Active Mysticism

Education is an indispensable aspect of the Way of Love, or mysticism. It is both a refreshing joy and necessity to learn about the Enlightenment Traditions of the past.

It triggers our own creativity and positive feelings to read of the Tradition. But reading alone, even admiring, the beauties of the Way will not, in itself, transform you. Instead, we all need to read and learn with the fullest and most honest intention to imitate the fine writers. For it is one thing to admire the great beauty of Sufi poetry, for example, famous for its profound beauty, and quite another actually to imitate the Love that it advocates. Reading, admiring, even imitating style, is not enough. For we must cultivate the intention of heart-transformation. In studying mysticism or mystical poetry, we should do so with the full intention of dissolving the ego or human identity into fuller identification with the interior Beloved. For if we do not, all our timenergy might be poured into an exercise that is merely intellectual.
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Renouncing Fear

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When Jesus used the phrase, "Get thee behind me, Satan!" he was not insulting his disciple, whom he loved. (I think that this was Peter, trying to comfort him by denying his personal prophecy of a very troubled future.)

Instead, he was referring, in a dramatic way, to the lower nature. This is the fear-nature. It resists Love, and is its conceptual opposite. That is why, "Fear and Love cannot coexist. For Love, when it is made complete, casts fear outside." (1 Jn. 4:18)

The future described by Jesus was dark and scary to the lower human nature. It tended to trigger fear. So, it was this fear that was being reprimanded by Jesus.

Since he knew that God was Love, the only "satan" was the opposite of Love, or fear. Since Jesus was "true man" as well as "true God," his human nature (side) was capable of fear-reactions. The "devil" of fear could affect this weaker, lower nature.

In an almost exorcistic way, he cast this fear from him! Knowing that this account would be recounted in the future, he wanted to make it a dramatic, even unforgettable, one.

This is the best example of how we should all learn to deal with fear. Fears can spoil or ruin our lives in several significant ways. When we encounter them in ourselves, in our heartminds, we dare not respond with complacency or apathy. Jesus taught us to respond with alarm! We must identify the fear, and then, immediately reject, renounce, and eject it! Only this ridding of fear leaves "room" for Love to fill the heartmind, since both cannot exist in the same heartmind at the same time.

Fear and Love exist in inverse proportions within us. That is, our entire heartmind is one hundred percent capacity. So, if there is seventy percent fear, for example, there can be only thirty percent Love. If there is forty percent fear, there can be sixty percent Love. Fifty percent fear allows for only fifty percent Love.

Anyway, our elevated and noble goal is fear, zero, and Love, one hundred percent. Can any truly human being ever reach and realize this ideal? Perhaps not; but that does not matter anyway. For it is the reaching for this fine goal that transforms us, every minute of every day.

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