Immortal Diamond Quotes

Have you ever fought an opponent you had no defense against? Like a fire breather or an acid spitter?" "Once I faced a female with diamond skin," Nix said breathlessly. "I was transfixed - even as she was choking the life out of me." "Really?" "No, I saw that character on X-Men. I just wanted to commiserate. Alas, I have no weaknesses.

Life is not a matter of creating a special name for ourselves, but of uncovering the name we have always had.

Metaphor is the only possible language available to religion because it alone is honest about Mystery.

As she lifted the glittering strand of diamonds from the box, a small slip of paper fell out. She caught it as it wafted toward the floor. Four words in ancient script, an arrogantly slanted scrawl. Accept these, accept me. Well, she thought, blinking, that was certainly direct and to the point. -Adam's note to Gabrielle

If unconditional love, loyalty, and obedience are the tickets to an eternal life, then my black Labrador, Venus, will surely be there long before me, along with all the dear animals in nature who care for their young at great cost to themselves and have suffered so much at the hands of humans.

Once I faced a female with diamond skin," Nix said breathlessly. "I was transfixed - even as she was choking the life out of me." "Really?" " No, I saw that character on X men. I just wanted to commiserate. Alas, I have no weaknesses." "Except your insanity," Lucia pointed out. sigh. "Well played, Archer. then carry on...

The hope is that science gives us objective truth; religion, however, gives us personal meaning or personal truth. They should not be seen as contraries.

Perhaps the True Self--and the full Christ Mystery (not the same as organized Christianity)--will always live in the backwaters of any empire and the deep mines of any religion.

MY OLD HEART was broken. It’d been replaced with something not of flesh and blood but diamond and immortality.

We have spent centuries of philosophy trying to solve "the problem of evil," yet I believe the much more confounding and astounding issue is the "problem of good." How do we account for so much gratuitous and sheer goodness in this world? Tackling this problem would achieve much better results.

The Risen Christ is the standing icon of humanity in its final and full destiny. He is the pledge and guarantee of what God will do with all of our crucifixions. At last, we can meaningfully live with hope. It is no longer an absurd or tragic universe. Our hurts now become the home for our greatest hopes.

It is almost impossible to fall in love with majesty, power, or perfection. These make us fearful and codependent, but seldom truly loving. On some level, love can only happen between equals, and vulnerability levels the playing field. What Christians believe is that God somehow became our equal when he became the human "Jesus," a name that is, without doubt, the vulnerable name for God.

grace is found at the depths and in the death of everything. After these smaller deaths, we know that the only “deadly sin” is to swim on the surface of things, where we never see, find, or desire God and love.

For a life where diamonds really are forever

Who is telling us about the false self today? Who is even equipped tell us? Many clergy have not figured this out for themselves, since even ministry can be a career decision or an attraction to "religion" more than the result of an encounter with God or themselves. Formal religious status can maintain the false self rather effectively, especially if there are a lot of social payoffs like special respect, titles, salaries, a good self image, or nice costumes. It is no accident that the religious "Pharisees" became the symbolic bad guys in the Jesus story.

Your True Self is who you are, and always have been in God . . . The great surprise and irony is that "you," or who you think you are, have nothing to do with its original creation or its demise. It's sort of disempowering and utterly empowering at the same time, isn't it? All you can do is nurture it.

Her shining tresses, divided in two parts, encircle the harmonious contour of her white and delicate cheeks, brilliant in their glow and freshness. Her ebony brows have the form and charm of the bow of Kama, the god of love, and beneath her long silken lashes the purest reflections and a celestial light swim, as in the sacred lakes of Himalaya, in the black pupils of her great clear eyes. Her teeth, fine, equal, and white, glitter between her smiling lips like dewdrops in a passion-flower's half-enveloped breast. Her delicately formed ears, her vermilion hands, her little feet, curved and tender as the lotus-bud, glitter with the brilliancy of the loveliest pearls of Ceylon, the most dazzling diamonds of Golconda. Her narrow and supple waist, which a hand may clasp around, sets forth the outline of her rounded figure and the beauty of her bosom, where youth in its flower displays the wealth of its treasures; and beneath the silken folds of her tunic she seems to have been modelled in pure silver by the godlike hand of Vicvarcarma, the immortal sculptor.

What the ego (the False Self) hates and fears more than anything else is change. It will think up a thousand other things to be concerned about or be moralistic about—anything rather than giving up “who I think I am” and “who I need to be to look good.

Think then what it is to live on here eternally and yet be human; to age in soul and see our beloved die and pass to lands whither we may not hope to follow; to wait while drop by drop the curse of the long centuries falls upon our imperishable being, like water slow dripping on a diamond that it cannot wear, till they be born anew forgetful of us, and again sink from our helpless arms into the void unknowable.

