Logopraxis

Third Round posts are short audio clips taken from Round 3 comments offered in the online Logopraxis Life Group meetings. The aim is to keep the focus on understanding the Text in terms of its application to the inner life along with reinforcing any key LP principles that have been highlighted in the exchanges.

Third Round posts are short audio clips taken from Round 3 comments offered in the online Logopraxis Life Group meetings. The aim is to keep the focus on understanding the Text in terms of its application to the inner life along with reinforcing any key LP principles that have been highlighted in the exchanges.

Third Round posts are short audio clips taken from Round 3 comments offered in the online Logopraxis Life Group meetings. The aim is to keep the focus on understanding the Text in terms of its application to the inner life along with reinforcing any key LP principles that have been highlighted in the exchanges.

Third Round posts are short audio clips taken from Round 3 comments offered in the online Logopraxis Life Group meetings. The aim is to keep the focus on understanding the Text in terms of its application to the inner life along with reinforcing any key LP principles that have been highlighted in the exchanges.

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The Impermanent Nature of the Self

Transcript

So, in this short talk, I thought we would just talk about the possibility of change, of transformation, and the possibility open to all so far as their regeneration is concerned. So, I thought a good place just to open would be a quote from the Arcana Coelestia number 4322. And there we read this,

...to be kept in being is constantly to come into being and therefore the preservation of something in connection and form is the constant creation of it.

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You know, we're offered so many big ideas in the Word that we can easily fall into a state of casual listening. We all know that state where we hear the words, but they fail to fall on fresh ground within the mind. So, because there's a lack of attention, we fail to grasp the implications of what we are hearing.

And of course, whenever we come to a truth, such as the one that I've just quoted, we need to bring our attention to it so that it falls on fresh ground within the mind every time. And that's because every truth, no matter what it is, if it is a truth, opens to what is infinite and eternal, so we can never exhaust the truth.

It is always taking us on a journey into what is new but that newness is only found when we're able to stand before it in a state of humility and allow it to take us into new places, to take our thinking to new places. So, this is one of those big statements that you have probably heard before that you are familiar with, but perhaps you haven't really thought through the implications of it.

This idea, that creation is constant coming into being, now I'm sure you've heard this, right? This idea that creation is constant coming into being. So, this is a very, very big idea. What I'm hoping for, is that we might be able to touch on just a few of the implications of this idea in relation to the nature of the self.

So, this idea feeds into another idea which has to do with the nature of finite life. So far as finite life is concerned, well, it can be defined as constant change. It is something dynamic. This can be held in contrast to what we know of Divine Life. Of that life, that is the Lord's life, it is said to be immutable or unchanging.

Now this is because the Divine by definition is the fullness of perfection itself. And if it is the fullness of perfection itself, then what change can be possible? How can, what is the fullness of perfection itself, be added to? It can't. If anything can be added to the fullness of perfection, it wasn't the fullness of perfection.

So, this is why, in part, the Divine Life is said to be unchanging or immutable. On the other hand, finite creatures, that is, those that have been created by the Divine, creatures like you and I, are imperfect. So there is always potential for change. There is always a potential for some kind of transformation and that makes possible our regeneration.

But let me ask you this question; Is who you are, who you feel yourself to be, is that something fixed and permanent? Or perhaps it is something undergoing constant change? What do you feel yourself to be now? Most people believe that who they are, is something that remains constant throughout their life. But then this raises another question. You know, if the self is a permanent constant thing, then, how does this fit with the idea that creation is a constant coming into being, and that the Divine alone is immutable, that finite life by definition, as we have just seen, is change?

So, what are the implications for believing that the self is some kind of permanent fixture? I wonder if you've ever considered that? The Word clearly teaches that the feeling that we have life in ourselves is an appearance. Now that is another big idea.

Third Round posts are short audio clips taken from Round 3 comments offered in the online Logopraxis Life Group meetings. The aim is to keep the focus on understanding the Text in terms of its application to the inner life along with reinforcing any key LP principles that have been highlighted in the exchanges.

The irony of the remembered delight of childhood innocence of ignorance, is that we then spend the rest of our life acquiring knowledge with the hope that it will lead us back to that feeling of awe and wonder and unadulterated delight. We are chasing the state in which we receive love and instantly offer it to others around us, without expectation of return.

But although childhood is steeped in the magical delights of new discoveries that each day brings, it is also deeply based in the life of the proprium that is anchored in hell.

"What?" I hear them say.

"How can the delight of innocence be steeped in what is evil?"

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Well, that’s the irony I was talking about. To all appearances its innocence on the outside but its self-love on the inside. The life of the toddler revolves around the life of the toddler. The young child expects food instantly when it cries. It expects all it's needs to be met  and is not yet aware that it needs to hide it's automatic displeasure when these needs aren’t immediately satisfied. It sees all people and things in its environment existing only to serve itself and the centre of its world... is itself.    The young child takes delight in owning what it learns and acquires. All knowledge it acquires belongs to itself. In essence, the young child is it's own god. It is the lord of its environment and all around it are subject to it.  It has no awareness that there exists any other state apart from this one. It is not awake to any other reality than the one that it lives in day to day.

And it’s not a coincidence that the Word describes the developing sense of self like an infant, when it first starts out in the world. It tells us time and time again that we are born into evil.

DP 83 . No one can come into the kingdom of God unless he has been born again, for the reason that man by inheritance from his parents is born into evils of every kind,  ..... Man's first state, which is a state of damnation, every one has by inheritance from his parents; for man is thereby born into the love of self and love of the world, and from these as fountains, into evils of every kind

And what else can evil be but anything that is not the Lord.

It is the absence of the Lord.

It is the absence of light.

It is the absence of awareness.

It is the absence of any type of consciousness that anything exists outside of the immediate reality that one that can see and touch.

This is the innocence of ignorance. It simply knows nothing else because there is nothing present in which to contrast it with.

Now we might look at this state and see it's pathetic, sad, unfortunate existence. We might even look at it and know that it is death, that it has no real life. But the mercy in it .... the thing that brings me to my knees every time I look at it, is that without it, we have no sensory experience of what being a God is. Of what it means to be all-present and all-potent.

DP 51. From all this it can now be seen that the Infinite and Eternal, thus the Lord, must be thought of apart from space and time, and that such thought is possible; also that those have such thought who think interiorly in the rational; and that then the Infinite and Eternal is the same as the Divine. Thus do angels and spirits think. From thought abstracted from time and space a comprehension of the Divine Omnipresence and the Divine Omnipotence, also of the Divine from eternity, is possible, but none at all from thought to which an idea from space and time clings

The hellish proprium lives from the natural world and is focused on space and time. It believes that the appearances of the finite senses are what is real and true .  It believes that it is all seeing, all knowing and all powerful. It therefore offers sensory impressions of what it mea...

Third Round posts are short audio clips taken from Round 3 comments offered in the online Logopraxis Life Group meetings. The aim is to keep the focus on understanding the Text in terms of its application to the inner life along with reinforcing any key LP principles that have been highlighted in the exchanges.

Third Round posts are short audio clips taken from Round 3 comments offered in the online Logopraxis Life Group meetings. The aim is to keep the focus on understanding the Text in terms of its application to the inner life along with reinforcing any key LP principles that have been highlighted in the exchanges.

Third Round posts are short audio clips taken from Round 3 comments offered in the online Logopraxis Life Group meetings. The aim is to keep the focus on understanding the Text in terms of its application to the inner life along with reinforcing any key LP principles that have been highlighted in the exchanges.