Inner  Frontier
Fourth Way Spiritual Practice

 

Approaching the Divine

Where is God? Where should we look for God? Where can we look? To approach the Divine or invite God to touch us, what direction shall we address? If we only look outward, we limit our search to the material world of space-time. God in the material world takes forms such as scripture, houses of worship, the beauty of nature, great art and music, and the kindness of strangers. As wonderful as these are, they leave us hungry, not fully satisfied with this outer experience of God. Indeed, their primary value lies in the very hunger they elicit.

If we look inward, will we find God in the jungle of thoughts, emotions, and impulses that populate our inner psychological world?  God enters our inner world as creativity, faith and love, though all too rarely, and as our need for meaning, completion, and freedom. Our kaleidoscopic inner world, even at its best and highest, leaves us with the same question: where is God?

Delving into the pure stillness, the pure consciousness beneath our inner tumult, we find peace. Yet God continues to elude us, for God resides beyond consciousness itself. But by repeatedly entering this profound inner stillness, our veils of separation grow thin.

From that quiet place inside, we summon our disparate parts, our heart and mind, our entire being in an unspoken prayer, calling out into the stillness, beyond the silence, reaching toward, opening and surrendering to that Greatness that resides at the core of all. In this forecourt of the Divine, in the foothills of the Sacred, we may encounter a sudden influx of a potent energy that we allow to work on us, to create our being and feed our soul. This Primordial Sacred Sun comes as an infinite whirlwind of light and energy.

Beyond that lies the formless Divine Mountain: the Will of the Universal Purpose, the ultimate Creative Force and Compassionate Heart of the World, in a realm of radical freedom. Again and again we return to seek being, to drink at the fountain of life, to serve the Earth by asking and receiving these gifts from above.

At other times, in that quiet place inside, we do nothing, we just allow, allow, and allow all to be as is. And in that becalmed allowing our will renders itself open to the grace of contact with the Divine Will, at Its initiative. Our role remains purely one of openness and non-doing.

But who among us can approach God? Though entering full unity with the Divine may require complete purity of heart, the crucial point for us is that the attempt to move closer also purifies our heart. Our soul-blight of self-centered egoism, of seeking more for ourselves, gradually gives way to our need for the Real, for Love, for service, meaning, and understanding. Certainly we overreach in calling upon God, but the very act brings us closer. As we look more toward the Ultimate, we look less toward our imagined self. We leave behind our self-referential immaturity and aspire toward the heights of inner and outer kindness, toward that Unknowable that we know awaits us.

 


     

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