An Ocean of Light: Contemplation, Transformation, and Liberation

Self-forgetful giving is likened to when we were yet uncreated.

God is eternal, the human mind is finite. If God could be comprehended, surrounded by a concept, this would make us greater than God.

The true self as opposed to the false self is yet another unhelpful dualism that is peddled by many in the spirituality industry who speak of this “false self” as though it were some sort of something to be rid of. If there is anything to be rid of, it is the illusion that there is something that needs to be rid of in the first place, and that ther

who are we to invite God in, who is already the very ground of our seeking? God is the great invitation—an invitation to release perpetually into that Love which finds Sabbath rest in us and sustains us in being.

It bears repeating that no extra effort or ingredient turns reactive mind into receptive mind. It is the exact same awareness. Receptive mind is simply less cluttered.

A habitus is a dynamism—mental, physical, or moral—that generates an increasingly positive momentum toward love of God and neighbor (this is but one love loving love). There can also be a negative habitus, that is, away from love of God and neighbor, but here we shall focus on the positive.

This allows grace to loosen this ego-knot and opens the way to a more expansive, receptive, far less cluttered awareness.

For our purposes we can describe ego as a sort of knot of psyche. This knot of ego gets in the way of our realizing with expanding clarity that there is no separate, isolated self to begin with, for we are all one in God and always have been. The problem is the knot, not the psychic energy itself.

Whenever we turn to God, there is a light that shines and burns in us, guiding us to what we should do and what we should not do, and giving us all kinds of good instruction, of which we had no knowledge or understanding in the past.”

As the twentieth-century Serbian Orthodox monk Thaddeus of Vitovnica writes, “Everything is constantly changing; nothing remains static.”