Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Keith Giles
Read between
September 13 - September 22, 2022
When you speak of all you know of God – Which is nothing – You speak more of yourself Than of God. But when you speak Of all you do not know of God – Which is everything – You speak, at last Of the One who transcends knowledge.
“What is fear? Nonacceptance of uncertainty. If we accept that uncertainty it becomes an adventure.” RUMI
we do know that Jesus warned us that “in this life you will have trouble.” So, trouble comes to everyone. We all have to go through hard times, no matter who we are, or how much faith we have, or how spiritual we may be.
The Gospel is not about acquiring knowledge that fills our brain. It’s about encountering a God who fills our heart and transforms our soul from the inside out.
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our faith is primarily about how we live, not what we know. Knowing is fine. It’s obviously important. But, without the practice of our faith each day, that faith is worthless.
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To know God is to know wonder. To experience God is to become acquainted with awe. To approach God, one must come emptyhanded.
Of course, the real danger of becoming certain about God is that we inevitably end up creating a version of God in our minds that looks and behaves a lot like us. We construct a false image of the Divine that hates the same people we hate and affirms everything we already are. This is not the real God. It’s the one we invent out of thin air. As Henri Rousseau famously observed, “God created man in His own image and then man returned the favor.”
Have you ever found a quiet place, turned off your phone, focused on your breathing, and just spent an hour or so in silence?
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When we are quiet, wisdom floods into the empty space. When we simply rest in God’s presence, our spirit begins to resonate at the frequency of the Divine.
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our fundamental self is not just inside the skin. It’s everything around us with which we connect.”
Before we can embrace mystery, we must first embrace the truth, which is that, when it comes to God, we know almost nothing about God.
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If our primary understanding of God is measured in quantity of information, we must confess that our information is vastly limited. Our finite minds cannot fully comprehend an infinite reality.
we need to learn how to shift our perspective from knowing God informationally to know God experientially. This requires us to become open to encounters with the Divine that inspire ecstasy and defy mere explanation. This, my friends, is where real theology begins.
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Simply put, the very best expression of true theology is love. But this can only happen if learn to loosen our grip on certainty and tighten our grip on exploring the implications of loving—God and others—without fear.
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Information is about accuracy. Transformation is about growth. Information is about being right. Transformation is about being Christlike.
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“The funny thing about my worldview is: no matter how many times it changes, I’m always right!” JOSHUA LAWSON
as Richard Rohr has said, “God is always bigger than the boxes we build for God, so we should not waste too much time protecting our boxes.”
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Who we are remains the same, even if what we believe changes.
This, I believe, is why Jesus told us, “Unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the Kingdom of God.” (Matt. 18:3) This may sound harsh, but it’s not an arbitrary prohibition or rule. It’s more like saying, “If you want to be a lifeguard, you have to learn to swim,”
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Buddha: “Consider others as yourself.” (Dhammapada 10:1) Jesus: “Do to others as you would have them do to you.” (Luke 6:31)
Rumi who was a 13th century Persian poet and Sufi mystic who wrote beautiful sayings like these: “Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.”
fascinatingly similar sayings to the ones we hear in Christ spoken of in ancient Egyptian proverbs like these: “The Kingdom of Heaven is within you: and whosever shall know himself shall find it.” “Know the world in yourself. Never look for yourself in the world, for this would be to project your illusion.”
God’s voice is everywhere. Signs of God’s presence, and truth are hidden in plain sight for those who have eyes to see and ears to hear.
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“If you understand it, it’s not God.” ST. AUGUSTINE
All of our theology falls short. Every doctrine is incomplete.
the question Einstein poses is this: Could the physics of Time somehow be a similar illusion? Could it be that what we see, and even experience, as the passage of Time moving forward from past to present to future, is actually not reality?
Time exists all at once across all possible dimensions of Space. So, Time doesn’t have a particular direction, and there’s no preferred “present” reality. Time is just a dimension, like Space, and we only observe the flow of time in one direction—similar
Time isn’t linear. The Past, the Present, and the Future already exist in one single block. Scientists even refer to this as the “Block Universe” theory for this very reason.
“When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change” MAX PLANCK, NOBEL PHYSICIST
gratitude, it turns out, is an excellent hack for escaping the negative feedback loops generated by our spiritual deconstruction process.
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As researchers from the University of California at Davis recently discovered, subjects who kept a daily journal of things they were grateful for experienced dramatically better results than those in the study who either kept a journal of negative experiences, or wrote about whatever they wanted.
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One recent neurological experiment at UCLA used magnetic resonance imaging to measure brain activity as participants experienced gratitude. What they found was “increased activity in the anterior cingulate cortex and medial prefrontal cortex— those areas associated with moral and social cognition, empathy, reward and value judgement.”
As long as we can maintain a loose hold on Truth and allow ourselves to sink deeper into the endless deep of an infinite God, we’re on the right track. But, once we arrive at the solution; once we believe we have achieved our goal, our fascination with the beautiful mystery is done and we begin to shift our energies into defending our rightness and opposing those who disagree with us.
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“All of our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance.” T.S. ELIOT
What biologist Albert Frank discovered was a fascinating symbiotic relationship between the roots of trees and plants with fungal colonies that grow around them.
roughly 90 percent of all land-based plants are connected to this vast communications network.
In fact, memory is something we recreate in our imaginations and it’s less like a video camera filming reality and more like a Wikipedia page that you—and others—can edit and update over time. That’s right, other people can edit your memories in ways you may not even be aware of.
there is a wider spectrum of light that our eyes cannot see, and a larger range of sound that we cannot hear. It’s all out there; it’s going on all around us, but it’s an aspect of reality that we are largely incapable of experiencing without technological assistance.
The truth, and the world around us, is more wondrous, strange and perplexing than we can possibly imagine: Trees communicate. Memories fluctuate. Reality itself might be something we hallucinate.
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Historians have noted a strange phenomenon that some call “The Law of Dual Discovery” or “The Multiple Independent Discovery Effect.’ This is a term used to describe the tendency for certain discoveries to have more than one source, even when separated by thousands of miles, without interaction or communication of any kind.
this theory overlaps quite well with Plato’s ideas of an Ideal Form where all material objects and ideals originate from, and especially with Carl Jung’s concept of the Collective Unconscious and maybe Hegel’s philosophy of the Spirit
according to Quantum Entanglement, individual particles are not truly separate from the whole. In other words: everything is connected.
according to Quantum Physics, observation changes the way particles behave. In other words: consciousness impacts the material world.
suppose all things, including atoms, are made of consciousness, instead! [Therefore, I conclude] the world is made of consciousness. Atoms are made of consciousness.”
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It’s not “Why does consciousness arise from matter?” it’s actually, “How does matter arise from consciousness?” Because, without consciousness, there is no matter.
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Mystics from all streams of faith throughout the ages have been telling us that the spiritual reality is the only true reality; that consciousness and the Eternal Self goes by many names: Atman (Buddhists), The Great Spirit (Native Americans), Brahman (Hindus), Inner Light (Quakers), etc.
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Quantum physics says no. When we are not looking [at an object, its] possibility wave spreads, albeit by a miniscule amount. When we look, the wave collapses instantly; thus the wave could not be in space-time … There is no object in space-time without a conscious subject looking at it … Nothing is outside of consciousness.”
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Our brains are quantum systems that constantly observe the outside world. This observation of the world around us literally creates the reality we see and experience.
The truth is, there is no “us and them” or “this and that”, there is only “us” and there is only “this” which is one interconnected reality that cannot be explained, nor denied.
All reality is the result of consciousness. All consciousness is the same consciousness, shared across all conscious reality.
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