Let me direct you to Amazon.com to find my new book. In the days ahead, I look forward to addressing your questions and reading your comments.
Why God needs our money . . .
In recent years, I took it as something of a project to examine the traditional teaching of my religious training. Thus, I will share the scriptures of Jesus’ teachings on giving your money to God in order to go to heaven:
* N/A
Then, I came to the conclusion that God needs a tithe of our income because clergy say so.
Today is the fourth segment of my discussion with Minister Steve Brannon. We continue our interview by chatting about how words are used to manifest our reality.
To read more about leaving organized religion and this interview with Steve Brannon, click the links below. Or, you may listen to the interview, "Are You Spiritual.. or Religious?," here: http://bit.ly/JcOKFt
Part 1 -Don’t Rock the Boat Lest You Want to Leave the Church Fellowship
Part 2 - Why Religion is No Longer Working for Most People
Part 3 - Emergent Conversation about Christians Leaving the Church
Part 4 - Why Words Are So Powerful
Steve: I believe a lot of lessons are being set in motion for us on the global scene, just by the economic instability in countries and climate change all around the globe. Mother Earth is crying out to be treated correctly and have good stewards. We’re setting up a number of lessons on that level, but even right now in our country, we are wondering which way we are going to go. Are we going to show love and take care of one another, or are we going to be selfish and see ourselves as separate? Even on the personal level, so many people that I know are having a lot of health things come up, conflicts in relationships, the same lesson is coming over and over again. Are we going to see ourselves as united as one people, one energy; or are we going to continue in separation, which is not working? We won’t be able to get through this life without having a chance at learning that lesson, I don’t believe. Today it’s really coming to a head.
Yvonne: Yes that’s what we’re learning, that we are one in spirit. We are one with each other. We are one with the earth. We are one with the animals. All life is valuable. That is what Spirit is trying to teach us, Oneness.
Steve: I loved the visual I got while reading The Celestine Prophecy. The individuals praying over the plant, watching the plant respond—a beautiful picture of oneness to me.
Yvonne: Mr. Masaru Emoto demonstrated oneness with water. People prayed over or spoke/wrote words and put them on containers of water, and the crystals changed formation.
Steve: Our words are powerful. That’s how we manifest our reality. When our heart and our mind are settled on one thing, we speak it out, we confess it with our mouth. That’s phraseology. Things happen.
Yvonne: The word was with God from the beginning and is God. God spoke and things came into being. We have that same life force in us. Our words have power to manifest our reality. It all starts with a thought or word, and we add our emotion; the next thing we know we have a creation whether it’s what we wanted or not—it may be a negative thing, but we get what we believe we should have. Even if it is condemnation or judgment from others, a loss of job, loss of health or whatever, we’re creating with our words at all times. Words are powerful. We have to be careful what we say
Steve: Every even our thoughts are prayers. The universe immediately starts to line up with what we think about and what we intend, so we better think about our thought life! Yvonne: No wonder the Bible encourages us to guard our hearts diligently for in it is the issues of life. Guard those thoughts. Guard those emotions.
Steve: It encourages us to think on things that are of a good report—anything pure, honest, true, lovely—think on these things.
Yvonne: That’s been one of my favorite verses—especially for the past two weeks. Well, we’ve come to the end of our interview. Is there one thing that you might say to encourage us from our conversation today?
Steve: Leave room for mystery and questioning; don’t get locked down when you find a comfortable place in your belief/faith system. Don’t drive too many tent stakes. Be ready to move on to something new. Never stop growing. If one door gets closed, there’s always another one to open. The Holy Spirit is always teaching and you will always discover new truth.
Yvonne: True, so true. I learn more every day.
Steve: This is the day for it too. We need a lot of guidance. It’s time for us to get still, enter the silence, and come back with the guidance and answers that we need.
Yvonne: Be still and know God.
Today is the third segment of my interview with Reverend Steve Brannon. We are continuing our discussion by introducing the Emergent Conversation.
Yvonne: Steve, I love the way your book gives us the freedom to explore. Over and over again you say to seek the spirit within you; ask the Holy Spirit for direction and guidance. The law is written on your heart, so go there and find it!
Steve: The most exciting thing for me is not for someone to sit down and tell me what they’ve gotten all excited about reading scripture or any kind of wisdom book. I love to have them tell me what the Holy Spirit taught them or guided them into. If a new revelation has come to you, or a new understanding has come to you, I want to hear it! Let’s talk about this stuff. Now that’s reality, a spiritual life is reality. This relative plane that we are living on is not the real world. There’s a solar vibrational level and a higher truth to be found when we enter the silence within. I love it when people come out of their silence and are bubbling over. They are excited and their faith is growing. They’ve got something to say and I want to hear it!