It is sadly true that most institutions and nations admire and reward sins of the "spirit," and various forms of arrogance and greed often lead to promotions and praise. But pride, ambition, and vanity are still pride, ambition, and vanity; they do not stop being capital sins because someone is pope or president. "Greed is good" in America, extravagant bonuses are envied and imitated, and careerism is rampant among the clergy . . . Sins of the flesh, however, carry shame and guilt and can always be used to bring anybody down in church, culture, or the state.

I designed this and had it made especially for you. The trefoil is the symbol of immortality: a beginning without an end, like our life together. The hearts represent my love for you. Forever love. Unending like the knot they form. I chose opals instead of diamonds, because opals are warm living stones, each color a birth stone, yours being the center of this ring just like you are the center of our family. “I know the inscription isn’t original, but the meaning behind the words is. I wrote those words for the wife I dreamed of. And here you are. With My Last Breath.

The good, the true, and the beautiful are always their own best argument for themselves—by themselves—and in themselves.

your soul is who you are in God and who God is in you. You can never really lose your soul; you can only fail to realize it, which is indeed the greatest of losses: to have it but not have it (Matthew 16:26).

Love is always stronger than death, and unto that love you have now returned.

God tries to first create a joyous yes inside of you, far more than any kind of no . . . Just saying no is resentful dieting, whereas finding your deeper yes, and eating from that table, is always a spiritual banquet.

My deepest me is God!” St. Catherine of Genoa shouted as she ran through the streets of town, just as Colossians had already shouted to both Jews and pagans, “The mystery is Christ within you—your hope of Glory!” (1:27).

As Jaroslav Pelikan so wisely put it years ago, “Tradition is the living faith of the dead. Traditionalism is the dead faith of the living, and I suppose I should add, it is traditionalism that gives Tradition such a bad name

Jesus never said, “Worship me,” but he often said, “Follow me.” We have wasted a lot of good energy on “vicarious substitutionary atonement theories” and created a punitive and petty God in the process—a “Father God” who was incapable of forgiving “without blood.”6 Is God that unfree? Remember, the ego likes contests of win and lose and cannot even comprehend anything like win-win. Jesus became our substitute in losing, hoping it would let us off the hook, I guess.

Religion knew the truth of metaphor and symbol for almost all of history until the past few hundred years, and especially until the wrongly named Enlightenment in the 17th and 18th centuries. Then we started confusing rational and provable with real. We actually regressed and went backward. In trying to defend its ground in the face of rationalism and scientism, religion tried to become "rational" itself and lost its alternative consciousness, which many of us call contemplation. It's as though we tried to deal with Mystery with the entirely wrong "software". We lost access to the higher levels of consciousness, the transrational, the transpersonal, the transcendent itself. Most tragic, we lost most inner experience of our own outer belief systems. That is the heart of religion's problem today, and it is indeed a deep and serious problem for upcoming generations. My generation took the symbols to literally, and now the following generation is just throwing them all out as useless. We are both losing. It might surprise you, but both religious fundamentalism and atheism are similar in that they are self-contained rational systems. Such a system works if you stay inside its chosen logic and territory.

The Crucified One is God’s standing solidarity with the suffering, the tragedy, and the disaster of all time, and God’s promise that it will not have the final word. The Risen One is God’s final word about the universe and what God plans to do with all suffering.

And because of Him, we get to be part of that Light too. The matchwood—lit by His fire, touched to the candle’s wick. We’re how His light is carried on. We’re what pierced the darkness. They were the immortal diamond…They didn’t have to fight them. They could just hold the light. The peace buoyed her…

The anger and mutual disrespect that I find among both conservative and progressive Christians today is really quite disturbing. It feels aligned much more with political ideologies of Right and Left than any immersion in the beautiful love of God. Jihadism and Zionism have become the death knell of any remaining beauty in religion for many sincere seekers all over the world. It is all so sad that we could regress so far in the name of God, who wants only to lead us forward.

The place which God takes in our soul he will never vacate, for in us is his home of homes, and it is the greatest delight for him to dwell there… The soul who contemplates this is made like the one who is contemplated. Lady Julian of Norwich, Showings On that day, you will know that you are in me and I am in you. John 14:20

I promise you that the discovery of your True Self will feel like a thousand pounds of weight have fallen from your back. You will no longer have to build, protect, or promote any idealized self image. Living in the True Self is quite simply a much happier existence, even though we never live there a full twenty-four hours a day. But you henceforth have it as a place to always go back to. You have finally discovered the alternative to your False Self. You are like Jacob awakening from sleep and joining the chorus of mystics in every age. “You were here all along, and I never knew it!” he says (Genesis 28:16). He anoints the stone pillow where this happened and names it Bethel, or “the house of God and gate of heaven” (28:17–18).4 Jacob then carries the presence with him wherever he goes. What was first only there is soon everywhere. The gate of heaven is first of all in one concrete place, better if carried with you, and best when found everywhere. That is the progression of the spiritual life.

love, not death, is the eternal thing.

