How to Awaken the Holy Spirit

And Experience the Deep Things of God

My godfather is a catholic priest and aware that my experiences and perspective on the Holy Spirit differed from most. He knew my meditation history and when he asked me to be his spiritual director, I wrote him a letter describing how I practiced the prayer of the heart, a few of my experiences while resting in intuitive awareness, and most importantly about the comfort and guidance of the Holy Spirit which for many years I had seen within as an infinite golden light and had felt flowing through my nervous system as a physical presence.

Another parish priest visiting from out of state was given the letter to read and having done so, asked if he could talk with me. We did and went over my journey with the Holy Spirit and many spiritual things. He listened to my life experience and told me that I had a story to tell that Christians living in the world but interested in how to awaken the Holy Spirit needed to hear and that in a few months, he was planning to conduct a class in Christian mysticism and wanted to use not just my understanding of spiritual truths but also my journey with the Holy Spirit as a study guide.

Perhaps I do have a story to tell but I felt that I had such a very different experience and understanding of the Holy Spirit that no one would want to hear. I explained that most think the Holy Spirit is a reward for being good or religious and that you must be a saint or at least somewhat holy to experience it. My experience was that this view was backward and that The Holy Spirit is not a reward but a tool that God uses in its dealings with each of us less-than-perfect souls, no matter where we start in life, no matter our past, present, or future mistakes, to take those who have opened and keep their hearts open to it, through whatever they need to go through in life so that by the end of their lives they might end up as saints.

Also, in its dealings with us, the Holy Spirit plays by its own rules, has its own morality, and does not at all care about any religion’s or individual’s feelings with what it does or how it does it: Does not care what religion we belong to or what we believe to be true about it or God, for when we open our hearts to it, the Holy Spirit will take us to the truth of all things from wherever we start, not by the belief in something told or read but by the direct experience of the deep things of God.

A journey with the Holy Spirit is about forming a relationship, maybe not exactly like a person-to-person relationship but a truly interactive one that can be more intimate, wonderful, and heartbreaking than any person-to-person relationship could ever hope to be.

I told the priest that except for the few monks who had experienced intuitive awareness from practicing the two-thousand-year-old traditional meditation of the prayer of the heart, I believed that feeling the presence and activity of the Holy Spirit and the knowledge of the deep things of God that was found in the early Church had been lost to modern Christianity and the milk of the truth that Paul said was all that the Corinthians were ready to hear, is now all that Christians wanted to hear.

But if when considering all that I just said, the two priests still thought that some would be interested in my story and what I would have to say about the Holy Spirit, I would do my best to explain my understanding of some of the deep things of God written in metaphors by the prophets, how with practice to achieve intuitive awareness and how to establish a relationship with the Holy Spirit and become open to the flow of it through the nervous system.

They said that I should write about my understanding of the Holy Spirit and the deep things of God as I had experienced them but equally important for others considering this path was my journey behind the understanding.

Ok, but some of the stories I will tell are uncomfortable. They are not the stories of so many others in their books about how wonderful it all is to awaken the Holy Spirit within. Truthfully, much of my journey with the Holy Spirit has not been all that wonderful. We must live in different universes.

B. Lawrence                                   

Setting the stage

When I was a toddler, my aunt and uncle asked their friend, a locally famous psychic in Las Vegas about their sister (my mother) and her family. They were told that two of her sister’s children would grow up to be normal people with normal lives but the middle one, me, was different and would have a different view of life. My mother said that it was not that I was special, not a saint, not chosen by God, not better than anyone else, not smarter, only that I would have a different view, experience, and understanding of the nature of life from the norm. That my life was not to be a bed of roses, and later in my life, there would be a period that was to be traumatic, but of a nature that my mother could not be told what it was and that they could not tell her why they could not tell her what it was.

There is nothing like a little mystery in life, but my experience and understanding being different from normal certainly came true. Unfortunately, my mother never told me of the prediction until both my aunt and uncle had passed, and I could not learn the rest of the prediction that wasn’t said to her. My father had just died, and I was trying to explain that his being an atheist didn’t matter and that everyone dies in God’s light and has His grace. After revealing a few of my experiences with the Holy Spirit with her, I was told of the prediction. Uh, thanks mom, I love you dearly.

I don’t know what was told to my aunt and uncle about me, but I don’t think that it was that I was going to be a terrible person. I remember that they always favored me, even asking me to spend several whole summer vacations from school with them. This offer was never given to either of my brothers and as far as I know, there was no offer like this given to any of their other nieces or nephews of which there were many. Grandma had eleven girls and two boys. When we had family get-togethers, we filled the city park. Small town, small park, big family.

Before the beginning

Whether from genetics or for some more mystical reason, we are all born with certain gifts and talents. Some have natural abilities in art, math, or communication or are born with musical abilities like Mozart, a child prodigy in that field. Of course, most of us are not child prodigies in whatever fields we are born with different talents but when we pursue what we have natural abilities in, we will usually end up doing what makes us most content in life. Sometimes a talent will show up out of the blue. We may be trying to do something different and unexpectedly find out that we have a natural knack for it, music or the arts usually. It was like that with me, with an ability that was not special but a little different from most.

As a young man, I was taking a course in psychology on the nature of traumatic memories and how to deal with them. Using the techniques in the course, I started to try some of the suggestions for dissipating the negative energy held in my mind from the repeated earlier traumatic experiences of my childhood. I see little use in explaining this in detail, but I had been experiencing daily headaches for years, half a dozen aspirins or more every day, kind of thing, and thought that this might help.

Following the suggested techniques, I looked into my mind for the related traumatic memories and first became aware of individual memories that when looked at in a certain directed way, dispassionately that is, would lose the negative energy they were holding: Exactly how it was supposed to work in clearing the mind of the negative energy and influence of such things.

But with continued practice, instead of pictures of the individual memories, I stepped back from it all and began to see chains of related traumatic memories as dark blocks, looking almost like box cars in a train, resting off at a distance in my mind. This was something that the literature never mentioned at all. In the commentaries and reviews on the practices suggested in the literature, no one mentioned the observation of or the dissipation of chains of negative memories like I was experiencing.

Through the course of many hours of practice, each time looking at these chains, the darkness of all the traumatic memories in that chain would lift, turn white, the chain would uncouple, and fall apart, at times, all at once, in a rather dramatic flash and crash, looking and feeling very much like box cars falling off a bridge that we will sometimes see in old movies. After, the memories would still be available, but their negative energy would have dissipated. In time, my daily headaches of the last too many years disappeared, so far, never to return, fifty-some years later now.

Many years after, I learned that this process is somewhat how yogis clear mental trauma, compulsions, irrational fears, and general unwanted negative energy from their minds. It seems that the key for them in practice is to relax the mind to the point where memories can easily well up from the subconscious. For the less advanced using a minder or recording with suggested symbols, pictures, or ideas, then sit back and dispassionately observe the slideshow of memories that well up from the subconscious, thus slowly releasing the mind’s negative energies. For beginners, success seems to be in the ability to rest in a vivid daydream state, or for the more advanced, and without a minder or recording, the deeper intuitive states of the mind. The how-to can be found in a few books on the various Yoga Nidra schools of practice.

At the time, I knew nothing of this kind of stuff. For me, it was all about focus, you know, looking at a memory or chain of memories and single-mindedly dissolving their negative energy. I did not know that intuitive mental states existed, but I did have an additional and somewhat awakening experience, which is what this first little story is about.

I was sitting in a study hall. I had been reading about the subject that I just wrote about, and my eyes were tired. Resting my eyes, I was casually looking over everything, and everyone with my eyes slightly out of their normal focus when suddenly I began to see an energy field around everyone in the room. Close to the body, the field was bluish gray and it extended out from the body in various colors. I could see this field around each hair on a person’s head. And then further out from everyone’s head was a small field of gold, resting over each person’s head, just like an upside-down golden bowl.

OK, so I seemed to have a small talent to see some things spiritual. But what do you do with it? When I described what I had seen to others, no one had any idea what I was talking about and I quickly learned that when you tell a regular person about things they can’t personally see, things that they don’t know exist or even can exist, they will look at you strangely and think that you are making the whole thing up to get attention or that you are delusional or worse.

But if I could see this aspect of our spiritual structure, my feeling was that so had others. So, what I did was to first begin to learn silence and second (pre-internet days) with Strong’s concordance to research the bible trying to compare what I had seen of this upside-down golden bowl with any experiences or spiritual observations written about by the prophets or early Christians.  I did know that the prophets had written about many spiritual things in their visions that no one seemed to understand.

Looking up “golden bowl,” I found this:

Zech: 4:2: “I see a solid gold lampstand with a bowl at the top……” and

Eccl: 12-6, “Remember your Creator before the silver cord is loosed, Or the golden bowl is broken…..“

I will explain my understanding of these scriptures a little later in the lessons, but although written two to four thousand years ago, it was a comfort to know that my observation of this aspect of our spiritual structure was confirmed by what was written in the bible. Another confirmation that I wasn’t imagining things was the fact that for centuries this golden field has been illustrated in religious paintings as a halo above a saint’s head. Evidently, the golden bowl, the halo is so much brighter in highly spiritual people that just perhaps in the right light regular people can sometimes see it.

The Beginning

A year or so later: Nothing special that day, just that something was drawing me within, so I decided to look behind the darkness of my mind to see what was there. It’s not that I was expecting anything, but I sat down on my couch, took a couple of deep breaths, and then with each exhalation imagined that I was falling deeper and deeper into the ocean of darkness inside me. I immediately started to fall inside. After a few breaths, my face began to feel wooden; my body lost all physical sensation and became completely numb. In my whole life, I had never relaxed to complete whole-body numbness and didn’t even know that I could.

By continuing to look more deeply inside, a stillness of mind began to creep over me. It was like something had grabbed and held me, both my body and mind. I was aware but locked in place. Resting In this thoughtless stillness, I became lifted into an intuitive awareness I did not know existed. Difficult to explain. but if you can imagine the difference between normal thinking awareness and the fog that a person might wake up in when they have not had enough sleep, it would seem the same distance between this still, crisp, intuitive awareness and what now seemed the heavy thinking awareness that I had always known.

For a short while, I rested in the wonder of it all.

Then, in this stillness of mind, in this thoughtless wonder, the golden light of the Holy Spirit appeared from what seemed like everywhere and wrapped itself around me, filled me, and brought a comfort and peace that again, I had never known, heard of, or even imagined could ever exist. The cognitive ability of intuitive awareness coupled with the peace and joy brought by being wrapped in the golden light of the Holy Spirit, was simply incredible. At that moment, I could have died in the Holy Spirit’s arms, completely happy with no regrets.

I rested for a short while, in thoughtless wonder, filled with the light of the Holy Spirit. But as soon as I started to analyze the experience of it, you know, trying to be rational about the whole thing, I dropped out of the intuitive awareness state and the Holy Spirit faded away.

As I left this intuitive state and dropped back into my normal thinking awareness, it felt like a description I read of this transition several years later: “As if putting on soiled clothes.”

Now, the only thing of importance to anyone else in this is what I did the next day.

I had just had the most wonderful experience of my life and I wanted it back!

So, the next day, trying to experience body numbness, the stillness of mind, the state of intuitive awareness, and the golden light of the Holy Spirit that I rested in the day before, I went over and over that first experience and determined that to repeat the experience of it I needed to repeat the sequence of events that brought me to the experience of it. I just wanted it back! You might call this a good reason to focus.

So, I again looked deep behind the darkness of my mind but this time specifically for the Holy Spirit. With each exhalation, I again imagined that I was falling through the darkness of my mind and melting my awareness into the arms of the Holy Spirit. For the second time, my body went numb, my mind became still and once more I was lifted into the light clear mental state that I later came to call intuitive awareness. This awareness is the intuitive state that the prophets and early Christians experienced when having their prophecies and visions, what mystics usually call super consciousness, but I think is more accurately described as intuitive awareness.

For the second time, the golden light of the Holy Spirit wrapped itself around me and filled me with the same peace and joy that I had felt the day before.

But one more time, as soon as I started thinking and rationalizing about the experience, intuitive consciousness, and the Holy Spirit, faded away.

Before this, I had never read a single book on meditation, knew nothing of Christian mysticism, mysticism in general, or that states of consciousness existed beyond the mind’s normal thinking processes. But I learned one important thing. YOU CANNOT THINK ABOUT THE HOLY SPIRIT AND IN THE MIDDLE OF THINKING ABOUT IT, EXPECT TO EXPERIENCE IT. The Holy Spirit only reveals itself to those who come to it with an open heart and an empty cup (mind) that it may fill.

So, this is how my journey to find the deep things of God began: Being drawn by the Holy Spirit to look inside, my body relaxing and losing sensations, followed by my mind becoming still and quiet, then experiencing intuitive awareness and finally being wrapped in the golden light of the Holy Spirit, not understanding anything but the wonder of it all and the fact that I could not think about the Holy Spirit to experience if I wanted to experience the Holy Spirit..

Each day after, with varying degrees of success, I began to practice the same sequence of events of my first two experiences with the Holy Spirit.

Monks would call this learning to pray from the heart.

The tradition of praying from the heart

Please understand that my experience with the Holy Spirit is not all that unique. For the last two thousand years, behind the scenes of Church politics, what I found by accident, Christian monks have been quietly teaching to those they deemed ready for the practice of it.

A few quotes of consequence: from two thousand years ago till now,

Evagrios the Solitary (born 345), in On Prayer writes:

“When your intellect in its great longing for God gradually withdraws from the flesh and turns away from all thoughts that have their source in your sense-perception, memory or soul-body temperament, and when it becomes full of reverence and joy, then you may conclude that you are close to the frontiers of prayer.” “Stand on guard and protect your intellect from thoughts while you pray. Then your intellect will complete its prayer and continue in the tranquility that is natural to it. In this way, He who has compassion on the ignorant will come to you, and you will receive the blessed gift of prayer.” “You cannot attain pure prayer while entangled in material things and agitated by constant cares. For prayer means the shedding of thoughts.”

A text used in many monasteries in the 5th century, written by Dionysisus the Areopagite and called THE HIDDEN KNOWLEDGE OF GOD, counsels:

“in the earnest exercise of mystical contemplation, you leave the senses and the operations of reason and all things that the senses or reason can perceive, to the end that you raise yourself by this unknowing to union with Him who is above all being and all knowledge,”

St. Hesychios the 5th-century monk, in On Watchfulness and Holiness writes:

“… When there are no fantasies or mental images in the heart, the intellect is established in its true nature, ready to contemplate whatever is full of delight, spiritual and close to God.”

“We should strive to preserve the precious gifts which preserve us from all evil… These gifts are the guarding of the intellect with the invocation of Jesus Christ, continuous insight into the heart’s depths, stillness of mind unbroken even by thoughts which appear to be good, and the capacity to be empty of all thought.”

The Desert Father, Abba Cronius ( 285 AD) writes:

“If the soul is vigilant and withdraws from all distraction and abandons its own will, then the spirit of God invades it……”

(St. Teresa of Avilla, 1515-1582) writes:

“We are not forced to take wings to find Him, but only to seek solitude and to look within ourselves.”

The catholic monk Thomas Keating (born 1923) writes:

“Let thoughts come, let them go. No annoyance, no expectation. This is a very delicate kind of self-denial, but it is more valuable than bodily austerities, which tend to fix one’s attention on oneself. Waiting for God without going away, giving the usual time to prayer, and putting up with what goes on in the imagination are the most effective practices for acquiring true devotion. The observance of them will lead to a complete change of heart.”

These are just a very few quotes from the last two thousand years of those experienced in praying from their hearts, all monks.

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Experiences

In these lessons, I will as much as possible try to write clearly of my direct personal experience with the Holy Spirit and as little as possible of what I believe to be true but have no personal experience. I will also write about some of the visions in the scriptures that I have touched upon in my inner journey with the deep things of God. I am not going to inflate, exaggerate, or fake any of it but I do understand that there are some things that I will write about that may be out of your reality. Many things are that way when you have no personal experience with them. The experiences that I write about are not really all that important anyway. What is important, is for you to consistently practice the techniques that will open your heart to whatever reality the Holy Spirit has in store for you. And believe me, it’s not the same for everyone.

My experiences are probably much more mundane than a monk’s, but at least I am willing to write about what I have experienced and will try to fill in some of the information gaps that monks simply won’t write about, and the prophets would only write of in metaphors. But I agree with them about one thing. That is, don’t openly talk about your inner experiences with those who will not understand. Learn silence as a virtue. Over the years this truth has been branded into my heart over and over again. The next little story is the beginning of it and will give you an example of why I feel the way I do.

Comfort from the Holy Spirit  

I was married to a lady and had a couple of very young children, all of strong fundamentalist faith when the light of the Holy Spirit came so suddenly into my life. Not knowing anything about what was happening except how wonderful it all was, what was the first thing I did? Tell everyone I knew of the experiences and ask everyone what it all meant. Most everyone thought that I was totally out of my mind. Intuitive consciousness above normal consciousness, never heard of such a thing. Being enveloped in the golden light of the Holy Spirit, this guy thinks he is Jesus Christ.

I told my wife everything about these wonderful (to me) earth-shaking experiences. She told her pastors, and they convinced her that I was possessed by the devil. She became afraid to be in the same room with me for the rest of our marriage. She didn’t believe in divorce, and I didn’t believe in leaving my kids without a father. So, we stayed together until the kids were on their own, thirteen more years. I know, old school. I just felt that personal happiness was far less important than duty. I still feel that way. Am I out of touch with the times, or what?

I hadn’t learned anything of the formalities or background of the prayer of the heart and neither in books nor in person could I find anyone in modern Christianity who had any deep inner experience with the Holy Spirit. Of course, this was pre-internet. Now everything is available.

Anyway, I felt that I was alone in my experience, and with no understanding of anything, I just sat down each morning and tried to become open to the Holy Spirit as best as I could. One day, I cried out to God in my dismay. Why does no one understand? Why am I the only one? Why, just why am I being punished like this? I should add a really big disclaimer here but all I can do is relate how the following experience felt at the time. The reality of it is, well my understanding of such things has changed with fifty years and so many more wonderful and sometimes (to me) earthshaking experiences. It’s just that this was the first time that I realized how personal the Holy Spirit could be.

I was deep inside experiencing intuitive awareness but had been wallowing in my dismay. There was a rip in the heavens. I felt it. Out poured the Holy Spirit which I saw with my physical eyes. It descended like a golden cloud and wrapped itself around me as if I were a baby in its arms. It rocked me back and forth for a few moments and when it lifted from me, all my grief over no one else understanding and my isolation from the world lifted with it, so far never to return. I cannot describe the peace, comfort, and joy. The reality of the experience, do the heavens rip? At the time I was young in the Spirit and knew next to nothing of the inner path.

But it was at this point in my spiritual journey that I realized something that has stayed with me throughout the rest of my life. Yes, just like others, I believed in the Holy Spirit as God’s finger of creation but now I understood that I also had a very and I do mean very personal one-to-one relationship with it. This experience changed my view of everything. It no longer mattered that no one understood, or what anyone thought of my relationship with God and the Holy Spirit or even me. I no longer needed to explain or convince others of the truth of the deep things of God that I had begun to experience. Put it out there yes, but without the personal baggage that usually comes with the attachment to the results of it.

Truthfully, many of my life situations and experiences with the Holy Spirit are so personal that without this relationship, I doubt that I would have the strength to write about any of it.

Anyway, Jesus said it better than I can. Do not cast your pearls before swine because they will tear you to shreds. Especially if like me and many others, you start having spiritual experiences and do not understand the process. No one around you is going to understand and when you start telling others about your wonderful experiences, you are going to lose friends and even family because they are all going to think you are crazy or one of the devil’s minions. I know better than most. I will say it again. Learn silence as a virtue.

A few years after separating, my wife passed.

This leads me to bricks.

Big and Small bricks

From birth, we all build a mental library of our experiences and things we have read or have been told and believe to be true. It is that part of the mind through which we view the world around us and try to make sense of it all. In mysticism, the only way to make that library solid is through our own experiences. Any mentor of worth is always going to tell his students to never take anything said or written as the absolute truth but to build their library out of their own personal experiences.

These experiences of the deep things of God may be massive life-changing revelations to a person like the first experience with the Holy Spirit in my life was to me. But before this, looking into my mind and seeing the substance of negative thoughts and getting rid of years and years of headaches growing up was not a bad start. Then seeing the energy field around people and the golden bowl gave me a different perspective of our spiritual structure. To have my first really important experience of being lifted into intuitive consciousness, which I did not know existed, immediately followed by being enveloped in the golden light of the Holy Spirit which before this I figured had run away and hidden somewhere after the death of Jesus and the Apostles, was a life-changing, blew down the old library and putting in a massive new cornerstone that would carry me through the rest of my life type of deep things of God experience. Those may happen only one or two times on the path to God. Having the Holy Spirit start flowing up my spine was another for me and the experience you just read of my first major comfort from the Holy Spirit wasn’t all that bad either. Another experience written about later in these lessons, of having the Holy Spirit tear my heart to shreds was probably the frosting on the cake of my first years with the Holy Spirit: All (to me) massive life-changing experiences.

But then,

our library is also built of a multitude of small almost insignificant little experiences that probably would never mean anything to anyone. Like this simple observation. It was summer. The Holy Spirit was active. Without a shirt on, I went outside to do some work in my backyard. When the sun hit my chest, I felt a ball of energy build in my heart and very distinct fingers of energy spread throughout my torso. My conclusion was that there must be some form of the Holy Spirit or subatomic particle akin to it radiating from the sun that scientists know nothing about. Well, unless you are a nuclear physicist, this observation is probably meaningless. Or you might conclude like I did that spending just a few minutes bare-chested in the sun every week might be a good thing to do. Years later I read a yogi saying just this.