Yvonne: Absolutely. Talk to me about the Emergent Conversation. How does The Two Agreements fit into it?
Steve: The Emergent Conversation or the Emergent Movement started around 1998 with some youth ministers from main line churches who saw the trend regarding what’s going on in Christianity and a big exodus of youth. Kids who were raised in church get to their twenties and bail. Not only are they not going to church anymore, they have really turned against it. They will never go back and they have no intention of following the religion of their parents. These ministers wanted to know what they could do about this. After they began talking, they got pretty liberal with their questioning. They began looking at the traditional ordained church that Christ commissioned and they wanted to get closer to it. As they did, they saw that the many dogmas and doctrines that had found a place in modern-day Christianity were not present in the first church. They’ve just been put added over the years. The church today has become contaminated by programs, doctrines, dogmas.
These leaders put everything on the table. They questioned whether there is a literal hell or heaven. Everything teaching was open to discussion. Well you can imagine this made quite an earthquake so to speak. The clergy in the larger organizations and seminaries started speaking out, writing books against the Emergent Conversation, and warning people about it. But again, if your belief system is so rigid that it can’t take a question, that’s a red flag. The first church was chaotic. They didn’t have a guide book. The Emergent Conversation was comfortable with chaos and realized that thisis just what you go through when trying to get some answers and being open to Spirit. You try some things and they don’t always work. All is not lost. The Holy Spirit is there to protect us, to guide us, to teach us. So the question is: are you going to be reliant on what you say you believe and stick to it even when it’s not working? Or are you going to rely on spirit to lead you? or are you going to go by your own understanding? The life line of Emergent is the Internet. Australia, New Zealand, and the UK are some of the larger, stronger areas of the Emergent Conversation. The US is rather slow about catching on, but once it got started in local faith communities, many congregations would sell their church building, take the money, and go help meet the needs of the community: those who are homeless and hungry. They started to practice what they saw happening in the first church and knew what was expected of them, which was not to keep up huge cathedrals, but to meet needs and actual taking some social justice stances.
Yvonne: Like that radical rascal, Jesus, did. He wasn’t one who hung out with religious people. He ministered to the people who needed him—those who recognized their need for a healer or someone to show them a better way. He was not one to be enshrined in a temple and wrapped up in religious theology.
Steve: No not at all. To be honest, a lot of folks would be pretty leery of having Jesus as a neighbor with all the people hanging out on his front porch.
Yvonne: They definitely would. They wouldn’t even recognize him.
Steve: They would be nervous with all the unsavory types coming out the door over there. That’s what this conversation wanted to pursue. Get back real go back to the roots as best as possible. The Two Agreements says that it’s well and good to follow the true teachings of Jesus, but not to get bogged down into the institution. That’s not what Jesus wanted. I don’t see where he said that he wanted to start a new religion. He really wanted folks to understand one thing: when you see me, you see the father. I am the father are one and I am one with you.
What you can do while you’re here on the planet is enjoy life as you enter the kingdom. It’s already here. It’s in you. It’s all around you and that kingdom is peace, joy, exuberance, and the knowledge that you have right standing with the power that puts you here in the first place. So don’t live in fear. You are one in the same with that energy and you have right standing. You can stand boldly and proudly as a divine being. It’s a sad thing that our children are being taught that they are less than divine.
Yvonne: They are taught to fear the god we have made in our own image—a god that is quite brutal and abusive. Look at the God that has been created through Christianity and in some belief systems and you have to think “if I had that kind of parent I would never go see him. I would never have anything to do with him.” Why have we made God, who is love, out to be a horrible, mean, unloving, punishing parent? We as humans treat out children much better that the Judeo-Christian God treats his kids?
Steve: Psychiatrists have had a field day with that one over the years. Why do humans want to beat themselves up so bad? Why do they feel so guilty? There’s been many books written on that. Some of them, Escape from Freedom, is a title that jumps out. Guilt and fear are things we have to deal with. We need to be healed in our minds first. Then it will go to our hearts, and then it will go into our body. Our first healing is right here realizing, professing it, and affirming it. I really am into affirmations. I like affirming “I AM ONE with God. I am one with the one who put me here, my creator. I am one with the source. I am one with life force.” Affirm that and feel it down in your gut, feel it in your heart, and get some healing going there. Yvonne: That always generates joy and gratitude generates all the fruits of the spirit. We were talking about how Jesus was with the outcasts of society. He was not hanging out in the temples. You also minister to some less fortunate people.
