WISDOM 4

“Everyone of us is shadowed by an illusory person: a false self..We are not very good at recognizing illusions, least of all the ones we cherish about ourselves.  Contemplation is not and cannot be a function of this external self. There is an irreducible opposition between the deep transcendent self that awakens only in contemplation, and the superficial, external self which we commonly identify with the first person singular. Our reality, our true self, is hidden in what appears to us to be nothingness....We can rise above this unreality and recover our hidden reality.... God Himself begins to live in me not only as my Creator but as my other and true self. ” 

― Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation

I hesitated to use the term intuition in the context of this chapter on Wisdom. The reason being that the definitions of intuition and the description of the term can range anywhere between a hunch, a guess, a gut feeling, a reflexive reaction to something, or the essence of Divine Wisdom within us. Obviously all of those descriptions are not the same thing.

The way it came up for us this morning is that one person was describing wisdom as listening to the wee small voice or the Divine wisdom within each one of us as being her understanding of intuition and with that I would agree.

As other people thought about or played with their own definitions, eventually we began to run into some unwanted baggage. For me there is a huge difference between a hunch or guess or an involuntary reaction or response to someone or something as compared to listening to the voice of divine wisdom. A hunch or a reaction or response to a stimulus are all learned behaviors that have become so much a part of our personality structure that they live in our unconscious and most often we don't even realize they have been triggered. We simply look at them is our natural way of responding or sometimes say to ourselves, “Well that's just the way I am.”

Probably the biggest challenge, if not the primary challenge, to this work is that we are being asked to both examine and release or let go of all of the old definitions of self including those that lurk on the unconscious level. To release all of those to allow ourselves to become the truth of Who We Are. I do not deny the difficulty of that .

In a way where we are confronted with is that wonderful quote from Einstein:

“No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.” 

Here we are looking at ourselves and our world with a burning desire to make things different and yet the realization is dawning on us that if we continue to try to make changes on the personality level they will not stick; they cannot stick.

Intuition is another form of knowing, it is not a reflexive or an unconscious act In fact, it is one of the higher states of consciousness that we can be in. In some ways intuition is a connection between our personality self and the Divine Self in the Spirit.

In the deepest way, when we are speaking of intuition, there is no such thing as my intuition that would be similar to claiming my divine nature. There is only one divine nature and it does not belong to my personality self.

It is true that our decision making process can be clouded by past learnings of fear, of separateness, prejudice and exclusion. We are not pretending that those go away by themselves, but our awareness of them as a very limited form of consciousness allows us to begin to bypass those old patterns of thought into ones that resonate more deeply with the truth.

“Now we ask you this: If you ask the question of yourself and you state it as an intention, “I am now asking myself in a higher way to move into alignment with the question I have asked,” and you set it as an intention, “I am setting this intention to move my frequency into accord with the response I require to know my own wisdom, my information in the highest way available to me,” you will claim it. As you make the intention, you must understand that you are making a decision to align to something. That is very different than grabbing something or shielding yourself from something. It is simply aligning to something new. And in this alignment you call your frequency as yourself in this new way.”

A simple way of distinguishing between true intuitive wisdom as opposed to the limited teaching of the personality self is that intuitive wisdom will be presented to us without a trace of fear or judgment recrimination. Whereas the voice of the smaller self will speak in the language of fear and exclusion as well as predicting dire consequences if we do not obey its dictates.

Because we have free will even though we are encouraged to love unconditionally we still have the choice to live in limitation.

“I am aligning to the question and the response that I require. I am Word though this intention. Word I am Word.”

We could repeat this truth or an affirmation directly after saying Serenity Prayer and being aware of how wonderfully they fit together .

We do not realize that we probably putting this teaching to practice more often than we think. Whenever we open our hearts in compassion to another, we are literally putting ourselves into their “space” to become aware and to know what it is they might be experiencing. We are not taking it on ourselves, but we are in awareness of the pain of another so that we may sit lovingly with them. If nothing else, they are reminded that they are not alone. 

Well, we began with Merton and I can not think of a better way to end with that wonderful prayer of Wisdom from his book Thoughts in Solitude:

My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think that I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to love as Christ loved does in fact please you. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing. I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire. And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road though I may know nothing about it. Therefore, I will trust you always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death. I will not fear, for you are ever with me and you will never leave me to face my perils alone