Or the fact that about a year into meditation, I began to hear inner sounds that eventually merged into the vibration of the Holy Spirit. It was C# sort of. Those ringing bowls that the Tibetan monks are seen using, well that’s the sound they are trying to duplicate. Ok, so I could hear Om, said to be the vibration of creation, the finger of God, or perhaps it was its harmonic that I heard, not exactly earth-shaking.

One or two massive cornerstone-type deep things of God experiences, a multitude of little seeming unimportant deep things of God experiences, with numerous bricks of in-between size deep things of God personal experiences, over the years build a library of mystical personal deep things of God observations and understandings that cannot be blown down by anything, even relatives or death.

It’s all about our hearts

Then, I was doing some personal research into the lives of the Desert Fathers. To bring the Spirit close, they would try to get their disciples to develop a deep sense of inner sorrow. They write that it is a sorrow that you do not want to get rid of. This seemed to be a really, really, really, stupid thing to cultivate. I have always been sorry for my sins. I have always rather hurt myself than another. But I could not understand why a person would want to go around in a state of sorrow, mentally beating themselves up over their sins. We all make mistakes. Just get over it and do better the next time.

Feeling irritated, I put the book aside for my devotional time. I rested in the intuitive calm for a few minutes and the Holy Spirit lifted my awareness above my mind’s thinking. Suddenly a sorrow poured through me that was so deep it went all the way down to my bones. It was beyond feeling sorry for one man’s sins. It was like feeling all of the pain and suffering of the world at once. But as the Holy Spirit filled my mind, I understood the grace of God extending to me and all of humanity. Oh, what sweet sorrow that I did not want to lose.

I was mistaken in my previous thinking: Because for me, the sorrow had nothing to do with my petty sins but everything to do with the Holy Spirit opening my heart so deeply that my soul could reach out and feel beyond its ego sense and embrace its innate humanity. Without the Holy Spirit opening my heart and bringing the experience of it directly to me, I would have never understood.

The Bible says that the seat of our emotions is in our hearts. Of course, it is not our literal hearts but the heart center in our spiritual body that is the seat of the soul’s ability to feel beyond itself, its humanity, and experience the deep things of God and eventually the very presence of infinite consciousness within. The whole spiritual process that Jesus left to us is nothing more than a war between the ego mechanism of our personalities and our hearts and allowing the Holy Spirit to open our hearts and diminish our ego sense and take us to the deep things of God is how this battle is fought and won or lost. As St. Clement wrote: Diminishing the ego-sense and opening our hearts (purification) is only the first step on the spiritual path. But to me, it also seems the hardest.

The spiritual goal in this life that so few of us attain or even strive for is to diminish our egos and open our hearts to God, all of humanity, and existence as much as possible before leaving this world.

The reason that we see the gifts of the spirit around some of those that we call saints and not mankind as a whole, is that these particular saints have opened their hearts and diminished their egos to a point of selflessness. The full power of the Holy Spirit will not function through the ego or egocentric individuals. The reason for this is that the full power of the Holy Spirit can only be used by the mind after it has risen through the opened heart. True, we will sometimes see miracles around ordinary people, but this usually only happens at a point of crisis where the thinking processes of the mind have collapsed, and the only thing left is the heart in its pureness crying out to God.

Relief from pain

Even when we are not old, many of us have a terrible time with pain and illnesses. I am not saying that deep prayer will cure the problem, but it may help us cope a little better. Perhaps my own experience will help explain. For several years I had been doing a type of production work that strained the muscles on one side of my neck. The muscles on that side became stronger than the muscles on the other side. The long-term problem that resulted was that when I would sit down for my devotional time, (trying to sit with my spine relaxed but erect) very painfully my neck would continually be pulled to one side. My devotional time was two hours in the morning and two hours at night but after an hour the pain would become so intense that I could not handle it and would have to stop. Eventually, I decided to stay with it and put in the whole two hours no matter how bad the pain became. For an hour the pain kept building until it was almost unbearable, and I would normally stop. This time I focused more deeply and continued. Within a few minutes of deeper concentration, I heard a small snap inside the center of my head and was instantly numb from head to toe, resting in wonderful peace. I had not been lifted into intuitive consciousness to experience this. It seemed to come as a natural course of deeper focus during my devotional time as a result of the body’s energy being drawn more deeply within.

Throughout the period of my neck problem, in my devotional time, I would feel the pain build for a while, then there would be a snapping sound in my head and after for as long as I wished, I could continue my meditation in total comfort and peace. Think of the blessing being able to do this could be for those who are recovering from injury or illness. The most important point of all this might be that if we are not strong enough or willing to work through the pain or periods of spiritual dryness, we may never have the opportunity to open ourselves to the blessings that can result.

A student writes about her similar experience: “Mr. Lawrence, I just wanted to thank you for sharing your contemplative journey and allowing others to learn from you. I have practiced contemplative prayer for about 5 years and am currently at the lonely stage of “nobody like me.” I have read most of St. John of the Cross’s writings and also St. Teresa of Avilla. I am also drawn to Brother Lawrence of old, for I wish to do everything for the love of God, for Himself, not for reward, experience, or any other reason. That is my desire, and the Lord is working in me by the power of the Spirit to grant the desire of my heart.

I discovered, quite by accident one day that contemplative prayer does relieve pain. I have had reconstructive surgery for a birth defect that went unnoticed until I was 35. I now have fibromyalgia, an arthritic disease of the muscles, ligaments, and tendons. It is an invisible illness. and that is difficult sometimes, for I appear well, but sometimes suffer excruciating pain.

God has taught me much through that pain and continues to use it to strengthen me spiritually. But when it is rough going, resting in the Spirit virtually removes all pain except for the most vicious. And the Spirit gives me the strength to bear that until my medicine for attacks begins to work. You are right about this in your contemplative prayer lessons, it would be wonderful to share this ability with people who would benefit from it. ……….

I thank you for the help you have given me. It is much food for thought and prayer. May the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with your spirit,”

A physical explanation for a spiritual process

First a simple observation of the spiritual process. Understand that the Holy Spirit resides in each of us, good and evil alike. It is God’s finger and substance of creation and the enlivening power of all living things. Its activity within is what makes living things different from rocks. Its activity within our nervous system also makes humans only somewhat different from the animals around us.

If a person wants to be a professional musician, they will generally put in hours and hours of practice each day for years. They are forming the brain cell connections necessary for them to be aware of the tones and rhythms that most of us are not aware of. The brain scans that have been done on professional musicians demonstrate that their brains in that area related to music are more fully developed and larger than the average person.

They did the same type of scans on taxi drivers in London, where the drivers have to be able to remember every street in the city as well as everything related to those streets, and found that in those drivers, the part of the brain related to memory was much more developed and larger than with the average person.

It is no different with the Holy Spirit and God. The awareness of both the Holy Spirit and God is innately within every human on this planet. To become aware of both, just like a professional musician, we need to put in enough practice time to create the necessary brain cell connections to make the awareness of the Holy Spirit and God a continuous part of our lives. There is nothing supernatural, nothing magical about any of this. Bringing the spiritual into the physical body is a brain cell and nervous system thing. That’s it. On earth, that’s all there is to it. (mostly)

If we were born perfect (in the ancient Greek of the bible, telios), say with the genetic profile of Jesus or the spiritual power of his soul, we would never have to practice anything but being quiet. The strong underlying impulse that develops the brain cell connections to experience God and the Holy Spirit would already be there or at least in the process of being made there. All that we would have to do is grow up enough for our nervous system to mature and to automatically make the nervous system and brain cell connections and we would be continuously aware of the Holy Spirit and God in our hearts for the rest of our lives. To me, this is what the story of Adam and Eve was really about: The soul’s potential for the continuous awareness of God (the Garden of Eden) and Jesus through his gift of the Holy Spirit giving us a way to bring the continuous awareness of God to fruition.

The evolution of man’s spiritual nature

The journey to the realization of God as a soul for everyone on this planet and everything in all of manifest creation is the evolution of the individualizing structures that manifest Universal Consciousness as individual consciousness. On the physical level, the journey is the process of the Spirit’s unfolding spiritual capacities located within very specific areas of the human brain and nervous system. These areas are where the soul’s spiritual body impinges on the various nerve plexuses of the soul’s physical body. These very specific areas are the gates to the higher levels of awareness that we must develop to investigate the Kingdom of God and become aware of the soul’s true nature. It is the Holy Spirit that opens these gates; or more accurately, it is the Holy Spirit that stimulates the growth of the nerve connections within the brain necessary for the soul using the physical body to realize the higher reality. It is no different than learning any new skill. The proper nerve connections must be in place before the skill can be achieved as a part of oneself. The evolution of mankind’s consciousness is the gradual process of mankind’s nervous system becoming more and more attuned to the Holy Spirit.

It is quite apparent to me that the Holy Spirit is the guiding hand behind the evolution of the human species. In another few hundred thousand or perhaps a million years the human nervous system will probably have evolved to the complexity necessary for mankind to naturally (any process that innately follows God’s will) and spontaneously develop an awareness of the higher reality and gifts of the Spirit. When one considers that the last species to rule this planet, the dinosaurs, lasted over 100 million years, a few hundred thousand to a million years for the human species is but a drop in the bucket of planetary time.

The nature of the universe

One day, while resting in the intuitive calm, I became lifted by the Spirit. It pulled my awareness above where it normally rests in my head and I seemed to be floating above. From this awareness, I looked down into my body and it was as if I were viewing the basic structure of creation, the smallest particles of existence. I could feel the spaces between what seemed like an ocean of hollow spheres of light in a constant swirling motion.

I realized that over the years my eyes had not told me the whole truth; for there is nothing solid in this universe. To exist in this universe everything must be in constant motion. By the nature of this universe, everything must always be changing. This applies to our bodies, our experiences, our lives, our loved ones, our world, our religions, our social and political institutions; everything. In all of the manifested realms of existence, including the heavens, nothing can or will stay as it is. There is a saying that “This too will change” and it always will. Trying to keep people and circumstances as they are is as futile as trying to stop the changing of the tides or trying to swim upstream. It is best to live with the ebb and flow of the Holy Spirit, the ebb and flow of life.

Another time I was resting in intuitive awareness and became lifted by the Spirit. The whole universe seemed to appear before me. It looked like a giant Christmas tree ornament hanging on nothing. While in this state I clearly understood that the whole of God is not to be found at the center of the billions of stars within our galaxy, the Milky Way, or even at the center of the billions upon billions of galaxies that make up the immense strands and clusters of matter and energy that exist as the observable physical universe. The whole of the physical universe that mankind feels is so vast is more like a small cluster of diamonds resting on one of God’s fingers. (as if universal divine consciousness had fingers)

The Heavens

The heavenly realms, each brighter and larger than the last, would make up the other jewels that rest on God’s other fingers. This illustration is appropriate for all of manifest creation is only a fraction of the size of the Consciousness within and behind it. The heavens are not a single place. Did not Jesus say, “In my Father’s house there are many mansions?” The heavens are more like a series of separate universes divided by vibrations of God’s consciousness. Mohammed speaks of consciously being taken through the seven heavens. The physical universe is at the bottom of the rest and has the coarsest vibration.

As we develop spiritually, our consciousness will become more highly attuned and will increase in vibration. When our bodies die and we leave the physical realm, the more highly attuned our consciousness, the more it has expanded and developed in this life, the higher we will be able to go into the heavens, and the less restricted we are when we get there. Only those whose consciousness is fully developed (Born again unto the Spirit) can roam the series of universes known as the heavens at will and fully choose how they wish to serve God. Sorry, that’s just the truth of how it works.

The Nature of the Mind

Many times, the visions we have in contemplative prayer are not of the outer world but of our own nature. During one period some mental mechanism had unlocked or moved away from me slightly. Instead of looking through the mind at the world, I was somewhat apart from the mind looking not through it but at it. It was as if I had become temporarily detached from its usual influence. For a couple of days, I went around touching everything. The shift in consciousness made everything seem so much crisper and clearer; almost like getting a new set of glasses. Before this, I had read that we are not our minds but this time, I for the first time, felt it. As we progress on the spiritual path we will go through several shifts in consciousness. Usually, they happen so gradually that we don’t notice them until we look back at how we were a few years before.

A student wrote of this experience: “I know it’s not the end of the month yet when I normally write to you but I did want to relate some recent events to you and ask your advice. The Spirit seemed to be very busy, moving between the crown of my head, the point between the brows, and the center of my brain, I couldn’t do anything else during my devotional after the breathing but watch this movement. I think I finally had a small experience of what you refer to as “looking beyond the darkness of my mind.” I felt myself falling away from my busy mind. I was sort of looking back or sensing my busy mind from a place just beyond it where the stillness was. I was feeling a stillness I had never felt before. It only lasted a few minutes, but my breathing practically stopped during that time. It felt as though I had stepped away from my mind.”

The mind can be our best friend. By this, I am speaking of the rational or thinking part of the mind coupled with the subconscious. Properly trained, it is what gives us the momentum, the inertia to find God. This is what I mean. If the mind is trained to move in a particular direction, its natural inclination is to keep moving in that direction. If you properly train the mind to meditate between seven and eight in the morning, it will try to do that every day. The mind seems to like staying in set patterns. Most meditators of even short length have had the experience of not being able to meditate at their regular hour only to have the mind at that hour, try to meditate in the middle of what they have been distracted to do. It is for this reason that it is a much easier path when we do our devotionals at regular times.

For those seeking God, the mind left untrained, left unbridled, can be their worst enemy. The unbridled mind is constantly trying to seek greater activity and sensation. Eastern mystics call it the monkey mind. Try to calm the untrained mind too quickly or too strenuously and like an outraged monkey, it starts going into all sorts of contortions. This is perhaps the greatest problem for new meditators. Training the mind for quiet meditation needs to be a long gentle structured process, so be patient and gentle with yourself and give yourself the proper length of time to let your efforts come to fruition.

The main problem with the mind is that for most of us, it distorts everything it sees. For most of us, our minds are not yet clear panes of glass but are as St. John of the Cross explained; muddied and rippled. Looking through the clutter we cannot see reality or ourselves as we truly are. The subconscious part of the mind holds pain, fear, mis-emotion, all the distorted opinions and tendencies that from childhood up to have been imposed on us from others and society in general, as mind stuff whirlpools. The whirlpools spin-off ripples of irrational opinions, fears, hatreds, compulsions, and unworthy habits that sometimes dominate our lives. Because of the mind’s programming, clutter, and distorted vision through which it is experiencing life, the soul cannot see God or its true nature clearly.

The play of mind and spirit

Thoughts are real things with real substance and energy. Do not ever believe that you can think and think along certain lines and because no one can read your mind your thoughts will not have consequences. Do not ever think that you can do a harmful thing and because no one saw you do it, it will not come back to bite you.

Your mind records every single thing that you think or do. Nothing ever and I do mean ever as in the tiniest little thought or action is not recorded by your subconscious and put on its shelves in storage. So what, who cares? Well, unless you are satisfied with why is this happening to me, I don’t deserve this; you need to care.

First, a couple of basic facts. The mind is very much like a pond of water. In its depths, it holds things, actually, everything we think and do. Every thought a person has creates a ripple on its surface that never disappears but sinks into the pond’s depths, into the subconscious. When we think enough thoughts along a certain line, enough ripples will have accumulated in the depths to create an upwelling of energy, a compulsive impulse in the mind that moves a person into actions that correspond with the accumulated power of each of our thoughts along this line of thought. This can be good or very bad. So, watch what you put in your mind and watch your thoughts. Your thoughts are real things with real energy and can bring very bad consequences when your thoughts are not properly controlled.

This is the underlying problem, but it gets worse. The upwellings, that is the compulsive thoughts that arise from the subconscious bring about actions that do two things. First, with each and every action taken along that line, acting on the compulsions makes the upwellings in the mind stronger, over time making the compulsion worse. I do not need to be specific in this. Even good deeds done compulsively are bad for us spiritually. Second, when not controlled, unhealthy compulsions can and usually do grow ever worse and can and usually do have very real damaging consequences.

And now, the good or bad part of all this. We, each and every one of us live in the ocean of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is everywhere and in and as virtually everything. The Holy Spirit’s interaction with our minds is all about energy seeking its own level, that is the positive and negative energies that live in our minds. The Holy Spirit will always seek balance in our lives. It is no different than water seeking its own level, with the Holy Spirit facilitating the flowing of energy from high to low. We cannot run from the Holy Spirit. We cannot hide a single thought or action from it. As a natural part of the task that the Holy Spirit has been given (the finger of God), sooner or later, it is going to bring about those circumstances in each of our lives that will help level out the imbalances in our minds. Good or bad, we can sometimes hide what we think and do from others, often from the surface of our own minds but we cannot hide the imbalances in the depths of our minds from the actions of the Holy Spirit.

When we pass from this earth, there is only one thing that we will feel from God: Absolute and unconditional love. That is His part. It is called grace. But what determines what happens to us after we pass from this earth is brought forth by the Holy Spirit using the process that I have just described. Sorry for all those who are looking to walk on golden streets without a care for who they are or for what they have done in life.

St. Isaak of Syria writes: “If something has become deeply united with your soul, you should not only regard it as your possession in this life but believe that it will accompany you into the life to come. If it is something good, rejoice and give thanks to God in your mind; if it is something bad, grieve and sigh, and strive to free yourself from it while you are still in the body.”

I do not think the Holy Spirit judges us so much as in this life or the next it simply brings about the circumstances that will balance the energies that are out of balance in our minds and our lives. And if you have given yourself over to the guidance of the Holy Spirit where you can feel it in your life, you can expect the process to be much more intense.

This interaction of the Holy Spirit with the mind, bringing the various needed circumstances into life for the soul to learn what it needs to learn, this subtle and occasionally not so subtle play of life is what mystics call karma and the bible calls an eye for an eye.

Learning to Give It to God

When the mind has run through its rationalizations and has come to the end of what it can do, if at this moment we reach out to the Holy Spirit and ask for its help, it will more likely be there for us than at any other time.

There is a practical aspect to this that over the years I have come to use occasionally and may be of use to you. First a few things. I don’t ask the Holy Spirit what socks to put on and such. It has enough things to do without nonsense like that. When I have asked for the Spirit’s help it has been because I have not been able to figure it out with my own thinking. Second, understand that the validity of the answer we get from the Holy Spirit has a direct relationship to the depth from which we ask the question.

Ok, having said this, this is how I have practiced it. When I have had something that I really needed help with, I would go as deeply inside as possible, ask the question, and pray (sometimes depending on circumstances plead, as the intensity of the asking is important) for the Holy Spirit’s help with the answer. Then I let the question go and will not allow myself to think about it. The last part is important. Get your mind off it. Your mind will only get in the way of things. I will ask the question deep in meditation sometime during each meditation period and then forget about it, for me, this is at least a couple times a day until the Holy Spirit comes up with the answer of how to proceed or not. Usually, within a day or so I will receive an answer.

Answers have always come as a flash when not expecting it and quite often the insight will come with a noticeable flash of the brightness of my whole mind: Not in my mind but of my whole mind, which is a sign of intuitive awareness. When I experience the brightness, I am pretty much assured that what I am being told is the real deal and not my imagination. Anyway, this is how it has always worked for me and hopefully will for you.

Divine Consciousness as Soul

All the saints who have directly experienced the true nature of God tell us (In ways that they think the followers of their denomination can best understand) that God is not a “big person” in the heavens.

Evagrios the Solitary in On Prayer writes: “Be on your guard against the tricks of the demons. While you are praying purely and calmly, sometimes they suddenly bring before you some strange and alien form, making you imagine in your conceit that the Deity is there. They are trying to persuade you that the object suddenly disclosed to you is the Deity, whereas the Deity does not possess quantity and form.”

St Cyril of Alexandria (378 to 444) writes that God is “incorporeal, immaterial, impalpable, beyond quantity and circumscription, beyond form and figure.”

In other words, God is not staring down at His creation, rewarding and punishing mankind like some petty Roman deity. God’s true nature is far beyond the concept of a personality that can be located in time and space, up there somewhere. The far greatest part of Divine Consciousness is like an infinite unchanging sky, an omnipresent consciousness that rests behind creation as an infinite unchanging, formless, and unmanifest presence. But at the same time, this formless unmanifest presence manifests on the surface of Itself that which dreams the dream of creation that is each soul and all that is manifest as the heavens and earth. This is what the greatest of the mystics tell us, anyway.

I will try explaining the best way that I know how: With an example that came to me many years ago while doing my practices in the desert followed by another commonly used example. Hopefully, between the two examples, I can get my and other mystics’ understanding of the soul’s true nature in God across clearly enough for you to understand the concept even if you choose to totally disagree with it.

The first example is in this way. Souls are a part of manifested Divine Consciousness; very much like the little whirlpools of air that I have so many times seen in the desert are a part of the sky. Called dust devils, the little whirlpools might seem different from the sky from which they are made but this is only because of the debris each has picked up on its journey across the land. It is illusionary: For it is only the movement, support, and flow of the whole sky that is carrying the dust. The whirlpools have no separate existence from the whole of the sky and can only maintain the appearance of an individualized structure if there is a creative impulse that is supporting them. Remove the creative impulse and the whirlpools are “immediately annihilated.”

As St. John of the Cross explained, the same concept is true of the soul. Expressing itself through the substance of creation, the soul is that pure Infinite and omnipresent consciousness, individually focused as each soul by the creative impulse, the wind of God. By identifying itself with the captivating and illusory structure of creation (the bejeweled angel Satan) into which it is born, the soul is deceived about its true nature and temporarily loses its awareness of its own perfection and unity in God. The soul becomes lost in its’ own dream, its’ mistaken sense of separateness. (The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil) and casts itself out of the garden of the awareness of its own structure of individualized divine consciousness (the tree of life) into a self-involved, self-created world of thorns and thistles. This is my understanding of the meaning behind the story of Adam and Eve.

