a self that, because it is an expression of Essence, remains unfathomable to the ego mind. Without some degree of personality to express the self in ordinary daily life, we could not communicate with each other and, ultimately, our Essence would be unrecognized and remain undeveloped.

The full development and expression of the true self is what we seek, and this cannot be done in a vacuum. Because we cannot live without form, our human Essence must express itself through the forms of our personality type, just as talents must be expressed in action if talent is to be developed. A dancing master does not become so perfect a dancer that the master no longer dances. Dancing is not forsworn as evidence of having achieved perfection: on the contrary, mastery is expressed by losing the self in the dance.

If we are fortunate, we are nurtured and guided in our development toward a stable, well-integrated ego, one that is therefore "ripe" for transformation. The idea is not to return to the infantile state, but to mature as adults so that we can move ahead with the process of transformation. In the famous phrase of Jack Engler, "You have to be somebody before you can be nobody," and we must develop a whole, well-integrated personality before we can really "give it up" in the transformational process. The healthy, well-functioning human ego plays a crucial role in the process of self-realization, and so our developmental deficiencies must be healed if our transformative experiences are to have any lasting effect.

Thus, personality is as necessary to the development of the soul as Essence, and it is to be used for living in the world and for contributing to it. The aspects of personality that are more congruent with our Essence are the healthy personality states we find at Levels 1 to 3 for each type. Moreover, those personality states themselves develop to become finer expressions of our essential self as we continue to evolve. Once we have begun to integrate and to live in Essence more habitually, we become the master of our ego and are increasingly able to express ourselves freely and appropriately. Ego no longer controls us: Essence speaks through personality.

...

The Enneagram guides us toward nothing less than learning how to consciously surrender the ego-self of personality to the greater Self so that we can become conscious participants in the sacred mystery of life. In reality, it entails the surrender of nothing—our personality—in order to receive the gift of everything—the life of the Spirit. But the first step on that path involves being willing to observe ourselves so that we can stop playing out the unconscious dictates of our personality.

The process of growth by whatever name it is called—living in Essence, the growth of virtue, or the movement toward integration—is evolutionary, an upward spiral that has no final state of completion since to become completely possessed of all virtues would be to become God—an impossibility. (Our call, in a religious frame of reference, is to become "like God"—to attain some degree of the virtues that God alone possesses to an absolute degree.) If some see this never-ending quest for increasing virtue (or personal strengths) as a frustrating chase after an unreachable goal, it is because they have not experienced the deep fulfillment that results from self-realization. If integration is thought of as merely collecting a set of impractical virtues as if they were merit badges being added to a collection, then of course the enterprise will be unsatisfying.

But the true situation is far from this. Acquiring the strengths of virtue brings about the enlargement of the person. By acting virtuously and by "living in Essence," the person becomes capable of living more deeply and consciously as master of the self. New depths are being opened in the integrating person. The creation of inner resources, the experience of oneself as enlarged, more potent, and creative is tremendously fulfilling. In this sense, the saying that "virtue is its own reward" has new meaning: the reward of virtue is the happiness that comes from the realization that we are living out of our essential self and that in doing so we are bringing more of ourselves into being.

Yet it will always remain true that realizing the value of self-transcendence can be found only in the individual's innermost heart. In the moment of self-transcendence, we discover that over and above liberation from the ego, self-transcendence gives us another, deeper reward by creating both the capacity and the desire for more of itself.

By integrating, we are constantly moving in the direction of increasing life. And nothing in life is more fulfilling than cooperating in the process of creation. Integrating persons become co-creators of that most vast yet intimate mystery, the human spirit. From only a psychological point of view, the capacity to be a co-creator bestows on human nature enormous dignity. But from a spiritual point of view, this capacity has a more profound meaning because to move in the direction of increasing life is to move toward Being itself. With each step we take toward Being, we also find that Being supports our quest. In the end, the quest for the self and its deepest Essence culminates in meeting the Divine.

Post Edited (One Love) : 11/11/2008 12:49:33 AM (GMT-6)

One Love's response...


"The eye with which I see God is the same with which God sees me. My eye and God's eye is one eye, and one sight, and one knowledge, and one love."
Meister Eckhart


Thought:

If the ultimate ground of things is CONSCIOUSNESS (because "all is subject" and there IS no subjectivity at all without consciousness)...

then "Who" is the ultimate subject that experiences of all subjective experience that exists?

As I see it, it can only be the HOLY SPIRIT OF GOD-THE-LOGOS, who is inseparable from consciousness.

(God's "personhood" PRESUPPOSES consciousness...and God doesn't have consciousness...God IS consciousness.)