Steve: He went to where there was a need.
Yvonne: There’s a need everywhere, but the people who can be helped are the people who realize they need help.
Steve: That’s a very good point. There’s not very much help for a person who seems to already have all the answers. In The Two Agreements the word “mystery” is used throughout. My belief system leaves room for mystery. To say, “I do not know” is a full, complete answer. I always allow room for the Holy Spirit to keep filling me up and giving me answers. I enjoy working with folks who are bound together with a common purpose to help one another be well and live well. Some are focused on getting a need met and are living in what I might call a “teachable moment” or being receptive. There are always new questions coming up.
Part of my ministry is with inspirational support groups for folks suffering from depression and other mood disorders. There’s always a need for healing, understanding, and support there. Depression is the number-one crippling illness in the country. It’s not heart disease or diabetes or cancer. The number one illness that puts folks on disability and causes the loss of career or job is depression. I decided to work with that population and create the inspiration support group. We are a plurality of faith systems. We have folks in the Jewish, Christian, Catholic, and other faiths, yet we have created an understanding family. There’s a lot of laughter and hugging; there’s a lot of joking and kindness going on. Folks would never believe that this is the room where the depressed people meet. They would say, “Wait a minute! Isn’t that supposed to be depressed people down there?” The janitorial service at one of the buildings where we were meeting actually asked that question.
There are two things that all of us want to believe and feel: that at least one other person on the planet loves us just like we are. The second thing that we need, not just something we want, but something we need is to feel that someone understands us, gets us, just the way we are, no matter what is going on with us. These folks need that.
Yvonne: Depression many times is a result of our seeing ourselves as separate from God or separate from others and feeling the emptiness that comes from a mindset of not being understood or accepted. So, it makes sense that when people who feel rejection learn about oneness and become part of a family that cares about them, they would laugh and rejoice. It’s a natural bi-product of being loved.
Steve: Exactly, exactly. If you removed the judgment and condemnation out of Christianity and present the love that Jesus said would identify them (they’ll know you by your love for one another) we’d be looking at a revolution.
Yvonne: I know we would. That is the soul reunion or coming back to God we are experiencing in the ascension process. Realizing that we never were separate means accepting that we brought all this suffering on ourselves. Religions and dogmas teach and emphasize the illusion of separation.
Podcast host: Yvonne Perry
Today is the second segment of my interview with Reverend Steve Brannon. We are discussing the organized religion and why it’s not working for so many people.
Yvonne: We’re sharing what we’ve learned along the way, a hard lesson. I think a lot of people have become frustrated because they’re being told that they have to believe a certain way and like you said they are feeling “boxed in” or very limited. Fear is a part of the way the church controls the masses. If you don’t believe a certain way then there will be retribution or punishment. For me, I was told that I couldn’t play piano at one church, and that my husband couldn’t hold a leadership position because we questioned the authority of the pastor. They have their ways of keeping you in line. I realized in my heart that there was something much greater to be experienced and that there was truth in more than what I was hearing in the pulpit. There was truth in the Bible that was not being expressed. If you ask about the spiritual gifts that Jesus and the apostles of that time demonstrated, the Sunday School teachers might tell you, “Oh, those gifts have ceased now.” But then I would pray for people and they would be healed. I have the gift of discerning spirits and I know when there’s an entity in the room. So my experience personally was not lining up with what was being taught from the pulpit and I expected to adhere to someone else’s truth.
Steve: The gifts of the Spirit are in operation today, but the church condemns these gifts saying that psychics are “of the devil.” Yet, we can communicate telepathically with someone around the world without using the phone or computer. Spiritually, we are connected. Spiritually, we are one just like the name of this show. We have the liberty to use these gifts just like Jesus did. He was one with God and said we are too, but sadly that message has gotten lost. Christianity does not present that truth—instead, it keeps people in bondage to a separatist mindset. I encourage anyone who is looking for a faith community to ask these questions: #1: is it all inclusive? Does it include everybody? Does it eliminate anybody on any grounds? Race, belief systems, lifestyle, anything. #2: Is it grounded in love? Are they showing a divine or a true type of love toward you or are they wanting to manipulate you through fear? If you don’t believe the way they do and they make you feel guilty or shameful about your life or what you believe, keep on moving. If it doesn’t pass those two steps, stay away. Keep on searching.