Through the action of the Holy Spirit, on earth or in the heavens, it is the innate impulse (the grace of God) and natural evolution of the soul to eventually burn away the dust, look to its true nature, and find that it is not the substance of creation after all, but rather “I am that” greater reality and individualized infinite consciousness behind the personality I have dreamed myself to be. As an inseparable part of infinite consciousness, as a wave in the ocean of infinite consciousness that is God, each soul exists as one of the countless individualizations existing within the whole. Each soul will eventually come to realize the simple truth that Moses spoke: “I am that” and will come to rest as “I am”.

Extending everywhere, within, and as everything, divine consciousness (God) is all there is, ever has been, ever will or can be, and souls as well as all of creation as individualizations of It, are not now, never have been and never can be separate or apart from the whole of It. The soul as well as all manifest creation would “immediately be annihilated and cease to exist.” if divine consciousness was not it. The truth is that only divine consciousness exists. All things are One Thing. There is only God and that which exists in Him or Her, but actually, it, as the case may be.

Nicholas of Cusa, (1401 to 1464) writes: “From the infinity of your mercy, I see, O Lord, that you are infinity embracing all things. There is nothing that exists outside you, but all things in you are not other than you. You teach me, Lord, how otherness, which is not in you, does not exist in itself, nor can it exist.”

St Symeon, The New Theologian, (949 to 1022) writes: “How then was the Word everywhere before making the world and, when He had made it, how was He shining in it without the world comprehending Him? Pay careful attention: God “Who is everywhere present and fills all things” was not, Scripture says, separated from it by location when He created this sensible world, but by the nature of the glory of His divinity, it being evident that nothing created approached or comprehended Him at all. Indeed, being inseparable from all He is as clearly in all.”

Echoing the Christian mystic’s understanding of the nature of God the Hindu scriptures repeatedly say, THOU ART THAT

St. Catherine of Siena, (1347 to 1380) speaking to God writes: You, eternal Trinity, are a deep sea: The more I enter you, the more I discover, and the more I discover, the more I seek you. You are insatiable, you in whose depth the soul is sated yet remains always hungry for you, thirsty for you, eternal Trinity, longing to see you with the light in your light.

You are a fire always burning but never consuming; you are a fire consuming in your heat all the soul’s selfish love; you are a fire lifting all chill and giving light. In your light you have made me know your truth: You are that light beyond all light who gives the mind’s eye supernatural light in such fullness and perfection that you bring clarity even to the light of faith. In that faith, I see that my soul has life, and in that light receives you who are Light…

Truly this light is a sea, for it nourishes the soul in you, a peaceful sea, eternal Trinity….. This water is a mirror in which you, eternal Trinity, grant me knowledge; for when I look into this mirror, holding it in the hand of love, it shows me myself, as your creation, in you, and you in me through the union you have brought about of the Godhead with our humanity.

Take the mystics’ usual example of the ocean. In the whole of it, you cannot isolate any of its waves from the body from which they come, the body that supports them and upon which they owe their existence. Their substance cannot be removed and isolated and have them remain waves. Waves are more like impulses created by the wind or other creative forces that as impulses travel across the surface of the sea. You must realize that the particles of ocean water do not travel the thousands of miles from land to land that makes up the birth (individualization) and death (reabsorption into the whole) that is the lifespan of a wave; that only the impulses travel and can be said to be waves. The waves have no substance of their own that they can say this is me and not the ocean. Take away the wind or other creative impulse and what happens? Is not the whole of the ocean still there? Not one particle of it is missing but the waves cease to exist. This is the nature of all creation.

This is true of the soul. There is no point at which you can isolate the soul’s being from the whole of God. Like a wave, the soul is an impulse created by the wind of God that rides upon the surface of the body of Divine Consciousness. The saints who have directly experienced God repeatedly tell us that the soul has no substance of its own and that it can say this is me and not God. If the Wind of God should stop blowing, what happens? The whole of Divine Consciousness is still there. Not one particle is missing but the impulse, the manifested divine consciousness returns to formlessness, returns to that point in time before manifestation and souls as well as all else that is manifest as the heavens and earth will have ceased to exist.

On a more personal level where I do have an understanding, one of my students wrote this question: “You have stated that God is not a personality. Does that mean, that God is not personal? That we do not have a relationship with God as a human son and father would have, as the Gospels seem to portray Jesus having with His Heavenly Father?”

Answer: We cannot have a more personal relationship than that which we have with God. Divine Consciousness is the very core of our being and most mystics relate to God in a very personal way. This is the soul’s nature. But this does not mean that the ocean of divine consciousness, that is the Father, Christ, and Holy Spirit, are personalities or a single personality that relate to us as we relate to them. The saints tell us over and over that God is not a big person in the sky that we can point to and say that God is there and not over there. The essence of our being is infinity, just as God is infinite but the soul is individualized infinity; infinity with a single focused point of individualization through which it relates. From this viewpoint, it tends to personalize almost everything. The ocean of divine consciousness, God, is not individualized and relates to each soul from the whole, from infinity. God is the closest thing to us and yet is impersonal with us as well as everything else that exists within the whole. Knowing that each of us is His own infinite dream playing out within Himself, it is as if God has stepped back and is simply watching the love, hate, and drama of each play.

But at the same time, through the Holy Spirit, God seems to be intimately available to His creation. At the many times that I have reached out to God, through intuitive consciousness or even in moments of distress, I have sometimes been answered with very personal responses like visions, comfort, or understanding. But over many years and many experiences, I have come to a much better understanding of the nature of these responses. I am not saying that it is not God who has responded but only that I have come to a better understanding of how something so completely impersonal can respond so personally. It is probably one of those revelations that instead of being told, should be experienced over the many years of one’s life and then only after we have stepped back far enough from it all and have taken a deep hard look at it all before the truth of it all can settle in.

Consciousness as light

“When the mind is completely freed from the passions, it journeys straight ahead to the contemplation of created things and makes its way to the knowledge of the Holy Trinity.” (Maximus the Confessor)

There is only God and God is Infinite Consciousness. In a myriad of forms, only consciousness exists. There is a main trinity of aspects to this Infinite consciousness that we call God that inwardly manifest themselves to us as light.

Usually, the first that we see inside of ourselves is the Holy Spirit. We are standing on it, breathing it and our bodies and minds are made of it. It is God’s hand extending to all individualized creation. (souls) Becoming open to it is not the end of the path; it is only the very beginning of a lifelong cleansing process culminating in the direct experience and knowledge of God and soul. But of what value is the boat that carries us to our Father if all we do is occasionally read the operator’s manual and never get in the boat and let it take us anywhere? The boat is the wonderful golden light and sound of the Holy Spirit. It is here for each of us: If we will only reach out just behind the darkness of our minds for God’s hand.

The light of the Christ aspect of God is a more subtle perception than that of the Holy Spirit. It usually takes many years of silent prayer, when the center of consciousness in the middle of the head, the Gate to the East, begins to open, before it can be seen behind and within the light of the Holy Spirit. (For me it took approximately twenty years of meditation, three to four hours a day before I could rest in it regularly.) The Christ aspect is the cosmic intellect of Divine Consciousness. It is that part of the triune nature of infinite consciousness that using the Holy Spirit, directed the creation of the heavens and earth, that is, all manifest existence. Souls are individualized through this aspect of Divine Consciousness. All souls are of the body of the Christ of God. This aspect is seen inwardly as a luminous deep blue ocean of light. Only after we rest in the light of Christ and more, will we begin to understand the peace that Jesus gives.

The Father aspect of Divine consciousness and the true nature of the soul is an even more refined perception of light than that of Christ. It is seen just behind and within the light of Christ. Everything is contained within Its nature. If you hear a description of its true nature, that is not it. Its nature as each and all must be experienced to be understood. It cannot be told. When this aspect is first seen within, it will often look like a white star floating within the deep blue ocean of light of Christ. When we enter into the light of the Father, it will expand as our true self into infinity and seem brighter than a thousand suns.

Over the years, as we fall deeper and deeper into God’s arms, we are actually experiencing deeper and deeper levels of Infinite Consciousness manifested as light.

The process of dying

Ecclesiastes 12:1: “Remember you, Creator, in the days of your youth,”

12:5: “Because man goes to his lasting home and mourners go about the streets,”

12:6: “Before the silver cord is snapped…”

Early in my spiritual life as I would sit in silent contemplation I would come to a stage where my awareness seemed to rotate inside my body: A rather odd feeling because my body would be facing forward but my awareness would be facing in a totally different direction. One day, while in this state I looked down at myself. What I saw was two bodies. My physical body and partially outside of it a silvery white spiritual body. Connecting these two bodies is a silver umbilical cord. At death, this cord snaps and the soul’s relationship with the physical comes to an end.

12:6: “and the golden bowl is broken…”

Remember the first experience that I wrote about? Seeing a golden bowl over each person’s head. And: (The halo, the same golden bowl that Zechariah writes about, the highest center of consciousness in the spiritual body)

12:6:”…and the pitcher is shattered at the spring and the pulley is broken at the well.”

And the physical body can no longer utilize the Holy Spirit flowing through the channels and centers of the spiritual body.

12:7 “…and the dust returns to the earth as it once was, and the breath of life returns to God who gave it.”

A student wrote of an experience she had before reading my lessons: “I must tell you that I read your contemplative prayer lessons and found them inspirational. I had an experience a couple of years ago when I was trying to understand how to become filled with the Holy Spirit.. ……. Well upon waking one morning I experienced a light feeling and looked down and saw myself and my husband asleep below. I rose through the ceiling so fast I shot up through the sky and could see the stars around in the dark night. I looked down and saw this silver cord that you spoke of. I got frightened. And suddenly I was whisked away back into my body. I woke up terrified and did not know who to discuss such a situation with. I did not know of anyone that would understand what I was going through at the time. I let fear get in my way and did not realize that my seeking understanding was bringing me closer to the answers that I was searching for. Well, I stopped trying and now I realize that there is nothing to fear. That someone else has gone through similar experiences and that it brings you closer to the Holy Spirit. I will start to pray in search of the Spiritual closeness that is meant for me to endure and not let fear turn me away. I thank you for your contemplative prayer lessons on the internet. I know it will reach many who are seeking an understanding of the Holy Spirit in their lives.

The Second Coming of Christ

Revelations 2:1 “The one who holds the seven stars in his right hand and walks among the seven lampstands of gold (The wheels of light of Ezekiel, the seven lamps of Zechariah) has this to say…”

2:7: “I will see to it that the victor eats from the tree of life which grows in the garden of God.”

The description of the inner battle to return to the garden of unity in God is written about symbolically in Revelations. We read that it is a time of tremendous strife, turmoil, family separation, and battle. But I believe that it is a battle with our bigotry, desires, and attachments (our family) that is being spoken of.

When the soul has fully opened the seven inner gates in its spiritual body (the process of climbing Mt. Carmel, writings of St. John of the Cross) and raised its consciousness to where it can no longer tell where it ends and God begins, we will be born again and the Christ of God will have come again as each of us.

The Higher Reality

Well, I might as well get into the most difficult concept for everyone to come to grips with. If you can get through this understanding, this one reality that is the basic experience for all the mystical understanding of all the great religions on this planet, you will begin to look at life from a whole new perspective. The rest of the lessons are relatively easy, for they are nothing more than practical advice on the path to the direct experience of this most basic truth of existence.

This lesson is about the soul’s physical relationship with God. It is not about a belief in anything or anyone but the soul’s innate being in God and simply said: It also is what it is. It is said by all who have directly experienced the soul’s innate being in God, what is called union in modern Christianity, perfection by the earliest Christians, enlightenment in yoga, Nirvana in Buddhism, bliss by the Sufi, and born again in the bible, that the true understanding of it only comes from the direct experience of it. So anything said about it is not the whole of it.

More than in any other lesson I will try to quote from as many different saints on this understanding as I can. From these quotes, the reader should be able to easily see the direct experience of the soul’s true nature in God, union, born again, enlightenment, nirvana, bliss, perfection, or whatever they want to call it in the various religions around the world, it is not limited to any one time, religion or person but is universal in nature and is spread throughout the whole of Christianity’s and most other major religions existence. Try to keep in mind that regardless of one’s orientation, it is the same experience for everyone who has progressed far enough along the spiritual path to have a direct experience of it. When we come to grips with the fact that this single experience is the cornerstone of all the world’s major religions, we will come to realize what an ego trip it is to think “I am most certainly going to heaven and they are most certainly going to hell.”

Well, what is this Truth of God, soul and the nature of all manifest creation, hidden by what the Egyptians called “adyta”; hidden behind “the veil” of the prophets, hidden within the parables of Jesus, hidden within keywords and phrases of the scriptures and writings of the saints? What is this truth of the nature of existence that has been and still is so far out of “those outside of the divine choir’s” reality that if heard will be trampled underfoot and in some religions even get the teller of this truth torn to shreds?

The answer is in a child’s song.

 ROW, ROW, ROW YOUR BOAT

(live your life)

GENTLY DOWN THE STREAM

(with love, throughout all your years)

MERRILY, MERRILY, VERILY, VERILY

(with much joy but in all seriousness)

LIFE

(Everything we do, think and believe, everything that happens to and around everyone and everything on earth or in heaven)

 IS BUT A DREAM

(is but Divine Consciousness individualized as each soul and all that is manifest, dreaming the dream of creation)

 Perhaps I need to explain.

The Dream Reality

When we dream, we enter a partial reality; a dream reality that is only a small part of the awareness that makes up our fully awake self. It is like having blinders to who we are. Each night we play a myriad of roles and while dreaming each role, absolutely believe that we are the various personalities we are dreaming ourselves to be. In our dreams we are hurt, we love and are loved, we harm others and others harm us; we are chased by evil and are consumed with visions of grandeur. Yet the roles we play in our dreams are illusionary, having no independent reality from us dreaming them, and each morning we awake, with the fundamental nature of who and what we are untouched by the previous night’s roles that we have played out in our minds.

When individualized Divine Consciousness (the soul) is born into the world, it is born into a partial reality, a dreamlike reality that is only a small part of the full awareness that makes up its true Self. The soul lives its waking dream, playing a myriad of roles, hurting and being hurt, loving and being loved, manipulating others and others manipulating it, absolutely believing that it is the personality of the role it is playing. It feels isolated, separate from God and even life, unaware that it is an individualization of the Infinite Consciousness that is in actuality dreaming the dream it is living.

The apostle Paul describes it this way: “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then shall I know even as also I am known.” (1Cor. 13: 12)

In other words, when our consciousness expands beyond the dream reality into the higher reality that so many of the saints have experienced we will come to know ourselves as God knows us.

Those who have awakened, (are “inside the house”) begin to live life from a different and expanded reality. Paul says: “But when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part will be done away.” (1Cor. 13: 10)

The saints who begin to rest in this higher reality begin to experience their true nature as individualizations of infinite Divine Consciousness. They begin to experience a profound peace and joy, a sense of absolute completeness, of oneness with God and life that only comes from having the soul’s full awareness restored. The soul begins to see clearly and becomes untouched amidst the din and clamor of the world. No matter the role the soul plays or the personality that it may have assumed, the soul feels and knows itself as a wave in the infinite ocean of consciousness that is God the Almighty.

The saints who have experienced the higher reality speak of but one truth. “Outside God, nothing has any existence at all. “ (St. Veronica Giuliani)

“The soul, when purified, “(wrote St. Catherine of Genoa), “abides entirely in God; its being is God.”

“If I am to know God directly, I must become completely He and He I, so that this He and this I become and are one I.” (Meister Eckhart)

“and thus we are brought forth by God, out of our selfhood, into the immersion of love, in which we possess blessedness and are one with God.” (Ruysbroeck)

“To understand the nature of this union, one should first know that God sustains every soul and dwells in it substantially, even though it may be that of the greatest sinner in the world. This union between God and creatures always exists. By it He conserves their being so that if the union would end they would immediately be annihilated and cease to exist.” (St. John of the Cross, 1542 to 1591)

We are not and cannot be separated from God because our being is innately one with the whole of Divine Consciousness. We can’t go anywhere but within our own nature to realize the truth of our own nature in God and find the reality that is our true Self. We can’t go out and get it when we are already it. We can only work to remove whatever is obstructing our realization of already being it.

“A ray of sunlight shining upon a smudgy window is unable to illumine that window completely and transform it into its own light. It could do this if the window were cleaned and polished. The less the film and stain are wiped away, the less the window will be illumined, and the cleaner the window is, the brighter will be its illumination, The extent of the illumination is not dependent upon the ray of sunlight but upon the window. If the window is totally clean and pure, the sunlight will so transform and illumine it that to all appearances the window will be identical with the ray of sunlight and shine just as the sun’s ray…The soul upon which the divine light of God’s being is ever shining…is like the window.” (St. John of the Cross)

Cleaning and polishing the window to the soul in God is a lifelong process. Saints come to know that there is nothing of lasting value for oneself outside of the refinement of one’s own nature in God.

“No one can be saved without self-knowledge.” (St. Bernard)

Jesus said in another way that is harder for a person who is attached to the objects and pleasures of this world to achieve the unfolding of individual consciousness as Divine Consciousness (entering the Kingdom of God) than it is for a camel to traverse that ancient pass known as “The Eye of the Needle.”

He said: “The Kingdom of God is within you.” (Luke 17:20,21)

Therefore, to realize the “Kingdom of God” within each of us, “Let us enter the cell of self-knowledge.” (St. Catherine of Sienna)

When the soul has won the battle with its bigotry, fears, desires, and attachments (a many-headed beast) and finally comes to know itself as a part of the whole of life; for it and each of us who fights and finally wins the inner battle, the Christ (as Self) will have come again.

The vision of Zechariah

Zechariah writes of a vision that he had of the soul’s spiritual body while he was in intuitive awareness.

4:2: “I see a lampstand all of gold,”

(The Spirit within the human spine, the tree of life)

4:2: “with a bowl at the top:”

(The halo seen around the heads of the saints, the highest center of consciousness in the spiritual body.)

4:2: “on it seven lamps with their tubes,”

(These are the wheels of light spoken of by Ezekiel. They are the seven main centers of consciousness in the spiritual body and their connections to the lampstand of the Spirit within the spine. They are associated with the spiritual body where it impinges on the various nerve plexus located along the human spinal column and into the head.)

Just as the physical body is not a lump of clay but a complex structure, so it is with the soul’s spiritual body. In the physical body, the main distribution channel for the Spirit and grosser nerve forces is the spine, the brain, and various nerve plexuses. In the spiritual body, the main channel for the distribution of the Holy Spirit and higher spiritual forces is described in this vision as the golden lamp stand with a bowl at the top and the seven lamps with their connecting tubes.

The seven lamps are the gates to the seven basic realms of existence (The seven heavens that Mohammed traveled) within the Kingdom of God and the seven basic states of consciousness that the soul travels through to God realization.

The spiritual body’s centers of consciousness

“The appearance of the wheels and their work was like unto the color of beryl: and they four had one likeness: and their appearance and their work was as it were a wheel in the middle of a wheel.” Ezekiel 1:16

On many occasions during deep contemplation, I have been drawn to the front at what mystics call the gate to the East and have seen the golden light of the Holy Spirit, as a wheel of light around the deep blue light of the Christ aspect of divine consciousness and even the white light of the Father. These many experiences with the light have not come from super consciousness as seems to be the case with Ezekiel. But then his visions seem a lot more dramatic than what I have experienced.

As our consciousness in the physical body is located within the brain, our spiritual body has its consciousness located within very specific areas of its body, for instance, empathy is seated at the heart center. Each area of spiritual consciousness has its own very specific vibration of the Holy Spirit and the resulting color from this vibration is seen inwardly as a wheel of light that comes from each area. (It is no different from splitting a full spectrum of what appears to be clear light into its different vibrational colors.) Each area in the spiritual body can be heard and seen inwardly as different frequencies of vibration of the light of the Holy Spirit and can be felt outwardly where these areas impinge on the physical body.

I was listening to some music when I began to feel the vibration of the centers of consciousness along my spine and into my head. Each center had its unique frequency that would be stimulated, and I would feel physically when the music hit the note at which the center vibrated. I felt seven areas of vibration along the spine and into the head, exactly where the great mystics have written they could be felt. The area at the base of the spine had the lowest frequency of vibration and the areas increased in vibration with the area at the very top of the head having the highest frequency of vibration. All areas seemed to vibrate within the human range of hearing or perhaps it was just a harmonic. As the vibrations poured through me, moving up and down the spine with the music, it felt as if I had become a musical instrument being played by God.

It is obvious to me that it was the different colors of the wheels of light and different vibrations of the Holy Spirit located within the centers of consciousness in his own spiritual body that Ezekiel experienced with his visions of light and sound.

“And I looked and behold, a whirlwind comes out of the north, a great cloud, and a fire enfolding itself, and a great brightness was about it, and out of the midst, therefore, was the color of amber, out of the midst of the fire.” Ezekiel 1:4

“as the appearance of a sapphire stone” Ezekiel 1:26

“And I saw as the color of amber, as the appearance of fire round about within it,” Ezekiel 1:27

A student wrote this question about his experience: “Could you please tell me of the significance of the appearance of a circle of white light after doing contemplative prayer and the breathing process and later the appearance of a smaller blue light in the center of the circle of white light?”

Answer: The three main aspects of Divine Consciousness are seen as the golden light of the Holy Spirit, the blue light of the Christ aspect, and the white light of the Father aspect. When seen as circles of light you are probably looking into one of the centers of consciousness (lamps on the lampstand) along the spine or into the head as you practice your exercises. It is a very good sign of becoming more sensitive to the Holy Spirit.

