Monday, November 24, 2014

Doing God's will is "keepin it real"

"God's Will is that you are His Son." it is written in A Course In Miracles. In more contemporary language we might write, "Life's will is that you are part of itself, obviously or you would not be here." It goes on to read in ACIM, "By denying this you deny your own will, and therefore do not know what it is. You must ask what God's Will is in everything, because it is yours. You do not know what it is, but the Holy Spirit remembers it for you. Ask Him, therefore, what God's Will is for you, and He will tell you yours." T-11.1.8:3-7

As a psychotherapist I am constantly reminded how stupid people are. By that I mean unaware, unconscious. The psychoanalytic idea of psychoanalysis is to make the unconscious, conscious. Most people have no idea what makes them tick, and yet Socrates told us over 2,000 years ago that the unexamined life is not worth living and how many people do you know that live examined lives?

We pray in the great Christian prayer the Our Father.............Who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name. Thy kingdom come, They will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Jesus, like UUs, believed that we should be getting heaven into people not people into heaven, a lesson which Christianity has pretty much missed and the path to getting heaven into people is to do God's will for us and ACIM teaches that we are in denial. We are too stupid to know what we don't know because we are so caught up in our ego world of projection that we don't even ask what might be deeper, richer, more inspiring, more authentic, more genuine, more real and we could know, we should know, we would know if only we asked the Holy Spirit to remind us and re-member it for us.

ACIM teaches us that God's will is not something external, foreign, but something deep inside of us because we are part of God. The problem is bringing our own consciousness, awareness, into alignment with our inner genuineness and to drop the pretense, the facade, the masks we wear constantly as we go about our daily lives.

The spiritual life is being real and in being real we and God's will for us is one and the same thing. Congruence, alignment, harmony, peace.

My daughter, Kelly, moved to California, and I called her up after a couple of weeks of getting settled in and I asked her how she was doing. She told me she scared herself because she went to work and people are so friendly and said to her, "Good morning, Kelly. How ya doin?" "Dad," Kelly said to me, "I heard myself say, 'keeping it real.'" We both laughed and I said, "It sounds like you're becoming a real California girl, Kel." We laughed again and then I said, "And I wonder what that bit of slang even means? You're not being fake and phony?"

It strikes me as I write this that doing God's will is simply keeping it real. How ya doin?

4 comments:

  1. Thank you for this. I can tell when I 'm on the wrong track because my anxiety goes up and I get worried about what other people think or whether my plans will work out. As they say in the first step of AA, I realize that my life is unmanageable by myself and I have to turn it over and surrender to my Higher Power. It reminds me of the old joke, "If you want to hear God laugh, tell God your plans."

    Thank you again for sharing. I feel blessed to be reminded that to do God's will I just have to be my real self.

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  2. It used to be said that "cleanliness is the next to Godliness" but reading this essay I am reminded that spiritual cleanliness in terms of authenticity, genuineness, and sincerity is next to godliness.

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  3. I'm Kelly, Dave's daughter, and 14 years later I'm still in California and still keepin' it real. It's even easier now because I'm firmly middle-aged (45!) and petty stuff that used to bother my younger self doesn't even register anymore. Plus, as almost anyone over 40 can attest, life kinda beats the pretense out of you after a while, and you come to understand that being authentic and genuine is much easier and more satisfying than the alternative.

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  4. Discerning God's will is not a skill which UU teaches its adherents in any kind of systematized way. People are left to their own devices as garnered from the six sources. That's too bad. It would be nice if UU had something unique to offer. As Bob Dylan sang, "You don't need a weather man to tell which way the wind blows."

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