The last posting ended by discussing ‘agape’ as a spiritual power that opens up our awareness of what God’s Presence is doing. That description came to me while I was praying about agape, when I realized that in such a spiritually powerful moment, God’s Presence wasn’t somehow 'coming to me;' but instead, I was opening up to become aware that God was present to me -- I merely had not been open to that awareness. So l needed to be made aware.
And of course, the spiritual influence that was doing the action of opening up my awareness was agape. Or as put in biblical terms: God was pouring agape into my heart through the Holy Spirit {Romans 5:4-5}
Later, as I looked back on what happened, I came to realize that through that action of God's agape, (which came to me as a spiritual sensation that I was being ‘caringly’ and ‘lovingly’ drawn into a close, intimate relationship of divine Presence -- I was experiencing an opening up in a deeply devotional way to becoming increasingly aware of a Presence that is always ‘with me’ because there is no way that the eternal Presence is ever ‘not there.’ Any sensation of ‘not there’ is strictly my own lack of awareness, and nothing more.
And of course ‘the paradox of spirituality’ comes into play in that situation as well as what I described in my last posting. What is ‘not there’ is me.
From my very limited perspective, the awareness is what is important. If I focus only on my ego-identity as some sort of a separate entity, then I feel so cut off and alienated that I lose touch with the power of an awareness that God’s Presence is eternally with me so intimately as to be permeating my being while simultaneously ‘extending’ into vastness. But on the other hand, if I let agape spiritually help me identify with the vast Presence, then I become aware that the vastness is also within, and then I begin to form an identity with the eternal formless Essence. But I need to have my awareness opened up by the spiritual power of agape because it is not possible for a separate ego-being to truly ‘know’ that connection with divine Presence.
In other words, it's not possible to do that on my own. It's egotistically not possible.
In that sense, there is no such thing as a separate ego-being. It is nothing more than a figment of overactive imagination, but the modern world indoctrinates people to think we must form an ego-identity and to believe falsely that each person is somehow not deeply connected to All that is. But of course, each modern society is a corporate ego.
So that false belief is what I meant by the ‘non-existence’ of an ego-being. The whole point of human existence is to become fully aware of the non-existence of ego-identity. (Of course that is very threatening to the modern world, so people who fully understand that point -- and work toward accomplishing it -- are in grave danger. Which is not all that different from what happened 2,000 years ago.)
Of course, in the modern world we produce the paradox because we are taught to believe very early in childhood that we need to build an ego-identity in order to defend ourselves against the modern world. [A strange paradox, isn't it.] We are taught that we cannot survive in the modern world without a very strong ego-identity. But actually the exact opposite is the real truth: our very spiritual survival is being jeopardized by our ego-identity. It is, in fact, the false belief in the existence of our ego-identity that keeps us from believing in our connection with divine Presence.
The paradox also causes us to believe there is some kind of an existential struggle going on between our ego-identity and God. When actually all we have to do is merely stop believing in ego.
But, of course, that is much easier to say than it is to do, because over the years of our living we increasingly think we have become completely dependent on that ego-identity which we have worked so hard to develop.
2,000 years ago so many people had lost all hope in experiencing a connection with God that Paul wrote his great message of hope: God was pouring agape into our heart through the Holy Spirit {Romans 5:4-5}. So it is by means of giving us agape that God brings us the experience of being intimate with divine Presence. Our task is to accept God's gift and live by it and through it.