Yvonne: That is very good advice. When I went through my divorce, I was excommunicated from the church I was attending. They said I didn’t pray enough and that I didn’t have enough faith in God to heal my marriage. I was praying five hours a day. I don’t know how I could’ve gotten anything else done if I prayed any more. It was time for me to move on because not only was my church affiliation limiting me, my marriage was limiting what I could do spiritually and how much I could grow. I could not expand my spiritual awareness without causing more conflict in that relationship.
Steve: When that does happen in our lives, we can still love and bless one another, wish one another well, and envision the best for the other. Letting go means believing that your partner or ex-spouse is going on their path; they are exactly where they are supposed to be at the right time, right place. Bless them and go on to whatever it is that you need to do spiritually.
Yvonne: Anytime you leave a situation or organization, whether it’s the church or a relationship, you have to forgive before you can truly move on. I stayed stuck in bitterness and anger many, many years after I left the church for good. I felt like I had been abused by the clergy and the whole system itself. But I began to work on this Oneness thing and realized there’s no us and them. Their suffering is my suffering. Religion worked for me for quite a number of years. It fulfilled a need in my heart as it still does for many people. Now that I’ve moved on and forgiven I have absolutely fallen in love again with Jesus Christ. Bible verses I memorized years ago now comfort me and I feel the Holy Spirit. Once again, I am asking to be filled with the Spirit. I am being drawn to praising the God within me, not some entity way out there in the sky that I’m going to go see some day after I die. The Spirit within me is the life force that gives me vitality, blessing, and health. Gratitude wells up in my heart—I’m so thankful I’m not in that cocoon where I couldn’t move forward, where I could never become the butterfly that I wanted to be. Through forgiveness I have become that butterfly. It’s so freeing.
Steve: Yeah, we can use life as a lesson. Every one of these intersections in life is about relationships. We have relationships with one another. We have relationships with society. We have a relationship with God. It’s on this relative plane, all it is, is relationships. Learning the lessons from each one of those, we go to the next lesson. All the events in your life are to teach us something and to help us grow into a higher consciousness.
Podcast host: Yvonne Perry
As the owner of Writers in the Sky Creative Writing Services, I have assisted many authors with writing and writing, editing, and bringing books to market. While I no longer personally assist authors with this task, I do have a team of writers and editors able to provide this service (http://writersinthesky.com). During the time that I helped Steve Brannon develop his book, The Two Agreements, we came to enjoy a divine friendship and I’m very pleased to see his book in print. As part of his book launch, I asked him to be my guest on We Are One in Spirit Podcast where he shared thoughts about why so many people are leaving organized religion. I will share segments of this interview in written format over the next few days.
But first, here’s some background on Steve. Steve left the Christian church after the clergy excommunicated him from his local fellowship. He was the youth camp director for a fellowship of churches in 1976 while he was stationed at an Air Force base in Oklahoma. He was having home Bible studies and prayer meetings with some of the members of the congregation when he felt led to open up a house for young people and folks living on the street to come in and fellowship. These people didn’t have a faith system that they were following. When he shared this vision with the ministers he was working with, it didn’t go over well. They did not allow meetings outside of a church building. He was excommunicated from the church when he told the senior pastor that he was going to follow through with the home group study.
The charismatic movement was going on in the middle 70s. Some of the attendees hailed from Methodists, Baptists and Catholic belief systems. Once they saw what was going on, they caught the vision for the family atmosphere and spiritual work. There was so much love, so much grace.
After the fellowship had been open for three weeks there was a knock at the door. A deputy sheriff stopped by to introduce himself and see what the group was up to. That particular house had been a drug house where dealers were selling marijuana and had been busted it several times. Steve had left the Air Force by that time and his hair was long, he had a full beard, and was wearing bell button jeans. He fit the picture of a radical child of the times!
The group quickly outgrew the house and secured a stand-alone building in the inner city. This Christian center was having regular services and meetings when Steve turned the leadership of the group over to a young couple who had just finished Bible college. This husband and wife team is still pastoring the congregation today, 36 years later.