Before transformation, sin is any kind of moral mistake; afterward, sin is a mistake about who you are and whose you are.

Love is the one eternal thing and takes away your foundational fear of death. This is very good stuff.

The breathing into Adam (Genesis 2:7) has become the breathing out of Jesus (John 20:22),

The incarnation has become resurrection in you.

The Holy Spirit is God desiring in you and through you—until it becomes your desiring too.

St. Augustine admits in his Confessions: “Late have I loved you, Beauty so very ancient and so ever new. Late have I loved you! You were within, but I was without.

Another planet has been discovered that apparently may be made of diamonds. It is called 55 Cancri e and is about double the size of the Earth but weighs about eight times more.

Christians affirm the communion of saints in the Nicene Creed, but I think there should be an equal belief in the “communion of sinners.

Your True Self is that part of you that knows who you are and whose you are, although largely unconsciously. Your False Self is just who you think you are—but thinking doesn't make it so.

Jesus did not come to change the mind of God about humanity but to change the mind of humanity about God. It is “simple and beautiful;” as Einstein said great truth would always have to be.

Once we truly accept our own demise as an inescapable fact of life, it makes no more sense for us to wish for immortality than to long for bodies as hard as diamonds or to be able to soar on the wings of a bird. As

Graphene consists of a single molecular layer of carbon atoms tightly bonded to form an ultra-thin, ultra-durable sheet. It is almost transparent and weighs practically nothing, yet is the toughest material known to science—two hundred times stronger than steel and stronger even than diamonds. In principle, you could balance an elephant on a pencil and then place the pencil point on a sheet of graphene without breaking or tearing it. As a bonus, graphene also conducts electricity.

Your False Self is who you think you are. Your thinking does not make it true. Your False Self is almost entirely a social construct to get you started on your life journey. It is a set of agreements between your childhood and your parents, your family, your neighbors, your school chums, your partner or spouse, and your religion. It is your “container” for your separate self. 4 Jesus would call it your “wineskin,” which he points out usually cannot hold any new wine (Mark 2: 21–22). Your ego container likes to stay “contained” and hates change. Your False Self is how you define yourself outside of love, relationship, or divine union. After you have spent many years laboriously building this separate self, with all its labels and preoccupations, you are very attached to it. And why wouldn’t you be? It’s what you know and all you know. To move beyond it will always feel like losing or dying. Perhaps you have noticed that master teachers like Jesus and the Buddha, St. Francis, all the “Teresas” (Avila, Lisieux, and Calcutta), Hafiz, Kabir, and Rumi talk about dying much more than we are comfortable with. They all know that if you do not learn the art of dying and letting go early, you will hold onto your False Self far too long, until it kills you anyway.

Without meaning we are surely less than human and deeply discontented. Most meaning is largely preconceptual and not subject to words, and in that sense it is nonrational, but meaning lies in wait to appear and grab onto the right symbol in the right moment.

Thomas Merton, say it, as he so often does: “A door opens in the center of our being, and we seem to fall through it into immense depths, which although they are infinite—are still accessible to us. All eternity seems to have become ours in this one placid and breathless contact.

The goodness of God fills all the gaps of the universe, without discrimination or preference. God is the gratuity of absolutely everything. The space in between everything is not space at all but Spirit. God is the “goodness glue” that holds the dark and light of things together, the free energy that carries all death across the Great Divide and transmutes it into Life. When we say that Christ “paid the debt once and for all,” it simply means that God's job is to make up for all deficiencies in the universe. What else would God do? Basically, grace is God's first name, and probably last too. Grace is what God does to keep all things he has made in love and alive—forever. Grace is God's official job description. Grace is not something God gives; grace is who God is. If we are to believe the primary witnesses, an unexplainable goodness is at work in the universe.

C. G. Jung, often very critical of Christianity, said that the “Archetype of the God-Man” (Christ) is a relatively adequate map of the unconscious human journey, and it should not be dismissed until and unless one has walked through it oneself. He feared that Western civilization would lose this map and that it would be quite dangerous and disastrous for us if we let this map wither in our midst. In that sense, we need an effective “Savior” who can name and guide us on the necessary path. Without a good map, Jung feared the manipulation, violation, and even “annulment” of the human personality.4 That sounds like an overstatement until you note the hugely destructive isms of our time: totalitarian communism, Nazism, consumerism itself, materialism in general, and what John Paul II called “rigid capitalism,” all of which deny many of the essentials of humanness, and often our very core.

