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Wednesday, August 07, 2013

Circumstance of the Grasses of the Field

 Pomp and Circumstance of Grasses


I was talking to a young lady who had trouble organizing her life.

She did not feel that she was living up to the ideal of professionals in the world today. She had all the accoutrements: planner, cellular phone, laptop, and was seemingly connected within the web of worldly accomplishment. Yet she had trouble.
And the inconsistency between the icon of efficiency and what she felt was her own failure added to her feeling of anxiety, adding fuel to her anxious desire to succeed according to the idols of worldly success. We have all been there, I am sure.
Some of her friends said she had her head in the clouds. She was intensely interested in certain matters, but the matter of balancing the checkbook was like working on a chain gang.

I said that to live in the world, you must play by its rules, no matter how painful it seems to you.
However, when people say that your head is in the clouds, remember:
  
“Stop worrying, then, over questions like “What are we to eat, or what are we to drink, or what are we to wear?”…Your heavenly Father knows all that you need.”

Your head is not in the clouds, you are not wool-gathering. You are living in Dawn Consciousness, the consciousness we had of God and with God when we were young.

When we reach the age of reason, we are instructed to put these things away. But these are not the things of a child to which St. Paul refers.
In our early awareness, we act like children in as much as we do fully believe that our heavenly Father provides for our needs. We are in innocence.
When we used to play cops-and-robbers, no one actually died; they always rose up again to play on.

This seeming fantasy is the bedrock of the internal Narrative which led our religious mind to the category of life eternal.
And this Narrative has no end, either. Play is the only eternal aspect of our lives... to live as if nothing mattered, except God and His gift of Life.

It was an expression in this world of the eternal reality inspired in us by the Holy. So we acted it out and did what seemed like common-sense: get up and play some more.
Your mind being in the clouds, your seeming fantasy life, stems from the early Narratives of the ways of innocence, of a golden age, of the Garden of Eden. It reminds us how we used to be conscious, not knowing fear and strife. These are stories which became Narratives as the cognitive system worked them into Long Term Memory. And so they became part of us.
St. Paul does not mean end your innocence of spirit, but to cast aside the unseemly ways, the magical ways, the superstitious ways of children and adults with children’s minds, such as praying to win the lottery, or raising the President’s poll numbers, or taking revenge. For these are the childish things that form the basis of the corrupted Narrative of the World where there is a cost-benefit analysis for everything.
We have to live in the world. Fine. But do not believe that this world is all there is.

Your inability to perform certain tasks is only a measure of how far removed they are from your true nature. Our true nature is to love. Love God, love our family, love our friends, whether by silent and humble service or an uproarious outpouring of a fecund passion.
However, we are born into a different world and a different nature is necessary for us to live in it.

Have you not been away on vacation and, upon returning, felt the freedom slip away every moment you get closer to the work-a-day world? Have you not felt yourself slipping back into that strait jacket of conventions governing our everyday lives? And then you yearn to be free again.

Do what is necessary to attain your goal of freedom. Do all the accounting and bookkeeping required. Raise your families. Love your husbands and wives. Tend for the sick. Through these humble acts – if you maintain the realization that there is something higher – you will eventually find your freedom.

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