Transcript

The Lord doesn’t love, the Lord IS love. So what love does is that it has to bring into being what is other than itself. In order for love to exist, there has to be two. But the Lord can’t bring into being a being that is Divine like Himself, because that would be loving Himself. So what the Lord brings into being is what is other than Himself. Now if you define Divinity, Divinity is to have life in oneself. That’s what Divinity is. To be the source of life itself. To not be Divine, is to be a receiver of life.

So everything that is created is not the Lord, it is a receiver of the Lord’s life. Now in order to have a reciprocal relationship, that life has to be received by the creature, or what is created, in a way whereby it feels it to be its own. So the feeling has to be there that I am a self. But the understanding is that that feeling is a product of the Lord’s in flowing life. It’s not something sourced in myself, although by all appearances it does. Then you have the conditions for reciprocity, which is what love is. It’s communion and connection. So that’s the only way the Divine Being as love, can have love manifest as if there is another being that for all intents of purposes operates as if it is Divine but knows that it’s not. And the more that you know that you don’t have life in yourself, then the more infilling there is from the Divine and the more fully you feel alive. So there’s kind of a paradox that sits in there.

Now from our perspective, where we believe we have life in ourselves, it all looks like – My goodness, if I have to give this up then I am nothing! And so you spiral into – What is it all about?

Well what the Word says is that every human being that comes into being has come into being through a need within the Grand Man to fulfill a use in the whole of the community, a unique use that only that being can fulfill. And so that’s what’s behind human beings being born, is that they’re being born for heaven to infill these uses in this community of heaven. So an example is like when you are in a use that you love, you give no thought to yourself. Like your sense of self just doesn’t exist in that time stands still, or time doesn’t exist either. You’re fully in the joy of what you’re doing and it’s not self referencing. Well that’s angelic consciousness, and angels do not self reference but they’re more fully alive and feel the life in the joy and the purpose and the meaning of being itself because they don’t have that belief in oneself getting in the way and obscuring the Lord’s life.

So the Lord’s desire is to give all that He is to another. That’s what love does, and love can’t do anything else but that, because the Lord is the fullness of all we can imagine from a perspective of happiness and joy and meaning and purpose. The more we can receive of Him, the greater our sense of meaning, happiness, joy and purpose is.

So the other aspect to it is that what we can say is that that life is nothing like how we experience life at this particular point in our development. So we struggle to see what joy and happiness is without self referencing whereas it’s actually true joy, true peace. True love is when the self is no longer something that’s looking to take for itself what it wants or what it believes will make it happy because humility, happiness, joy, all of these things arise when the self is put off. That’s what we become and that’s what heaven is.

So all there is, is as of self. There is no self other than the Lord. The Lord is the only Self. So just by extension, there can only be as of self and all sense of me being a self falls into the realm of falsity. So we are receivers of the Lord’s life. We don’t have life in our self and by definition only that which has life in itself is a self. So the Lord is the only self. The struggle we have is around trying to live out of an as of self as opposed to out of my-self. Well, you can’t do it because that effort is coming from self, that thinks it can sort of conjure up an as of self state. It can’t do it. What you can do is recognize when self is owning what is the Lord’s and shunning that evil as a sin. And then as that process moves forward, the as of self becomes the default mode of being.

It’s already here. It’s all that’s possible. Everything else is a delusion because it separates us from the Lord. As soon as I say I am an autonomous independent being, I separate myself from the Lord because the Lord alone is an autonomous independent being that has life in itself. And so if I’m in a state where I believe myself, my ego, my proprium to be everything, then of course that separates. It separates not just from the Lord but from everybody else. And that it is not true can be seen in the fact that we constantly have to defend it. And we have to push our right to be. Well the very fact that we have to do that, that we have to put our self forward all the time…

And I know what pop psychology and the rest of it, or it not even pop psychology, actual psychology says, that it’s about self-esteem and affirming the self and individuation and all of these terms that float around, but they’re all built on the idea that there is a self that can actually achieve something. And that’s where it all breaks down. So it’s about dying to self. It’s dying to that self which has been built up and acquired from the loves of self and the world being active for most of our lives. That self has to die in order for the Lord to provide us with a new self which is an as of self. This is a full recognition that it’s from the Lord and is the Lord in us. And that’s why you have to go to the Word and work with its truth because what those truths do is strip back the love of our self. That love of self is really the love of the feeling that I am a self.

So the term metanoia which is usually translated repentance, it means aftermind. The literal meaning of it is aftermind or it can also mean higher mind, meta, like metaphysics, like it’s the same prefix there. But it means literally a changing of mind in the sense of turning around, inverting. So these ideas are in the doctrines. The idea of there having to be this inversion that occurs and it’s often described in terms of where truth leads and good is held to be secondary. There has to be an inversion whereby we come to see that good is first and has always been first or lover is primary and truth flows from that.

So we have this sort of low level of existence which in a sense actually establishes us in freedom because we don’t feel the influx of heaven or hell really. We’re kind of in the state of having to respond to the Word as of self. And that’s what builds a new will. And there’s no other way that a new sense of self can be implanted unless there is a response or a cooperation on our part so far as our engagement with the Word is concerned.

So yeah, you know, like .. and every day it’s a battle. But the thing is is that we only see what’s going on at a surface level. The Lord’s undertaking to change those mental structures and the affections and all of that realm, that’s all the Lord’s work. So long as there’s something from our side that is at least looking to apply truth to life, you know, like as long as there’s something of that activem – then a lot can be done. It’s like the two fish and the five loaves, or the small amount of meal, or the oil in the cruse, or the mustard seed… there only has to be a little for it to be expanded, but it’s not expanded until that work is complete. 

Third Round posts are short audio clips taken from Round 3 comments in the online Logopraxis Life Group meetings. The aim is to maintain focus on understanding the Text’s application to the inner life while reinforcing key LP principles highlighted in the exchanges.