मंगलवार, 12 अप्रैल 2011

Worship the Lord with your substance





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Worship the Lord with your substance
and feed the poor with your first fruits.
Thus shall your barns be filled with abundance 
and your presses run over with wine.

Solomon said this to his son but take it as addressed to yourself, and understand it spiritually...

Thus you can see that by pursuing your meditation to the farthest reaches and ultimate frontiers of  thought, you will find yourself in the end, on the essential ground of being with the naked perception and blind awareness of your own being.  And this is why your being alone can be called the first of your fruits.

So it is, that naked being takes first place among all your fruits, all the others being rooted in it.  But now you have come to a time when you will no longer profit by clothing or gathering into your awareness of naked being, any or all of its particulars, by which I mean your fruits, upon which you have laboriously meditated for so long.  Now it is enough to worship God perfectly with your substance, that is, with the offering of your naked being.  This alone constitutes your first fruits; it will be the unending sacrifice of praise for yourself and for all men that love requires.  

Leave the awareness of your being unclothed of all thoughts about its attributes, and your mind quite empty of all particular details relating to your being or that of any other creature.  For such thoughts will not satisfy your present need,  further your growth, nor bring you and others closer to perfection.  Let them alone.  Truly these meditations are useless to you now.  But this blind, general awareness of your being, conceived in an undivided heart, will satisfy your present need,  further your growth, and bring you and all mankind closer to perfection.  Believe me, it far surpasses the value of any particular thought, no matter how sublime.


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~ The Book of Privy Counseling

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