Part IV: Living the Path
How we walk the way back to God
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THE GOOD FIGHT
Aligning our will with God’s will
It is important to understand how deeply Jesus loves us.
But where do we go from here?
One place to begin is by removing the inner barriers that prevent us from feeling this truth.
Many of us have come to realize that this world is infused with God.
But far fewer people have made personal contact with God.
God became human.
Because of this, it is possible to know him in a deeply personal and loving way. Yet many believers experience God only in a vague and general sense.
This can be a problem.
For we can only experience what we are able to conceive of and believe in.
We have spent our lives fighting for the aims of our Lower Self. Now we must learn to fight the good fight.
Dismantling inner barriers
When we search for a realization of Jesus Christ, we may come face-to-face with our inner barrier instead.
The vicious circle works like this: when we feel unworthy, unlovable or unacceptable, it becomes almost impossible to believe that Christ cares about us.
So we need to work on establishing some level of self-acceptance and self-respect.
To move in this direction, we must surface the genuine guilt we carry for failing to love.
This delicate work involves uncovering our wrong conclusions—without condemning ourselves in the process.
This is a common pitfall of the purification process.
For so much self-condemnation tends to accompany our efforts to clean up our Lower Self.
Yet this is exactly what must be done if self-love is to grow.
Making matters worse, we may have no sense at all that Jesus Christ personally cares about us.
When this is the case, it can be exceedingly hard to find our real value.
To make progress, we need a two-pronged approach.
We must be thorough and rather ruthless in searching our soul for obstructions.
At the same time, we want to have compassion and realism.
And we want to deeply desire to feel Jesus nearby.
Yet it can be hard to take in that Jesus cares about even the smallest details of our lives.
But the glory that comes with doing this, as we go along on our spiritual path, is hard to describe.
Nothing compares.
For many, though, the price tag for knowing such total fulfillment feels very high.
It requires total surrender of our limited will to God’s will.
In everything.
Instead, we hold back.
We have some little corner where we hold out.
Our self-will believes it knows better than God what will make us happy.
Now here is Jesus Christ, asking us to trust him and give ourselves to him.
Our resistance may come up.
Yet we cannot eliminate our fears and our inability to trust others without practicing surrender to the highest within ourselves.
We need each other. All of us are linked together in a chain of connection.
When we center our dependence on God—and on his personal expression in Jesus Christ—we create a healthy center of gravity deep in the soul.
His presence merges with our Higher Self, and we begin to experience true inner unity.
From that center, our relationships change.
They become free of neurotic dependency.
We begin to see where trust is justified and where it is not.
The result will be healthy relationships with our leaders and followers.
Without this healthy center, we will live in fear, and we won’t trust our own judgments.
In short, we’ll become confused.
And so, we’ll be distrustful or gullible in all the wrong places.
When we become impatient and begin to doubt, we effectively yank up the seedlings
Waiting and working for the good
Few things are more painful than being unable to see the connection between life’s painful events and their inner cause.
When we develop a living relationship with God, those connections begin to illuminate themselves.
It can be an enormous relief to discover that there is meaning behind what we experience.
It can happen that we may tune our personal will toward total surrender—and even sincerely mean it—and then nothing happens.
No sweet loving presence of Jesus shows up.
So we may have to wait.
Which is about the time we become impatient and begin to doubt.
We effectively yank up the seedlings we’ve just started growing.
It’s not that Jesus is keeping us waiting.
It’s that our inner barriers have to give way.
This is a process that takes time.
Relax—Christ is here. He hears us and he loves us.
He protects us and cares deeply about us, even if we cannot feel it yet.
At some point, we will become intensely aware of this fact.
Christ will wrap his loving arms around us and we will feel peace. Along with the strength we need for our life task.
This is what the spiritual path ultimately asks of us.
This is something worth fighting for.
We have spent our lives fighting for the aims of the Lower Self.
Now we must learn to fight the good fight.
We cannot afford to be apathetic about living the good life.
Neither can we afford to sit back passively and allow ourselves to become enveloped in negativity.
When we do this, we draw dark forces to us.
This makes it more likely that we will unleash our aggression in a destructive way.
The better way is to use some of our zeal to dispel the evil and assert positive forces within and around us.
Just being willing to let in the light of truth creates a shift in consciousness.
The way to restore harmony
The next step is becoming willing to question thoughts that create disharmony.
We look for thoughts that seem correct but leave us feeling uneasy.
That fail to bring a feeling of peace, love and unity.
Just being willing to let in the light of truth creates a shift in consciousness.
The truth of God, that is, rather than some temporary perception of truth.
It helps to visualize surrendering any tightly held position to God and his vision of truth.
This is the way to becoming enlightened.
And it lifts a tremendous burden.
If, on the other hand, it feels humiliating to be wrong.
If it seems shameful to be imperfect, or to have made a mistake.
Then it will be so much more difficult to release our tightly held positions.
This is what happens when we hold a low opinion of ourselves. The lower it is, the greater is the stake in some prideful, egotistical, self-elevating and self-righteous position.
Usually, for good measure, there will be judgment of others involved as well.
The solution?
Try reaching out to Christ.
We can know, and later feel, his love and total acceptance of us, no matter where or how we are now.
Eventually, we will be able to learn to do the same for ourselves.
This is the way to come to trusting our own divine nature.
Then we can afford the luxury of accepting our sins—our shortcomings—without losing the ground under our feet.
From there, we can reach further for truth.
That’s the route to restoring harmony with ourselves, others and life.
Turning aggression into spiritual strength
We can see ourselves being firm and reasonable with our own Lower Self.
Maybe we ask Christ to help us with this.
Then we assert our right to only want the will of God, and nothing less.
We trust that it will bring us the best we could ever hope for.
And that if anyone says otherwise, it’s a lie.
We want to plant these seeds deep in our soul.
This is how we transform our aggression into something that works for us, not against us.
This is how we rout out painful untruthfulness in our psyche.
Don’t be fooled into thinking these aspects will roll over easily.
Untruthfulness is not easy to ferret out.
That’s why people need to work with someone—a healer, a Helper, a therapist, a friend.
After all, our faults are often more obvious to others than they are to us.
Know too, that some bits may take a long time to surface.
Those may be issues we didn’t originally plan to address in this incarnation. But having completed our original task, our spirit may have chosen to go ahead and tackle them.
Our true being has never been touched by any of this. It remains whole and peaceful, untouched by pain.
From that deeper place it watches our earthly life with compassion, seeing our struggles as part of a process of healing.
What seems tragic from here is not tragic there.
Slowly, through this process, we are learning to return to our true nature.
All is well.
Even this suffering is guiding us home.
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