Only to our eyes is Jesus dead and gone; he’s still around.

States are things you can taste but places you go to.

Stages are places you come from.

The journey emerges from God. We all participate in the Divine desire to manifest.

Altruism is the only path to God but only provided it is accompanied by self-knowledge. We need to be constantly sure that the need to give comes from a deeper and deeper compassion. The one you are helping is not below you.

Love your neighbour as yourself. Your neighbour is your self. But then you see that there is no self, no neighbour; you are both one.

When is a personal narrative not just more story? Personal narrative can be useful if it helps clarify a situation. Ask:

– What is the motivation?
– How is this helpful?
– What is the need of the hearer?
– Does the narrative serve the point?

We tend to use our personal narratives for personal expression but they work better for communication. Use personal narratives for service not for identification. They are useful up to the point that they are not useful any more. Most of us locate our “wealth” in our personal narrative.

I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present,
nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation,
will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

(Romans 8:38,39)
  • Where am I with that?
  • How much is that real to me?

Keep within. And when they say, ‘Look here or look there is Christ,
go not forth, for Christ is within you.
And those who try to draw your minds away from the teaching inside you,
are opposed to Christ.
For the measure’s within, and the light of God is within,
and the pearl is within, though hidden.                                                                                                           

(George Fox 1624-1691)

Pandemic –

For the privileged developed world, COVID exposed our collective terror of death and our brutally distorted relationship with life.

COVID has revealed our collective and individual failure to live by love and to live beyond fear.

COVID was a double wound: people were dying and people were so terrified of death that they lost touch with their basic humanity.

Where does this massive fear of death come from?

It is an operational hazard of the mental structure of consciousness which operates with a sense of boundariedness = the shadow side of the gift of self-reflective consciousness when I function from my story of myself, my nucleated self-hood which says: “I exist;” “I have a ‘me’;” “I am going to die;” “There will be a time when I do not exist.”

Our death is already in our life. Rather than seeing it as something alien, integrate it into life. Death is in life; life is in death.

We need to atone for our disordered relationship to life and to death.

Three things are now collectively on the conscience of humanity:

1. the privileged immediately sequestered themselves, removed themselves to places where they could socially distance (went on zoom, ordered on-line) and claimed the high moral ground, leaving the poor to fend for themselves while they delivered our goods.

2. we locked up our churches. The entitled went to Zoom-church, which did have its good qualities in broadening the community but left people with fewer sacred places to go to sit in quiet.

3. we allowed our dead to die alone.

The pandemic is forcing us to think collectively. Can’t do cosmic salvation with an 18c. individualistic vision.