More on this book
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
July 10 - August 15, 2022
With panentheism, God is in the universe, and the universe is in God.
Panentheism is a way of saying that God is both right here and out there.
Buckminster Fuller was the first person I heard say that God was a verb rather than a noun.
God is less like an object and more like process—the Creative Urge and the Evolutionary Impulse.
Esalen
God is not a “being”
“You Better Start Kissing Me”: Throw away All your begging bowls at God’s door, For I have heard the Beloved Prefers sweet threatening shouts,
Something on the order of: “Hey, Beloved, My heart is a raging volcano Of love for you You better start kissing me— Or Else!”35
As one sage directed at the man seeking guidance, “You have clearly lived a remarkable life, achieving great things. Do you think there’s any chance of you getting over yourself?” That is why Jesus said that to find our true self we must deny our false self.
Our divinity is buried under a bucketful of ego.
When No one is looking I swallow deserts and clouds And chew on mountains knowing
They are sweet Bones! When no one is looking and I want To kiss God I just lift my own hand To My
M...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
we need this personal relationship to our Source because we are spiritual beings. To
Leaving out the Intimate Face of God invites us to narcissism because we confuse our ego with our True Self. Our ego would like nothing more than to think of itself as God. As one fellow said, “I aced the narcissism test. I got every single question right!”
“Have you accepted yourself as your own personal savior?”
The Spirit has even more to teach us here
the first followers of Jesus left out or misunderstood some of who Jesus was and what he taught. They did this because they were at a lower level of spiritual development than Jesus was.
Another factor was that soon the growing cadre of official church leaders actually suppressed some of the early understanding of Jesus, especially the Sacred Center within us all, because it was threatening to their ecclesiastical power.
Believing that Jesus was the unique and only Son of God prevents us from recognizing our own divinity and acting as the fully human and fully divine Jesus in the world today.
standpoint. Just as the idea of Trinity came from the
must awaken to the Inner Face of God, my own True Self.
Cosmic Christ
propelled to love for all conscious beings.
“Intimate God, you are always with me.” 51
“Inner God: I am the light of the world.”
Health, not heresy
In Jesus, the early Christians believed that God had moved out of the Holy of Holies to be near us. Jesus was called “Emmanuel,” which means “God with us.”4
as
First, God moved from out there to close by. Second, God moved from close by to inside of us. Third, God moved from inside of us to as us. Each time we have to let go of a little more of that terrible baggage we have had God carrying around. Those who haven’t let go of the old baggage around God still can’t see God in them, much less AS them.
The greatest cognitive block to our spiritual growth is the belief that Jesus is the totally unique and only Son of God. (The other block is a psychological one—our emotional woundedness. See Chapter 16.)
The serpent said to Eve that if she ate of the fruit of the tree of good and evil, “your eyes will be opened and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”
But the serpent was actually telling the truth!
Genesis not as a story of the fall of humankind but of the emergence of humankind.
“Jesus said to them, ‘You are the light of the world.’
“Whoever believes in me will do the works I do, and even greater ones.”
Jesus had a different view of us. He believed that we could evolve to the
spiritual level he inhabited and even beyond it. He not only believed this, he taught it.
I think Paul is behind in his spiritual development possibly because of his Baptist upbringing.
The writer of Hebrews says, “He was like us in every respect.”16 The writer is emphasizing that Jesus was human, exactly as we are human.
Jesus prayed, “As you, Father-Mother, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us . . . so that they may be one, as we are one, I am in them and you are in me.”17 Here was Jesus’ fervent prayer that we would realize our divinity —our oneness with God is exactly like he was one with God. Historian Elaine Pagels says that the kingdom “symbolizes a state of transformed consciousness.”18
looking forward
How about now?
Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274 C.E.) wrote,
it not written in your law, “I said, you are gods”? If those to whom the word of God came were called “gods”—and the scripture cannot be annulled—can you say that the one whom God has
sanctified and sent into the world is blaspheming because I said, “I am the Child of God”?27 He reminds them, “And the scripture cannot be annulled.”
We have been deeply conditioned by a distorted form of Christianity.
And it took him a long time to open his eyes.
C. S. Lewis
Paul was not saying that. He was saying that if you look inside to see who really lives there, it is not the I of the ego which you find, but rather the
I of the Universal Christ.
It is read into the texts because traditional Christianity cannot
tolerate the real divinity of humankind.