No institution of learning of Ingersoll's day had courage enough to confer upon him an honorary degree; not only for his own intellectual accomplishments, but also for his influence upon the minds of the learned men and women of his time and generation. Robert G. Ingersoll never received a prize for literature. The same prejudice and bigotry which prevented his getting an honorary college degree, militated against his being recognized as 'the greatest writer of the English language on the face of the earth,' as Henry Ward Beecher characterized him. Aye, in all the history of literature, Robert G. Ingersoll has never been excelled -- except by only one man, and that man was -- William Shakespeare. And yet there are times when Ingersoll even surpassed the immortal Bard. Yes, there are times when Ingersoll excelled even Shakespeare, in expressing human emotions, and in the use of language to express a thought, or to paint a picture. I say this fully conscious of my own admiration for that 'intellectual ocean, whose waves touched all the shores of thought.' Ingersoll was perfection himself. Every word was properly used. Every sentence was perfectly formed. Every noun, every verb and every object was in its proper place. Every punctuation mark, every comma, every semicolon, and every period was expertly placed to separate and balance each sentence. To read Ingersoll, it seems that every idea came properly clothed from his brain. Something rare indeed in the history of man's use of language in the expression of his thoughts. Every thought came from his brain with all the beauty and perfection of the full blown rose, with the velvety petals delicately touching each other. Thoughts of diamonds and pearls, rubies and sapphires rolled off his tongue as if from an inexhaustible mine of precious stones. Just as the cut of the diamond reveals the splendor of its brilliance, so the words and construction of the sentences gave a charm and beauty and eloquence to Ingersoll's thoughts. Ingersoll had everything: The song of the skylark; the tenderness of the dove; the hiss of the snake; the bite of the tiger; the strength of the lion; and perhaps more significant was the fact that he used each of these qualities and attributes, in their proper place, and at their proper time. He knew when to embrace with the tenderness of affection, and to resist and denounce wickedness and tyranny with that power of denunciation which he, and he alone, knew how to express.

Within us there is an inner, natural dignity. (You often see it in older folks.) An inherent worthiness that already knows and enjoys. (You see it in children.) It is an immortal diamond waiting to be mined and is never discovered undesired. It is a reverence humming within you that must be honored. Call it the soul, the unconscious, deep consciousness, or the indwelling Holy Spirit. Call it nothing. It does not need the right name or right religion to show itself. It does not even need to be understood. It is usually wordless. It just is, and shows itself best when we are silent, or in love, or both. I will call it the True Self here.

 St. Irenaeus (125–203), The Scandal of the Incarnation, and St. Athanasius (297–373), On the Incarnation, are two early classics that set a bar of good theology that we have since seldom matched or even understood. The mystery of incarnation is the unique trump card that Christianity adds to the deck of world religions.

It is sadly true that most institutions and nations admire and reward sins of the “spirit,” and various forms of arrogance and greed often lead to promotions and praise. But pride, ambition, and vanity are still pride, ambition, and vanity; they do not stop being capital sins because someone is pope or president. “Greed is good” in America, extravagant bonuses are envied and imitated, and careerism is rampant among the clergy. (This is not just my judgment but a statement of the Vatican Office for Bishops a few years ago.) Sins of the flesh, however, carry shame and guilt and can always be used to bring anybody down in church, culture, or the state.

Her shining tresses, divided in two parts, encircle the harmonious contour of her white and delicate cheeks, brilliant in their glow and freshness. Her ebony brows have the form and charm of the bow of Kama, the god of love, and beneath her long silken lashes the purest reflections and a celestial light swim, as in the sacred lakes of Himalaya, in the black pupils of her great clear eyes. Her teeth, fine, equal, and white, glitter between her smiling lips like dewdrops in a passion-flower’s half-enveloped breast. Her delicately formed ears, her vermilion hands, her little feet, curved and tender as the lotus-bud, glitter with the brilliancy of the loveliest pearls of Ceylon, the most dazzling diamonds of Golconda. Her narrow and supple waist, which a hand may clasp around, sets forth the outline of her rounded figure and the beauty of her bosom, where youth in its flower displays the wealth of its treasures; and beneath the silken folds of her tunic she seems to have been modelled in pure silver by the godlike hand of Vicvarcarma, the immortal sculptor.

It’s time to assume your glorified body, your celestial body, your radiant body, your spiritual body (soma pneumatikon) – the vehicle for your out-of-body experiences. When you attain your “diamond body,” you become one of “the immortals”. You are now one of the cloudwalkers. Pure mind is superconductive. It can never run down or degrade or experience any friction. Your eternal mind is a Golden Mind. It’s a Star Mind, it’s the Glory of the Whole Universe.

