The Kingdom Within

[Agnostic_Gabe]

I was reading my book:

The Essential Mystics, Poets, Saints and Sages by Richard Hooper and it describes the enlightenment experience. Listen to this:

The loss of ego can happen rather suddenly, so it’s quite noticeable. Normal life has disappeared and cannot be regained. Thus when the ego disappears, it’s a kind of death and the ego might mourn it’s death and the life it no longer has.

In this new state of being, the ego is no longer affected by desires. Just to function takes an act of will. That which formally attracted us ceases to exist. One may also feel a sense of worthlessness, that there is nothing worth doing. There is an emptiness inside.

Such is the nature of the soul before enlightenment that it undergoes a dark night. Not only has the ego self disappeared, but in the emptiness, the mystic doubts everything. page 62.

Well, that describes me to a T… I guess I’ll wait for a great enlightenment… I won’t hold my breath, however.

[St_Michael]

Hang in there Gabe buddy. It’s dark before the light.

[St_Michael]

This comes from page 61 of the book “The Essential Mystics, Poets, Saints and Sages by Richard Hooper”:

Renouncing the world seems like it would be incredible hard, and renouncing the ego seems entirely impossible. Modern society is especially challenged: we have iPhones and iPods, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and American Idol. We all deserve our fifteen minutes of fame. It is especially difficult to become nobody in a world that only respects those with big egos.

The mystics tell us, however, that we can never realize we are one with All until we have eradicated our personal sense of “I”. God can’t come to visit unless we’re not home. As Ram Dass put it, “The mystical game is not about becoming somebody, it’s about becoming nobody”.

[Eaglesway]

There is no such thing as a sustained vacuum.We are already empty… "without form and void"until the word “Let there be light” starts a new creation within through the Logos, and a relationship with Him. It is about fulness, given by grace, and receiving it with thankfulness, even in the midst of difficulty. It is not by looking in the mirror of what “I dont want to be”. It is by looking in the eyes of the one who “Is Who He Is” and receiving His fulness via His love.

For in Christ all the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form, and in Christ you have been brought to fullness. Col 2:10

For of His fullness we have all received, and grace upon grace. John 1:16

IMO the destruction of the ego only occurs through the impartation of the divine nature- by grace, through faith, in fellowship with the Father and the Son through the Spirit.

Fixing our eyes on Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith, let us run with patience the race set before us.

I am sure of this, that He who started a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.

[St_Michael]

Eaglesway:

Ego death happens or begins when you hit bottom. It’s a painful ego puncturing. Someone or something else usually has to do it. It’s a shattering of the ego and then a complete surrender and abandonment to God. A letting go. You first have to become aware of your ego. Check this out from Wikipedia:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ego_death

We empty ourselves and become nothing. Jesus gave us the example:

he emptied Himself

by taking the very nature of a servant,

being made in human likeness.

And being found in appearance as a man,

he humbled himself

by becoming obedient to death—

even death on a cross!

Phil. 2:7-8

As an empty vessel the wind of the Spirit blows through.

[St_Michael]

To go more in depth try the Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions book written by Bill Wilson. As he says in the book: Each one of the steps and traditions are designed to deflate ego.

or this by Eckhart Tolle

[Eaglesway]

I have read both of those books( and Murray’s “Humility” is wonderful as are most of his books). “Hitting bottom” is often when the grace of God begins to manifest as the revelation of Jesus Christ, but imo the ego has not died that has not bowed the knee to Him.

“Hitting bottom” is also often a place where a person languishes for lack of someone to lift them into the waters, and desperately in need of the healing touch of Jesus.

Ego death requires more than just sinking into helplessness, granting that that is often a path through which people find Christ, and is always an element of salvation.(For through the Law I died to the Law, so that I might live to God).

‘I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.’ Gal 2

[St_Michael]

I agree. It’s an undoing of your personality. You gain humility. This is why I hold to free will and to G.K. Chesterton’s paradox of predestination. The determinism of Hyper- Calvinism with it’s unbreakable chain leads to mental illness. It’s ego to the extreme. It places you at the center of the universe with no break in the causal chain. I was diagnosed with this. Listen to Tolle describe this:

The mental illness that is called paranoid schizophrenia, or paranoid for short, is essentially an exaggerated form of ego…The mental illness we call paranoia also manifests another symptom that is an element of every ego, although in paranoia it takes on a more extreme form. The more the sufferer sees himself persecuted, spied on, or threatened by others, the more pronounced becomes his sense of being the center of the universe around whom everything evolves, and the more special and important he feels as the imagined focal point of so many people’s attention.

Listen to G.K. Chesterton in Orthodoxy:

Obviously if any actions, even a lunatic’s, can be causeless, determinism is done for. If the chain of causation can be broken for a madman, it can be broken for a man. But my purpose is to point out something more practical. It was natural, perhaps, that a modern Marxian Socialist should not know anything about free will. But it was certainly remarkable that a modern Marxian Socialist should not know anything about lunatics. Mr. Suthers evidently did not know anything about lunatics. The last thing that can be said of a lunatic is that his actions are causeless. If any human acts may loosely be called causeless, they are the minor acts of a healthy man; whistling as he walks; slashing the grass with a stick; kicking his heels or rubbing his hands. It is the happy man who does the useless things; the sick man is not strong enough to be idle. It is exactly such careless and causeless actions that the madman could never understand; for the madman (like the determinist) generally sees too much cause in everything. The madman would read a conspiratorial significance into those empty activities. He would think that the lopping of the grass was an attack on private property. He would think that the kicking of the heels was a signal to an accomplice. If the madman could for an instant become careless, he would become sane. Every one who has had the misfortune to talk with people in the heart or on the edge of mental disorder, knows that their most sinister quality is a horrible clarity of detail; a connecting of one thing with another in a map more elaborate than a maze. If you argue with a madman, it is extremely probable that you will get the worst of it; for in many ways his mind moves all the quicker for not being delayed by the things that go with good judgment. He is not hampered by a sense of humour or by charity, or by the dumb certainties of experience. He is the more logical for losing certain sane affections. Indeed, the common phrase for insanity is in this respect a misleading one. The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.

