Intuition, a religious, philosophy essay
Intuition? Is it trustworthy?...
My conclusion is that Intuition, true intuition, like Faith, Hope and Love, is the Mother of every Genesis coming from our Being, flowing from the Genesis of our Being. It is more akin to a She, an intimate friend, lover, confidante or yes also confidant. She, Sophia, the Wisdom of God, is trustworthy because she is tender enough to weep with our tears, never telling us to stop because good children, or good gods, do not cry. Sophia is strong enough to birth the Uncreated in our Being, forever being both one just like us, yet forever being the one uniquely whose womb became more spacious than the heavens, containing the uncontainable God, and her Son. Intuition is like a Man too. Like the Man who gave ‘names to all the species that God gave Genesis in the Garden, and then cared for being the vice-Sovereign over the whole of the created world. Intuition sees through the glass dimly and knows safety. Intuition needs not be told that to love your neighbor here are some things that you shouldn’t do to them. Intuition knows as it is known, to love always flows from love, and from negation is impossible to impugn another in the slightest of manner. How can One Icon of God initiate harm to One other Icon of God, save if we reject intuitive creatureliness wed to the genesis of heaven’s love lived out with and in this and every world. Intuition, both in its iconographic genesis, before nakedness was traded for a clothed relationship with the Divine; and in its transfigured, recapitulated, resurrected, new day, the Lord’s Day, is trustworthy. I believe this to be the Truth. I do not know how naked I am willing to be before and in this Truth.
Note: All quotes from Christian and Jewish writings are my own translations, hopefully as literal as possible, and are therefore subject to the flaws of the translator. Wherever there is interpretive parenthesis, it is my opinion as to what would be a more correct understanding of the text, thus highly subjective. My approach to translating, not a liturgical text that is to be sung, chanted and read aloud, but one to be looked at critically from any angle, is to do the work as literal as possible, no matter how wooden or constrictive it might appear. Wherever there are definite or indefinite articles in the text of the writings I have most often placed them, even if redundant, so one is free to see the subtleties not always easily observed in our common texts of such scriptures. My style of writing is extremely prosaic, for which I make no apology in the positive or negative. This is most natural for me, the way that I happen to think, and I do believe, think most clearly. Those who are critical of this style of writing, when making their criticisms will wax verbose, leaving nothing for a passionate soul’s imagination, at the end debauching prosaic writing as too passionate, poetic, personal. I like the prophets, the prophetesses, the seers, the desert monks, mothers and fathers, even the ‘Yoda’ of the Star Wars movie series, as well as the Stylites, those individuals that spent their lives atop a platform atop a poll, the fools for Christ, rarely having a word to say to anyone, yet transforming anyone that allowed them, that have no place in our sophisticated world of bells and whistles that measure goodness by the bottom line.
'Where do we find the Kingdom of God?...’The Kingdom of God does not come by observation….The Kingdom of God is within you.' 'Repent, for the Kingdom of God is upon you.’
‘Let not your good be spoken of as evil’. Because the, ‘Kingdom of God is not of eating and drinking (that is, vegetarianism in contrast to omnivorism and drinking of wine and or alcoholic beverages in contrast to complete abstinence from such drinks, as well as keeping fasts and feasts and holy days or none, and any variations); also it is righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit. There is no ‘the’, definite article in the Greek text. The absence of the definite article ‘the’ prefacing ‘Holy Spirit’ might be more important than it appears at first.’ Here’s the exact order in the Greek text: ‘a Spirit Holy’ or ‘a Spirit that is a Holy one’, neither a definite article with ‘spirit’ or ‘holy’, hence not necessitating a reference The Holy Spirit, thus changing the emphasis to the life within a person being lived out freely over against a life being lived out constricted by commands from outside of our being.
How is the life of God lived out, day after day? St Paul to the Christians living at Rome, chapter eight, tells us, ‘What the Law could not do (could not do more than to make us law-keepers or law-breakers), in that it was powerless in the flesh (to give the doer the ability and joy to continue); The God, having sent his only Son, in the likeness of the sinful flesh, and in behalf of sin, judged the sin in the flesh, that the requirement of the Law should be fulfilled in us, who not according to a flesh is walking, rather according to a Spirit. Because they that are according to a flesh (keeper of the law or otherwise, in the context) do mind the things of flesh; and they (that walk) according to spirit –mind- the things of The Spirit.’ Note: The life of God, the righteousness of God, even the legal requirement found within the Law of commandments, again the Life of God is, by the Son’s death and life, fulfilled ‘in’ us, not merely ‘for’ us. The point of St Paul’s words in this chapter as well as the previous chapter is to encourage the person who finds themselves at the short end of the stick. These folk ‘miss the mark’, they ‘sin’, no matter how much they try, like the Saintly Apostle Paul, in chapter seven in the Roman letters, ‘the will is always present (to obey God), but how to perform that which is good, I find not.’ The Law, especially the whole of it, not only the ten words (Decalogue, literally, ‘ten words’, not ‘ten commandments’, which shifts the emphasis to more of a ‘guide’, rather than an anvil ready to come down upon your head when you ‘transgress’ it), will ultimately do one thing. Condemn. Why? Because it must continue to be followed, no matter how many more laws are attached. It does not, it can not ‘bring us back to The Garden.’ ‘There is NOW (my emphasis) therefore no condemnation to those in (in communion, as in chapter 6, by baptism’s transformation of death’s burial and life’s opening of it’s tomb in order to live, not just live again, but live abundantly in step with the crucified risen God) Christ Jesus, who walk not according to the a flesh (that is, the whole of the law), but according to a Spirit. For the Law of The Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set me free from The Law of the sin and the death.’
