Responsibility, Time and Miracles
When praying, we can have all the right ingredients in place—humility and confidence, which together equal faith—but a certain kind of barrier can foul up the works for us.
It’s long been known that whatever our attention is fixed on we tend to get.
My late father helped to clarify this by pointing out that we have three vectors at work, each with their own purpose. Confusing or conflating them has been the source of great difficulty. The three are,
Attention,Awareness, andIntention.
For miracles, we need attention and intention to be aligned, but awareness to be pointing in a different direction. That’s the trick that allows a creation (prayer) to persist in the current time stream.
Karma can fix our attention on things that tend to block miracles from going according to plan. That’s where responsibility comes into play as a solution.
Christ said that knowing the truth will set us free. That’s one clue.
Another clue was given to us when Jesus advised us to turn the other cheek.
Still another clue can be found in Genesis 2:2–3. It involves God resting from His creation. And here we find the powerful, spiritual technology which makes our universe possible. This is where a creation, which initially exists outside of time—essentially persisting for merely an instant—gains infinite potential persistence. In other words, this is where the time dimension is added to a creation.
The Buddhists refer to this as “allowing.” And this is where a pure idea—the “Word” of God—gains the darkness or taintedness of dichotomous, or action-reaction existence.
(I know that’s a mouthful, but bear with me. With this article, I’m compressing 70 years of spiritual insights into one tiny article. Hopefully, it will be clearer by the end. Regardless, please let me know if you have questions about any of this.)
Thus, resting (or “allowing”) is one end of a creation’s existence—at the beginning.
Finding the truth of a thing resides at the other end of a thing’s existence—at the moment of Truth, where the thing ceases to persist and returns to the timeless realm.
[image error]Pocket watch, savonette-type. Photo: Isabelle Grosjean (CC BY-SA 3.0).
In a way, Truth “sucks” the persistence, or time, out of a thing. And a thing can be a physical object, a natural phenomenon, or a condition or state of existence (e.g. turmoil, hatred or confusion). Another way to look at this disappearing act is to view the object’s time dimension as an infinitely thin sheet of paper parallel to the time stream while it persists, but turning 90° to the time stream when its truth is discovered. Thus, the infinitely thin “object” lasts only for an infinitely thin slice of time and is then gone as time moves forward.
But what is this “Truth?” How do we nurture and develop it? How do we control it?
Look again at the nature of creation—the specific pattern of actions.
God gets an idea and then rests from it. In a sense, He’s walking away from it. He’s allowing it to run along on its own as if it created itself. Perhaps, inside the object is a kernel of the creative impetus itself—a sort of inertia or endless loop of creation as the object rolls along from the past into the future.
And if we stand back and look at the conceptual shape of this last paragraph, we see that God is abdicating responsibility for His creation. This is what gives it persistence.
Thus, taking responsibility is the same as finding an object’s Truth.
The Four Elements of God
While working on my current book, Four Elements of God, I realized that those four elements can be combined to define or describe other, more complex conditions, states or attitudes. The initial four elements are,
Unconditional Love,Perfect Responsibility,Utter Humility, andFearless Confidence.
For instance, combining humility and confidence gives us faith, as in the faith to move mountains.
Combining responsibility and confidence yields competence. Thus, we come to realize the profound truth that incompetence is an effect of egoistic selfishness. When we understand this idea on a deeply spiritual level, this can be quite liberating and empowering.
This approach to understanding is similar to the four natural elements, which were misinterpreted by the Ancient Greeks, like Empedocles, and which are used in our modern, technological world to measure the physical realm.
Space (air),Time (water),Energy (fire), andMass (earth).
Using and combining these elements gives us things like distance, area, volume, density, power, force, velocity, acceleration and others.
Opposites in More Ways Than One
[image error]Wooden hourglass as a measure of time. Photo: S. Sepp (CC BY-SA 3.0).
Philosophers have long considered the idea that spirit and physical nature were opposites. Some have characterized this physical world as a training ground for the spiritual children of God.
Working on my current book a couple of days ago, I suddenly realized that the four physical elements may indeed be opposites of the four spiritual elements. Consider the following comparisons:
Love is closeness; space is distance.Responsibility is freedom; time is entrapment.Humility is stillness; energy is motion and a braggart.Confidence is go or accomplishment; mass is stop or failure.
Do you see this? If not, remember that our human languages were not built to discuss such spiritual things. Virtually all of our vocabulary and definitions are based on physical things, relations and conditions. Take these comparisons from a spiritual viewpoint and “see” the intended meaning behind the words. Still have questions? Ask!
Learning these ideas on an intellectual level is insufficient. That is as good as getting a rock to pray or attempting to get a computer to build a real universe instead of merely a virtual one. Such things are not going to happen.
Instead, we must learn these things spiritually. We must exercise these spiritual muscles, practicing and perfecting God’s four elements so that we can come closer to Him.
God is a constant force of Loving Generosity, but we cannot receive His gifts if we remain a universe away from Him. This is the big lesson from this physical university.
So, it seems to me, now, that this physical realm was built to be a mirror, negative image of God—opposite in every way possible. Our examination comes in the form of a simple choice.
Physical reality seduces and lies. It holds out the promise of pleasure, but it’s all entirely deterministic (a trap), with fleeting pleasures and far more common suffering, because of our distance from God.
Hungering for the pleasures of this world traps us in the natural realm as a cog in the machine of physical reality. While we decide to be a cog, we are driven only by desires, fears and pains.
Only when we decide to give up our pursuit of physical pleasures and flight from physical pains can we move into the unattached viewpoint of spirit—pure freedom.
This is our only dimension of free will—To be or not to be—and choosing to remain a human—a slave to physical commensurability—we are choosing not to be. For the physical ego was the death we chose in the Garden of Heaven. Ego is the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Ego is the dichotomous, action-reaction bone and blood of our false, physical identity.
Only by being reborn of the spirit can we truly be. Sadly, too many Christians have a dim understanding of being “born again.” For many of them, their feelings remain glib and shallow and not truly spiritual. A conversation with them reveals the attachment to ego, rather than to the humility of perpetual learning.
Being a human is spiritual death. Being spirit while operating a human body, we still risk falling back if we give in to the temptations of ego.
The solution to this problem remains one of combining all four elements of God. The foremost element, of course, is one of Unconditional Love, focusing outward away from self. This is our spiritual desire to give to others. The solvent to any barrier is Perfect Responsibility, for with it, we find Truth and gain freedom. The antidote to ego is Utter Humility. And the power that drives it all is Fearless Confidence, tempered by Utter Humility, an unquenchable Responsibility and an undying Love of others.