The Nature of Scripture

From the few examples of scripture provided in the lessons, it should be obvious that there are at least two levels of awareness being referred to in the bible. We need to understand the reason for scripture being written as it is. The tradition in that part of the world was that the average person was not capable of understanding the higher realities of God and was therefore only given surface duties to do: Be good and follow the law. This is what the early Christians referred to as the milk of the truth. Much of the bible was written as a parable. On the exoteric side, the scriptures were written as morality plays but underneath, they were explanations of the nature of existence in God. This is evident from the first of it in the parable of the Garden of Eden, where the soul loses its awareness of God, to the last of it in Revelations, where we are told of the battle that the soul goes through to regain full awareness in God. Everything ties together in between. For good reason, the number seven is symbolically described by Seven lights, seven stars, seven candles, etc. are all symbolic of the seven centers of consciousness in the spiritual body, the seven basic states of consciousness the soul travels through to the realization of God and the seven heavens of the basic realms of existence in God’s kingdom.

There are seven basic states of consciousness. Each state of consciousness has its own vibrator rate. Each vibrator rate corresponds to one of the seven realms of existence known as the earth and heavens. In the spiritual body, there are seven main centers of consciousness that as each is developed give the soul access to that realm of existence. The journey to directly experiencing God as the soul is the opening of these centers. When seen inwardly the centers appear as circles of light within circles of light. When seen in another they might appear as lights branching off of the spine or as described by Zechariah as seven lamps on a golden lampstand, which actually is the golden light of the Holy Spirit within the spine.

I remember going through the bible after having so many mystical experiences and thinking” experienced that, touched on that, now I understand that, etc.”

The awakening of the Holy Spirit and Lighting the Lamps on the Lampstand

In reading the gospels, I had always wondered where the power of the Holy Spirit had gone. In the early Christians, it was just bouncing around everywhere and in the Christians of our time, it has just seemed to disappear. It had been ten years and I had yet to speak or even hear of a single Christian who had any deep and real experience with it. OK, I watch TV. But all that I have ever seen about the Holy Spirit is platitudes, trash, and make-believe, sorry. But it is usually, you may not see them around me but I have angels holding my hands sort of thing. It is quite obvious to me that the early Christians had something happening that we don’t have, the power of the Holy Spirit through Jesus and the apostles, of course. Over time the power and gifts of the Holy Spirit just got lost. My reason is politics in the Church but you can choose your own reason.

Fortunately, there is another way for each of us as individuals to awaken the Holy Spirit within. I first learned of this when reading some of the writings from the Greek Orthodox saints and came across a reference to a breathing practice that the Greek Orthodox monks use to awaken the Holy Spirit, or more accurately awaken the nervous system to the Holy Spirit.

The quote started with: “You know, brother, how we breathe’, says the holy faith.”  Saint Nicephorus I, Greek Nikephoros, (born c. 758, Constantinople—died June 2, 829. This makes the exercise at least a thousand years old and who knows how much older.

My reading started from there and went as far as I could take it at the time, pre-internet. Well, this is a secret practice that even today is not talked about or written about openly, and at the time I could not learn the whole of the practice. When you don’t know the whole of a practice you just don’t do the practice, rule of thumb. Even when just mentioning the existence of the practice in the writing of my first set of lessons I had an unhappy Greek Orthodox priest e-mail me with his opinion about what I had done.

OK, keep your secret practice. I did what I always have done. There are other breathing exercises from other spiritual systems, all of them to awaken the nervous system to the Holy Spirit’s presence and I think I must have tried most of them. I found the best of them, for me that is, adapted it for my use and continued with the practice. It is called a kriya and its purpose is the cleansing of the nervous system through the movement of the Holy Spirit rising through the spine. The bottom line is this. Those who only practice the prayer of the heart seldom awaken the Holy Spirit in the spine in enough strength to light the lamps on the lampstand and therefore never attain the gifts of the Spirit that come from their lighting. There are exceptions. Whether by accident or on purpose, or by whatever circumstance, the great Christian mystic saints that we all read about simply had to have their lampstands fully ablaze.

The beginning of it sometimes happens with the prayer of the heart even with us lesser souls. When I wrote of coming to a point in my meditation when I would hear a snap in my head and my body would go numb, well, this experience only happens when the Holy Spirit begins to enter the bottom of the lampstand (spine), the central spiritual channel (sushumna). So, perhaps it was going to happen to me no matter what I practiced.

Why a Breathing Practice

There is a technical reason as to the how and why of doing the various breathing exercises in virtually all the different spiritual paths and the structure of it was written about in a metaphor of Zechariah’s.

Zechariah 4:11-12-14 “And the two olive trees (nerve pathways that mystics call the Ida and the Pingala) on either side of the lampstand (spine)?” I asked. “What’s the meaning of them? And while you’re at it, the two branches of the olive trees that feed oil (the Holy Spirit) to the lamps (centers of consciousness)—what do they mean?” He said, “You haven’t figured that out?” I said, “No, sir.” He said, “These are the two (nerve pathways) who stand beside the Master of the whole earth (spine) and supply golden lamp oil (the Holy Spirit) worldwide (to each and every soul).”

The thing that is so great about what Zechariah has written here is that although he is speaking in metaphors, there is nothing ambiguous about what he is saying, which is perfectly describing the main structure of the spiritual body and second, the function of the two nerve pathways along the spine.

The mystics who in-depth know about such things and the varying spiritual systems that each may teach are all based on this one premise spoken of by Zechariah. The practical application of this understanding is to awaken and stimulate the rising of the Holy Spirit up through the spine opening each center of consciousness. To do this it is necessary to first circulate the Holy Spirit through the two pathways alongside the spine. Different systems use different methods for this (alternate breathing through the nostrils, inhaling through the nose, exhaling through the mouth, etc.)

Anyway, using the breathing exercise to awaken the Holy Spirit in our nervous system is the most powerful spiritual process that I am aware of, my main practice, and the only spiritual exercise that some mystics ever practice.

Well, This is Different

I had been practicing the prayer of the heart for about ten years and then had added the breathing exercise. Shortly after this, I began to feel the flowing of the Holy Spirit up my spine and resting in my head with various electrical types and other sensations for the next year or so. In two years, the flow felt like a river, and in three years, this.

I had been on retreat for a week when the next morning after arriving home and starting my regular devotional routine, it was as if a dam or a blockage had given way in my spine and the Holy Spirit started pouring up my spine and throughout my nervous system, well like I said, a river but like a stronger river. Suddenly, the wind of the Holy Spirit that Ezekiel and other prophets allude to, began blowing throughout my body. The Spirit would concentrate upon very specific areas along my spine and into my head. The Spirit seemed to rise through my body; gently bending my spine backward, holding me like this for a few minutes. As it continued to flow upward through my spine into my head, the Spirit flooded into my eyes making them spasm mildly.

Every day during each devotional and even during the rest of the day, storms of the Spirit began flowing through me. This was my experience of the lighting of the lamp at the base of (the lampstand,) the spine.

Over the next few weeks, the activity of the Holy Spirit diminished throughout my body but started building at the nerve plex at the naval. There were a couple of years of on-and-off gradually increasing pressure of the Holy Spirit at this area in my spine. After a couple of years, the pressure became constant, I started running full body fevers on and off, not feeling any different from the flu, and nausea no different from a bad case of allergies.

Look, at the very beginning of these lessons, I said my experience with the Holy Spirit had nothing to do with the fluff written by some others about it. True spirituality is a cleansing process of our physical, mental, and spiritual bodies. It is a structural thing, and it is not always fun. For me, the lighting of the lamps has never been fun but that I know of, is the only way to achieve the potential for full spiritual development.

At the end of about two months of what I just described, I felt the Holy Spirit break through the nerve plex at the naval and move upward in the spine to the solar plexus area gradually starting to build pressure there. Same process here. There were a few years of building pressure, then constant pressure from the Holy Spirit at the area with fevers and nausea for a couple of months followed by a breakthrough and the pressure of the Holy Spirit moving from the solar plexus to the heart area of the spine.

When the Spirit flowed into my heart, it was as if my heart had been set on fire. It would burn and burn.

I would do my regular devotional routine and the Spirit would start flowing into my heart. My heart would start burning and I couldn’t get it to stop. There would be so much energy that the burning would go into my lungs and couldn’t even take a comfortable deep breath. My devotional routine was mostly breathing exercises at the time and it would get so bad that I could no longer do them. I would stop my devotional routine and, in a week, or so the flow would subside. Only then could I take a deep breath again and continue with my normal daily spiritual routine.

My lungs went out on me six times that first year: The last time for nearly a month. I went to a doctor and he could find no physical reason for it. How do you tell a doctor that the Holy Spirit has been rough on you lately? I didn’t.

I was determined to press the flow of the Spirit to the limit and was not about to cut back one bit on my exercises. In my naivety, I figured that if I could keep up this pace, and keep the Holy Spirit this active, I would probably be enlightened in short order. So, I called the monastery where I had learned the breathing exercises and asked for someone to send me diet instructions for handling the heat and discomfort. I had read somewhere that adding clarified butter to the diet would help.

Instead of a letter, the monk in charge of the spiritual practices of the rest of the monks at the monastery, a brother Adonay or something like that called me on the phone. I do not know what his position is called but this monk rested in continuous non-duality, continuous Christ consciousness. It is a blessing to ever even get to talk to someone like this. Few of the greatest mystics that we all have read and admired ever attained continuous non-duality. He was ever so kind but was quite blunt about my situation. He said that I was not yet spiritually advanced enough for the hours of my routine and that if I didn’t cut back on it I would permanently damage my nervous system. So much for my ego. (One more time.) When I cut back on my routine the problem never happened again. Now many years later I am doing more hours than what I had to cut back on then. But the good thing is that this was the fourth lamp on the lampstand that had been lit for me by the Holy Spirit. It all works out in God’s time, the Holy Spirit’s time for us not in our time for us. This might be one of the hardest things to learn. It has been for me.

I have read of the saint’s referring to the fire in the heart. The biblical scholars had stated that the early Christians were speaking of religious enthusiasm. So much for religious scholars with no experience of the Holy Spirit: Now I knew what they were writing about, the lighting of the lamp at the heart.

It was Thanksgiving Day and I had just finished my third helping of everything I could hold. This is just one of those wonderful traditions we all need to do at Thanksgiving. Full and content, I went outside to be by myself and enjoy the moment. (You know, to figuratively go belly up to the sun like an overstuffed lion) I sat on the porch for just a few minutes.  I must inject here that I knew the breakthrough was coming sometime soon. I could feel the spot of heat building in my throat for about six months and I had been running full body heat on and off all day long for a few months. I had been spaced out like with an allergy problem for as long and was feeling the occasional periods of nausea that had always come with the past buildups of the Holy Spirit: I was feeling all of the normal symptoms that I had come to expect as my nervous system tried to cope with the intense buildup of the Holy Spirit within it.

Back to Thanksgiving Day. Everything I have ever read on the subject has always said that heavy food just kills the Holy Spirit’s activity, so it wasn’t like I was looking for anything at that moment. As I sat there, my sinuses cleared with the airflow becoming perfectly even between the two nostrils. Now, that’s a good sign that the Holy Spirit has just started to enter the central channel in the spine and is moving upward through it. As with the other breakthroughs, I began to feel the movement of the spirit opening up and moving through the center, the lamp on the lampstand located at the pit of the throat. Flowing upward from there, the Holy Spirit spread out into my ears and then it poured into my head, feeling like an electrical storm. It then flowed into my eyes causing them to spasm mildly. Well, that’s how I sat, filled with turkey and trimmings in the stomach and filled with the Holy Spirit in my head with one more lamp on my lampstand lighted by the Holy Spirit.

Well, that was the fifth lamp on the lampstand to be lit and opened. After the Holy Spirit had risen through all the centers of consciousness in the spine (lamps on the lampstand) it started working in my head. There are two main centers in the head, the Gate to the East located between the eyebrows, and the golden bowl at the top of the head. Along with this are several minor centers to be opened. After this there is no further place to work on or clear, that is if the cleansing process ever ends. The lighting of each lamp brings with it the spiritual potential and gift of the spirit associated with that center. When all the lamps are lit only then will we have the possibility of developing our full spirituality but even before this, spiritual things may happen.

The Holy Spirit’s power is not from you, only through you

I was attending a class on the comparative study of the bible and the Bhagavad Gita, the most sacred of the Hindu scriptures. At the end of the class, we would all hold hands and the person conducting the class would offer a prayer. After a few weeks, I noticed that a lady attending the class would always make sure that she would be holding my hand at this time. She would almost push people out of the way to make sure of this. Finally, I pulled her aside and quietly asked her what was going on. She said that she was sensitive to the Holy Spirit and wanted to avail herself of it flowing from my hands: That she had never felt it in anyone that strong. All that I knew was that my hands would get very hot at this time. We talked of the Holy Spirit.

Then there was a time when I was meditating in between jobs in my work truck in a parking lot and had a minister come over and ask about the golden glow surrounding my truck and we talked of spiritual things.

Or sitting on the floor, doing some repair work with my job, and having the homeowner walk back and forth behind me a half dozen times and finally stop and ask, “Who are you that I am feeling this?”. We talked of spiritual things.

Or the sales lady who was at my home setting up that year’s advertising for my small business. She seemed nice, so, as I sometimes do, I silently asked the Holy Spirit to come into her life. She immediately burst into tears and went through some kind of catharsis, sobbing for a while. When she got herself together, I apologized and told her what I had done. We also talked about spiritual things.

And the time when a customer I had never met opened the door to her house for me and stood there as if shaken. Finally, she said, the exact words: “I have been waiting for you my whole life.”  It wasn’t me that she was waiting for but for the Holy Spirit to come into her life. We talked of spiritual things. I could go on and on but for what?

But there have also been those who have been truly frightened.

Like the young man who asked me to teach him mediation. I taught him the breathing exercises and told him of possible sensations but to practice them and come back in a few days and I would teach him the prayer that I use. OK, shaking his hand I mentally asked the Holy Spirit to come into his life. He didn’t come back but called me. Quite emotionally he said that electricity was running throughout his body and that he knew that I had opened him to the devil. I never heard from him again.

Then, dear Lord help me, when the flowing of the Holy Spirit first began, I was in a personal relationship with a lady that had a wonderful personality, kind, understanding, of religious persuasion. She knew that I meditated but so did a lot of people. Most think it is for relaxation or some such. With my experiences with Christianity, I didn’t talk of my inner life with anyone, family, friends, or acquaintances, not with anyone who hadn’t directly asked me about what they were feeling when around me. Most people, even truly good-hearted people are not sensitive to the Holy Spirit’s presence. I have been close to people at church, working with people for hours, had friends that I would spend leisure time with, even gone on vacation with, and over the years, personal friendships, and few have felt anything. I don’t know if it is unusually open hearts or whatever but not that many seem to feel the Holy Spirit’s presence. And you just don’t go around telling everyone you meet, oh, if you feel unusual sensations when around me, know that it’s the Holy Spirit and not the devil. Most will think you are out of your mind. Except for the few who have asked, I have learned silence is a virtue that I strictly follow.

I guess it was a mistake not telling the lady I was in a relationship with about the possible sensations when being around me because instead of coming to me about it, she asked her preacher about all the electrical-type sensations that had started running through her whenever she was close to me. He convinced her that it could only be the devil doing it, that these kinds of things don’t happen to good Christians. Well, she was afraid and then gone.

Again? Will Christianity ever get out of the dark ages? Christianity has never liked me. I quit! Seriously, I quit.

The almost last of my little stories

It had been twelve years since first becoming open to the Holy Spirit. With my family circumstances, I had learned to meditate in my car, before work, at lunch, after work, ad infinitum. I had meditated for months outside on my porch, in below-freezing weather with a blanket wrapped around me, out in the desert at above a hundred degrees, in noise, in every distraction, in the rain because I could and there’s a snap in my head when I meditate, and my body goes numb.

Over the years, I had studied yoga, hardcore. Buddhism, Taoism, the Sufis, all (for me) hard-core studies: None of this new age soft stuff. For the last few months, the Holy Spirit has been flowing up my spine like a river and I suppose for a Westerner I thought that I was something else and of course humble. But ask me how much sympathy I had for those who need everything to be perfect before they can meditate. Ego, ego, ego, a beast with so many heads. Cut off one and two grow back.

A Kriya yogi whose style of breathing exercises I had adapted for my use was aware of my relationship with the Holy Spirit and how people were feeling it when around me. As a Shivite (the yogic term for a devotee to the Holy Spirit) this was a gift that had also been given to him. I know this because I had felt it with him but then, as I know of, most who went on retreat to see him felt nothing. At least no one ever mentioned it to me. It is what it is and says more about the normal human condition than anything else.

He asked me to work at his retreat answering student letters from around the world, and eventually much more. He was looking for someone to take over his ministry when he retired.

My thought was (To answer student letters: I don’t have to put myself out anywhere or in front of anyone. I don’t have to keep explaining that just because you feel the Holy Spirit when you are around me doesn’t mean that I am anything special. I can do this.) Because of my relationship, I had hesitated but now with that in the drain, I changed my mind, and on this day, I have decided to agree to spend the rest of my life at the retreat. Why? In the last twelve years, I have never met a single Christian who has ever seen, felt or heard the Holy Spirit within themselves. Not one. Yoga is where I belong. As devotees to the Holy Spirit, (Shiva) yogis are more like the original esoteric Christians than modern-day Christians are like original esoteric Christians. Kids are on their own and don’t like me much anyway., Christianity had caused me to spend so much time being treated like a second-class citizen in my own home and meditating in my car because my fundamentalist wife freaks out if I meditate in the house: You know, in her opinion, opening the house to the devil and such. But personally, I had never met the guy.

I am going to go work at the retreat. The rest of my life is set. That was my decision, solid for the first time since being asked.

The next morning, deep in meditation, this matter-of-fact little voice, soft like my closest friend:

“No, you won’t.”  It was with the obvious understanding that it was working at the retreat it was referring to.

“WHAT!” I said.

I don’t hear voices. Never, ever before. They don’t talk to me. They have never talked to me. They don’t tell me what to do. Not once, in the last twelve years of meditation has a voice spoken to me or told me what to do or what not to do. I have thought about this decision to work at the retreat for months and now that I have made up my mind, I hear this. This; is not a vision or even intuitive awareness. There is no brightness here. It’s just raw power. This stupid little voice is trying to sound like my best friend but is just my subconscious pushing me around. I haven’t even left Christianity and already I’m having withdrawal symptoms.

I said to myself: “This is coming straight out of my subconscious and I’m not going to tolerate it.” I gathered up my strength and pushed the voice out of my head willing it to die a horrible death. I don’t just want you dead. I want you to suffer: The indignation of having my subconscious pull something like this and all.

I finished my morning meditation feeling quite proud at how powerful I knew I was: Me, B. Lawrence, the thought killer.

Next morning; deep in meditation, matter of fact but soft like my closest friend whispering in my ear:

“No, you won’t.”

In disbelief, my exact words to myself were: “Oh, my God, ………….I’ve got a real problem here.”

Maybe you have not been around enough to know how horrible this was to me, but I knew the full implications of having my subconscious pull something like this. This voice brought to my mind the kind of mental instability cult leaders experience when they do terrible things, they think God is telling them to do.

I remember saying to the voice: “I am not going to change my mind over a rational decision I have thought about for months. This will be to the death of one of us and I don’t die easily.”

This was not a fight over what to do or not to do. This was an all-out battle over who is control of my mind. Does Jim Jones or David Koresh ring a bell? So, I said to it: “Whatever you are, you might as well kill me now because I’m not going there:” Meaning Jim Jones and such. I took every single ounce of mental strength that I had and again pushed the voice out of my head.

But it didn’t work.

A black cloud descended on me. Yes, a literal black cloud of the most incredible grief I have ever felt in my life, along with a vision of stabbing Christ in the back enveloped me. I sat in tears for the remaining two hours of my morning meditation refusing to change my mind. Yeah, that powerful guy I just described sat in tears over a stupid little voice in his head. No, I wasn’t sobbing, just tears.

Next morning: Same thing only worse. Again, I refused to change my mind. More tears.

This went on for seven days: Each day this black cloud wrapping itself tighter and tighter around me. Each day, the grief gets more and more invasive into my mind. It felt like a death shroud. After seven days of this, it got to a point where I could not bear the grief.

I remember standing in my yard not being able to get my feet to work.

I broke inside. I’m the boss of my destiny just died. Tears streaming down my face, (well, that was normal for the last seven days), I looked up into the sky and whispered to God, “I give up. I don’t know what you want of me but whatever it is I will do it.”

Immediately the grief lifted, and I was filled with the Holy Spirit in a way that I had not felt since the Spirit had come from that rip in the heavens twelve years earlier, wrapping itself around me, bringing with it such incredible comfort. Again, words fail to describe what I felt, frozen there, standing in that yard for I don’t know how long with eyes turned up to infinity.

I wonder what the neighbors thought.

A couple of months passed.

You wanted me doing something other than teaching and answering student letters at a yoga retreat, so what now? You know, a little help here God. I’m just treading water for the last few weeks. But the truth was that I was kind of glad that the Holy Spirit wasn’t beating up on me and was happy to take a rest. The experience had truly left me shaken.

This day I have just been lifted into the mental brightness that is a sign of intuitive consciousness, you know, that state of visions and such, during my morning devotional time: It is the intuitive state of visions and prophecy of the prophets and early Christians. Before me is standing the saint from India who brought the breathing exercises to the West that I practice. He had died several years earlier and over the years, I often before beginning my breathing practices had asked for his blessing. You are not going to pull a saint out of the heavens but through the Holy Spirit, it is possible to tune into their consciousness.

He stood looking at me but never spoke. Thoughts just formed in my head. “I will always be with you, but you are not meant to be in yoga but to stay in Christianity and teach what you know, and here is where you need to go to find others like yourself.” As I saw a vision of the local catholic church, he just disappeared.  I had never been to a catholic church and didn’t know anything about them. I didn’t doubt a vision that comes from intuitive awareness but it did seem to be an odd place to go, you know, the pope thing and all that.