Hours later Kaderin paced in the main cabin of the jet, furious over more things than she could process. The first: because of the Lykae’s stunt, she was being forced into this situation with Sebastian. And she’d left the diamonds. Silly Valkyrie. The second: two of her half-sisters, her coven mates, had been wed, and she’d heard of it after the fact. They are so not getting gifts from me. Were her sisters that averse to her presence at weddings? Am I that dismal?

Our True Self knows that there is no place to go or to get to. We are already at home—free and filled. That is the essence of the good news. What else would be “good news for all the people,” which is what the angels promised the Bethlehem shepherds (Luke 2:10)? But it seems we would prefer a win-lose world, even if most lose. We are even willing to think of ourself as a loser or failure than dare to allow the Great Allower to do a win-win for what is perhaps God's only universe.

In the religion these words ‘save me’ were created to suppress the truth of the human life. These words ‘save me’, indicates that you are sinner and so you are uttering these words. But see how wonderful the human life is! Yes, I am Universal. Upanishad is saying ‘Amritasya Putrah’ (Sons of Amrita or Immortal self). What a wonderful version! And in that case they are crying ‘save me’! Upanishads created heaven by saying ‘Sons of Immortal self’ and on the contrary they have created hell by uttering the words ‘Save me’.

Only a simple black pencil will do for making a notation of a benchmark. Ink will run, be dissolved by the tree sap, be washed away by rain, dew, fog, and snow. Nothing as artificial as ink will do for recording eternity and immortality. Graphite is carbon that has been subjected to enormous pressure for millions of years and that might have become coal or diamonds. Instead, however, it has been transformed into something more precious than a diamond; it has become a pencil that can record all that it has seen… A pencil is a greater miracle than a diamond, although the chemical make-up of graphite and diamond is identical.

Any language of exclusion or superiority no longer makes sense to you. Inside your True Self, you know you are not alone, and you foundationally “belong” to God and to the universe (1 Corinthians 3:23). You no longer have to work to feel important. You are intrinsically important, and it has all been “done unto you” (Luke 1:38), just as it was with Mary, who made no claims of worthiness or unworthiness. And if God so gratuitously and graciously includes you here and now in this world, why would such a God change God's mind in the next world? Love is the one eternal thing and takes away your foundational fear of death. This is very good stuff.

We are not so at home with the resurrected form of things despite a yearly springtime, healings in our bodies, the ten thousand forms of newness in every event and every life. The death side of things grabs our imagination and fascinates us as fear and negativity always do, I am sad to say. We have to be taught how to look for anything infinite, positive, or good, which for some reason is much more difficult. We have spent centuries of philosophy trying to solve “the problem of evil,” yet I believe the much more confounding and astounding issue is “the problem of good.” How do we account for so much gratuitous and sheer goodness in this world? Tackling this problem would achieve much better results.

Remember, please remember, you do not (you must not!) fear, attack, or hate the False Self. That would only continue a negative and arrogant death energy, and it is delusional and counterproductive anyway. It would be trying to “drive out the devil by the prince of devils,” as Jesus puts it. In the great economy of grace, all is used and transformed, and nothing is wasted. God uses your various False Selves to lead you beyond them. Note that Jesus' clear message to his beloved, Mary Magdalene, is not that she squelch, deny, or destroy her human love for him. He is much more subtle than that. He just says to her, “Do not cling to me” (John 20:17). He is saying, “Don't hold on to your needy False Self. We are all heading for something much bigger and much better, Mary.” This is the spiritual art of detachment, which is not taught much in capitalistic worldview where clinging and possessing are not just the norm but even the goal. You see how trapped we are. Great love is both very attached (“passionate”) and yet very detached at the same time. It is love but not addiction. The soul, the True Self, has everything, and so it does not require any particular thing. When you have all things, you do not have to protect any one thing. True Self can love and let go. The False Self cannot do this. The “do not cling to me” encounter between Jesus and Mary Magdalene is the most painted Easter scene, I am told. The artistic imagination knew that a seeming contradiction was playing out here: intense love and yet appropriate distance. The soul and the spirit tend to love and revel in paradoxes; they operate by resonance and reflection. The ego (False Self) wants to resolve all paradoxes in a most glib way and thinks that it can. It operates in a way that is mechanical and instrumental. This is not always bad, but it is surely limited. The ego would like Mary Magdalene and Jesus to be caught up in a passionate love affair. Of course they are, in the deepest sense of the term, but only the True Self knows how to enjoy and picture “a love of already satisfied desire.” The True Self and False Self see differently; both are necessary, but one is better, bigger, and even eternal.

