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John Jensen, a licensed psychologist, former Catholic priest, and educational consultant creates a spiritual psychology: How we change our thoughts and actions in order to develop a reciprocal relationship with Divine Spirit. As we align our consciousness with God's action in us, we place ourselves in reach of daily miracles.
In Experiences with Spiritual Reality, traditional spirituality from "the science of the saints" joins with advances in the understanding of consciousness from New/Old Age religion and modern psychology. As a student of religions, John Jensen explains how to approach the presence of God and change one's life to align with God's encompassing activity. He asks readers to understand why they want to pursue a spiritual life and then to engage consciously in a learning process about the nature of God and Soul. Grounding the process in direct experience offers a way to assess progress as it crosses slowly into the intangible. The book addresses from many angles the common difficulty of discerning what's real and true, and the importance of finding a personal spiritual guide to work with on the inner planes as well as outwardly. It explains the critical role of spiritual exercises and the essential daily discipline of withdrawing consciousness away from all forms of negativity -- moral, spiritual, emotional, and behavioral -- and redirecting it toward God. |
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Table of Contents |
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Introduction Chapter 1 FIND A REASON Chapter 2 ENTER A LEARNING PROCESS Chapter 3 OUR VIEW OF GOD AND SPIRIT Chapter 4 OUR IDENTITY AS SOUL Chapter 5 COMMUNICATE WITH GOD Chapter 6 ALIGN CONSCIOUSNESS WITH GOD Chapter 7 ALIGN AFFECTIONS WITH GOD Chapter 8 ALIGN BEHAVIOR WITH GOD Chapter 9 TRANSCEND THE VISIBLE References |
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Introduction |
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My dear, precious Soul. Even though I don't know you, I love you and want everything for your-your happiness and your well-being, physically, emotionally and spiritually. Your trials and pains strike me deeply, while my distance from you and the limitations of my life leave me unable to respond more fully. So the few words I send are a token of my hope for you. Maybe they'll provide encouragement in your determination to find God. What is excellent, truly excellent? This book is addressed to you who answer that question (or would like to) with "the love of God," who yearn to break from pettiness and earthbound concerns to experience God- love in every moment. Even if that doesn't sound like you just now, you'll eventually be home with God, I'm certain, because God has arranged it that way and has a fail-safe plan that gradually draws you to Itself. This may take a long time and extend well past the end of this lifetime, but you can accelerate the process if you choose it actively and pursue it with even the kind of determination you give to ordinary tasks in your life. My purpose in writing is to help you think through how to do this if you're looking for ideas about it; how to engage in the interplay with God that we call the spiritual life. The ideas I collect now at age sixty-eight are what I wish I'd understood as a youth. Some were clear years ago, but many have taken decades to learn, and more emerge day by day. Many are drawn from what's been called "the science of the saints," the study of how the saints of past millennia have lived, prayed and thought. These I read about as a seminarian and priest for a few years and as a student for all my adult life. Some come from my spiritual path of Eckankar which is called "the Religion of the Light and Sound of God," some from the psychology of consciousness, and some from personal experience. I believe that ideas about the spiritual life can be as clear and firm as those about our physical reality, though our challenge is to maintain this clarity when the subject matter rises into the ethereal. Some limits are from the sheer inexactness of words about the intangible and others lie within my own understanding. I'm certain that I'll fail at this task frequently, so I ask for your patience and welcome your comments in response. Many basic notions warrant discussion from different viewpoints, so topics may not be neatly separated. Some passages open with a guess about you, and if the guess is right, take it as meaning "if you think this way, then this discussion may apply be for to you." From the many ideas treated, perhaps only a few will apply to you personally, so I invite you to study those and ignore the others. Some issues we face in common and some are unique to each. Chapter one begins with the suggestion that we find our motivation for change. This has only secondarily to do with choosing a religion, and primarily with looking at why we might want to inform our conscience and respond more to God's activity in our life. St. Augustine wrote, "God and soul I wish to know. Anything more? Absolutely nothing!" This is a goal each of us might adopt. We want a holiness, a connection with God, that causes everything else about our lives to be different. Such a purpose can lead us deliberately to undertake a learning process, which we discuss in chapter two. By acknowledging that we want to alter some of our attitudes and actions, we invite influences from many directions that begin to change us. Exploring these questions in our lives, we may encounter a confusing array of opinions. It would be easier if everyone who believed in the "A" version was good and no one else was-we could all safely adopt "A." But we find people with B and C who are close to God also-Hindu, Moslem, Catholic, Orthodox, Protestant-so we may notice that the differences that distinguish our beliefs may not be the decisive issue for our spirituality. Since many who hold opposing beliefs are good, it makes less sense for us to persuade each other to accept a different belief. Rather we want to plant ourselves first on the elements that enable us to be close to God, with the assurance that the guidance we receive then will surely lead us to the spiritual home that works best for us. So a task facing us in chapters three and four is to sort out what assumptions about the intangible worlds and about our own nature are essential to our progress. Chapter three invites us to think through how our view of God connects to our relationship to God, and chapter four treats of understanding ourselves as Soul. The following four chapters all concern aligning ourselves with God and becoming ever more alert to how God is active in our lives. Chapter five treats of the key element of communicating with God: praying, contemplating, listening and reading God's messages to us in the circumstances of our lives. Chapter six addresses changing our consciousness and changing how we view life so that we invite God within. Chapters seven and eight deal with two expressions of our relationship with God. The first is by aligning our affections, the river of our inner emotions and desires, with what we perceive of God, and the next concerns managing our actions. Everything we think and feel flows into the viewpoint from which we decide, "What do I do now?" We act from what we have become. Issues that may arise from religious convictions but that are argued politically are not our focus here. We wish to weigh instead the intangibles about God, life, freedom, love, self-responsibility and human nature that become important as we conduct our inner life. Our increasing understanding both arises from and gives energy to our spiritual state. Chapter nine points us finally toward transcending the visible. We can do little more than suggest some directions, since by definition we work in a zone out of sight from others, yet certain clues may orient us as we proceed further on our own. |
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