Clearly it is not enough to Be A Christian nowadays - we must also live spiritually, from the spirit - that is, we need to have direct and personal experience of that vast area of life which lies beyond the materialist stuff to which modern public discourse is ever-more-tightly restircted.
As the world becomes more-and-more a single, global Leftist-bureaucracy-media complex; we can handily define the spiritual realm as everything ignored, deliberately left-out, or excluded from serious consideration by that uni-world of public, official discourse.
But most people are addicted to this world, and have developed deep habits and unexamined primary assumptions that rule-out the spiritual - treating it variously as childish, insane or evil - nipping in the bud any nascent emergence of the spirit into consciousness.
How then to begin to live by the spirit? Clearly (here-and-now) it must be a deliberate and conscious choice - it is not going to Just Happen - not any more. So first make that choice.
And remember that it is not enough to think About the spiritual, it must be Experienced to be valuable.
Start by noticing. Feelings are a good place to start noticing. All kinds of things - knowledge, discernments, impulses - are being (at present) un-consciously signalled to us.
When we feel a mood, a premonition, a dream, a synchronicity (a strange 'coincidence'), feel an impulse which does not apparently derive from externally... When we seem to discern some speial good or sinister evil in a person, institution, communication...
Take it seriously. Consider it further.
But let that consideration not be on the one hand based on 'evidence, nor on the other hand based on gut-feelings; but instead try to consider that thing with your real self, your heart, your truest being. This again requires conscious intent.
To know what that direct-heart-intuitive knowing feels-like; it may be worth considering the most significant events of your past - significant in your own private soul - what I have termed The Golden Thread.
All this is not easy - because it is going against external constraints and internal habits - but it is possible, and it will succeed - although neither permanently nor with overwhelming effect.
In this mortal life we are here to learn; and that learning is only cashed-out in-full beyond biological death. But every-thing learned will be of value in Heaven - if Heaven is what you choose*.
*(If, instead of accepting Jesus's gift of resurrected life eternal, you instead choose some destination other-than Heaven; then indeed this mortal life is not of value, and the above advice does not apply. I that case you really are On Your Own - but you have nobody to blame for the fact but your-self.)
2 comments:
It seems like as we age, it becomes harder to "act spiritually." The things you're talking about here (experiencing and noticing) seem effortless for a child. Take, for example, the Birdemic. Both of my children intuit the silliness of the various prohibitions. They freely play with the neighbors' children. Children also seem to forget and forgive easier than adults. Or, take the nearly universal understanding of children that God exists and that Good and Evil are concrete things. Compare such understanding to the modern academic posturing: there is no God, Good and Evil do not exist, and the greatest thing to be done is to support TheSystem (Birdemic, Antiracism, GlobalWarming).
Perhaps conserving this Divine Light through adulthood is critical to our spiritual walk? But Jesus called them to him, saying, “Let the children come to me, and do not hinder them, for to such belongs the kingdom of God.” (Luke 18:16).
@MS - Well, I think (with Steiner) that it is not so much a conservation, as a consciously chosen return to the spiritual childhood way of thinking. In adolescence we are cut off from God - which means we are able freely to choose God in a way that children are not. (Or, Not to choose, obviously.)
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