Body Prayer We must hunker down into the “Body of Hope and Resurrection” (Philippians 3:9–11; 1 Corinthians 15:44) and pray also from below and from within, on a cellular and energetic level too—or the attitude of prayer does not last or go deep. You are not thinking your prayer as much as energetically feeling your prayer. You pay attention from the bottom up and from the inside out. Rest into the Body of Christ energy instead of trying to pull an Infinite God into your finite world. Your body itself receives and knows, and is indeed “a temple” (1 Corinthians 3:16–17) where God dwells in the Spirit. Walking meditation, yoga, and breathing exercises are all helpful here. Body prayer actually works much more quickly and more naturally than thought prayer alone. Body prayer is what we have tried to do with inspiring music, body gestures, and all sacraments, so this is not a new idea. It is what many are seeking in tai chi, pilgrimages, prayer beads, chanting, repeating the Jesus Prayer until it prays itself in us and through us, and so on. To “pray from the clay” will also move you to the shared level of prayer. You will know that “you” are not doing the prayer, but you are falling into the unified field, and the Body of Christ is now praying through you (Romans 8:26–27) and with you. It becomes “our” prayer, and not just my prayer. Now you pray not so much to Christ as much as through Christ, and you will know experientially that you are Christ's Body too.

Why, oh why, did we make the Gospel into a competition instead of a joyous proclamation of this necessary but good process—of surrender into love? I think it is because the ego (the False Self) prefers win-lose over win-win, even strangely enough, when it ends up defining oneself as a loser. The ego will always choose trumped-up competition over any calm cooperation. We would sooner run a risky NASCAR race that only one, or a few, of us can win than allow God to win with everybody. It is almost the American way. Such a mind-set is of itself “hell.” It is nothing more than spiritual capitalism. God's big win is accurately called heaven. Heaven is God's victory celebration, not ours! And the banner over the eternal banquet table will say one thing: “Love is stronger than death.

God is formlessness (the Father), God is form (the Son), and God is the very life and love energy between those two (the Holy Spirit). The three do not cancel one another out; rather, they do exactly the opposite. God is relationship itself and known in relationship, which opens up a huge conversation with the world of science and physics and therapy too. What a wonderful surprise this is, yet it names everything correctly at the core—from atoms, to ecosystems, to families, to galaxies. The doctrine of the Trinity was made to order to defeat the dualistic mind and invite us into nondual, holistic consciousness. It replaced the argumentative principle of two with the dynamic principle of three. It leaves us inside the wonderfully open space of “not one, but not two either.” Sit stunned with that for a few minutes.

Metaphor is the only possible language available to religion because it alone is honest about Mystery. The underlying messages that different religions and denominations use are often in strong agreement, but they use different images to communicate their own experience of union with God. That should not shock or disappoint anyone, unless they are still kids shouting, “This is my toy, and the rest of you can't touch it!” Jesus, who is always using metaphors, says, for example, “There are other sheep I have that are not of this fold, and these I have to lead as well. They too listen to my voice” (John 10:16a). He is quite obviously talking metaphorically by calling people sheep. He is also saying that sometimes the outsider to the “flock” hears as well as the insider. Furthermore, he says that he cares about and respects the “other sheep,” which means that we should too.

Metaphor is invariably more meaning, not less. Literalism is the lowest and least level of meaning. We must never be too tied to our own metaphors as the only possible way to speak the truth, and yet we also need good metaphors to go deep. That is the inherent tension and conflict: only the right symbol dives deep into the good, the true, and the beautiful and retrieves these like pearls from the ocean depths. The right symbol at the right time allows us to move beyond complexity and illusion. Often that which looks like mere symbol is indeed the doorway to all that you really need to know—if you approach it humbly and respectfully. How else could an always available God be always available? It cannot depend on having a college education or even a common education, but on a simple ability to read the symbolic universe, which some ancients seem to have done much better than we do.2

I just lay on the mountain Meadowside in the moonlight, head to grass, and heard the silent recognition of my temporary woes. Yes, so to try to attain to Nirvana when you're already there, to the top of a mountain when you're already there and only have to stay -thus to stay in the nirvana bliss is all I have to do, you have to do, no effort no path really no discipline but just to know that all is empty and awake , a vision and a movie in God's universal mind(Alya-Vijnana) and to stay more or less wisely in that. Because silence itself is the sound of diamonds which can cut through anything the sound of holy emptiness the sound of extinction and bliss, that graveyard silence which is like the silence of an infant's smile the sound of eternity, of the blessedness surely to be believed the sound of nothing ever happened Except God(Which I'd soon hear in a noisy Atlantic tempest) What exists is god in his emanation, what does not exist is god in his peaceful neutrality, what neither exist nor does not exist is god's immortal primordial dawn of father sky9this world this very minute). So, I said stay in that no dimensions here to any of the mountain s or mosquitos and whole milky ways of worlds Because sensation is emptiness old age is emptiness. T's only the golden eternity of gods mind so practice kindness and sympathy remember that men are not responsible in themselves as men for their ignorance and unkindness, they should be pitied, God does pity it, because who says anything about anything since everything is just what it is, free of interpretations. God is not the attainer, he is the farer in that which everything is the abider one caterpillar, a thousand hairs of God. So, know constantly that this is only, you ,God ,empty and awake and eternally free as the unnumerable atoms of emptiness everywhere.

