God Is the Very Self of Each of Us

as we're sitting here I'm realizing that the religion I practiced my whole life did a pretty darn good job at making it totally duel where God was an entity that was unreachable and my activity as a human was simply to pray and ask for or hope for and so now I see it the way you guys explain it and I see the conversations that if I am that divinity right I then is prayer truly a monologue and and if so then where where does my faith go because my faith was always hoping for that unlimited

awareness to offer me save salvation of some sort and I'm sure you guys have heard the answer to that before but I just I have no idea I mean my entire belief system has cracked in two days and I'm pretty unstable right now so having grown up in a in a pretty traditional Catholic household this is pretty intense so I need help with prayer and faith thank you one of the reasons that these retreats are the form of these retreats is the way they are with plenty of time in between our meetings not too much

silence no plenty of conversation is that that this teaching is as you say a profound challenge to our most deeply cherished beliefs and feelings and that can be very destabilizing and so the we gather with this loving community of friends and hold each other and support each other not just in the meetings but but in between the meetings and that's a very important aspect of our retreats so now to specifically what you said about about prayer do you understand the Mary and Jane metaphor yeah yes sir yes so take take Jane's point of view she

has no idea that she is a limitation of Mary she knows nothing of Mary although all there is to her is Mary she doesn't realize that so from her point of view she lives in a world of separate people and separate objects and she is one amongst innumerable such people everything on the inside of her is made out of mind her thoughts feelings and everything and everyone on the outside of her is made out of stuff called matter this see this is the way this is her a fundamental but this is her belief system identity

is is crafted around this this belief all her relationships express this belief all her feelings express this belief but and Jane looks out at her creation at the creation and she sees that that it is extraordinary and she wonders where does it come from what is it that creates all of this what was before all of this and thinking in this way and she obviously thinks that she is just a tiny incidental insignificant little body that he's going to last in the scheme of things chat just a moment so she has a sense of this

vast an extraordinary universe that somehow created everything that she sees including herself so she wonders what is it that created this where does this come from and asking this question her mind goes it travels as it were through the creation that she sees to something beyond and she conceives of something at an infinite distance from herself that is somehow outside the universe that she perceives that must have created this universe so Jane conceives the this creator Jane conceives this creator God has something at an infinite distance from herself outside of herself that created her world

and so she then she then wonders how could I ever have a relationship with this God at an infinite distance from myself what would I have to do and because this God is at an infinite distance from herself and essentially unknowable that the best she can do is believe in it pray to it but even have a she has a feeling for it and have feeling for God it is his very true it comes from her intuition that there is something much bigger than her own finite self that gives rise to all of this but

she conceives of that something in a way that is consistent with her belief in being a separate self so although her intuition about God or the ultimate reality is true the way she thinks of it is simply a reflection of her belief in her sense of herself as a separate self so she conceives as of God as the separate other and at an infinite distance from her self and this is the conventional religious model what she doesn't know although she intuitive but what she doesn't know is that the ultimate reality the ultimate creator of this

extraordinary and vast universe that she perceives is identical to her very own self her very own self remembers Mary's mind and it is Mary's mind that that has created the world she perceived so so although she has this intuition she doesn't yet know that what the world is out there is identical to what she is in here and so she she spends much of her life following an exoteric religion praying to a god an infinite distance from herself anyway because of this intuition that she has she is led by a series of apparently chance events

to a retreat at garrison I'm Jane hi everybody and on the retreat at garrison she's given a new model of this of this so-called creator goddess she is she begins to realize that what she is in the depths of herself is the same as what the universe is that the the the apparent distinction between herself and all objects and others is only an appearance that underlying this appearance there is a fundamental unity of being and that that unity of being is accessible to her through the knowledge I am because the knowledge I am is the

knowledge of being all that is required is to remove the limitations that we have placed on that being and then she begins to think about the the sayings in the Bible that she was brought up with when when Jesus said I and my father are one what I essentially am and what the universe essentially is are the same being refracted into a multiplicity and diversity of objects and others only through the limitations of each of our minds but behind those limitations there is this fundamental unity of being the being in each of us borrows it's

apparently individual existence from that shared being and that shared being is what is traditionally called God and that is why you're quite right that we cannot that the highest prayer is is silent because the silence is the highest prayer because we we cannot go from ourselves to God we cannot make any movement from ourselves to God because any movement from ourselves or away from ourselves would be a movement away from God there is no pathway from ourselves to God God is not at an infinite distance from herself God his utterly intimate with God is the

very self of each of us and because we are already that self we cannot approach God we cannot take a step towards God any step we take would be an apparent step away in fact we cannot even step away from God because we take ourselves with us wherever we go so when we realize this we realized that praying to God is is simplistic I don't mean to I don't mean to criticize it because before Jane knows any better it's all she can do because Jane has this intuition the Rianne the ultimate reality is much bigger

than myself so she has this intuition and because of her conditioning she conceives God at an infinite distance from herself and supplicates she prays to that God so I'm not criticizing that she doesn't know any better but in time her understanding is refined and refined and refined and refined until she realizes that the the God that she has been praying to is the very self of herself and there is a beautiful line that I heard once from an Italian monk who said Lord thou art the love with which I love thee I thought that that

the Lord was an infinite distance from myself and that I was loving that God so my love started in my heart and proceeded that went for for an infinite distance to my god and then I realized thou art the very love in my heart with which I was loving you are closer to me than myself you are my very self I cannot love thee because you are that enough you are at the origin of my self never had you are never the destiny you can never be a destiny you can never be something I travelled

to you are always where I travel from so is its faith or what I've called faith up to today as sort of a surrender to the infinite consciousness exactly exactly just yes as is yes thank you yes the little if it's the the complete surrender of everything that seems to limit you it's a complete letting go the surrendering of everything that seems to limit you and and the yes surrender is it's another name for self inquiry it's another name for this traveling back King Lear traveling back to John Smith it's another surrender and self inquiry

are the same thing it's the letting go of everything that seems to limit you the letting go of everything that is superfluous to you letting go letting go letting go until you arrive at that element of yourself that you cannot let go of you your naked self aware being yes so if you you have this this feeling for God so in your case think of it more as surrender in rather than self inquiry it's the same thing it's exactly the same thing you