Posted on 15 April 2019, 10:49

How to relate to a God who is in all, through all, and above all? ... to a God who is experienced as Creator, and in the created, the sensory-physical world in which we are now incarnate?  Plato called the Creator the world of Ideal Forms, physicist David Bohm called theCreator “the Implicate World” and the Created, “the Explicate world;” the Gospel of St John describes the creative Word,  which brings all things in heaven and earth into being.  One undivided universe found at two levels, Creative and created.

How to relate to such a God?  Mystics of all religions proclaim that there is a lot in common between the mind of the creator and that of the created. And that it legitimate to say “God is Love” but since this God has brought the universe into being, there must always be an infinity of which we can have no knowledge.

Because we can be called “children of God” we can always talk to that universal parent and maintain relationships. Thinking in Trinitarian terms, “The Father-Parent is universal Spirit, the Son-Child is the physical personality and the Holy Spirit is the soul.

The hoope is that we in our physical bodies and minds will let go and open up to universal Spirit.  Sin describes the degree of not being opened up universal Love. Salvation is the word for the degree that we died to selfishness, and rise to universal love.

In prayer we can talk to this Universal Parent about our hopes and fears, and we ask for guidance in dealing with problems.

In the Western World especially we all have problems with the machinatioins of our physical minds which perceive them selves vital to our physical survival. We haved ideas about our God, and fear that after all God may not be a God of Love, but rather be a punisher. We have superstitious fancies,  we may be sure that we know what is good for us, we may difficulty inn letting go of our hurts and angers, we may sustained physical and spiritual hurts from which we feel that we never recover.  Welcome to human nature.

This is where non-dual centring prayers comes in.

In centring prayer we put aside our thoughts about this world, next world, right or wrong, hopes and fears, likes and dislikes. We “let go, and “let God,  we invite God into our inner selves and experience the loving presence of God, experience communion with that God, keeping the sometimes destructive activities of our minds at bay. Those leading centring prayer usually suggest that one choose a word like “shalom” to quieten the chattering mind, if need be.

In centring prayer we can achieve some snse of union with the All.
The reader might like to view this video by Father Thomas Keating.

Keating extols the simplicity of this method of meditation. It is easy, relaxed and one can’t make “mistakes,”

But because the meditation banishes the chattering mind, we may eventually get glimpses of Spirit through the veil of the physical mind

Michael Cocks edits the journal, The Ground of Faith.
Afterlife Teaching From Stephen the Martyr by Michael Cocks is published by White Crow Books and available from Amazon and other bookstores.

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