What made us think we were

This creative tension between wonderful and terrible is named so well by Gerard Manley Hopkins, as only poets can. Even the long title of his poem reveals his acceptance of the ever-changing flow of Heraclites and also his trust in the final outcome: “That Nature Is a Heraclitean Fire and of the Comfort of the Resurrection.” Flesh fade, and mortal trash fall to the residuary worm; world's wildfire, leave but ash: In a flash, at a trumpet crash, I am all at once what Christ is, since he was what I am, and This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, patch, matchwood, immortal diamond,

God is gathering us out of all regions till he can make resurrection of our own hearts from the very earth [emphasis added], and teach us that we are all of one substance, and members of one another; for the one who loves his neighbor loves God, and the one who loves God, loves his own soul.

As Simone Weil said in various ways, it is much easier to make non-Christians into Christians than it is to make Christians into Christians. Cradle Christians are almost totally preconditioned to the carrot-on-the-stick model.

Many of the fathers of the church believed in an actual ontological, metaphysical, objective union between humanity and God, which alone would allow Jesus to take us “back with him” into the life of the Trinity (John 17:23–24, 14:3, 12:26). This was how real “participation” was for many in the early church. It changed people and offered them their deepest identity and form (“trans-formation”). We had thought our form was merely human, but Jesus came to tell us that our actual form is human-divine, just as he is. He was not much interested in proclaiming himself the exclusive or exclusionary son of God, but he went out of his way to communicate an inclusive sonship and daughterhood to the crowds.

Make ready for the Christ, whose smile like lightning, sets free the song of everlasting glory that now sleeps—in your paper flesh. Thomas Merton

The gods are immortal and who are saying so? Human beings are saying so. They hoped to become immortal by creating imaginary deities. In Upanishads we see that the Rishis are praying ‘Take me from death to immortality’. They are not praying for the imaginary deities, they are praying for themselves. The Vedic Rishis or sages were also human beings, and so they are praying for immortality of the human beings.

The True Self has already overcome the contradictions and paradoxes of life, which is symbolized by the Risen Christ who presents the full tension of death and life, earth and spirit, human and divine—and precisely as overcome. That is the standing message that the Resurrected One holds for all of history. He holds and overcomes the ultimate and major tensions of humanity.

Perhaps the True Self—and the full Christ Mystery (not the same as organized Christianity)—will always live in the backwaters of any empire and the deep mines of any religion. Some will think I am arrogantly talking about being “personally divine” and eagerly dismiss this way of talking about resurrection as heresy, arrogance, or pantheism.

Because far too many religious folks do not seriously pursue this “reverence humming within them,” they do not recognize

Your True Self is that part of you that knows who you are and whose you are, although largely unconsciously.

Surely God was not just waiting for Orthodox Jews, Roman Catholics, and American evangelicals to show up, which is in the last nanosecond of known time.

Perhaps Moses said it poetically and best and very early on: “This law is not beyond your strength or beyond your reach. It is not in heaven, so that you need to wonder, ‘Who will go up to heaven and bring it down to us so that we may hear it and keep it?’ Nor is it beyond the seas, so that you need to wonder, ‘Who will cross the seas for us so that we might hear it and keep it?’ No, the Word is very near to you. It is in your mouth and in your heart” (Deuteronomy 30:11–14).

Whenever you are fearing death, physical death or death of some ego fixation, or using diversionary tactics of any kind, you are in your False Self at that moment. Again, it is not usually bad or evil, but just inadequate to the big questions of love, death, suffering, God, or any notion of infinity. God allows and uses all our diversionary tactics to get us to the full destination. That is how perfect and patient divine love is. God probably knows we are procrastinators much more than perpetrators.

Even the human mind of Jesus did not know some things until he came out the other side of death. In fact, I do not believe the human mind of Jesus fully knew his own True Self as the “Son of God” until after the Resurrection. Before his own transformation, Jesus lived in faith and “was like us in all ways except sin” (Hebrews 4:15). Jesus never appeared to believe the “lie of separation,” which is the core meaning of sin. He said without hesitation, “I and the Father are one” (John 10:30). That made him indeed unique—and the ultimate model and leader for all of humanity.

