Blessings 3

Well… where the heck have I been? I start… I stop… there is no consistency.

Well, I get it, the starts and stops can be a little challenging. The excuse I offer is this… on March 15 Tucson New Thought took possession of a new space that we are calling our full time home. Since that time I have been deep in trying to make sure the space was suited to our needs. I had broken down my home office and only today have I finally pulled together a semblance of an office space at the new Center location… and now I am able to start blogging again.

So, where did we leave off?

We were still on the Beattitudes, the first section of the Sermon on the Mount.

Picking up with Matthew Chapter 5 Verse 8…

“Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.”

One of the aspects of spiritual practice that many find challenging is the consistency. Funny how that has played itself out perfectly leading up to this podcast episode. One of the basic habits to develop is the habit of keeping our mind focused on Spirit, not just thinking about Spirit, but knowing we are Spirit embodied. Spirit is God. So are we. When we keep our minds focused on the recognition of God, and an identification AS God, from both an intellectual perspective as well as an embodiment perspective, we come to know and understand the Divine nature of all things more deeply. This is becoming immersed in what Troward defines as the “Divine Ideal.” Knowing that ALL things are God. The Absolute is the relative, and the relative is the Absolute. There is no difference. Purity of heart is this very recognition and identification, and we not only see God in all things, we see God when we look in the mirror.

“Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called the children of God.”
-Matthew 5:9

How do we find and experience peace? This, again, is a question that can be answered in one word, practice. We become peacemakers through the use of affirmative prayer and other spiritual practices. Through these practices we embody a more peaceful, serene, and perhaps contemplative attitude toward daily life. Daily practice changes our tendency in thought, and that change leads to a change in experience. This is the consciousness of oneness. We are OF God… that is the understanding I bring to my self-recognition. I call myself a child of God.

“Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness sake, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven.”
-Matthew 5:10

What I am about to impart gets a little dicey for people. We can only be persecuted to the degree that we allow ourselves to be persecuted. When we allow persecution to be a part of our consciousness, we experience a life based on that consciousness. Now, you may think, “that’s easy for you to say as a white man in a first-world country, you’ve never had to experience persecution.” Well, I haven’t experienced the same kind of persecution as others, but there have been periods of my life where I was trapped in my own self-image as a gay man who could be persecuted by society. What it took for that persecution to stop was a change in me. The work I had to address was the internalized homophobia that I had embodied. The internalized homophobia was a persecutory thought space I had developed below the level of my awareness as I came of age.

We experience life based on thoughts both above and below the level of awareness. As we pray for a higher realization of our good, we begin to experience it. The good crowds out the persecutory thoughts. What we are left with in thought is the realization that we are NOW living in the Kingdom of Heaven, because Heaven is a state of mind.

“Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.”
-Matthew 5:11-12

To stand in Spiritual Truth can be a lonely place. You may be met with resistance in the world of form. As we delve more deeply into our recognition of our deepest selves (which is no different than our surface selves) as God we are rewarded. We experience the consciousness of Heaven more and more. This takes work, work to maintain a state of mind in opposition to some of what you hear all around you.

Maintain your course just as all prophets do. You are worth it… and the reward is great!