This vision was not a go out and save Christianity from itself speech but more like, go do your little part in the present unfolding Christian spirituality and you will find your place.

Less than a year later I was baptized Catholic, and I must admit that it felt like coming home from a very long journey. Later my godfather, the priest who baptized me, asked me to be his spiritual advisor and the other priest asked me to write the lessons for his course in Christian mysticism. Eventually, I finished the lessons, they will be put on the web, and I am doing for Christians what I had been asked to do at the yoga retreat, teaching and answering questions, now emails from around the world.

You might think that all is now wonderful

and that for the rest of my life, the Holy Spirit is done pushing me around and that I will find someone and have the simple family life that I have always wanted. I wish that my journey with the Holy Spirit was that easy. I had done what the Holy Spirit had asked of me for others, the writing of the lessons and helping other Christians from around the world to understand their journeys. That is to” teach what you know.” Truly, this is what I wanted and expected for the rest of my life, but the Holy Spirit still had work for me to do on me. This was to be the hardest time of my life and I think it was the period of emotional trauma and circumstances that so many years earlier the psychic had predicted for me in the later years of my life.

About this time, the lady who had ended our relationship because she was feeling electrical type sensations when around me, wanted to see me again. She said that she had changed churches to one less fundamental and that when she told her new pastor about her sensations when around me, he had said to her, quote: “Don’t you know that you have just walked away from the Holy Spirit.” She said that she had never stopped caring for me and wanted to renew our relationship. Honestly, she was such a truly fine woman that I would have been blessed to spend the rest of my life with her, and I absolutely would have but Lord help me, then there was another who had taken my heart.

Maria

Maria was a more than wonderful woman who fit me like a glove that had been hand-crafted. I met her at church. It surprised me that there was another Christian outside of a monastery, living in the world who had a deep relationship with the Holy Spirit. She did not need me to feel it, she was already there. And beautiful, with two children, a boy and a girl who liked me a lot, who seemed to take the place of the boy and girl that I had lost due to the Christian fundamentalism in my marriage. I thought I was Job with all things restored and set to have the family relationship that I had always craved. When away from her I actually felt physical pain. I never even knew that such a thing was possible. My God, I was in love with her.

Time progressed. This day, it was in the afternoon, and I said to her that I was in love with her, totally, and how did she feel about it. She said that she felt the same about me. Now, it is time for me to take a very deep breath on my feelings. Because there are not that many times in life when everything feels so complete.

The next morning as I am meditating. This same little voice that had before torn out my heart has just said to me: “No, this is not meant for you.” With the very clear understanding that it wanted me to live and die alone. Again, this was not bright, not intuitive awareness. It was blunt and powerful and just two months before had torn me to shreds as I tried to fight it. And now this sweet little voice has just left me stunned. I fell into shock. Everything that I had wanted from this life had just been taken from me. And I knew what it would do to me If I turned my back on what it wanted.

In my mind, I had just been told that I was unworthy of a family relationship. I went to my godfather about it, and he confided with another priest who also was aware of my inner experiences about my question of why God would do this to me. They both thought it was because God wanted me to be a monk. Go ahead, tell me what I didn’t believe already.

It’s not like I don’t have the personality for it. I love small spaces and could live in a closet and be perfectly happy. I cannot bring myself to watch regular TV. I can go days if not weeks without talking to anyone and be perfectly happy about it and it hurts my heart to participate in frivolous conversations about nothing.

But there is this problem. Real or imagined, I have these memories of in more than one life being a catholic monk. Whether it was real or imagined for them, the earliest Christians had the same belief in what they called the transmigration of the soul. (Start your study of it by running a search on “”the early Christian belief of transmigration of the soul”,  and reading Origen’s (c.185-253) On First Principle, or what’s left of it anyway. Real or not, this memory stuck in my mind, is a very vivid picture of lying on a bed in a monastery overlooking a bay, dying with the main thought on my mind “Why should it not be possible to live in the world with a normal family life and still progress spiritually?” This memory has been with me since I first became open to the Holy Spirit. It’s all that I ever wanted from this life. I did not want to be a monk. I had another path that I wanted to walk, period.

On a whim, I once had my natal chart done. You know that chart that tells you what influences you are born with that need to be fulfilled in this life. It said one thing, that I was born to answer a question. I knew that before having the chart done and now the Holy Spirit has just told me that I will not ever be allowed to live out the answer to it.

I could not be consoled.

God, I have done every damn thing that the Holy Spirit has asked of me. I have endured the failure of my marriage, rejection from my children, disfellowship and shunning from the church I attended with my wife, rejection and loss of all my friends, and then over ten years of isolation with not one person to talk to who understood who You truly are or what the Holy Spirit has to offer. Being alone for the rest of my life, dying alone is what I deserve?

I had gone from stunned to being pissed, no that’s a lie. I was furious and called God every foul name in the book, invented a few more, and vowed that I would never listen to the Holy Spirit again. Go ahead, send me to Hell because I don’t care. I will never forgive You. You have taken everything from me. There is nothing left. You have destroyed my life. Like You even care!

Ok, I got a little emotional. But let me explain something. You love your children. You love your mother, maybe even your spouse, and sometimes a very few others. I have these feelings just as deeply as anyone else, but they do not compare to my feelings for God and the Holy Spirit, and the Holy Spirit has just put a knife into my heart. There was nothing left for me.

Am I afraid of the Holy Spirit? Duh.

Not so much for me, at the time I just didn’t care, but I was afraid that it could and would tear the whole world down around me including everyone that I cared about, and I could not bring this into their lives. Within a month I had moved three thousand miles away, never saw or spoke to this more than wonderful lady again or my godfather, and I fell apart. And do mean I fell apart, that with the aid of too much alcohol, acquaintances of low character, and a whole lot of self-pity, I did stupid things. I don’t need to describe stupid; the word speaks for itself. There were just far too many days, months, and years of nothing can be worse than this, nothing can be worse than this.

But, if you can see through it, you won’t have to work through it.

Time often brings the circumstances for a more expansive understanding of life’s past situations. It was not a sudden epiphany. It was not like I had suddenly started to look to the Holy Spirit’s guidance or anything close to being that great, but more like a hint of something I had read here then another sliver of something there and yet again. It began with reading a yogi’s commentary where he said he needed to be very careful with his thoughts because good or bad, life would try to bring whatever was in his mind to fruition. He was a Shivite, so I felt that he had referenced the Holy Spirit. …..Good or bad, …….and the Holy Spirit will try and make it happen. That rang a distant bell that made me look deeper. The Holy Spirit does not judge what is in the mind. Sort of knowing what to ask for, I found many other stories closer to home.

I try not to make definitive judgments about anything but I am pretty sure about this one. The information is not in your face but the stories of the possible side effects of the Holy Spirit rising up through the spine and into the head can be found. In yogic terms, the rising of the Holy Spirit through the spine is called the awakening of kundalini and it was only from this source that I could find any information on the experience of those voices pushing me around.

Here is what I am pretty sure is the truth of God pushing me around and telling me what to do in life. This guidance does not come from infinite consciousness, that is God up there somewhere pushing us around but from the deeper parts of our own being. As it flows up the spine into the head the Holy Spirit strengthens all levels of the mind and everything in it, from the deep,  the good, the bad, and the ugly. Given this power, it is up to us to handle it. Miracles don’t happen through weak minds. It takes the power of the Holy Spirit for that but this power can come with side effects…

You can’t win a war if you don’t understand who or what you are fighting. Still, so few in Christianity have had the experience of the rising of the Holy Spirit up through the spine that I never found anything in Christian literature about the possible side effects or possible mental and emotional instability (stupid) from all this energy suddenly flowing into the brain. Especially when you don’t understand the process or how to deal with it. The writings of the prophets and saints blame everything on the devil and he may be out there, but that doesn’t help. I have never met the guy but I have done battle with some of the deeper parts of my mind and not knowing what I was fighting,……lost.

We are deluding ourselves when we say God wants us to do this or that or that the devil is tempting us. From whatever level within us, it is only us, even if it’s from the deepest levels of us. It was fruitless for me to be mad at God. All of this that I went through was nothing more than deeper parts of me accompanied by the power of the Holy Spirit pushing the surface of me around to satisfy the deep influences of entrenched conduct patterns of the past. How far past, use your imagination. It was rather sobering to realize that it wasn’t God pushing me around, it was just me. Dear Lord, all of this was just me. What a colossal waste of time and energy being mad at God over something a knowledgeable mentor could have explained to me in less than a five-minute conversation. But the thing here is that when we realize that it is us and not an outside influence, even if it is God,  good or bad, wanted or unwanted, that is pushing us around, we can choose to accept that part of us or change it. I have nowhere said that it would be easy but at least you know what you are dealing with.

In all of this God offers His grace which if accepted will take us through all things. To everyone, everywhere, earth, Heaven, or Hell. I just had to come to the point where I could ask me to forgive me for my ignorance and not understanding and for the stupid that followed and that is so much harder to do than to ask God to forgive.

Finally, like the prodigal son, I asked the Holy Spirit to return to my life. When I looked within, the Holy Spirit had not gone anywhere. It was only me who had left it. But there are consequences for turning your back on the Holy Spirit. All the gifts that had come so easily through grace, now I had nothing but hard work to regain. But over the next few years of steady practice, (back to three hours a day devotionals) the Holy Spirit was again flowing through me as if it was a river I had never let run dry.

The two major things that were offered to me and that I dearly wanted from this life, that is to have a simple family relationship and still progress spiritually and to have a mentor to guide me through all the misunderstanding and uncertainty of this journey, the deeper part of me would not allow me to accept. You read it. It’s not like the surface of me didn’t give every ounce of willpower I had to do what I thought would be best for my spirituality. The yogi who offered me the opportunity to work with him died without ever finding someone who could awaken the Holy Spirit in others and take over for him. But the deepest part of me rests in Christianity and it is where I belong, so I doubt that I could have ever been what he would have wanted of me. With time, I have come to be at peace with it, with all of it.

I like to think I have reached a working compromise between my rational mind and those deeper parts of me. But I guess it’s not that much of a compromise when you consider that I am living almost exactly as the Holy Spirit instructed. I live not too far away from the Trappist monastery in Conyers, Georgia, and often attend mass there and have also gone on retreats. They call me Brother Lawrence and I am content with that. On retreat, the monks have offered me the ability to sit with them and participate in their practices, which is nice. I meditate three hours a day which is almost like being a monk without having to be one, which is probably the only compromise the Holy Spirit has allowed me. Perhaps, I am to live and die alone but I do I have my five rescue cats, each having their demands for attention. One, my little girl, while I am meditating will pull the glasses off of my face to get the attention she needs. It’s family to me, but best of all things, the Holy Spirit seems to be satisfied and has not demanded anything further…. So far…….

In reading my little stories, it would be easy to assume that the Holy Spirit has broken me, broken my spirit. But this is not how I feel at all. I will admit that this journey with the Holy Spirit has humbled me to my bones, directed the course of my life, and made me accept who I am but that is different than having a broken spirit. When open to its guidance, the Holy Spirit will do what it needs to do to put each of us where the deepest part of us feels we need to be. It’s just that some of us are a little more hard-headed than others.

For me, this journey with the Holy Spirit has been about developing a sense of trust in God’s grace, that is to completely trust in the way He does things, the natural workings and flow of creation, and those of us in it. It is best summed up in a simple prayer that keeps repeating itself over and over in my mind, probably until the day that I die.

Father, do with me as you will, do with me as you will.

And that is the last of my little stories.….mostly.

I promised the two priests I would unvarnished tell it all to the best of my abilities. Well, there it is. As I said at the beginning, you will have to think of my little stories and of me as you will.

Some questions and experiences from those who have written to me.

Question:     I’ve read your website and your additional writings. I enjoyed them very much. Thank you for your work. I agree with so much of what you have written, you have articulated so many of the things I have thought, studied, and researched. I have practiced meditation in many forms for years, and I have had many encounters with Holy Spirit. Previously, I would have never considered myself a Mystic, but I have spent a lot of time trying to reconcile the universal truths of all major religions with my faith in Jesus and Holy Spirit. However, I am still but a babe in the things of the Holy Spirit. I learned much from your teaching.

My question has to do with the primary concept of the Personal God. This is something I have struggled with in all of my searching. Isn’t one of the major themes of what Jesus came to reveal is that God wants to be personal? The Israelites knew God as the Ever-existing All-encompassing One (I Am That I Am), but it was Jesus who came to say that God is “Abba.” As He prayed (High Priestly prayer Jn. 17:3) Jesus defined “eternal life” as knowing =“intimate knowledge of” the Father and the Son. In addition, one of the reasons they crucified Him was because He called God His Father. Also, “When Jesus left He said, He would send Holy Spirit to further this truth of the personal relationship, “sent into our hearts by which we cry Abba”(not trying to be a “quoter” but for the sake of ref. Gal. 4:6, Rom. 8:15). I noticed throughout your writing you used the impersonal “It” to refer to Holy Spirit (although I know in Grk. “spirit” is neuter). My question is; have I misunderstood Jesus’ teaching about the Incomprehensible, Infinite God becoming personally real to me (personal Savior and Guide)?

Please understand I am not trying to prove anything or make a case, truly want to learn? This is something I have waffled on for years. This is how I currently understand it; God is the life force in all of us, man = formed from dust, breathed into, and now a living soul. From that standpoint, we are all spirits. We are spirit beings equipped with a mind, emotion, and body as tools for the spirit’s use. These “tools” are to be in subjection to our spirits. Our spirits’ are not to be ruled by the mind, or the emotions, or the flesh (as most of the world). Rather, our beings are to be properly aligned so that our spirits rule the mind, emotions, and body. Many disciplines have acquired the proper alignment of their being. With this proper alignment, many have produced and manifested many wondrous things; fruitful characters, physical healings, emotional stability, martial art feats, ect.

However, the Holy Spirit is given as a Gift, not to all (although He is available to all, through the Lord Jesus, who is both Savior and Baptizer of the Holy Spirit). Holy Spirit is to be united with our spirits (Rom. 8:16) to personally equip, gift, and empower us supernaturally. He supernaturally enables us beyond what we would be able to do through our own spirits (which can be amazing in itself when properly aligned). The one who has properly aligned his being, (that is one whose spirit rules his own mind, emotions, and body), then humbly submits his spirit to the Holy Spirit. Then, in this union Holy Spirit personally and supernaturally accomplishes that which the Divine Consciousness is seeking to express through this submitted vessel on earth, who is simply a small part of the larger whole. The glorious union is found in the submission; not my will, but Your will be done.

I have struggled with this Mr. Lawrence, can you give me some guidance? What am I missing in this equation? I would love to hear from you.

Answer:     Thanks for writing

I think you have stated the concepts as well as they can be stated (but) there is a difference between believing in a concept mentally and feeling it in your bones as an intimate personal experience. The first is to know about and the second is to know.

The Holy Spirit is the most personal thing that I have ever experienced and yet God as infinite consciousness is entirely impersonal. I know that it makes no sense to the mind but it is what it is.

Be steady in your practices giving the Holy Spirit the amount of time it needs to reveal (as it chooses) the deep things of God to you.

It is all that any of us can do.

Question:     I find your writing about the holy spirit fascinating and would like to ask for your advice upon a matter. A few years ago I had an encounter with a beautiful spirit, at that time I was unsure if it was the holy ghost but now that I have done my research I’m sure that it is. The peace and empowerment that I felt with in that moment was tremendous, I had become a vessel waiting to be filled sadly I was unable to let go of my pain and walked away. My question is this, do you think that the holy spirit will ever return to me and set me free? I know this may sound like a strange question but it’s an important one to me as I am in need of deliverance.

Answer:     The Holy Spirit is always with us. It will never leave any of us. It is us that leaves it but it will still be here within us waiting. So the question that you should be asking is of yourself. Am I willing to put in the time each day to be able to feel it within me. Many times the Holy Spirit will give us a glimpse of itself so that we will have the courage to do what needs to be done to find it and never lose it again.

Question:     Dear Mr. Lawrence: I seem to have lost it. How can I relive the wonderful initial experiences I once had with the Holy Spirit?

Answer:     You can’t go back. You can’t relive any of it. None of us on this path ever could or ever will. That is not how it works. If it did, we would all be back reliving the initial wonderful spiritual experiences of life and no one would ever progress.

Losing it may have been very good for you. It has been for me. (at times) What you learn from it is a steadiness of practice. The norm on this path is long dry periods followed by revelation followed by another long dry period until continuous non-duality.

Whatever your practice, steadiness in it is the key to progressing spiritually.

Question:     Dear Mr. Lawrence – I have read your lessons several times now and I was wondering if you could point me in the direction of support, a teacher, etc.

 I have been experiencing the rising of the Holy Spirit for about 6 months now – energy coursing throughout my body, spontaneous yoga positions, dances, hand movements, my heart aching (physically), eye spasms, hand pressure on eyes that produce the colors of my chakras, and a general feeling of being plugged into an electrical socket.  This is really a 24/7 phenomenon for me if I close my eyes or do anything to still my mind. This has been an unbelievable blessing as my desire to know myself/God has deepened.  You spoke of desert monks or monasteries where the mystical teaching of Christ still exists.  My life is changing quickly as my feelings/emotions/desires/ambitions/etc. are being transformed.  My greatest hope would be to be able to study or work with someone who has gone ahead of me.  Do you know of any such possibilities?

 Thanks you so very much.  Your lessons have been a blessing for me.

 Answer:   For a Christian, I would suggest looking up Contemplative Outreach. They can give you association but the truth is that I have never met anyone in their association that feels the Holy Spirit as I have experienced it or even as you write of it. But they can give you people to meditate with, which for many can be very important on this usually lonely path.

Question:    At present, I seem to have reached a stage of confusion about the right way forward. Do times of confusion often crop up to try and pull us away from a practice of constant discipline? I’m left feeling that there are one hundred options to select from, but I can’t discern how I really feel about each.

Answer:     Society in general is in a constant state of confusion. Everyone has different agendas that are always in conflict with each other. It is the free choice (thank God) that is not always available in societies that are controlled by one individual or a few.

With all of the randomness and options around us, I have always tried to create a calm space in my life that I can retreat to as needed. We also need to free ourselves or at least distance ourselves from those people and circumstances that are bringing turmoil into our lives. This is the hardest to do for we are forced to confront other peoples’ intentions for us.

The other side of the coin is our own consciousness. Those on the spiritual path are progressing at a faster rate of consciousness than those satisfied with their consciousness as it is. This faster pace naturally creates more confusion in us. It is why we all need someone to talk to and why I do what I do.

Step back and take a look at what you really want in life. Take another step or so back and see what it is that is stopping you from doing or getting there. Take another step back and determine what you need to do to get or do what you want.

Hopefully, by this time you have backed off enough to have a good view of it all. Then do what you need to do. It takes strength and determination to accomplish anything worthwhile, otherwise everyone would already be there.

Question:  “It seems the more I seek God and pray and “work” to be open to the Presence, the more darkness comes up (like weird, violent thoughts, hard-heartedness, etc.) It scares me. Is this just my ego reacting and feeling afraid?? I want to blame it on “evil spirits” etc. Is there any fear for you when you think of “opening up to the universe?” I have heard some of the mystics “fighting off evil spirits” and they often refer to the devil. What do you make of this?

I think I am having a hard time accepting the darkness in me. Why is that so scary for me to accept? I do not know. I am afraid if I embrace the darkness, I will never get out of it or that it will consume me. I think there may be something holy in darkness. God created it. God created night. God created our ego?? (I feel like I might be punished for saying this!!) Just thoughts.

Any ways, I wanted to see your thoughts on this. . . It kind of makes me mad that the spiritual and scary can be so intertwined. I am mad that God created the darkness. Why did Jesus have to suffer on the cross? He told me that He choose the suffering, just as I choose my suffering– to learn, grow, and become the light. Does the polarity of seeking the Light and feeling surrounded in darkness pass with time? I am very new to this all. When I pray, I pray to Jesus. I still have the old, incorrect belief that God is a punishing man in the sky. I feel as if I am powerless over this belief. It is like it is hardwired into my body– literally. I tremble for fear. Did you feel this way at all in your path? I just pray about it because I really don’t know what else to do. Any suggestions?

And lastly, I am having physical problems. I can literally feel the imbalance in my body energetically. I am scared to have God heal it. I am afraid it will hurt– emotionally that is. It is incredible how we can store these emotions and the past in our bodies. Have you experienced any types of physical healings, or witnessed them. I keep praying that Jesus may touch me and heal me. Is there ways that are more effective? Then again, I don’t want to do this with the intention of “using” God for His healing. I feel guilty about that. I feel unworthy on some part to receive healing which I am sure blocks it. I want to be with God because I love Him. I have a hard time knowing how to address Jesus. It ranges from Master, Friend, Brother, God, Everything, Myself, etc. There is a lot of shame associated with Him. I feel that the world needs healing around Jesus.

Any ways, thank you for your ear. I’d appreciate any thoughts or insights.”

Answer:   We Christians seem to carry a lot of totally unnecessary guilt, shame and feelings of unworthiness. The truth is that in our inner being we are all as pure as the driven snow. The very essence of our being is Divine Consciousness. The rest is just stuff we picked up from living in the material universe.

Knowledgeable mystics understand that the demons are usually coming from ourselves; from our subconscious fears, desires, hates prejudices etc.

The harder you struggle, the more you fear, the more quickly you will remove yourself from God’s grace. The goal on this path is to flow with God’s grace, to flow with life. Struggle and worry (especially worry) put up mental blocks that only make the path more rocky and harder to travel.

It is the same when we struggle to be still in meditation. The more we struggle the more the mind reacts. It literally feeds on its’ on turmoil. You are right in your understanding that it is an ego thing. That is all that fear and mental turmoil are about. It is the ego refusing to let go.