The Risen Presence always appears once your False Self stops attaching, defending, denying, and blaming. As in Matthew's account (28:9), he just walks up and says, “Hi!” Paul actually says in several places that “our former selves have been crucified” already (Romans 6:6). The False Self is fragile and temporary and is thus already “over and out.” Its death knell has already rung. It is just a matter of time until you touch the true, and the false falls away like clumsy scaffolding. This is probably why some saints were pictured holding or looking at a human skull. It was not meant to be morbid but a way of picturing this shock of realization and the utter change of consciousness that follows. Once you experience the Real, the unreal is increasingly a mere diversion or entertainment, not substantial reality. Once you encounter the Risen Presence, you can rather easily let go of the past and the petty. The Risen Christ could be called the “future shock” of God. The Gospel accounts make note that the Resurrection occurs “very early on the first day of the week” (John 20:1), clearly evoking a new creation, a fresh start, a new first (Genesis 1:3–5), but now an eternal day of Easter light. And, of course, scientists now tell us that all light in the universe is electromagnetically connected and that all natural light is in fact one. The Risen Christ is the personification of this one Light that includes all light, which is why he is always described as “dazzling white” or “like lightning” (Matthew 28:3).

our fear of death is actually our fear of God. If we resolve one, we normally resolve the other. To totally resolve the God issue would be to totally resolve the death issue. And we have the full wherewithal to do just that! That wherewithal we call Trinity, which is saying that God is an outpouring in one direction. God is only for and never against.

Somehow the True Self in all humans has a natural access to that “hidden” will of God—if the mind and heart and soul are open and undefended (which is always the spiritual task and not easily achieved). Jeremiah called it “the law written in your heart” (31:33). The Catholic tradition called it “natural law” or “natural theology.” The soul or True Self has responded naturally to the soul of other things since the beginning of human consciousness. The False Self almost always distorts even good things, because it still thinks “it's all about me”—and it never is.

Christianity is much more about living and doing than thinking.

I might not ever see Dorian again, but I can say that I came across a stunning diamond once. Time and circumstance split perfectly for me to find him, and though I cannot have, I know that he exists—and because he is immortal, he always will.

The city sparkles in the twilight, like diamonds thrown across obsidian sand.

Knowledge of your True Self gradually places your life in a big and ever bigger frame. Then the small stuff can no longer hurt you or define you for the long term. Therapy is not equipped to call the small stuff into question—things like ever higher pay, more vacation days, not being noticed, taking offense. That is the job of religion, the ultimate clearinghouse, and why spiritual direction is a different discipline than therapeutic counseling is. You can do both, as I do. Good spiritual direction will highly simplify and clarify your therapy, and good therapy will ground any spiritual direction in honesty and necessary shadow boxing. Good therapy will allow you to cope with greater serenity and efficiency because you will learn how to do your human job well and with personal satisfaction. True spiritual direction can link that human job with your divine job without dismissing the human job in the least.

The death side of things grabs our imagination and fascinates us as fear and negativity always do, I am sad to say. We have to be taught how to look for anything infinite, positive, or good, which for some reason is much more difficult. We have spent centuries of philosophy trying to solve “the problem of evil,” yet I believe the much more confounding and astounding issue is “the problem of good.

As Jaroslav Pelikan so wisely put it years ago, “ Tradition is the living faith of the dead. Traditionalism is the dead faith of the living, and I suppose I should add, it is traditionalism that gives Tradition such a bad name.”1

wisely put it years ago, “ Tradition is the living faith of the dead. Traditionalism is the dead faith of the living, and I suppose I should add, it is traditionalism that gives Tradition such a bad name.”1

In a flash, at a trumpet crash, I am all at once what Christ is, since he was what I am, and This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, patch, matchwood, immortal diamond, Is immortal diamond.

John Duns Scotus, OFM, taught that the opposite of good was not bad but nonbeing itself. The opposite of truth was not falsity but nonbeing itself. And the opposite of unity was not multiplicity but nonbeing itself. All the opposites are all held and contained within pure being, even the finite and the infinite, matter and Spirit, male and female, etc., and this harmony between things is called beauty, which for some is a fourth transcendental itself. This worldview creates a very positive theology and anthropology based on original blessing instead of original sin. It also creates a philosophical basis for nondual thinking and the nature of evil. Evil is nonbeing and unconsciousness. Beauty is the fullness of being and full consciousness.

Only later in life can we perhaps join with Thomas Merton, who penned one of my favorite lines, “If I had a message to my contemporaries it is surely this: Be anything you like, be madmen, drunks, and bastards of every shape and form, but at all costs avoid one thing: success If you are too obsessed with success, you will forget to live. If you have learned only how to be a success, your life has probably been wasted.”7

In this high place it is as simple as this, Leave everything you know behind. Step toward the cold surface, say the old prayer of rough love and open both arms. Those who come with empty hands will stare into the lake astonished, there, in the cold light reflecting pure snow, the true shape of your own face. David Whyte, “Tilicho Lake”   Conservatives