Yvonne: Every minute of the typical church services is formulated, planned, and organized. It’s so regimented and structured that the Spirit can’t get a word in edgewise. The church is a system; it’s an organization, and the love for which Christians are supposed to be known has taken a backseat to gossip and backbiting. However, this laid back group of people that Steve was shepherding enjoyed offering input and having discussions about spiritual things rather than being spoon-fed a doctrine from the pulpit. I personally think many people are tired of being told what to think, believe, and do. That they don’t have an opportunity to express what is on their heart and if they do they end up being excommunicated from the church for rocking the boat and causing waves.
The pastor of the last church I left tagged my husband and me as troublemakers because we didn’t go along with a financial decision he made without consulting the congregation—that pastor’s decision obligated the tithing members to more debt on an already tightly-strapped budget.
Steve: The popular interpretation of the Bible and New Testament story regarding the life of Jesus gives way to judgment, condemnation, and even damnation of folks who do not think a particular way. There’s rigidity and resistance when someone wants to question a doctrine or decision. My reinterpretation explains that the whole theme is not about trying to recover a fallen sinful nature of man, but it’s actually working to enlighten the hearts and minds of everyone. There is no distance or separation between us and God. There’s no separation between us and one another. There’s nothing to fight about. There’s nothing to war about. We’re all on the same team.
It’s just a matter of allowing the spirit to grow in us and lead us into spontaneous works like what I did in Oklahoma. When you follow your heart you have freedom in spirit. Without the church telling me what I can and cannot do, I feel like I’m living in a virtual spiritual candy store! I can believe whatever I want to believe and follow the Holy Spirit, knowing that Spirit is going to protect me and keep me from harming myself. We are unlimited in the things we can do.
I read your blogs. I read your books. I see the ways that you have broadened yourself, deepened and gained a depth in your life that you could have never had in the religion system you were in. You’re a very good example to the rest of us of the freedom we have today. That’s the freedom The Two Agreements is pointing toward. I’m trusting that my book will be a bridge for many people like us who were on the wrong track and boxed in. We knew that there was a voice inside—a hunger inside of us saying, “Hey there’s more. There’s gotta be more than this.” When we open our mind and heart to it, the door begins to open, opportunities come into play, and next thing we know, we’re writing books and teaching others.
Podcast host: Yvonne Perry
I would have loved to discuss John's thoughts on the lyrics to Imagine. How visionary! I wonder what some of my friends think about these words.
IMAGINE
John Lennon
Imagine there's no Heaven
It's easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people
Living for today
Imagine there's no countries
It isn't hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace
You may say that I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will be as one
Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world
You may say that I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will live as one
By: William Meader
Practical Mysticism is not a spiritual approach that denies the validity of mysticism (as we traditionally understand this term). Instead, it is the next stage in its evolution. Mysticism has, historically, emphasized the importance of relating to God’s love. It is based upon the conviction that God is love, and that to find a deep love within oneself is to find divinity. A practical mystic would not refute the truth of this notion. Yet in addition to this view, the practical mystic understands that God is not only a representative of love, but also of mind and intelligence.
This is the essential difference between traditional mysticism and the perspective advocated within Practical Mysticism. To the practical mystic, God is love and mind, and equally so. Both represent sacred attributes of divinity seeking expression through humanity. As our mystical understanding of life matures, we are beginning to understand that the use of the mind (higher mind) is a gate to God. It is a portal into the will and intelligence of divinity, just as the heart is the way to divine love.
As an individual’s abstract mind is developed (in conjunction with love), s/he begins to realize that God speaks to humanity through lofty and profound ideas. From this, a new understanding of life emerges. It is a recognition that humanity is truly evolving. However, it is not evolution as we typically consider it. Unlike the Darwinian notion that survival of the fittest propels evolutionary change, the practical mystic realizes that humanity evolves through its relationship to progressive ideas and their practical application.
Practical Mysticism states that service to humanity needs to be centered in compassion, while at the same time expressed with wisdom and intelligence. It demands that we learn to establish a deep connection to the soul’s love while simultaneously applying the wisdom of the mind in practical ways. Too often mystics are lovingly compelled, but lack the ability to demonstrate practical skills for living. This must change. Through widespread education in recent years, humanity’s ability to think and reason has increased tremendously. We therefore live in a time when love alone will not suffice. Instead, love must be accompanied by intelligent thought and practical skill in action. This is the mantle of the practical mystic.
When we view the historical underpinnings of religion, we see that mysticism is the ground that gives birth to theology. In its early phases, a religion is largely mystical and only later hardens itself with unnecessary creed and dogma. Yet, even with the destructive introduction of dogma the mystical tendencies of a religion are still held by some of its exponents. In many ways the orientation found in certain branches of Christianity give evidence to this. The belief in cloistered living is one such indication.