What is needed on the mystical path is a practice that opens us to the Holy Spirit and second enough steady time at this practice to keep the Holy Spirit active in our lives. We do not have to understand the end before we get to the end. With our minds on the Spirit what can prevail against us? We are in God’s hands. Let Him worry about our spiritual progress and handle our inner fights with our shortcomings. He is much more understanding and forgiving of our shortcomings than we are.

Fear, hate and turmoil are held in the body and can make or contribute to making us ill. They block the body’s natural ability to heal itself.

Learn to let go and flow with life. Learn to turn your inner turmoil over to the Spirit. Most important of all, learn to be steady in your devotional practices. Without judgment, give yourself the time to learn these things.

Question:    Thank you so much for sharing on your website. My question is this: I have an addiction to alcohol and cigarettes. I have tried unsuccessfully to quit both. And I have felt that I needed to get rid of these things before I could honestly start to “look” for God. If I start to do the exercises you teach, will they help me to battle the addictions or should I actually get rid of them before I do the exercises, to be “clean” before I try to experience God’s presence.

Answer:    The truth is that none of us are all that “clean”. Everyone has something they wish they weren’t doing or thinking. We all seem to want to be holy before trying to experience God’s presence. It’s almost like we will not let ourselves have the experience of God until we have proved to ourselves that we are worthy of God.

The truth is very simple. Everyone has problems and every soul has God as the inner most part of their being and is worthy of experiencing Him.

It is our own opinions about experiencing God that is the problem. Most think “I really messed up yesterday and therefore can’t do my devotional or pray today. I’m not worthy.” What we really should be thinking is that “I really messed up yesterday so I will at least do my regular practices today and if I can, I will spend more time in my devotional practices today to make up for yesterday.” If we can keep that attitude, it will be much easier on us.

There is a practical side to changing our “bad” (I hate using that word.) habits. It is far easier to replace a bad habit with a good habit than to just outright drop a bad habit. The mind is obsessed with things to think about. If you try to outright drop a bad habit, all the mind can think about is that habit you are trying to get rid of. If you have a good habit for the mind to dwell on, (Like trying to experience God’s presence.) the mind will have that to think about and begin to forget the bad habit. (Over time and with many ups and downs.) But if it is truly something you want to do and you give yourself time and patience, the good habit will win out. Then when you actually begin to experience the guiding hand of the Holy Spirit, it is even more wonderful. You keep your mind on it and let it take care of the things you want to change in your life. IT WILL DO THIS FOR YOU. Just be kind and gentle and forgiving of yourself. God already looks at you in this way. B.Lawrence

Question:    My name’s………and I was trying the exercises on your page. I guess I need to know if you’re supposed to sit down, praying position, Indian style?  And also if these techniques are applicable to “rookie” Christians? I’m still pretty new in the lord, and haven’t felt the Holy Spirit in a sizable magnitude yet. Anything that you can do to help would be great.

Answer:  The breath and stretch exercises that I write about in the lessons are probably more suited for “rookies” than anything else you can do. The reason for this is that they give the mind something to focus on during the devotional exercise. Even so they are quite powerful. I always recommend that a person do them before contemplative prayer. They calm the mind and create a spiritual feeling for the silence to follow during contemplative prayer. Split your time evenly between the two. The most important thing is to be steady in your devotional routine. It is better to commit to less time that you can do than more time that you can’t do. Only steadiness of practice brings us anywhere. We in the West are not well equipped to sit in the Indian lotus posture. Don’t worry about it. Do the breath and stretch and then sit in a comfortable chair with spine erect but totally relaxed to do contemplative prayer. Don’t meditate while lying down. Most only fall asleep. Be patient with yourself and learn to love yourself as God loves you. B.Lawrence

Question:    When ………… writes about the work of the Holy Spirit in terms of his method of centering prayer, he says that the phenomena of this work — psychic powers, charismatic gifts, etc. — are not important; rather, it is what happens outside of the prayer time during the rest of the day that will show the work of the Holy Spirit — was I able to be more patient or more generous with a family member than I had been capable of in the past, for example.

Answer:    I perfectly agree with what …………has written. What each of us has written is a matter of emphasis not substance. For each soul, the value of visions and gifts of the Spirit etc. is in understanding the nature of existence not in what the soul does with them. I have tried to make very clear in the lessons that the gifts of the Spirit are not where our attention should be.

Question:    I was directed recently to your website by an internet friend. Your information and Jim Marion’s book have been really helpful to me in the fact that I can now understand the confusion that I have been going through. At least I know that I am not crazy and know the journey that I am traveling.

I will try to explain my conflict briefly. It is hard to put everything into a short e-mail. I am married and have been for nearly 15 years and come from a Bible thumping church. About two years ago I met the person that I would call my soul mate because it fits the description the best. I have fought my feelings and tried to ignore them of my soul mate but not without a lot of pain……….. She is in my mind constantly. I can’t put it out. Can you offer any insight on this plus I am in the process of leaving my wife so that I can be closer to my soul mate. My traditional upbringing has hindered this so far but I feel that I can’t come closer to Christ unless I embrace this person in my life………

Note: (I included this question only because it is one that I get asked more often than I would wish.)

Answer:    There is only one soul mate and that is God. We are created complete in God and are born whole, if inexperienced, not half complete in need of someone to make us whole. The soul is neither male nor female but a wave in the ocean of Divine Consciousness that assumes its viewpoint from where, when, how and into what body it is born in the material universe or the heavens. Souls with similar backgrounds are naturally drawn together but there are a myriad of other souls that are wonderfully compatible for each soul not just one.

People get divorced all the time. I cannot tell you what to do or feel. It is improper for me to express any judgment on what anyone else does or feels (when it is done honestly). I will give you a bit of advice. The wanting is usually better than the having and all of our pain and joy in life is but a reflection of our attitude about our circumstances. The hardest thing for each of us to do is to honestly look at our own feelings and actions. I have heard the soul mate/past life excuse used too many times to justify actions that only hurt those who are close to us. Too many times I have heard tantric or Gnostic spirituality used to justify sex and or group sex when the only problem is lack of self-control.

As long as we are adults interacting with adults and are not hurting anyone or ourselves, I have no problems with most anything someone wants to do in life but we should always try to be honest with our own motives and every now and then, we need to step back and take a good look at what is really going on.

Question:     I just finished your wonderful lessons in contemplative prayer, and it seems to me that your prayer method is yoga. I practice Yoga as well as Catholicism, and to me there doesn’t seem to be a difference. However, Catholics are suspicious of yogis and vice versa. How do you reconcile the two?

Answer:    There is really nothing of conflict to be reconciled. Yoga is not a religion. It is a grouping of different methods to achieve unity in God. (enlightenment) Anyone who is doing anything to find God is practicing yoga whether they know it or want to admit it. There are Christian yogis, Buddhist yogis, Hindu yogis etc. and none may call themselves yogis at all. There is one eternal truth (Santana Dharma) that those who call themselves yogis teach. But in truth there is only one eternal truth that encompasses everything and everyone no matter what religion we look at this truth through.

Question:    I have just read your lessons on contemplative prayer and the Holy Spirit. I was very filled by what you said. Filled seems to be the only word that comes to me. I am a woman who has recently returned to the catholic church. Many years I have spent on the spiritual path but felt the church had no place for women or for those of us not interested in legalities. For some reason, I know it is God, I have felt the desire to return to investigate the religion of my birth. As of late, I have been contemplating the Holy Spirit, and just tonight typed that into my computer, it was your text I was drawn to. Your message was beautiful and resonated within my soul. Do you have other lessons or insights to share, I am hungry to learn and would greatly appreciate any further information you could give. With deepest thanks,

Answer:    I really do not have anything to say outside of the lessons. I put my lessons on the internet because I thought my experiences might help a few others have a better understanding of the nature of the higher reality that we know as God. I did not realize that there was going to be the size of response that there has been. I will answer any questions that I can from the people who e-mail me and will keep adding to the Q&A as people ask more questions that I have not fully answered in the existing lessons. I have listed links to three libraries of early Christian works that I would encourage you to look at. I would also encourage you to read the great mystics of all faiths. Each has their own way of expressing the same truth. In looking at the same truth from different viewpoints we can greatly expand our own knowledge.

Question:    I have e-mailed you once before just to see if you would respond and you did, thank you. I have read your lessons and the book you recommended Putting on the mind of Christ and I put them into practice. I just don’t understand why is it that I am in such turmoil, at times I can’t believe the words that come out of my mouth. My family is hurting please help.

Answer:    I think the main point that you need to have firmly in your mind is that YOU ARE NOT YOUR THOUGHTS. The majority of our thoughts come from subconscious desires, fears, trauma, etc. They are not what you are made of. We are all pure in the depths of our hearts. We just need to get rid of the trash in our minds to see it. This trash is not you. When these kinds of thoughts occur, realize where they are coming from and do not personalize it. Just look at them and say to yourself something like “Well that was interesting, can I get on with life now and act and think like I want to.” Separate yourself from unkind thoughts. Hope this helps,

Question:    The scriptures say that the only unforgivable sin is sinning against the Holy Spirit. Do you have to experience the Holy Spirit or have it fall upon you to sin against it.

Answer:    I am afraid I will have to qualify my answer for I totally agree with Origen when he writes that no one is lost forever. I know what is written at Hebrews 6:4-8 but I do not rely on any one scripture to give me a belief system. There is a reason for this. We do not know that any one scripture is now as it was written then. We have no original documents. We do not know what may have been accidentally changed or even changed on purpose to fit some scribes view. Then we have the translation problem. When you translate from Greek to Latin to English or directly from Greek to English or any other language there are meanings to words and phrases that have been lost in time to the original language that can never be translated properly. Think of how many slang terms we use in our time that if written down and then read two thousand years later without our original understanding could never be understood.

I find that those who are the most prone to pile one scripture on top of another (usually out of context) to prove their view are the least knowledgeable about how the scriptures came to be written. Besides this, God has not declared any scripture as holy or sacred. Mankind has done this. Man canonizes what he wants to keep around. And then there is the nature of how scripture is written. Saints look into Divine Consciousness and try to interpret what they have experienced and it is called holy. But there is always a loss in clarity between resting in super consciousness and the mental processes of writing something down. The saints or prophets personal opinions always seem to be intertwined in the revelation. It is unavoidable. Scripture is always a product of the times in which it is written.

I think it is better to take the general context of a group of scriptures than it is to quote any one scripture. I think it is better to contemplate the general theme of the Gospels than to pick scriptures out of the bible as if from a department store catalog where you can choose what fits your mood. Go inside and let the Spirit give you an intuitive feeling of the rightness of your understanding of the scriptures that you are in question about. To me this is far better than trying to rationalize about them.

Question:    Why did the One ever separate into the Many? I can never seem to come close to a satisfying explanation of why the fall. Why the illusion of Maya (This is an Eastern term for illusionary nature of the field of primordial matter in all manifest creation, including the heavens, represented in the bible by Satan, the bejeweled angel) though there is no question to me this is what’s going on.

Answer:    You are asking the ultimate question. What is the nature of Divine Consciousness (God) and why does it do what it does. All of the great mystics say that the answer can only be understood when directly experienced. A relative answer would be that It does what It does because this is Its’ nature. Beyond this, there seems to be an innate impulse in Divine Consciousness to manifest itself as each and all that we know and more that we may never know. The only thing I can suggest is that you allow the Holy Spirit to take you to the direct experience of God as Self. It is the unity spoken of by the Christian saints, the enlightenment of the Hindu, the bliss of the Sufi, the nirvana of the Buddhist. B.Lawrence

Question:    Thank your for the lessons on line. I need to read and reread the breathing exercises. Having trouble concentrating. ……..Time is an issue now. Having real problems with not being able to feel anything akin to what I had felt before. Just feel like I’m sitting there by myself, no feeling of God at all. Do you have any suggestions? The sit seems to be so dry and empty and it is hard for me to want to go there. Sincerely,

Answer:      We all go through dry spells. It is a part of the process. Sometimes we get so busy that our minds will not stop thinking about our problems and we just can’t get into a spiritual mood. Doing ones’ devotional routine first thing in the morning before the mind has a chance to get overly involved in the world helps many. Also bringing some good memories into the beginning of your devotional may help: Saying a prayer that you like, holding a sacred picture or thinking of your relationship with Jesus, a favorite saint, or God or perhaps playing spiritual music quietly in the background during the breathing exercises. (But not contemplative prayer). Whatever works for you is fine. Patience and steadiness are the most important virtues you can develop.

Question:      How can one experience God’s love? I have meditated until I fall asleep and never seem to be able to make it a habit for long. Is it possible with a full-time job and a small child and spouse?

Answer:      God’s love is not something separate from us but is a integral part of our own nature. All that we need to do is to look within long enough and it will be there. The expression of God’s love is to be found in the Holy Spirit. When we give of ourselves, we allow the Holy Spirit to flow through us and are expressing God’s love. Look at how you feel when you give of yourself unselfishly. This is God’s love. It flows, never wants anything in return and if it is to grow within, cannot be kept to oneself . It radiates like the sun to all who will step out of the shade. This is how we should endeavor to be. It is the giving that brings joy not the taking.

It is better to set a schedule that you can keep than to bite off more than you can chew. Set a time when you are alert to do your devotional practices and try to get some more sleep each night. You will find much better results. I have been in your situation most of my life and still have managed a strong spiritual life. It takes devotion and will power. Good luck,

Question:    In the lessons how did you come up with this information? I am new to Christian life. However you speak of things I know. Except it is Hinduism and Buddhism. I am sure you know that I am referring to the chakras. What saint speaks of these things? I just blew my mind when you spoke of these things? If you have worked these points already but without any Christian background how could I pass it off as the Holy Ghost? I have had experiences with the spine numerous times during meditation and sleeping. These experiences cannot be the same of what you speak of. It would not seem biblical.

Answer:    Actually what I speak of is quite biblical. (To me anyway) The seven centers of consciousness (chakras) that you speak of are symbolically referred to throughout the scriptures. In the Hebrew scriptures they are referred to as the seven candles on the golden lamp stand and in Revelations, the seven stars. The spiritual anatomy of a Christian is no different than that of the Hindu, Buddhist or atheist. Each society has its’ mystics that look at the same human spiritual anatomy and describes it in its’ own terms. After my study of the nature of existence and inner experiences I read the scriptures with a whole new intuitive understanding. If you read them with your present understanding you also will see the truths symbolized in the scriptures. I do not know of any saints who have written a direct explanation of the candles of light or the stars of revelations. Most were pretty closed mouthed about what they knew as truth and only hinted at such things. If you are familiar with Church history at all, you must know that many mystics have been forced to hide and even retract what they have written to save their lives. 

Question:    I have just discovered your page. I have saved the contents to HD and will read it this evening. Whenever I have the opportunity for dialog with others who have had mystical experiences I feel compelled to ask a question. Has your changed view of the world put you in conflict with others who see your perspective as threatening to orthodoxy? In what ways have you dealt with it? Has any such conflict discouraged you from sharing your experiences openly.

I understand that these are rather pointed questions coming from a stranger, so I understand if you are hesitant to answer them. It seems to me that these are questions that every mystic in every age and tradition have had to deal with. Indeed, they have had great bearing on my experiences and how I have chosen to act upon them. I invite you to a dialog on these issues if you are interested and have the time.

Answer:    You are right. Mystics have always had this problem, and this is why I teach privately rather than through a religious organization with its constrictions. I believe in allowing everyone to have their own view of reality from their own personal experience. I only wish to give people access to the methodology for opening themself to the Holy Spirit that has worked for me. It is the gift of the Holy Spirit that Jesus gave to mankind that I consider the most important thing he did. There are other methods in other religions that also bring us to God and I respect all of them.

How do mystics deal with those who do not understand the inner path? The deeper the mystical experience the more one feels at one with the whole and the less one needs to change others who are not ready to expand their awareness. The deeper the experience the less one feels the barbs of those who do not understand. (For there is less ego to be hurt.) The deeper the experience the more one will help without needing anything in return. (For there is less ego to feel puffed up.) Then we learn silence as a virtue. Do not cast your pearls before swine we are told. If someone does not want to hear about the higher reality we should in no way try to force it upon them or anyone else.

Question: ……….how old should my children be before I can teach them the exercises you write about in your lessons.

Answer:    I do not know that there is any age that is too young to pray to the Holy Spirit with our children and this will naturally lead into contemplative prayer and eventually the breathing exercises when our children are ready for them The most important thing is to make the Holy Spirit real to our children. Get some children’s books about the Holy Spirit at your church and read the books to your children daily. Talk about the Holy Spirit and explain its workings in terms that they can understand. Explain that the Holy Spirit is inside of each of us waiting to be discovered. Explain that it is Jesus’ gift to mankind.

Each night as your children go to bed say a simple prayer with them. Something like, “God, we thank you for your gift of the Holy Spirit. As we sleep we ask that it look over us. We ask that it guide and protect us. In Jesus name. Amen. Then say to your child: “Now let’s take a deep breath and as we look inside let’s feel the Holy Spirit filling us with its’ light and sound, its’ wonderful peace and joy as it watches over us tonight.” Do something like this each night and you will probably be very surprised at how soon your children will be describing the Spirit’s aspects to you. If you don’t pray with your children daily you will probably have to wait until they are young teenagers before they can get a grasp of the inner journey. Good Luck,

Question:    Here’s a question: Is there a place in the mystic’s journey through Christianity for the homosexual who is actively partnered, and feels in exile from the mainstream experience?

Answer:    I wish this world was such a place that you would not even have to ask a question like this. As far as I have ever seen, the Spirit does not care what we believe or what we do. This of course does not include hurting others or ourselves but even in that it is what these actions do to our own mentality rather than the Spirit judging our actions and saying this person is worthy of experiencing God and the next person is not.

The truth is that the soul is a single point of awareness in an ocean of infinite awareness. Divine Consciousness is neither male or female and neither is the soul. When the soul is born into the world it usually assumes the orientation of the body in which it dwells but throughout the animal kingdom exceptions to this rule continue to be born. (National Geographic special) Who of us can judge Mother Nature.

The most spiritually advanced Christian I have ever met is gay and rests in continuous non-duality. Maybe one in a hundred million people achieve this state. Few of even the greatest Christian, Hindu or Buddhist mystics ever achieve continuous non-duality.

Having said this, I know that few will understand how it could be possible for such a thing and I do not believe that traditional Christianity is ever going to be a comfortable place for anyone outside of a traditional relationship or even outside of a traditional belief system or traditional worship, add traditional infinitum.

Judge not another we are told. I wish more of us would take this to heart.

12 Questions: 1. Why did God create evil?

Answer: It is a matter of perspective. In order for the physical universe to exist there must be polarity. There must be a positive and a negative aspect to it. This creates vibration and the vibration allows the physical universe to exist. I am referring to the smallest particles of existence of course but the same principle applies to the largest movements of the universe. There can be no interaction without the possibility of positive and negative actions. There could be no dream of Divine Consciousness (life, with all that is involved in it) without it. Evil is a term we use. From the viewpoint of infinity everything exists without any judgment about what it is.

2. Why would God condemn something He created (Satan & other fallen angels, sinners)?

Answer: I have to agree with Origen when he writes that no one is lost forever.

3. Why would God only choose one race culture (Hebrews) to send out His message to the world? What about the people who didn’t know of them or their message?

Answer:   I do not think that God did. You are writing questions as if God were a personality, a big person in the sky, that deals with mankind like humans deal with each other. Picture God as an infinite ocean of consciousness. We have mystics in all societies that dive into this ocean and tell the rest of their society what they see. We call these people prophets and saviors. Few understand what they are truly trying to teach us, so we set them apart, make them special, give them the quality of seeing something that the rest of us can never attain. In infinity, no soul, no wave in the ocean of Divine Consciousness is more special than another. We all are a part of the One. What anyone has attained we all can attain. Even if some see more clearly than others, it is only the illusion of being different.

4. How can temporal lives and finite beings produce eternal, infinite results? (infinite, eternal punishment of infinite, eternal reward)

Answer: Only Infinite Divine Consciousness does anything infinitely. Finite personalities can only do things finitely.

5. Why is the O.T. God so different from the N.T. God?

Answer: The ocean of Divine Consciousness is always the same. With the passage of generations, the personalities of each society and the viewpoints of those who swim in the ocean change. Often people will only get their feet wet and not really understand the nature of the ocean. The ocean is the ocean, no matter who swims in it or what they feel or write about it.

6. Why is God anthropomorphic at times and abstract & transcendent at others?

Answer: Read 5

7. Is the Bible the word of God? If so, what about apparent biblical contradictions? And what about John 1: 1-14, which seems to say that Jesus God is the Word?

Answer: Esoterically, many mystics believe that John is referring to the Holy Spirit. But from a exoteric viewpoint anyone or anything that talks from the direct experience of God is the word of God. The greater the experience the more it is the Word and the less it is the ego.

8. Why are both Jesus and angels called sons of God? Why are both men and Jesus called “sons of man”? and 9. What did Jesus mean by “Ye are Gods”?

Answer: It is a matter of realization that is usually being spoken of when the scriptures use these terms. Of course, when anyone is born of mankind they are considered a son of man but in truth we are all sons of God; which makes us gods. (small g)

10. What is the meaning of life? Why did God create us?

Answer: That is the one question that must be experienced from the state of unity before it can be known. It cannot be told.

11. Are angels aspects of God?

Answer: Everything and everyone is an aspect of the ocean of Divine Consciousness. (God)

12. What about reincarnation?

Answer: There is much evidence that the Jewish people of Jesus’ time believed in what was called the transmigration of the soul. Origen writes that the apostles taught the doctrine privately. If this is true, that means that Jesus taught or confirmed the doctrine with them. The Romans believed that humans were material bodies only. When Christianity became a Roman state religion, the resurrection of our material body became the Church doctrine. This doctrine is not talked about much anymore.