Why think this is so?

1)God is omnipresent, meaning there is no where that "consciousness" is not. Everything that exists is grounded, sustained, and known in God's consciousness.

and...

2)God forms the DEEPEST INTERIORITY of any subjective experience. That includes ALL subjective experience in Creation. It is this deepest interiority that we ground ourselves in...discovering that "place" to be God.
I could put it this way.

At the end of the day, what is the ANSWER to the question "Who am I?"

Possible hints...I'm trying not to overdo quotes here. Really. But their just so dang ON POINT and POWERFUL...

-------------------------------

I ask a sensual man, “Who are you?” and he replies, “I am I,” and he thinks of his body.

I ask a thinking man, “Who are you?” and he replies, “I see two sides in myself and I make my way between them, associating first with one and then the other,” and he is thinking of his instinctive and conscious soul.

I ask a spiritual man, “Who are you?” and he replies, “There is someone in the depths of my soul. I stretch out my hand to grasp him but see that to do that I would need arms longer than the universe. Ask him who I am.”

St. Nicholai of Zicha (Velimirovich)

http://fatherstephen.wordpress.com/2007/12/04/who-am-i/

One of the great tragedies of the modern world is that, as it seeks to define itself apart from God, it is defined as so much less than God would have it be. It is at this point that atheism or secularism are the least humanistic of philosophies. The gross inequalities that follow us all from birth - despite every government proclamation to the contrary - cannot erase the fact that some are born wealthy, some smart, some beautiful (all by the standards of the world) and that every survey conducted has to honestly admit that those people who may be so described get better jobs, are elected easier and are simply liked more than others. For the vast majority of people, life will not reward them with more than an opportunity to watch “the lives of the rich and famous.”

Only in the proclamation that God has become man is the value of being a man underwritten - indeed the value of being any human being. The God Who made us all has become one of us and in such a union has also united us to Himself in His exaltation. Compared to that exaltation, every human excellence is as dung. Whether beauty, intelligence or wealth - all will perish in the grave and become nothing more than the bread of worms. This is the gift of a world without God - worms.

But to the very least of my brethren, I can say, “God has not only created you in His image, but has predestined you to be conformed to that image.” Your destiny in Christ is to become as He is. I can say this to the ugly, the poor, the disenfranchised, the foolish, the stupidest sinner (people like me). For all are welcome.

What attraction, other than the weakness of a mere decades’ latest bout of “rationality,” could a philosophy of worms hold? For time has already proven that the “supermen” who seek to reign as gods (believing there is no true God) will treat the rest of us as worms - mere farms for the harvesting of our stem-cells - or whatever their godless schemes may next desire.

Better to see a child - the poorest of the poor - and say, “It would take arms longer than the universe to reach the depths of who this child is.”

-----------------------------------------

Not only that, but I saw the relative despair that my grandfather fell into with the death of his wife.  As much as he loved Jesus...and as much peace as the Spirit did grant him, he still felt terribly "alone" and "disempowered" without her to some extent. And God showed mercy through PEOPLE coming to "see about him from time to time."  To the extent that he was not living in "dispassion" in God's Perpetual Presence...he mourned the loss of his wife.  And from seeing him and his struggle, I saw the possible end result of the two-storey view of Christianity that he and my whole family had.

Does all this make sense?

PS: There was a repeated dream that God kept giving me from the time I married Aki.  It only stopped about a year or so ago.  Basically, I'm in a church and Aki's in a casket.  I walk down the aisle to the casket...and I have a Catholic priest's garb on with white collar and all.  I walk up to the casket, look at her and feel extremely sad and angry.   I take off the white collar, place it on Aki's chest, and walked out of the House of God for good. And I knew. I did not have the strength of Ezekiel.*  I did NOT have unconditional love of God. I would leave God if he took my wife away from me.  I saw the truth...I was an idolater of the worst kind. As I look back, I really think the Spirit was trying to warn me...even then.  I started having this dream BEFORE Aki wrote the poem above...and shamefully, a significant time afterwards!

*The word of the LORD came to me:  "Son of man, with one blow I am about to take away from you the delight of your eyes. Yet do not lament or weep or shed any tears.  Groan quietly; do not mourn for the dead. Keep your turban fastened and your sandals on your feet; do not cover your mustache and beard or eat the customary food [of mourners]."

     So I spoke to the people in the morning, and in the evening my wife died. The next morning I did as I had been commanded.

Post Edited (One Love) : 11/11/2008 6:59:11 AM (GMT-6)

Post Edited (One Love) : 11/11/2008 7:31:18 AM (GMT-6)