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Light is the intelligence of understanding. In response to interest and focus it will give insight into how to make a painting beautiful as readily as how to make a gun, for even at the level of the sensory mind or intellect it leaves you free to ask what you like. That is because people must learn to value and develop their intellect before they can learn to use it rightly. But to the real mind or intelligence, that is, to the deeper intuition or understanding, the Light shows the cataracts of preference and prejudice on the sense mind's eye.The sense mind should be the focus faculty for the real mind – a neutral, unfeeling hand that holds steady whatever the mind wants to look upon, and it is that which translates understanding into action. But most often it is the cause of the mind's fall. It is unfeeling and only perceives the surfaces of things. It works with forms and with abstractions from form, with what the senses show, and with words– but not with underlying principles or ideas, unless they concern form. If made to do so despite its incapacity – and it is made to do so all the time – it carnalizes meanings and strips them of their living essence so that it can grasp them. It works with them mechanically as if they were sense objects. It is analytical, taking things apart to work with them, or, it treats things as dead to “understand” them. Its action is to isolate and separate, as if everything and every problem it considered were a form it could fit together or take apart. It cannot wonder, nor synthesize its understandings through essences. Like a computer it really largely only tabulates and measures. It compares surface aspects or appearances through association (this is like that) – for it perceives neither essences nor life.When it tries to work with ideas it cannot. It substitutes mechanical logic, linguistics, and authorities to imitate, for real  thinking or direct knowing with the Light. The carnal mind as the Bible speaks of it is an identification. It arises when the soul identifies with the body, with the point of view of the sense mind of the body, and with the conscious personality that arises from these. Then a person acts for the body as if the body were identity; it acts to have feelings and get desires, and not for intelligence and love. Objects and how they feel become strangely important and substantial, as feeling fills them out, and desire hungers after them; while what causes them or what they are in themselves recedes.The real mind is what focuses meaning and comprehends. When brought together in the pursuit of knowledge the real mind and the sense mind (or intellect), called the shining mind and the chattering mind in Taoism, produce conceptual intuition. More often though, the ego or earthly man will use the carnal intellect as its prop and ally, not for knowledge but to deal with things unfeelingly. The intellect or sense mind has this virtue – it can view desire and emotion unmoved. This allows the real mind breathing space to see and consider; but this virtue is often used to suppress, not to acknowledge or feel feelings, or to work with, or think about desires. Using the sense intellect to work with issues and matters beyond itself is how evil arises, especially if it is acting at the whim of the ego or of unbalanced emotion. It then cuts off feeling, empathy, and the sense of relation. In that case, its aim and focus sharpen in an intense and now unconscious drive which seeks connection even while negating it. The intellect deals with things as if they were mechanical and unfeeling like itself, and is able to slice through bodies or issues as if they were so much butcher's meat. Nevertheless, it has no motive of its own, being unaware as a self. The soul of feeling and desire is what chooses through its loves and fears. It identifies with either mind, or channel for the Light, depending on what it wants. The soul may identify with the sense mind through the carnal ego, or with the mind of the Spirit. The Pharisees are the Bible's imagery for what the carnal mind regularly does with and how it sees the things of the Spirit.The Light shows what Love is, and what it is not. It gives intuitions of your real relations with things. It can also bring to the surface the emotion behind a habit, and show how to release that contraction of life. Your heart's knowledge must include the warmth and depth of love to understand the greater dimension of what is Good. The Light that the sense-intellect accesses allows for any and all discovery, based simply on right asking, and not yet on right being. Honesty will solve much, and through the development of the morality that honesty and truthfulness are, will reconnect the intellect to the real mind – but without Love the mind plows a barren field. Put differently, despite the fact that the sun is brightest in winter, the earth is cold when its axis is turned away from the sun's warmth. Nothing can grow or live then, and everything returns to the root. Come spring, though, the hemisphere leans back into relation; light and warmth combine, and everything comes to life and grows. The light of the intellect needs the love of the heart to grow into the actual Light of Life.It is really Love that allows Light access to all things and gives entry to whatever the mind considers or tries to understand. Knowledge  is union spiritually with the subject or object known, by means of the Light. On the other hand love without intelligence, or a knowledge of what is true, is blind, selfish, sentimental, and foolish; a psychic whirlpool of feelings and desires. It is not then the One who is Good (Lk 18:19). It takes love and light for life to take root in the Real, and reach upward.