It does not matter to me what the truth of the reincarnation is. It does not change what I need to do to find God. I still need to do my daily devotional routine regardless of what the truth of it is. And when we leave the physical body and personally experience the truth of it or not we will know the truth of it or not.

Question:    What is your view of mankind’s place in the universe?

Answer:    From mankind’s perspective the physical universe is a very large place with us at the center of it all. I think that mankind’s sense of self-importance comes from the lack of knowledge of what is out there. The mystics who can leave their bodies and travel the physical universe and heavens in their spiritual bodies say that the physical universe as well as the heavens are teaming with countless civilizations and life.

Just in our galaxy, there are billions of other suns besides our own. Our sun is said to be of an average size situated on the end of a spiral of other stars on the outside edge of the Milky Way; our galaxy’s name. This does not make us very important, even in this galaxy. In the physical universe there are said to be hundreds of billions of other galaxies, each with a few hundred million to as many as thousands of billions of stars in them. There are more stars in the physical universe than there are grains of sand on any of the beaches on this earth. If you want to get a grasp on how important mankind is from the perspective of the rest of God’s physical creation, go to the beach and pick up one grain of sand. In turn, talk to each of the other grains of sand on the beach and try to convince each of them that the grain of sand you are holding is the more important than the rest of them.

A child always thinks that its life is the center of the universe; until it grows up and sees what else is out there. Some people as well as some religions never do seem to grow up and always think that they are the center of everything. Eventually mankind and it’s belief systems will mature enough to see their true place in God’s vast creation. I guess it is only a matter of when.

Question:    Thank you very much for your lessons. I have found my spiritual path but as times passes I feel a conflict between my old ego-oriented world view and my spiritual path. I feel called to take a retreat or a sabbatical and this makes me very nervous because I worry that I am trying to escape from life’s issues. Do you think a call to be on retreat or to stay still and listen which is how I feel is an authentic spiritual longing? Does it seem advisable to take a break from the world so that one can learn to live in it and yet not be swept away? Or should I keep trying to learn how to incorporate spiritual exercises and study in my daily life. Which I find difficult, I always fall off the wagon so to speak and it becomes another thing to feel guilty about like losing 25 pounds, and saving money, remembering birthdays, e.t.c

Answer:    Life is hard enough for normal people. Add to that the spiritual quest and a person needs to take a break as often as they can. I see little value in walking through the mud just to prove that you can walk through the mud and keep your mind on God. We do not have to be martyrs or ascetics to find God. The middle path is usually the best. Go on retreat. Relax and take a breath. It can only help.

Question:    Lawrence: I appreciate your work. Although I consider myself a Christian, my primary spiritual practice is TM, Transcendental Meditation. I suppose I have ended up doing TM because I couldn’t find anybody around in a Church who thought prayer might be more than “Our Father who art…” and TM was the first thing which “appeared”.

I find more similarities than differences between TM and Contemplative Prayer in the Christian tradition, certainly there are also many “experiences” which are similar. For sure, in you I find a kindred spirit!

I am writing to share one specific thing. I have read most (I think all) of your lessons and Q&A and nowhere did I find a comment on the aspect of my spiritual practices which I find most powerful and that is prayer in groups of people. I realize that most of your readers may not have the regular opportunity to pray with others, but it has enriched my evolution greatly. It is my opinion that when Jesus made the statement that “When two or more are gathered in my name I will be there” that he was referring to what I call “group effect”! My experience in meditation/prayer (I don’t make a distinction) in a group is always deeper and more profound. Always. Currently I live in Fairfield, Iowa, which has about 3000 TM meditators. I meditate in one of our “domes” twice daily. Often there are 2-300 doing program at the same time, in the same room. My “experience” there is limited only by my physiology—as I understand what is taking place. Even when I stay at home and do my program with just my wife or one of my daughters my experience is deeper.

With this email there is no implied suggestion. I felt “Nudged” to share this. It would have been easier to ignore the Nudge, but I’ve kept coming back to your website for some reason, perhaps this was it. I require no response, though would be more than happy to receive any questions or observations you might have about my practices or those of this community. It is quite a place. That is entirely up to you.

Answer:    I guess the reason I have not written about group meditation is because I try not to write about what I have not directly experienced and I have had so little experience with group meditation that it is best for me to be quiet about it. Even on retreat I have only been with a couple of dozen people. Although I try not to write about what I have not experienced, I can post your e-mail and let others read of your experience.

Question:    Thank you so much for writing your experiences with contemplative prayer…..I have had experiences of seeing a bright gold light for several years now. I don’t know how to proceed, It is a bit into uncharted territory..…

Answer:    It sounds like you are experiencing the golden light of the Holy Spirit. Dive into it and let it take you to the deeper things of God.

Question:    I have recently been diagnosed with 6-8 months to live. All I have read indicates a period of time I don’t possess. Should I seek some other discipline or stick with verbal prayer?

Answer:    This is not one of the easiest questions I have ever been asked but I will try to give you a concise, honest and straight forward answer of my understanding of the process.

As our time comes to an end on this earth, there is a natural deepening of our inner world and a natural withdrawing from the outer world. If it is truly our time to go, we should let ourselves flow with this natural process. It helps by spending as much time as is comfortable looking inward to God and giving ourselves to him. We are not asking anything in this process but simply going with the natural inner flow of consciousness that occurs at this time.

We gradually let go of worldly desires and attachments, especially bodily attachments and become ready for a new reality. It is the desires and attachments that we will not let go of that makes the transition process must difficult for some. Once we have let go of these obstacles it is much easier to just step away from the physical and enter into the Spirit’s waiting arms. It will take you where you need to go. We need not worry about where the Spirit is taking us. That is the Spirit’s realm.

If it is truly your time, then spend time looking inside and giving yourself to God and Spirit. That is all any of us need to do. God takes care of all of us. No one is ever forgotten.

Question:    I wanted to ask you, “How did you come about picking the church you did.” I thought you might help give me advice on finding the right church. Do you believe in all of your churches theology and canon? Do you think it’s pertinent that a person does? Or do you believe you “rise above” so to speak as you become more spiritually advanced?

Answer:    A mystic will never find an organized religion that understands the mystical path. They may tolerate and even use the mystic for their own benefit if the mystic stays quiet and tows the religious line of the religion he/she is in.

Having said this, most of us need companionship. It is a part of our human nature. Most mystics or students of mysticism who belong to an organized religion (that I know) use the organization for companionship or as a social function. They usually plant little seeds of truth to those who are open to it but mostly keep quiet about their experiences.

The truth is that we all have a one-to-one relationship with God. This relationship relegates organized religion to a secondary role which it is not content to play. By its nature, organized religion wants to be the intermediary between man and God. It therefore downplays individual experiences with God and promotes its’ own dogma.

That’s the way it is and each person with mystical experience deals with it in their own way. Usually we learn silence as a virtue.

Question:    Hello, I have written to you one time before, but I know you mentioned on your web site that it takes you a while to respond, I just don’t know who else to ask these questions to. If I told people about my about my experiences lately, I think they would lock me up 🙂

Well, recently while doing the breathing exercises and visioning pulling up the Holy Spirit through my spine, inhaling and exhaling, I felt as if the energy was swirling through me. My heart began to race and my eyes fluttered very quickly, then all the sudden it felt as if I was being moved to the music that was playing while I was meditating, “it’ (I think the Holy Spirit?) was moving me back and forth, sort of like wiggling me around. It did scare me, the more I breathed in the stronger it became so I stopped, I was trying to be unafraid, but I have never felt something psychically move me like that before so it was a little overwhelming the first time it happened. I have continued to meditate and I it still is moving me around, but I am trying to be less afraid each time and just let it be.

I guess what I am looking for is reassurance that this is all ok, ever since I started this, which has only been a few months I now see lights differently, hear a constant humming in my ears and now this with the movement in me. I would appreciate any help you could give me about this, of course my head is going to places like, maybe I am getting myself into something I shouldn’t or I’m being possessed. I just don’t understand why is this happening to me so quickly? I really did not expect to feeling anything right away, I thought it would take years, I pray and meditate approximately 1 & 1/2 hrs a day.

Please when you have a moment, help me to understand that this is ok, I look forward to your response. Thank you again.

Answer:    If you read between the lines in the scriptures and writings of the early saints you will find references to dramatic movements of the Spirit. It must be realized that there is a cleansing process in raising our consciousness to a level where we can see and hear what the Spirit can show us. In the beginning our nervous systems are just not ready for full realization.

Everything that you have described is pretty much normal for a person who is ready to begin or is already beginning the journey to know God. The movement of the Holy Spirit within those who are ready for it is not the blessing but the necessary (in most of us) action required to prepare us for realization. It is often like getting your teeth cleaned. That is it sometimes feels uncomfortable and really good at the same time.

It is a blessing to be as open to it as you describe but the movement of the Spirit is not the goal. It is something we may enjoy and sometimes not that will take us to God. The Apostle Paul tells us that the Spirit will reveal the deeper things of God but we have to have the courage to allow it to do this.

I must admit that it is easier to allow the Spirit to do this when we have someone to ask questions of who has been through what we are now experiencing. 

Question:    I read in your lesson and from this email you mention that we cannot keep the Spirit for ourselves or it will die. I’m not sure I understand that, could you please give me some examples of sharing the Spirit with others? When I pray for others, is that sharing the Spirit?

Answer:    I simply meant that when not allowed to flow through us the Spirit will stop flowing within us. The Spirit is not something that we can store within us for later use. It is an active principle and the abilities we get from it come from the flowing of it through us. In other words, you cannot put it in a bottle, you can only open up expanding channels for it to flow through us.

There are as many ways to share the Spirit and allow it to flow through us as there are people to share it with. Prayer is just one way. Teaching is the best because it expands the Spirit’s activity in a materialistic world of people that are so lacking in its activity within them. B. Lawrence

Question:    Why is getting close to God & finding out the truth about life all I can think about? I feel like I am obsessed with it or something, it is on mind all the time, particularly since I have started meditating for the Spirit to rise up through me, is this normal or I am just consuming myself with it too much?

I feel like I am having trouble with being too deep, I have always been a deep person anyways but now more than ever. I almost feel a little lonely because no one I know is going through this yet and I feel like no one really understands. Plus I feel like I am on a very small level starting to see things in life differently and it seems that others that I am around at this time in my life just don’t see things this way yet. I feel sorta stuck in the middle, not completely asleep anymore but not yet enlightened either.

Anyways, more than anything tonight I needed just to get my feelings out but when you have a second it would be helpful to read what your thoughts are too. Did you feel this way at all on your journey?

Answer:    The easiest thing on earth for the mind to do is to be obsessed about something. Unrealized souls spend their whole lives grasping one obsession after another. Look at your own life and those of everyone around you if you need to confirm this. It is just how we all are.

From my lessons you should be aware that you are not the mind but a soul, that is pure divine consciousness in individualized form. Whatever the mind is doing or being obsessed about that’s not you. You are the one sitting behind it being led by it doing the leading. When we are obsessed we are being led by it and in the end that is not where we want to be. The mind is a much more powerful tool when it is calm, at rest and fully directed by the soul when in use but the mind is only a tool that God has given the soul for its’ use, nothing more.

Having said that, from a practical point, it must be understood that so few are at that point of absolute control that it is not worth talking about and we might as well deal with what we have. Remember that in a previous answer to one of your questions I told you not to let your extra activities interfere with your practices. Not that you should not do them, only to not be too involved in them. The minds’ tendency for obsession was the underlying reason for my reasoning.

My viewpoint in giving advice for those who ask for help or eventually come to consider themselves students is how to give the best advice to keep them steady on this path. By this I do not mean attached to me as a teacher but steady in their practices because that is the only way to get from here to there. Getting there usually takes a lifetime. If you want to get from here to there, I think it is best to use a problem that you eventually want to get rid of to your advantage in the now. I will use myself as an example and you can determine the wisdom or folly of it for yourself.

Fifty years ago when I first started becoming open to the Spirit with visions of inner light etc. I did not understand what it was or what was happening to me but I certainly became obsessed with it. Honestly I think it served me well that no one understood, especially my wife, kids and family on both sides. My wife and her side of the family were Christian fundamentalists and came to think that I had opened myself up to the devil. My side just thought I was deluded.

I learned silence as a virtue. I did not have any background in mysticism to help, did not know what meditation was and did not know where to look to find out the truth of anything. But I was obsessed with the seed that God had planted within me and it carried me through for ten years. For ten years I carried the obsession of which you write. I read everything I could get my hands on and learned everything I could about mysticism and my experiences. It took a long time to know where to look to find what I needed to learn and then my experiences needed to expand to a point where I would discern the seed of truth from all the misinformation I was reading. It seems so many who write want to have great followings but have not had enough experience to even know what they are writing about.

After about ten years of reading and learning from most every direction you can imagine an odd thing happened. Whereas in the beginning everyone seemed to be telling me something different, in time everyone seemed to be saying the same thing. When I look back on it, this is when my obsession with it all disappeared.

Now there is another important aspect of the mind to consider. It is that the mind loves to operate in a standard pattern. It will get to be trained along a certain line of action and that is what it wants do. A person will meditate at a certain time and place and after a while the mind will want to do this even when a person is pressed to do something else at that period. This is the result of steadiness of practice. Same time, every day, same place etc. By the time my obsession wore off my steadiness of practice had set in and this has carried me through the rest of my life.

I try to keep this model for those I give advice. Not too much information too soon. Read everything from every direction till it all sounds the same. Perhaps enough struggle in the beginning with no one understanding and not enough time for practices. All of this when we are still obsessed so that when the obsession is gone and we are relying on steadiness of practice we will have the strength and knowledge and experience that carries us though the rest our lives on this path.

Question:    If you could please answer this email before the last, I would appreciate it. After my meditation last night I was terrified, the best way to describe it was I was hyper-sensitive to energy or something, I felt like I wasn’t alone, like there was negative energy in the room. I just kept praying and surrounding myself with the white light, but it did not seem to make it stop. I tried to go to sleep but that wasn’t for long. Let me tell you what I think may have happened. I read a lot so I had read about a meditation to open my Chakras, so during my meditation I visualized opening my Chakras and the white light unblocking them, starting at my crown Chakra and then each on down my body until the last one. Well, when I fell asleep I woke by what seemed to be a huge vibration starting from my tailbone and going up my body, it really terrified me, I don’t even think I am explaining what happened to the full degree of it. It felt as if was physically moving me. I’ll admit I don’t know a lot about religion or God but I kept thinking last night why if this is the truth to God would we have to go through something like this, it would seem a loving God would not want us to be scared. I mean I feel fine today, I was just very scared last night. I thought I was safely meditating because I only meditate an hour to an hour 1/2 a day, but it still seems to be pretty intense for me. I’m sure all this is just me not truly understanding what’s happening.

I was feeling pretty good before this because I had completely lost my fear during meditation, but I am feeling a lot when not meditating now. I will be at work during the day at my desk and I feel my head being pushed back and then a gentle nudge to open my mouth and just stay in that position, this happens a lot during the day. Even that wasn’t scaring me, I wasn’t sure what the heck it was but I was ok.

Are these sensations I just described all part of the process to take me to God, is this how it will be until I reach Christ Consciousness?

I also at the same time couldn’t help but feel grateful last night too, that at least I am able to talk to you about this, I mean I am sure there are people out there who don’t have anyone to talk to going through this process. Thank you from the bottom of my heart.

Answer:    The path that we have chosen, breathing exercises coupled with meditation has more sensations that develop with it than other paths that do not work on the whole of the spiritual body. Usually, the sensations are more dramatic or perhaps we are not that familiar with them in the beginning of the movement of the Spirit. Most would give their eye teeth to experience the sensation you write about but it is not God that puts us through any of what we go through nor is it God who has chosen anyone above others nor can we blame any of the sensations we feel on that universal consciousness. I suppose if we must blame it on anything we could blame it on the fact that our species, humans have not yet evolved a nervous system that is spontaneously capable of dealing with God awareness and gifts of the Spirit.

It has only been a blink of an eye in universal awareness terms since our species was little more than standing or walking man (homohabilus) 3 million yrs ago. OK, so we call ourselves homosapiens now (thinking man) but it will probably be another 3 million yrs before our species has evolved into spiritual man where all of the awareness of God and the gifts of the Spirit occur spontaneously.

If we are not in the mood to wait that long we do what we need to do to develop our nervous systems now. It is called meditation etc. and that is what speeds the development of our nervous system and therefore the awareness of God that is the natural result. But you can’t blame any of it on God. Considering the state of our human development, it is our choice to strive for the awareness or not and deal with the sensations as they come or not. The worst thing we can do is to get all wrapped up in the significances of the process. There aren’t any. None of the sensations and shifts of awareness mean anything of themselves and although acknowledged should be ignored. These sensations are neither good nor evil but simply the result of the process, which brings me to another part of your note.

You will do yourself a grave injustice if you make this process more complicated than it needs to be. Keep your practices steady and simple. You do not need to worry about what center of awareness (chakra) is doing what, nor do you need to be delving into the thousands of variations of meditation. You will lose ground on the path and besides at your level of development it is far too early to be specific in technique for what part of the spiritual body. You might look into it 30 yrs from now. Until then do the two practices as they are written in the lessons. In case you have forgotten, they do seem to be working for you.

Now, to the third part I wish to discuss, FEAR. The mental processes are strengthened by the movement of the Spirit especially the subconscious is something we should be aware of. It is not that it is given more power than the rest of the mental processes only that we are not used to dealing with it when it has more power to influence us. There is a creative spiritual power developing within that we must learn to have better control of than was usual before the movement of the Spirit. Do you really think the gifts of the Spirit happen through weak minds? The subconscious holds fear like a whirlpool that is continually throwing off ripples of imagined problems and disasters and false awareness. Realize them as such and ignore them with the same fervor you should be ignoring the other sensations of the process that are real.

The spiritual process is like growing up all over again to a new level of adulthood and strength of mind. Those who make it to the end of the path deserve to make it to the end of the path. Spiritual children do not get there until they are no longer spiritual children but spiritual adults with the focus and strength of mind that comes with it.

Question:     Hi, I just read a text on your page. I had an experience a few years ago that shook my spirit so much that I was grieving greatly. I have ever since hearing God been incarcerated 3 times, and in the end I was meeting with death. I saw the people around me as walking corpses without will. It was a truly scary experience. I remember shouting at my mother: “You are dead! Completely dead! Live! Come back to life!”

I later got incarcerated a third time. This time I was with God all of the time, but I said goodbye to Him. Ever since I have not been sure about what to feel about God, but seeing your page opened up me to this idea, that I might have experienced something true. God said that no one on the planet was alive, for if they were alive, they should be coming to me. It was so dreadful to be the only living person.

But now I have taken away some meds forced on me, and I have only one anti-psychotic left. And I would like to have your advice on how to cope when I remove it completely. I am planning to take my time lowering the medication.

Now my heart is more still and I don’t expect to be drawn to such negative thoughts again. I still have the feeling of a light above my head, and I have gotten control of myself. I meditate every day.

I have never met with Christians, nor any other kind of people. I have phoned a catholic priest who right now doesn’t even want to talk because I have lowered one med. This feels silly, now that I feel better than ever!

Do you have some idea of where to find like-minded people? I have felt such confusion. The whole world is at war over silly things, and I don’t even know what to do.

Answer: I must admit your email is a little different than most and I needed to think a bit before writing back to you but will try to answer in the order of things you have brought up.

The Holy Spirit could care less if you have been incarcerated three times. It is the enlivening force in all of us and is always available to those who open their hearts to it but this doesn’t mean that we will not pay for our sins. The Holy Spirit will balance things out in all of us.

Your vision is not at all far from how mystics see the world, not so much that we are all walking dead but that we are all born seeing through the glass darkly and sleepwalking through life. Paul said that when we wake up, we will see as we are seen by God. The task before each of us is to still the mind, which allows us to see clearly into the depths of our being to find that as souls, we are but individualizations of God’s infinite consciousness. To find God is not to go out somewhere but simply to find that spec of Him as the core of each of us.

The mind is like a pendulum, swinging back and forth between one obsession to another, swinging from self-grandeur for how wonderous we are to self-hate for being so sinful. We hope in life that our bodies and minds will continue to work well but this is seldom the case. So, we get help and take meds when the body needs it, but this is also true of the mind. It is hard enough for most of us to dampen the swinging pendulum of our minds and I can only imagine the strength required of you to do the same. I can only say that the mind is not you and is no different than any other bodily function that we try as best we can to keep in balance but so many times cannot.

Trying to find like-minded people? I have never found that for myself. Most Christians simply have no clue about our true spiritual nature. Students of yoga and Buddhism generally understand the nature of existence, but I am a Christian, just one that most other Christians cannot relate to with my three to five hours of meditation a day, any more than I can relate to the common belief all that is necessary is to do nothing but to believe and be saved.

Whatever your understanding, if you can get beyond trying to have others believe as you do, it is so much easier to get along. I keep my understanding of our spiritual nature to myself but associate with others who have a love of God and am content with that. On the internet, I will communicate with those like yourself and give advice when that advice is asked for. I just think that each of us must find that balance in life that fits our needs.

I wish you the best in God. B. Lawrence

Practices, in the order that I do them, 3hrs first thing in the morning.

One and a half hours of the Breathing Exercise followed by one-half hour of the Breath and Stretch finishing with the Humming Breath, followed by one hour of Meditation. The breathing exercise is the foundation for all the other exercises and I will start with it.

But before that, this. I don’t do any spiritual exercise on a whim. There has to be a very good and specific reason for me to spend the rest of my life doing any practice I include in my daily routine. Having said this, I have never said that my practice has to be or even should be your practice. I have promised to include the practices I have come to use and why I do them and I will. But everyone needs to find those spiritual exercises that work best for themselves. I do what I do but the bottom line is this, how badly do you want a relationship with the Holy Spirit and what are you willing to do about it? Ok, it has been said that I am not good with lousy excuses.

