Benji
@benji
Benji
• Due to my own exhausting skepticism, I am still not entirely sure what my relationship to God and prayer is. But my nightly reviews have increasingly been accompanied with the wish that “Thy will be done.” I have zero confidence that I have sufficient self-knowledge to manifest exactly the right path for myself, and the more I’ve leaned into surrendering control the better my life has gotten. But this surrender always seems to come with a fear of my family falling into material insecurity. The good news is that specific fear’s also a path back to the main quest.
• Because money tends to be one of the biggest barriers on our path to a life we truly love, our money triggers are critical indicators of precisely where we need to integrate our consciousness. Put another way: money often makes us do things that are out of integrity.
• As we move further from fear, he shows us how to create from an increasingly loving and authentic place. It’s one of the most interesting and useful conversations I’ve had. He concluded his masterclass with fifteen steps on the path to making the transition from fear to integrity. This helps shift you from the black magic of “my will be done,” to the more subtle miracles of “Thy will be done.” If love is one of the most powerful forces in the Universe, coming into ever greater integrity with it will enhance the creative potential of your thoughts.
• Your job is to find the place you're out of integrity and align so that you can continue to be like a larger and larger conduit of this wildly loving, fantastically intelligent consciousness that ultimately we all are.
• Martha Beck
• The question of goodness permeates Murdoch’s entire body of work, but she plumbs this particular aspect of it — its bearing on truth and morality, lensed through Plato — in greater depth in an essay titled On “God” and “Good,” also included in Existentialists and Mystics.
• With an eye to the relationship between the good and “the real which is the proper object of love, and of knowledge which is freedom,” she considers what it takes for us to purify our attention in order to take in reality on its own terms, unalloyed with our attachments and ideas.
• What it takes, she suggests, is “something analogous to prayer, though it is something difficult to describe, and which the higher subtleties of the self can often falsify” — not some “quasi-religious meditative technique,” but “something which belongs to the moral life of the ordinary person.”
• Half a century after the existentialist and mystic Simone Weil liberated this raw mindfulness from the strict captivity of religion with her lovely observation that “attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer,” for it “presupposes faith and love.”