this inner spaciousness, perceived as always having been present, is at the same time always new.

All these stories are the spawn of the originating story of blame. Adam cannot resist blaming God for the predicament Adam now found himself in, “the woman whom you put here with me—she gave me the fruit from the tree, and so I ate it”

The problem is not that God is absent but that God is so intimately present.

If we experience a longing for God, Truth, Beauty, Happiness, the Peace and Silence that have no opposite, then we have in some hidden way known God, and for this hidden knowledge to have taken place, God must first have known us in some hidden way. Our very longing for God is a response to having already been touched and embraced by God. Desire is

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.

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.

Reactive mind would be resigned to live in this prison, insulated from the simple suchness of life and love were it not for the fact that creation bestows an instinctual orientation toward our ground in the grounding love of 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

“Thinking gets you nowhere.”34 This comes as a rather startling statement from a fiercely analytical young thinker. She continues, “You shouldn’t live on your brains alone but on deeper, more abiding sources, though you should gratefully accept your brains as a precious tool for delving into what problems your soul brings forth.”35