Christian mysticism has been governed by the assumption that to find God (in the deepest sense) requires separation from society, and to live a life of contemplative solitude. Though not denying that there is a measure of truth to this, Practical Mysticism doesn’t emphasize this notion. Instead, finding the divine within society is the primary theme. To the practical mystic, divinity is found within the crucible of culture and civilization. And, it is this conviction that motivates the practical mystic in his/her commitment to serve humanity.
The cloistering tendency still found in religion is actually a residual effect of life lived during the Piscean Era. During that great astrological epoch it was believed that rapport with God is deepened by removing oneself from the doings of the world. From this, monastic theology came into being and convents and monasteries provided the needed isolation. Indeed, for the last two thousand years this has been the ordained means for finding God. However, humanity is now in transition, astrologically considered. At this remarkable time in history we find ourselves moving between two great ages—Pisces and the emerging sign of Aquarius. A new order is therefore on the horizon, and with it comes the next step in the evolution of humanity’s mystical relationship to life. Indeed, the notion that God is primarily found in seclusion is gradually coming to an end.
The dawning Age of Aquarius represents the next step in the development of our understanding of God and humanity’s relationship to the divine. This zodiacal sign symbolizes the importance of intelligent and practical approaches to life. Aquarius is known as the sign of service, and is profoundly related to the development of the higher mind. In addition, it encourages us to realize that there is no place where God it not. As such, God is equally present in the hectic circumstances of urban life as in the isolation offered in remote places. A religious monastery, places of science and the arts, or even the ghetto are all gates that lead to the divine. This sign hearkens to the cultivation of lofty thought and the need to find practical methods that support the evolution of culture and the upliftment of civilization. Our future largely depends upon this. The sign of Aquarius is the force that urges us toward Practical Mysticism. Even so, it is we who must rise to the occasion.
One of the perceptual differences between the mystic and the practical mystic has to do with belief about the nature of creation and its relationship to the Creator. Historically, Western theologies have held the view that there is a gulf between God and creation. This is the root assumption in the mind of the Western mystic, and has led to a sense of isolation from God. Indeed, this is why some scholars have referred to Western theologies as religions of exile. Yet, practical mysticism sees this in a different manner. It is not God and creation, but God as creation that the practical mystic holds true. This is the deeper reason why the practical mystic sees God within every facet of civilization. Every societal institution is understood as an aspect of divinity struggling to evolve toward a perfected expression. Spiritual service, therefore, has relevance in all places.
A key distinction between the mystic of old versus the practical mystic has to do with the question of good and evil, right and wrong. Over the centuries, Western theologies have strongly delineated these two things. The view has been that there is good and evil and a choice must be made. The notion of hell and the devil emerge as tools used to define evil and to prompt people (usually through fear) to make a choice in favor of goodness. However, the practical mystic does not see it this way. Instead, there is an understanding that everything in the world is an expression of both darkness and light, of good and evil.
Every human being, life event and social institution hold measures of truth and distortion. Indeed, this is one way (of many) to understand evil. Simply stated, evil is the distortion of truth. We can easily see this when we consider the fact that a vice is often a virtue that has been distorted or misapplied. All things are imperfect and, therefore, have measures of distortion and impurity (evil) in their expression. This is true for the criminal and the saint alike. The simplistic notion that darkness is due to origin sin, as Western theology suggests, is being superseded by a more enlightened understanding of evil. Evil is a dynamic characteristic found in the physics of creation itself, and is naturally a part of the evolution of all things. To the practical mystic, the question is not what is good and what is evil. Rather, it is to see all things as manifestations of both, and to facilitate the transformation of the lesser (evil) on behalf of the greater (goodness).
Mysticism has been governed by the belief that love is the only road that leads to God. Yet, we are entering a new and dynamic phase in the evolution of mystical yearning—the era of Practical Mysticism. Gradually we are realizing that God is not just love, but is also mind. Practical mystics understand that the heart and the mind are equally divine, and both must be utilized in service to humanity’s betterment. Such people advocate the importance of bringing spiritual wisdom into practical expression. They seek to build a new civilization where humanity’s oneness is recognized and outer societal structures evidence this recognition. This is done by inwardly aligning with the soul while simultaneously keeping one’s feet planted on the ground. Such is the formula for bringing heaven to earth, and is the mandate of the practical mystic.
© 2007 William Meader