The lunatic’s theory explains a large number of things, but it does not explain them in a large way. I mean that if you or I were dealing with a mind that was growing morbid, we should be chiefly concerned not so much to give it arguments as to give it air, to convince it that there was something cleaner and cooler outside the suffocation of a single argument. Suppose, for instance, it were the first case that I took as typical; suppose it were the case of a man who accused everybody of conspiring against him. If we could express our deepest feelings of protest and appeal against this obsession, I suppose we should say something like this: "Oh, I admit that you have your case and have it by heart, and that many things do fit into other things as you say. I admit that your explanation explains a great deal; but what a great deal it leaves out! Are there no other stories in the world except yours; and are all men busy with your business? Suppose we grant the details; perhaps when the man in the street did not seem to see you it was only his cunning; perhaps when the policeman asked you your name it was only because he knew it already. But how much happier you would be if you only knew that these people cared nothing about you! How much larger your life would be if your self could become smaller in it; if you could really look at other men with common curiosity and pleasure; if you could see them walking as they are in their sunny selfishness and their virile indifference!

Mysticism keeps men sane. As long as you have mystery you have health; when you destroy mystery you create morbidity. The ordinary man has always been sane because the ordinary man has always been a mystic. He has permitted the twilight. He has always had one foot in earth and the other in fairyland. He has always left himself free to doubt his gods; but (unlike the agnostic of to-day) free also to believe in them. He has always cared more for truth than for consistency. If he saw two truths that seemed to contradict each other, he would take the two truths and the contradiction along with them. His spiritual sight is stereoscopic, like his physical sight: he sees two different pictures at once and yet sees all the better for that. Thus he has always believed that there was such a thing as fate, but such a thing as free will also. Thus he believed that children were indeed the kingdom of heaven, but nevertheless ought to be obedient to the kingdom of earth. He admired youth because it was young and age because it was not. It is exactly this balance of apparent contradictions that has been the whole buoyancy of the healthy man. The whole secret of mysticism is this: that man can understand everything by the help of what he does not understand. The morbid logician seeks to make everything lucid, and succeeds in making everything mysterious. The mystic allows one thing to be mysterious, and everything else becomes lucid. The determinist makes the theory of causation quite clear, and then finds that he cannot say “if you please” to the housemaid. The Christian permits free will to remain a sacred mystery; but because of this his relations with the housemaid become of a sparkling and crystal clearness. He puts the seed of dogma in a central darkness; but it branches forth in all directions with abounding natural health. As we have taken the circle as the symbol of reason and madness, we may very well take the cross as the symbol at once of mystery and of health. Buddhism is centripetal, but Christianity is centrifugal: it breaks out. For the circle is perfect and infinite in its nature; but it is fixed for ever in its size; it can never be larger or smaller. But the cross, though it has at its heart a collision and a contradiction, can extend its four arms for ever without altering its shape. Because it has a paradox in its centre it can grow without changing. The circle returns upon itself and is bound. The cross opens its arms to the four winds; it is a signpost for free travellers.

This is why I say we are to become nobody special.

[St_Michael]

https://scontent-atl3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/20840942_466284190417634_3104842570067566068_n.jpg?oh=3e7d0369f235c2009f5b6e14bdf2ce8c&oe=5A36FFEF

[St_Michael]

One more from Chesterton:

There is a notion adrift everywhere that imagination, especially mystical imagination, is dangerous to man’s mental balance. Poets are commonly spoken of as psychologically unreliable; and generally there is a vague association between wreathing laurels in your hair and sticking straws in it. Facts and history utterly contradict this view. Most of the very great poets have been not only sane, but extremely business-like; and if Shakespeare ever really held horses, it was because he was much the safest man to hold them. Imagination does not breed insanity. Exactly what does breed insanity is reason. Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do. Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers; but creative artists very seldom. I am not, as will be seen, in any sense attacking logic: I only say that this danger does lie in logic, not in imagination. Artistic paternity is as wholesome as physical paternity. Moreover, it is worthy of remark that when a poet really was morbid it was commonly because he had some weak spot of rationality on his brain. Poe, for instance, really was morbid; not because he was poetical, but because he was specially analytical. Even chess was too poetical for him; he disliked chess because it was full of knights and castles, like a poem. He avowedly preferred the black discs of draughts, because they were more like the mere black dots on a diagram. Perhaps the strongest case of all is this: that only one great English poet went mad, Cowper. And he was definitely driven mad by logic, by the ugly and alien logic of predestination. Poetry was not the disease, but the medicine; poetry partly kept him in health. He could sometimes forget the red and thirsty hell to which his hideous necessitarianism dragged him among the wide waters and the white flat lilies of the Ouse. He was damned by John Calvin; he was almost saved by John Gilpin. Everywhere we see that men do not go mad by dreaming. Critics are much madder than poets. Homer is complete and calm enough; it is his critics who tear him into extravagant tatters. Shakespeare is quite himself; it is only some of his critics who have discovered that he was somebody else. And though St. John the Evangelist saw many strange monsters in his vision, he saw no creature so wild as one of his own commentators. The general fact is simple. Poetry is sane because it floats easily in an infinite sea; reason seeks to cross the infinite sea, and so make it finite. The result is mental exhaustion, like the physical exhaustion of Mr. Holbein. To accept everything is an exercise, to understand everything a strain. The poet only desires exaltation and expansion, a world to stretch himself in. The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits.