When I read Marianne Williamson’s A Return to Love for the 2nd time, I began to realize that most of the time she was talking about love in a spiritual way. In a follow-up careful study, I saw that she was meaning agapé.
So I decided to go thru her book one more time and change ‘love’ to ‘agapé’ whenever the context gave that meaning. Doing that gave enough of a profound lesson in agapé understanding that I will now list those re-written sentences.
Agapé is what we were born with. Fear is what we have learned here. Agapé is the essential existential fact. It is the ultimate reality and our purpose on earth. To be consciously aware of it, to experience agapé in ourselves and others, is the meaning of life. We came here to co-create with God by extending agapé. We’re on earth to share agapé. The only love that completes us is God’s agapé, and God’s agapé is to be shared with everyone.
Agapé is within us. It cannot be destroyed, but can only be hidden. Agapé merely becomes clouded over, or surrounded by mental mists.
God is the agapé within us. When we choose to share agapé, or to allow our minds to be one with God, then life is peaceful. When we turn away from agapé, the pain sets in. Once we get to the point where we realize that God is agapé, we understand that following God simply means following the dictates of agapé. By affirming that agapé is our priority in a situation, we actualize the power of God.
Agapé is energy. The return to agapé is the great cosmic drama, the personal journey from pretense to self, from pain to inner peace. The perfect you is the agapé within you. Your job in life is to allow the Holy Spirit to remove the fearful thinking that surrounds your perfect self, just as excess marble surrounding Michelangelo's perfect statue is removed.
The agapé in one of us is the agapé in all of us. There’s actually no place where God stops and you start, and no place where you stop and I start. Agapé is an infinite continuum. We are all one, we are agapé itself. Anything other than agapé is an illusion. The only thing lacking in any situation is agapé. The experience of agapé is a choice we make, a mental decision to see agapé as the only real purpose and value in any situation.
Until we make that choice, we keep striving for results that we think would make us happy. When we relax and sense agapé active within the core of our being and keep to that as our focus in every situation — that’s the meaning of working with agapé in charge of life.
God, as agapé, is constantly expanding, flourishing and creating new patterns for the expression and attainment of joy. When our minds, thru focus on agapé, are allowed to be open vessels thru which God expresses, our lives become the canvasses for the expression of that joy.
Thursday, June 25, 2015
Sunday, June 21, 2015
Maybe Agapé is a verb, like “agapic flow”
A few decades ago an exciting change happened in theology: the “God is a verb” movement. Those were creative days for exploring what had been going wrong in Western Civilization for hundreds of years. Unfortunately, most people didn’t want to start thinking with the model of verbs because our modern world had organized a worldview based on noun thinking.
Okay, so why do figures of speech make good analogies for how to think about the world and spiritual matters? It’s because we communicate with language, whether we like it or not. So nouns become representatives of the whole material existence. Then verbs represent every aspect that is not material. But… does that leave anything for verbs to represent?
If those people, who are stuck in a 18th Century scientific viewpoint, still have a general approach to existence where everything has to be material (expressed by nouns), then what’s left? To them verbs are no more than nouns in action. They even think of electrons as tiny bullets whizzing along. That reduces electricity to something solid — because All is thought of only as solid.
Of course, the advanced 21st Century scientists don’t think that way at all. They like to think using verbs. And they are trying to get everyone to start thinking using verbs — before humans destroy the ability of the surface of this planet to sustain human existence. Such destructive results come from too many centuries of materialistic thinking.
But to use verbs as the basis for putting together a general worldview, that leaves open the way for spiritual thinking. No wonder there is so much doubting going on today about spiritual matters; because, if the major organizing worldview is based on materialistic thinking, where people get reduced to loveless objects of consumerism, then life gets reduced to nothing more than mere material existence.
That brings me back to the reaction when I refer to agapé as a spiritual power, and the question I get is “what is spiritual power?” — followed by a blank stare. I’m beginning to wonder if the problem stems from not being able to think of agapé as a verb. First, that thinking is important because agapé is not some sort ‘thing’ that can be found inside of our body. Of course, it’s inside — but from spiritual understanding, there is no ‘inside.’ So flowing agapic power is as much ‘outside’ as ‘inside’ (and the Source of agapé is not merely ‘inside’ of human beings).
Secondly, being fully aware of the flowing agapic power permeating our present situation is an action awareness — so of course we need to understand this by using verb as the analogy. That’s what I mean by agapé being a verb, not a noun. As I said in my book, “agapé is the spirituality of action.”
So then what happens when we begin to think of all spiritual concerns in terms of verbs — with no aspects as some sort of material forms. Then spirituality becomes fluid — and motivational. It’s action that spurs us into more action. Ultimately, we are able to organize a general viewpoint of life that considers the Source of our true spiritual identity in terms of verbs. Then we can have our awareness opened up by agapic power drawing us into intimate relationship with the Source, and we can understand being sent out to spread the power of agapé wherever we go.
Okay, so why do figures of speech make good analogies for how to think about the world and spiritual matters? It’s because we communicate with language, whether we like it or not. So nouns become representatives of the whole material existence. Then verbs represent every aspect that is not material. But… does that leave anything for verbs to represent?
If those people, who are stuck in a 18th Century scientific viewpoint, still have a general approach to existence where everything has to be material (expressed by nouns), then what’s left? To them verbs are no more than nouns in action. They even think of electrons as tiny bullets whizzing along. That reduces electricity to something solid — because All is thought of only as solid.
Of course, the advanced 21st Century scientists don’t think that way at all. They like to think using verbs. And they are trying to get everyone to start thinking using verbs — before humans destroy the ability of the surface of this planet to sustain human existence. Such destructive results come from too many centuries of materialistic thinking.
But to use verbs as the basis for putting together a general worldview, that leaves open the way for spiritual thinking. No wonder there is so much doubting going on today about spiritual matters; because, if the major organizing worldview is based on materialistic thinking, where people get reduced to loveless objects of consumerism, then life gets reduced to nothing more than mere material existence.
That brings me back to the reaction when I refer to agapé as a spiritual power, and the question I get is “what is spiritual power?” — followed by a blank stare. I’m beginning to wonder if the problem stems from not being able to think of agapé as a verb. First, that thinking is important because agapé is not some sort ‘thing’ that can be found inside of our body. Of course, it’s inside — but from spiritual understanding, there is no ‘inside.’ So flowing agapic power is as much ‘outside’ as ‘inside’ (and the Source of agapé is not merely ‘inside’ of human beings).
Secondly, being fully aware of the flowing agapic power permeating our present situation is an action awareness — so of course we need to understand this by using verb as the analogy. That’s what I mean by agapé being a verb, not a noun. As I said in my book, “agapé is the spirituality of action.”
So then what happens when we begin to think of all spiritual concerns in terms of verbs — with no aspects as some sort of material forms. Then spirituality becomes fluid — and motivational. It’s action that spurs us into more action. Ultimately, we are able to organize a general viewpoint of life that considers the Source of our true spiritual identity in terms of verbs. Then we can have our awareness opened up by agapic power drawing us into intimate relationship with the Source, and we can understand being sent out to spread the power of agapé wherever we go.
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