Astonishment

All that we have anciently called “God” and presumed to know as “Divine” invariably falls within human experience of things and energies, physical and subtle, that appear and disappear. Therefore, what we have since prehistory been labeling “God” is not absolutely different or distinct from the whole dimension of “being human.”

What “God” is cannot ever be known. Yet the Bright Mystery is freedom, and freedom can be lived now. In other words, what is God can only be realized—or understood, presumed and lived.

We must take responsibility for our “God” ideas and for everything that we have traditionally projected outside ourselves. We must apprehend and acknowledge the fullness of the human being, in order to be fully human, which is unfathomable and divine.

Realization of Real God necessarily involves the sacrifice of all experiences and things and ideas we identify as “God.” Therefore, our true spiritual responsibility is to be reconciled with essential Wonder, and so stand already liberated (not displaced by mere concepts from whatever is God or Reality). Such heartfelt and whole-bodily Wonder is the simple and profound and eternally reliable link with actual God. It is to simply be God (Real Life) through perfect alliance and non-recoil from Infinity. It is to rest in the Unavoidable. It is to flow with the inevitable changes of birth and death, without fear and without any ultimate knowing.

To live this happiness is the holy message, the essence of spiritual instruction. Such joy, fully lived—now and now and now—is the truest prayer and the primary means to serve all beings.