About the Prayer of the Heart and Meditation. With my initial experience with the Holy Spirit, I have always thought it best to rely on its strength to draw us within and let meditation take care of itself. My first spiritual experience was the melting of my awareness into the Holy Spirit and this is what I have tried to do for the rest of my life. For me it’s simple, others might say simplistic, give yourself over to the Holy Spirit, and let it cleanse your spiritual anatomy and reveal the deep things of God as it will. Again, give yourself to it and do your best to stay out of its way.

Moving on, mystics of most traditions have written that in the average person, the Holy Spirit lies asleep at the base of the spine and needs to be awakened for it to flow up the spine, and throughout the nervous system, light the lamps on the lampstand, reveal the gifts of the Holy Spirit and take us to the deep things of God. I found a Greek Orthodox exercise that was said to be quite effective in this awakening, and shortly after starting a related practice, I began feeling the first signs of the Holy Spirit flowing up my spine and eventually filling my head with its presence.

I had been exclusively practicing the prayer of the heart for the previous ten years but had never felt the movement of the Holy Spirit in my nervous system. Visions, intuitive awareness, and the Holy Spirit’s presence yes but never the flowing of it throughout my nervous system that would light the lamps on the lampstand. For years my devotional time was three hours a day with the Prayer of the Heart, so perhaps when I began the breathing exercise, I was awakened sooner to the flowing of the Holy Spirit than it would be with someone who had no previous meditative experience—just a guess. After starting to do the breathing exercises my devotional time remained at three hours but now it was two hours of the three breathing exercises I am about to explain followed by an hour of meditation, which is where it has remained since.

The first and basic breathing exercise, I like to relate with John 4:13,14 – Jesus answered and said to her, “But the WATER that I shall give him will become in him a FOUNTAIN OF WATER springing up into EVERLASTING LIFE.”

Regardless of a person’s previous experience, using this breathing exercise that I am about to explain will eventually help to awaken the Holy Spirit and at the same time relax the body and naturally quiet the mind, taking us deep within without even trying to meditate. I was taught a more complicated Kriya yogic form of this exercise which to learn I had to sign an agreement not to disclose but once I started feeling the Holy Spirit moving through my nervous system and could monitor its activity, I found that (for me) this simpler Taoist form that I am about to explain was just as effective. Of course, it could be that once the Holy Spirit starts flowing, it’s just going to keep on flowing regardless of the practice.

Whether your meditation time is thirty minutes or you have built up your time to a couple of hours at a sitting, it is best to spend at least the first half of that time doing a breathing exercise of some sort to awaken the Holy Spirit and then follow this with the Prayer of the Heart or meditation to let the Holy Spirit settle into the nervous system and do its work. The breathing exercise is most effective if done at least twice a day. For many years my practice has been one hour of the breathing exercise followed by one hour of meditation all this preceded by a half hour of the breath and stretch routine (two and a half hours) done in the morning before work and then another two hours of the breathing exercise and mediation after work but then we each need to do what we can and my routine is not your routine.

Throughout the breathing exercise always keep looking out to infinity for the Holy Spirit. This is where you will find what Christian mystics call the Gate to the East and where we should keep our focus. But as you do this, also imagine the Holy Spirit resting at the base of the spine, which is where it is most concentrated in the body. The prophets have metaphorically described the spine and its related spiritual structure as the golden lampstand with six lamps spreading out from it and the upside-down golden bowl at the top making seven major centers of consciousness. The opening of each lamp brings with it the potential for the spiritual ability of that lamp, ending with the opening of the golden bowl, bringing about being born again unto the Holy Spirit, what the earliest Christians called the spiritual state of perfection.

Inhaling through your nose, with your imagination and as much willpower as you can muster without straining yourself, grab hold of the Holy Spirit at the base of the spine and be aware of where you slowly and evenly imagining it to be at different locations along the spine, (this helps it to rise up through it) try to feel the Holy Spirit flowing up your spine into your head, filling your head with its vibration. As you continue to look out to infinity to the Holy Spirit, comfortably holding your breath for a few seconds, imagine and eventually feel the Holy Spirit as it fills your head with its vibration, or pressure, or light, and or presence.

Next, exhaling through your mouth, still looking out to the Gate to the East, imagine that just like the overflowing fountain spoken of in John, the Holy Spirit is washing over you and down through your body and especially your spine, washing out of your body all of your aches, pains, and bodily sensations. (Most important) feel yourself melting into the arms of the Holy Spirit at the Gate to the East as you exhale.

With your breath out, only for as long as it is comfortable, continue melting into the arms of the Holy Spirit.

Repeat your breath, dropping deeper and deeper inside for your devotional time or until your mind becomes so still that it doesn’t want to move. When the stillness of mind comes, rest in the stillness and let the Holy Spirit take you where it will. Ok, this does take a little practice but even before stillness, your mind will have calmed, and your body will have relaxed.

It’s simple, but in my view not simplistic, this practice works to awaken the Holy Spirit in the nervous system and to take us deep within.  

Here are a couple of emails I received from students who actually tried the breathing exercise.

Question: Peace be with you. I am a Cameroonian living in South Africa. I have been practicing contemplative prayer and doing the breathing exercises for about 4 years now. I am a bit confused in respect to the flowing of the Holy Spirit. In the second half of 2008, I was enveloped by the golden light of the Holy Spirit 6 times during contemplation, and twice in 2009 I felt electrical vibrations throughout my body in 2010 till the present moment I am feeling a burning heat-like sensation at the center of my chest and on my palms with a light momentary tickling sensation and pain in my physical heart. Please, I need your help, My question is am I experiencing the correct flowing of the Holy Spirit? This question is because I have never felt it flowing from the bottom of my spine up as you have explained. Maybe I am not doing something correctly.  May mercy, peace & the love of Christ Jesus abound in you.

 Answer:…….From what you have written, you seem to be doing everything correctly. This journey is a cleansing process of body, mind, and soul preparing each of us for the higher states of consciousness necessary to experience the deep things of God. The Holy Spirit will work with each of us where it feels the need. It is different for everyone, but the main thing is to do your part in keeping it active by steady practice and then just let it do what it needs to do. It’s the best that any of us can do……

Question: I have been practicing the breathing exercises for the past 2 months. I have been experiencing the sensation of a liquid-like movement up my spine like a snake but stopping right in the middle. Sometimes it goes up to in between my shoulder blades when I do the exercises. Two days ago while at work helping a customer, I experienced electricity moving from the top of my head down my spine and eventually out of my legs after 20 minutes. I felt fire hot but did not sweat. Are these signs of the Holy Spirit beginning to clean up my nervous system from the exercises?

Answer:    Yes, and in only two months, remarkable. I always hope that those who practice the breathing exercises will experience exactly the sensations you have described. Just wonderful. Well done and keep up the good work. But do not forget meditation after the breathing exercises to let the Holy Spirit bring you the experience of intuitive awareness and the deep things of God. I admit some mystics only do the breathing exercises and the raw power of the Holy Spirit is the fastest way to cleanse the nervous system to be Born Again unto it, what we call enlightenment, which is a structural thing of lighting the lamp on top of the lampstand. But in my view, it is a better spiritual balance and understanding of the process to have experienced intuitive awareness and some of the deep things of God along the way.

Transitioning to Meditation

When transitioning from the breathing exercise and beginning your time in meditation keep the visualization but now breathe exclusively through your nose concentrating on melting deeper into the arms of the Holy Spirit. Eventually, as you feel yourself going deeper inside, let go of the visualization but keep looking out to infinity for the Holy Spirit. With each exhalation keep imagining and feeling that you are melting into its arms, allowing yourself to drop deeper and deeper inside. This makes an easy transition from the previous exercise into meditation That’s it. After the first ten years of exclusively practicing the Prayer of the Heart, I have continued to do these exercises.

It does not matter if it is the melting into the Holy Spirit, devotion, or relaxation, it is the melting into that helps quiet the mind and takes us deep within. Do not neglect this very important part of the practice. This practice should not feel like a burden but more like a pleasure, kind of like melting into the relaxation you get from drinking a glass or two of wine but without the ill effects.

The Breath and Stretch

I do this exercise before the others because it is the most physical and I try to go from the most physical to the least physical in the sequence of my spiritual routines but I needed to explain the basic breathing exercise first because this exercise is based on that exercise.

The reason for doing this exercise is what happened to me at the age of fourteen. My brother and I had set off walking through the woods along a creek. It was cold but the creek was not yet totally frozen over. To warm up, we stopped under a rock ledge and built a good-sized fire. After several minutes, my part of the ledge collapsed and after a rock, maybe six inches thick, a foot wide, and three feet long clipped my back and knocked me unconscious, I woke up in the creek paralyzed from my waist down. My brother carried me home. Fortunately, although having a couple of herniated discs, my spine had been bruised but not severed and in about a year I was able to walk again without too much of a display.

Keeping my back as limber as possible and the related muscles strong has been the only way for me to stop the pain, sometimes intense, from shooting down into my legs. In other words, stretching exercises for my back are not an option for me but a necessity.

After becoming open to the Holy Spirit, my thinking was that if for the rest of my life, I am stuck with having to do these stretching exercises, I might as well make them as spiritual as possible. Over the years I have investigated the exercises of hatha yoga, tai chi, qigong, and the Chinese wand, etc. for the best exercises to use for this. The problem that I found in all these practices is that when these paths were brought to the West, they for the most part have been practiced as strictly physical routines, whereas more important than the physical is that the original and underlying reason for each of these paths is in whole body health by encouraging the Holy Spirit to rise through the spine and spread throughout the body, balancing the nervous system bringing a better degree of health. I remember reading the work of a teacher of the Chinese wand asking a student if he had yet started to feel the chi (Holy Spirit) rising up the spine which for me verified my feelings about the true nature of the exercises. Like the rest of my other spiritual practices, I adapted the best practice I could find for my own needs. In this case, the yogic exercise of the Maha Mudra which I have done in a way that is best for me.

The exercise that I am about to explain, I do for thirty minutes first thing in the morning, well, after my morning coffee. It is done slowly with full concentration on the flowing of the Holy Spirit and an important factor is that I have been able to rest in intuitive awareness facilitated by the practice of this exercise, something that I would have never expected from a stretching exercise.

As I could already feel the movement of the Holy Spirit up and down my spine, it was kind of easy for me to tell if I could do the stretching exercises and maintain the same movement of the Holy Spirit as with my regular breathing exercises. I found that not only could I do this, but I think, because I was bending and stretching my spine in coordination with my breathing, I could often feel an enhanced flow of it. Well, that was also unexpected. So, I have continued the practice and now consider it an important part of my spiritual routine.

For many, the basic exercise, done for thirty minutes twice a day as their stand-alone routine can be an excellent place to start their spiritual journey. Properly done, it can by itself bring a person to intuitive awareness and initiate the rising of the Holy Spirit up the spine and throughout the nervous system. And if you learn the breathing principle of this first exercise, you can use this same principle in any other sitting, standing, lying down, squatting, lunging, twisting, or stretching exercise that you choose to do. Generic (moving) stretching exercises are on the internet and are explained in a myriad of books.

Now to the basic exercise that I call the breath and stretch. If you have practiced the breathing exercise previously explained, this is well, going to be easy. Progressively, slowly, and easily, never stretch yourself to pain.

Sitting on the floor, on an exercise mat or carpet, or in a way not uncomfortable, with legs outstretched and either slightly apart, knees apart, feet together, or legs and feet close together, in other words however you want but with hands in your lap. Sitting like this, start doing your normal breathing exercises until you are completely comfortable doing them while sitting on the floor with your legs in an outstretched position.

Except for the stretching, your inhalation in this exercise is almost identical to the regular breathing exercise already described. Bend forward and with your hands reach out as far as is comfortable to touch your toes. Then, as you inhale, imagine the Holy Spirit rising from your feet and through your legs up to your spine. In coordination with where you imagine the Holy Spirit to be in your feet and legs, bring your hands, and palms pointed towards your body, and in coordination with where you imagine the Holy Spirit to be as you feel it rising from your feet up through your legs, then up through your spine and into your head. As you imagine or feel the Holy Spirit and your hands at that level keep reaching upwards and when you have reached upwards as far as you can, imagine the Holy Spirit flowing out through your hands like an overflowing fountain.

Then, as you exhale in a continuous movement of attention, intention, and imagination, feel the Holy Spirit in coordination, your hands moving back down your spine and then stretching and bending forward, down your legs into your feet. As you do this try to feel the Holy Spirit flowing out through your hands.

With breath out, stretched out as far as is comfortable and looking inward, rest like this but again only for as long as is comfortable. If it is not comfortable, don’t stretch so far, and don’t hold your breath to the point where you gasp for air. At the end of your breath, you should try to feel the Holy Spirit in your feet and your hands.

Here is where the possibility of intuitive awareness comes in. Often at this point, where I am stretched out as far as is comfortable, I will take several breaths, often minutes, looking within to the Holy Spirit. With each breath, I will myself to melt deeper into the stretch, relaxation, and the Holy Spirit and have been lifted into intuitive awareness at this point.

A physical exercise, done with the proper breath and intention, can be a spiritual exercise that takes us deep within and no one would ever know that we are doing a spiritual exercise. (Good under certain circumstances that I have already written about.)

A full routine of stretching exercises can be done in the breath and stretch method and I think because you are pushing your hands forward is particularly effective in radiating the Holy Spirit from your hands doing squats and lunges.

If you decide to do a full set of stretching exercises, a little heads up. Always use your hands in coordination with where you are imagining the flow of the Holy Spirit to be in your body. It greatly enhances its movement. And no matter what you are doing with your exhalation, always fully concentrate on pulling the Holy Spirit up the spine with your inhalation on each breath. As with everything else I have written about, keep the principles but tweak them, change them, and do each exercise the best way for you.

The Humming Breath and a too-long explanation of why I do a five-minute practice.

Genetically my body is predisposed to high blood pressure and high cholesterol. My grandfather died of a heart attack at sixty-three. Relatives say we could have been twins which should tell you what I was thinking about when approaching that age.

I have been taking high blood pressure drugs and statins for fifty years. The meds have never seemed to interfere with my relationship with the Holy Spirit so, truthfully, I have never worried about the physical side of things. For a long time, I have stayed away from refined carbs and always thought I had a decent American diet.

A while ago, for some reason, my cholesterol went up around 250 and my doctor doubled my dose of statin meds. Statins eventually raise a person’s A1C, sometimes bring on brain fog, hypertension and or diabetes, and can even cause muscle problems.  In the previous fifty years, not one of my several doctors had told me of these possible side effects. Why is this and why had I not taken more responsibility for my health?

Suddenly, I had pre-diabetes and had lost nine pounds of muscle mass in a little over a month. Uh, thanks doc. There just had to be a better way, so I did what I have always done. Read everything, months of reading and watching videos of everything and then follow the advice of those who had no agenda (like tobacco companies original research telling us smoking was not all that bad etc.) They just had to actually know what they were talking about. The first thing I heard from several researchers was that mainstream medicine is usually fifteen to twenty years behind the latest research and there is a lot of latest research and even more old research misapplied. I am not into food or supplement fads but I did come up with a few basic things I follow that will end with the Humming Breath as a very small part of it all. I will write in headlines and if you have an interest, I will leave it to you to do your research. I am not (the doctor) and can only say what I have come to do or no longer do, but nothing I will mention is complete and you need to do your own research.

First, two things that I no longer do. Refined carbs, sugars, and such. They spike our insulin levels and was an easy no longer to do ever again thing for me.

Second, the omega-six fatty acids found in extremes in all seed oils get lodged in every kind of our cells, disrupt their normal functioning. As a result, our bodies start to fall apart from diabetes to dementia, add infinity. I no longer go near seed oils but stay with olive oil and ghee. The deciding factor for me was when I was looking at a chart comparing the use of sugars and seed oils, compared to the rate of diabetes over the last one hundred years. A hundred years ago diabetes was under 1%. Today with its related problems, it’s at 13%. There was not that much increase in sugar use over the last hundred years and I could see no real correlation between sugar and diabetes but a hundred years past there was no seed oil being made or used and diabetes was a rarity. Over this time period seed oil has gradually increased in use (it makes so much money for big companies) and in this chart there was a perfect correlation between the percentage of its use and the percentage increase in diabetes-related problems in the general population of America. I understand that this does not prove causation but it was enough of a correlation for me to never go there again. Even when we stop consuming omega 6 seed oils, it takes three years to get them out of our systems.

These are my big two don’t go there ever agains.

But then there is what I have come to do after months of reading everything. Just know that none of it is on a whim.

First, as much as possible, for gut health, I daily eat fermented foods containing live cultures. (do your research) This was easy and cheap. I started making my own sauerkraut.

And, each day, for proper functioning, our bodies need enough time with no food intake to settle out our blood and heal itself from our brains to our toenails. The research says this takes from fourteen to sixteen hours each and every day. It’s called intermediate fasting and not eating for 14 hours was the easiest thing I ever started to do.

I try to concentrate on foods that don’t have labels attached to them and if they do, I read the label. If it has a label it is usually because it contains refined sugars or worse omega-6 fatty acids, seed oils that is. If it has nitrates, I don’t worry about that part of it, explained in a bit.

With the depleted nutrient level of the food supply available in America, eating whole foods simply does not fix the problem. It’s like eating straw, a little fiber but depleted of the nutrients that are needed for our bodies to not prematurely age. There are a myriad of vitamins and nutrients, and what they do and how to get them, I am not going to get into BUT, there are three nutrients that the American diet does not supply that (in my humble opinion) are the baseline of our body’s functioning and absolutely without fail need to be supplemented for us to live a more healthy life for longer years.

Vitamin K2 initiates the process that takes the calcium in the artery including the calcium in plaque and puts it in the bones where calcium belongs but because we can’t get enough of it in our American diet it doesn’t happen. Welcome, to plague buildup, and heart attacks and you see old bent-over seniors, low K2 does this. 200 mcg is said to be needed daily to fix the problem. I like food rather than a pill but at this time I have found no other way, but it is not expensive.

C15 is a huge deal and is missing from the American diet. C15 fortifies the walls of all our cells. Without this nutrient, the cell walls weaken and the cell gradually falls apart creating the premature aging of our bodies. We need about one hundred mg of this daily for healthy cell structure. I did what I always do, read every option. You can get this as a supplement which is the easiest way but ghee has 1.2% or more of C15. One tablespoon of (grass-fed only) ghee is approximately 14 grams times 1.2% is about 168 milligrams if consumed daily, problem solved. Take a supplement or eat at least one tablespoon of (cultured if available) ghee each day. More if you can. Don’t knock ghee, it is truly a superfood.

In my view, equally important to C15 is the nitric oxide process that is in each and every one of our cells. To simplify, it is the baseline of all of the other cell processes. I am not going to even try explain a process that I do not fully understand and am not qualified to explain in detail. But this process is what our arteries use to heal themselves. Nitric oxide production is produced in the arteries and sinuses but due to the American diet and even with a superb diet by the time we reach sixty, nitric oxide production declines to almost nothing at which time our arteries can no longer heal themselves. Again welcome to premature aging, dementia, diabetes and heart attacks.

To take the necessary commercial supplements and fix the problem costs about $120 a month. Well, good luck with that one. You already know what I did. First I found that there was an easy way to test the nitrate level in the body with a saliva stick test, which I did. At eighty my level was not non-existent, just pitiful, far below a level where my arteries could heal themselves. Ok, I tried everything high in nitrates and settled on celery seed powder, and beet root powder, most importantly not a pill but taken with food. (do your research) One half teaspoon of each in the morning and then at supper. For pennies, my body’s nitric oxide level went from pitiful to spectacular. End of that problem and I can now pretty much go back to not thinking about all this stuff and just keep doing what I am doing.

I don’t know what other processes are inside us not yet researched or written about but all any of us can do is the best that we can with the information that we have. Hopefully science will get all of it figured out to the benefit of all of us. But for now, I no longer need statins and my blood pressure is as good as with the meds. Good Lord, fifty years of unnecessary meds with high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and prediabetes. What I do now with all that gone, well for me it has been a good trade-off.

The Humming Breath

I guess that it was a lot of talk for what is next a very simple five-minute exercise that I am trying, done at the end of the Breath and Stretch exercises. Nitric oxide is produced in the arteries but also in the nasal cavity. It has been recently found but known by yogis forever that vibrating the nasal cavity can help (the blood). Recently found to increase nitric oxide production ten or fifteen-fold in the sinuses. Well, that’s big unless like me you are eighty years old or have killed your nitric oxide production with our lousy American diet.

The yogis call it the bumble bee breath, (do your research) I call what I do the humming breath. Trying this breath, I found that even at my age it increased my nitric oxide level but not spectacularly. I mean ten to fifteen times pitiful is still next to pitiful. But with the supplements, I am hoping that with enough time this might improve. I know, good luck with that one.

I do this exercise for five minutes or so after twenty-five minutes of the Breath and Stretch exercises and then transition to meditation. I use the regular breathing exercise visualization but as I exhale it’s through my nose humming to vibrate my sinuses. Interestingly, research shows that the most effective pitch is around C#, which is the vibration I hear inside when listening to the sound of the Holy Spirit. You know, the om of the yogis. Try to match this vibration and move your tongue or mouth in whatever way to maximize the vibration in your sinuses best. That’s it.

You can get some nitric oxide test strips, (eleven dollars) and see if any supplements or this exercise help to increase your nitric oxide level to where your arteries can heal themselves. It’s one of the few things we can test for ourselves, and the nitric oxide process is truly one of the big ones.

To a large degree spiritual development is about brain cell development and connection. Our physical health is not something that we should neglect.  (do your research)

And with that, I’m done.

B. Lawrence

If you have questions about what I have written, I can be contacted at (b.lawrence.comments@gmail.com)

The lessons are available in book form at amazon.com under the title

How to Awaken the Holy Spirit and Experience the Deep Things of God by B. Lawrence