01

Learning to be alive in the time left for living is a simple matter of transforming your relationship with yourself and with your life. You've been doing it all wrong. Reconciliation is a two-way street. We have to reconcile ourselves to the world, and we have to reconcile the world to ourselves. Here's the catch: The world is not going to change until you do. When you change you, you change the world. And everything flows from the shift you make within to begin seeing what you look at. Starting with you. What we see depends on how we look. More specifically, on what we look for. How much time do you spend looking for beauty in yourself and in the world? What is beautiful about you? What are your most beautiful features? Where are you stopped and astounded by something beautiful that you do? Spend the rest of the day looking for the beautiful things about you, for the beautiful things you do. And notice how you make this difficult by interfering with the process with judgment, opinion, disapproval and censorship. Seeing has to be just seeing! Seeing beauty is seeing beautifully! Take judgment, opinion, disapproval and censorship out of the way and everything is beautiful. See? Start seeing beauty everywhere you look!
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02

The problem with theology across the board, around the world, throughout the cosmos, is that God is right and we are wrong. In the Old Testament, Abraham turns all of this on its ear with his declaration: "Shall not the Judge of the Universe do right?" Judging, as he did, "the Judge of the Universe." Job should have taken the same tack. We would all be better off. But. By the time Job came around theology was firmly in place, and held there by the power of those who held the power of God in place with their interpretation of who God was/is and what God wanted, which is always what they wanted God to want. The interpreters of God are God. But. In obeying them, the people are not obeying God, but who God's interpreters say God is. Jesus said it best: "Why don't you judge for yourselves what is right?" They (the interpreters of God) killed him for that. It doesn't pay to mess with Those Who Know Best! The current ideas of God are held in place by those who kill those who have different ideas. How do you think orthodoxy came to be? The martyrs were all heretics, don't you know? Orthodoxy torched the flames that burned people at the stake. Orthodoxy determined what was heresy and what was Revealed (to Orthodoxy) Truth. And now we have this wonderfully consistent and systematic theology declaring who God is and what makes God happy. It is a miracle! Not! We got here by murdering the opposition to Orthodoxy's way of seeing things. God is who Those Who Know Best say God is. And they say God is right and we are wrong. That's wrong. "Why don't you decide for yourselves what is right?" How would we know? We would begin by living out of the center of ourselves! Feeling our way along! Trusting ourselves to be corrected by the results of our deciding what is right and what is wrong. Observing everything. Forcing nothing. With self-transparency and self-awareness and self-correction leading the way, like a "wheel turning out of its own center"-- a gyroscope maintaining balance and harmony with itself and its environment, being true to itself within the context and circumstances of its existence, reflecting its way into new realizations and new ways of seeing and doing what needs to be done, moment-to-moment in each situation as it arises, constantly deciding anew what is right and serving it with the gifts, genius, daemon (sounds like "diamond"), spirit and vitality that come with us from the womb. God couldn't do it better than that!
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03

We need a better way of thinking about God. Which means we need no theology at all. We are God's way of becoming conscious of God. We are mirrors which reflect God to each other and to God. This is not theology. This is awareness dawning. Only those who are stirred by it to reflect and consider their own awareness dawning will find this helpful. Everyone else will find it to be heresy or meaningless. The only kind of God-talk that is helpful is the kind with a life of its own. It cannot be argued or debated, it can only be heard or not-heard. Think of God as the right kind of silence. The kind of silence that is vibrantly alive with realization, awareness, insight, illumination, recognition, creativity, comprehension, wonder, amazement, vitality, fascination, and the qualities and characteristics of life aborning. God is life in the silence of being. And so it is said, "Be still and know that I am God!" And the "I am," is as much the knower as the known. If this stirs something to life in you, let it do its work-- allow it to work you over, separating you from all the theology you are weighed down under, faithful to Meister Eckhart's observation: "The final leave-taking is leaving God for God."
Thank you, Jim, for this kind of perspective ✅ will approach my day differently now👍🙂
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