Knowing Yourelf in the Light

The Sense Mind, Intelligence & Love

Nothing real can separate us from the Life that the Light and Love of God express. Only fear can, distorting our hope and estranging our love. Fear of God, of pain, and fear of our fellow man express themselves in a contraction from life, from events, and from others. This contraction of the heart causes us to be afraid of others and not realize they are terrified as well. People believe themselves vulnerable and mortal when they identify their spirit with the body, conscious as the personality of the body's life, and not of it. The fear at the root of this idea of self, that of an earthly conditioned ego, capable of being hurt and dying, is an emotional and moral collapse from the heavenly man or woman. This fear is our satan, and is what really opposes a Christian of the New Covenant. Every other form of evil and harm only reaches us through that.This collapse of selfness causes withdrawal emotionally and leads to obsession with your own mind states, your appetites, or energies. People become mere images to you; blips on your radar, and not real relations. You recoil from openness, engagement, freed feeling, and radiance – from happiness and life. Events and experience are then no longer how the living Father communicates the path of growth, but are something fear and distorted desires manipulate to avoid problems and seek comfort. As spirits we do not die, so what do we fear? We fear the death of the body because we think we are it. None of this confusion is real simply because we imagine it and fear it.Recognition or identification with the Son or Daughter of God you are, through the Light and Love of God, transforms your energy. Identification with the body – not simply feeling through it – but feeling and desiring as the personality or as the elemental energies of the body lowers it. This is the Fall, and the Fall is a choice you continue to make, not one made for you. Choose to ascend through the Light and Love of God by being intelligence and love in relation, and you will arise. Ascension is moral and spiritual and is not a matter of space and time. This then is Christos, for "the Lord is that Spirit: and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty. But we all, with open face beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord" (2 Cor 3:17-18).The Light shows us what is true; we need only listen and look. But we must be truthful with what we see, otherwise the Light will wait until we are looking to show us what is there. Similarly, if we are authentic in our being, and open our hearts unselfishly, we will see others for the first time, and feel directly. We will then discover that Love underlies the happenings of our lives, and enfolds the sorrowful selves who appear here as fearful caricatures of their real selves. Love truly does weave the fabric of all of life's events and relations but it does so for who you really are, and not for the image of vulnerabilities you protect as a self, or try to shelter from growth.We must love our neighbor which means first and most importantly that we are fair and open. Not foolish and not blind&hellip; fair and open. If you want to know God you must enter into relation with man. "Is not this the fast I have chosen?&hellip; That you loose the bands of wickedness, undo the heavy burdens, let the oppressed go free, and that you break every yoke?" You are to deal your light to the hungry, bring the poor to your feast, and cover with your love those who are naked.  We are not to hide from others who are – in God's eyes – our own flesh.  If we do what God has asked, "Then will our light break forth like morning, and our health spring forth speedily." We will be called, repairers of the breach.We will call, and he will answer (Isa 58 KJV).

