Choosing Your Words Carefully

Mark Twain once said, "The difference between the right word and the almost right word is like the difference between lightning and a lightning bug. So...choose your words carefully today.

The Beauty of Nature

Dinner tonight at a pristine little restaurant on the Ohio River. Enroute, we were graced by nature itself. What a beautiful world this truly is.

Favorite Quote from Maya Angelou

"The greatest agony is bearing an untold story inside of you."

Part Two: Enoch, Archetype of the Sacred Art

Part Two

Enoch: Archetype of the Sacred Art

“And Enoch walked with God: and he was not; for God took him.”
-- Genesis 5:5

“An infinite God...does not distribute himself that each may have a part, but to each one he gives all of himself as fully as if there were no others.”
-- A. W. Tozer

“The truth is, God talks to everybody.”
--From Conversations with God by Neale Donald Walsch

A God-awakened life is a transformational shift in human consciousness that brings the sacred Presence into immediate awareness. In this awakened state, one knows there is an Intelligence beneath, behind, beyond, but also, within all living things. This awareness is not hypothetical or speculative. To the contrary, in the awakened state, awareness of this Presence is personal and private. The ever-present sense of Presence causes everything to look different to the awakened person precisely because this person is waking up to what is really real—not what’s seen, but what’s unseen. In this sense, it is very personal. Saint Paul put it beautifully: “The things we see now are here today, gone tomorrow. But the things we can’t see now will last forever.”[1]

If you are waking up, a shift is taking place in your consciousness. You are becoming more and more aware of yourself—that is, your own feelings, hopes and dreams, disappointments and failures, and there is an intense acceptance of it all. You feel at peace with yourself and your purpose in this world—which is, of course, to wake up to the Divine Presence. But, this is not something you can talk to others about very easily. Few would understand anyway. So, in this sense, there’s a confidential nature to the inner transformation you are experiencing.

You are ending the madness of looking for yourself outside yourself—in things, relationships, a career, a religious belief system, and so on. You know that any of these may add richness to your life journey, but none of them is your life. Furthermore, you sense a deep connectedness to all sentient beings. The prejudices, stereotypes, opinions, and beliefs about others, part of your conditioned upbringing, are coming into the light of your consciousness. What needs changing, changes. What needs to disappear fades away. What needs to expand does so, too. None of it happens overnight but, on your spiritual path, you are yourself amazed at how the landscape of your thinking, feeling, and living change on this journey. You are living the life Jesus described as “abundant.”[2]

The abundant, God-aware life is flawlessly illustrated in the life of Enoch, an enlightened spiritual master who lived hundreds, perhaps even thousands of years ago. Early Jewish and Christian saints, including many of the early Church Fathers, regarded Enoch as an enlightened soul whose writings were both sacred and inspired. In spite of this widespread reverence, however, by the fourth century, his writings had been excluded from the Canon of Scripture or what we know as the Bible today. This is most regrettable because Enoch’s example of an enlightened life holds the secret to life and death. Enoch lived as God desires all to live. He died as God desires all to die. But, because his writings have not been widely accessible, his example has been virtually hidden from countless generations.

Enoch has much to share with us. Our Jewish anscestors knew this, which is why, long before Jesus, as well as long after him, Jewish and Christian saints revered him, underscored by the fact that there are only two persons in the Bible credited with having “walked with God.” They are Noah and Enoch. That alone is provocative enough to warrant an investigation.

To walk with God.

What does that mean? Is this simply an anthropomorphic way of describing a spiritual life? It is this, of course. But, it is manifestly more than this, too. The implication is that, between Enoch and God, a depth of intimacy existed, unknown to almost everyone else.

[1] 2 Corinthians 4:18
[2] John 10:10, KJV

YOUR GUIDE

When the voice within you is a greater guide than the opinions around you, then you have begun to live...and to enjoy living. Author Unknown

Excerpt # 4 from upcoming book THE ENOCH FACTOR: SACRED ART OF KNOWING GOD

I call God, God. But, I hesitate to say much more than this because, anything more I might say, no matter how correct it may be, seems only to diminish this Ineffable Reality. God is more than any name I give to her and infinitely more than anything I might say about her, or him, or whatever it is. And yet, what is so ironic to me is that this Reality is both personal and knowable. Whenever I speak of knowing God, therefore, I am referring to an inner sensation, an awareness, a kind of consciousness that something infinitely grander than anything I could ever imagine has wrapped itself around me in love. For me, this kind of awareness is accompanied by a sense of peace, inner tranquility, and it really doesn’t matter what’s going on around me. Joy is almost always present, sometimes expressed as laughter but, most often, as a quiet sense of contentment I feel within. No matter what shows up in my life, more and more I meet every moment as if it is exactly as it should be. The longer I walk with God, in fact, the less I worry about anything. In such a state of blissful union, there is no stress, no anxiety in me—at least when I’m conscious of God’s presence. Everything about everything is just as it should be. Why? Because God’s presence is in me, around, beneath, and also beyond me. Does this mean I regard everything in this world, or in my life, as perfect? Of course not. But, in this state of God-realization, what could be wrong with my life? This world? Furthermore, what is there to fear? To fret over? Or, to be angry about? The world, everyone and everything in it, is inexplicably beautiful. Wherever I look, it is the face of God I see. As the Catholic mystic Meister Eckhart used to say, “The eye through which I see God is the eye through which God sees me.” I cannot imagine a more incredible way to look at my life, this world, or a more wholesome way to look at you.

Excerpt # 1=3 from upcoming book THE ENOCH FACTOR: SACRED ART OF KNOWING GOD

“Do not believe in anything simply because you heard it…because it is spoken or rumored by many…found written in your religious books…Do not believe in traditions just because they have been handed down…But, after observation and analysis, when you find anything that agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it.”
--Buddha (c. 563 BCE – c. 483 BCE)