Teaching II – Community of the Inner Light

If our mission statement is too organizational in nature for you, and sounds like the same old stuff, take a chance and read on…

If one is to live a life set free from the nightmare of ignorance, my recommendation is to ask yourself, “do you really want to be free of that sensation of oppression in circumstances beyond your control which can be frightening?” And even to doubt your identity.

It is not too uncommon to meet people who, having just entered adulthood and feel the need to live and think for themselves, cannot find the courage and tools to encourage and support themselves and to ask why do I believe in things, ideas, people or ideologies, even religions that are punitive, controlling, and judgmental that kills my spirit of living, not even faith in myself?

It is good and correct to have help and faith in a being who is all good, loving, kind, supportive, and very close to you. Who listens and doesn’t judge you or condemn. And even does good for you. Some being you can trust, having faith in; yes, even believe in.

If you consider yourself a thinking person, lets take a quantum leap and ask a “why” and look at what is belief and faith in a god like being and be bonded together in a respecting love affair.

What is Faith?

Faith in a god presupposes two distinct inquiries. One concerns belief in itself, which engulfs the total personality of a man or woman. The other concerns the existence of a God in whom they believe and the very existence of a God.

Personal faith is a given for one to accept as true; meaning the existence of a god. The average person recognizes their lack of a total capacity to believe. They feel inferior to what they know they could be or feel they only need themselves, not a god. The existence and substance of a God is the object of one’s inquiry.

The primitive peoples like the rest of the creatures of the earth ate and drank and slept. Like all the rest they wished that it was hot when it was cold and cold when it was hot. But unlike most other creatures on earth they asked the question, “why?” He not only asked questions but even tried to answer them. He imagined what the answers might be, to the best of his ability, and then said that “that” was really the answer. Some people appear to be living today without much time to think about it. Others become so interested in social activities or sports and making money, that they ignore their deeper wonderings about the nature of things or their living is controlled by habit and they do not look for improvement. They then can loose the opportunity to grow and progress. Yet the questions still annoy us: “Why are some people more popular or have more money and don’t work hard for it?” “Why should I be honest or take responsibility for my actions?” “Does God really have his eye and judgment on my genitalia?” “Is love to control others?” “What happens when we die?” “Is there such a thing as eternity?” “What is in it for me?”

Doubts and questions are healthy, signs of honesty within us and our measure of our effort to increase self-understanding.

Sometimes an answer to a question, which one did not even recognize as a question, is right inside oneself. Like the first great discovery mankind can make was and is that he could and does think.

What one thinks and continues to support with faith can cause conflict with interpersonal relations. So many of us fear this challenge of others thinking and take it as a judgment against ourselves, or we can think we have something wrong with us or in them. We often take an emotional, combative position with the other or within ourselves.

In human interpersonal relations this experience can often be called average. This is part of the law of averages, which allows a wide margin of failure and even accident.

This is all about the evolutionary development of human consciousness. It has been a process in which the individual person has not taken a conscious part. If a person is to evolve further, it can now only be by his own conscious participation in individualized intelligence and effort. It is a process of intelligent growth. No one else can grow for us. We must each grow for ourselves. The lower degree of self-recognition is that which only realizes itself separate from other entities, as the ego is distinguished from the non-ego. But the higher degree of self-recognition is realizing its own spiritual nature. Now, it is this higher degree of self-recognition that is the power by which the individual person produces results. This self-recognition is a clue to perhaps the biggest question a human can ask, “Am I more than just a human?”

Human nature has been conditioned to live life according to the temporal principle of living conditioned by good and evil and where good is short lived and evil deeds or events must be endured or protected.

This living in duality seems to be physically true and supported by our sight as we experience and see up and down, girl and boy, good and bad, health and illness, rich and poor, yes and no, death.

Yet in this duality we can understand the law of change. This law of change can be the awareness and first step to our salvation from duality and the nightmares that it causes. Understand that change is an innate freedom to choose. This is sometimes recognized as metanoya, which is to change one’s focus of understanding what is true and can be accepted by any thinking person.

Creation

A theological position developed by Maximus Gregorios

“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” (Genesis 1:1)

This creation are the ideas of God and everlasting. While the creation are ideas of God and everlasting, as fulfillment it begins in time and space. This creation, first as ideas, not in fulfillment, is witnessed in Holy Scriptures: Psalms 90:2, LXX 89:2, John 15:15, Ephesians 1:4.

Ideas and fulfillment of them in time and space are correlated and known as reciprocals. The succession of things and their movement constitute the sense of time in such a manner that the universe does not exist without time or time without the universe. It is not possible to understand time before the foundation of the world, time cannot be understood between everlasting God up to the fulfillment of creation.

The everlasting God existed before the creation of this universe not in time, because there was no time.

The will of God to create the universe existed before the sense of time. The eternity of God means that God is above time and space and thereby ever present without end. Time humanly understood is the moving of things which have a beginning and an end which are changeable. God is above time. “There is no duration of time as far as God is concerned” (II Peter 3:8b). Life before time and also the creative cause of time are the meaning of eternity, which is an attribute of God. “Who is and who was and who is to come” (Revelations 1:4). This same unchangeability of God in relationship to his eternity is denoted by the Hebrew word, “Yahweh,” saying, “I AM WHO I AM” (Exodus 3:14), “For He, God, cannot deny himself” (II Timothy 2:13).

This understanding connotes that all we think and physically experience are in an eternal “NOW” of universal consciousness; intellect, universal mind, that is called God.

These facts of time and space and physical form are true phenomena within eternity.