The Holy Man - Moses' Ascension into heaven

Understanding Your Connection

Christos

There is an old saying aimed at God by the philosopher Epicurus who invented the philosophy known as Hedonism. It goes:"Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?" ~&nbsp;EpicurusMy answer to this speaks from the idea of justice developed out of an understanding of karma and re-existence (both of which I think I can even demonstrate are Biblical if that is of interest).~&nbsp;Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent&hellip;That doesn't follow&hellip; what if evil has a developmental use? Those who believe in God also believe you have an immortal aspect, usually called the soul. In the Bible that one is called the spiritual man or elohim, a god who pre-existed the foundation of the earth. And then you have a man made from dust on the "6th Day" (after everything else was made) called the earthly man, the animal body in your charge. This one which you ride and try to humanize, the earthly personality, is the one "unto whom it is appointed once to die, and then the judgment", or a summing up of the fruit of his works. Evil in your sense really just means things that can happen to your body, because of its frailty and mortality, that you don't want to feel or experience. But if, as spiritual people believe, you are not your body, and your consciousness survives death – and even causes your next body to be formed according to the divine pattern given it - then you are entirely unharmed by anything that happens to it. If it was known for a fact that nothing you could experience could really harm the one who survives death, nothing whatsoever, which if you wake up after you die IS the case – bodily experiences then might be seen as learning situations rather than as anything that does you real harm. Especially if your experiences are mere reaping of what you sow. Like the principal of a primary school, God ensures you have the environment, tools and teachers you need to learn, ensures you are in no real danger and cannot be harmed, and guides the curriculum. But he also ensures that each learns under their own interest and initiative. And instruction is through deeper consideration of what is true, and failing that, through experience.~ Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent.Under the above described scenario, since nothing ultimate is actually at risk, where is the malevolence? Human culture is the expression of our ideas and desires. The difficulty arises when desire suppresses intelligence to satisfy or get some feeling you want. When you ignore what things do/are/feel like to others/your body/the environment. You don't care. You just want to feel what you want to feel, and you cant if you have to think about what you know to be true. Like smoking kills the body. The results of suppressing intelligence like this at the behest of unreasoning desire, is mirrored in society as the willingness to condone the actions of vested interests, preference, habit and prejudice, over what people know or see is true, fair, good or real. So mankind learns why not to do this. How? Well, since they will not think (because they are suppressing their knowledge and intelligence to satisfy desire, or craving) the only way to reach them and make them think, when they absolutely will not and do not want to, is to make them feel. More specifically, make them suffer. Evil, so-called, provides the opportunity to smart under unfairness, under someone else's unreasoning desire, under someone else's rationalizations for not caring what you go through.It brings your willingness to allow things to happen to others, so long as you are not disturbed, up for consideration, by reversing the situation you desire and making you experience it, thereby provoking thinking about it.~ Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil?From our own thinking of course. But also, from the higher standpoint of the inner man, from our willingness to develop and evolve as consciousnesses, and use our experiences honestly, to do so. It is our honesty that demands, because of our divine nature which does not lie, that we experience what we sanction. Consider you were about to come into life, and you could influence the ideas your culture adopted and stood for, but that you had no say in the position, gender, power, status, or money you personally would have, or be, in that culture&hellip; what ideas then would you promote? Well in an intelligent universe trying to teach selfish people simple ideas about fairness and human decency, experiences which caused them difficulty might be in order IF every time they got into a position to lord it over someone, they did so. The eternal Ideas of God, in the form of the Logos according to Heraclitus, would then have others who were similarly confused about fairness administer balancing doses of pain and difficulty to those who previously imagined this was a cool plan; who doled it out whenever they thought there was no mechanism in place to correct their ignorance, no blowback. This is the "spitting into a fan" explanation of evil. The word karma incidentally comes from&hellip; ka from kama, or desire. Ma, from manas, or mind. R, a letter for action or interaction. Thus karma means literally, the action or interaction of mind with desire; the result of that. Everything we are by thought is wrought and built. If a man think evil, pain follows him as surely as the wheel the ox behind. If a man think good, joy follows him as his own shadow, sure. – from the Dhammapada.~ Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?Since God is normally conceived as comprising all, then evil would be said to come from him, as there could not be an equal and opposite force outside of him, and he still be what we call God. What that means though is that all experiences are controlled to learning, and are in place to accomplish the divine ends projected for our education. In other words, All things work for good to those who love God, or the Light of the World. Since nothing ultimate is at stake and only your selfishness and willed ignorance allows you to suffer, or causes you to suffer, then the picture of what is happening is different than what it appears to be, especially to the vested interests of your ego. Interfering with the lessons your inner being is trying to teach your own personality by preventing them would be the same as constantly telling the child what the solution to the problem was, and not allowing him to work it out and develop his or her own powers.The above, even if you don't know that it is true, is a perfectly cogent answer to these questions. You can see them as working hypotheses if you like. They do explain the strangeness of human experience and why earth is, as the Buddhists term it, the place of Middling pain. A place where it was never intended you get comfortable in any permanent sense, as this is not the minds real home.~ Daniel Drumm &copy; 2009

a Discussion of Divine Justice

Answer to Epicurus

Religion

Philosophy

Hedonism

The Logos

Divine Justice

Official blog for the book, The Light of Life by Daniel Drumm. A Christian look at the nature of truth. Non-denominational, it shows that the focus of Light is what we call thinking and thinking is what produces both knowledge and understanding. The Light is what shows things, as they are, to the mind.

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The Light of Life by Daniel Drumm

LIGHT OF LIFE BLOG

Current Articles

Knowing Yourelf in the Light

The Sense Mind, Intelligence & Love

Understanding Your Connection

Christos

The Light of Life

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