Some things that are often construed as together are things like 'intuition' and 'trust', the kind that children may seem to have with strangers. No, I do not believe that they're the same. Children trust adults because their experience, good or bad, tells them to trust us. We adults tell them to do so. – My oldest daughter from my second marriage did not choose to sit on my father’s lap until she had reached just about four years of age. I was scolded by both family and friends, of good intentions but blind I would say, for being unloving, for refusing to ‘make’ my daughter to express this sort of love to her grandfather. Sometime after around four years of age she began to kiss, by choice, and when she chose to do so, only then, and hug my father. Guess what? She is the one closest to my father, both my true intent as well as innate intimacy for my father’s, her grandfather’s good and goodness. I am glad that I followed my intuition rather than what the constraints of the world around us, both religious and secular, whatever this means. - Intuition will tell our children and us, their parents to watch out for the person that they do not know, though their learned experience tells them that adults, Mommies, Daddies, and so on take care of little people, therefore they can be trusted. Once a friend of mine said to me, 'Yes, children seem to always like you, but children also seem to like pedophiles.' I laughed with her. Today I find the observation to be untrue. I believe that children love, period, by nature and as well intuitively express this to those they are free to love. Violators, of any sort, of children, or other trusting innocents, manipulate this purity of person for their own purposes. They betray an intuitive pure trust and betray what and who is a True Person.
I believe that intuitively we trust the Mother of our God, Jesus the Lord and Christ. (Jesus is the same name, ‘Joshua’, to get perspective. Lord, is a divine respect shown towards those in a place that expects it, like, kings, presidents, bishops and such. Christ is the Hoped for one, ‘Anointed One’, literally, again a title and or expression of respect, hope and honor. Jesus, the same name as we hear elsewhere, ‘Hosea’, ‘Jesus’, pronounced, ‘Hasus’, Yeshua, Joshua, is a the name for this person, that some also call, ‘Lord,’ and or, ‘Christ’.) When this intuition is betrayed by religious leaders, either to one extreme or the other, our innocence is betrayed no less than a rape or incestuous attack upon a true person.
Intuition blesses the children, and says, 'For such is the Kingdom of Heaven.' Violation of purity and natural intuition holds away from this Kingdom children and women coming to Christ the Anointed King of the People Israel as well as the Pagans, questions whether the non-Jews should be allowed to be part of Jesus' group and turns away those who do not measure up to their standard, even if the standard comes from God, or are said to. St. Paul reminds us in Romans chapter thirteen that 'Love fulfills the Law.' This is an intuitive life in Christ, the other, the keeping of laws and commandments, though necessary for those who choose not to love their neighbors, even especially those that hate them is merely a matter of marking time till the undertaker comes.
Intuition is connected to nature, if what we are referring to is our genesis makeup, our core being, our essence of self, whether understood personally, or collectively. Intuition is not nature, when used as a universal assumption about one thing or the other. Not all will agree with me. That’s ok. I will not agree with you if you disagree with me, just to make sure that we’re on the same page. The holiest of our Christian champions of faith seems to align intuition and nature together. At least this is the way that he sounds when he makes his, though few, thank God, arguments. ‘Does not nature teach us, or does not teach us,’ this is one of St Paul’s arguments for whatever he’s saying that does not, did not, have universal affirmation. The other one is, ‘And I do think that I do have the Holy Spirit within me.’ He said, ‘Does not nature teach you that it is a shame for a man to wear long hair?’ Actually, no it does not. But in Roman society, as well as much of the Hellenic Jewish society of his time, men did cut their hair short. Yet this was and remained an anomaly in men’s hairdressing for most of our known history. He made the same case, in context, for the women in the Church to wear veils, and for men to not cover their heads during prayer, this latter issue being contrary to the Jewish practice of our Lord as he and all other Jewish men would have followed, both in the Temple and the Synagogue. He said the same sorts of things about a woman’s role within the teaching structure of the Church, that men are the natural heads over women. But according to whose nature? And in relation to the innocence of the male-female shared image and likeness of God before their eating of the forbidden fruit or in relation to their strained desires after the ‘fall’ from this innocence into the tensions of ‘he will rule over you, and you will seek his desire – his place,’ the result of the Garden being aloof, male and female arguing about whose place is to first and now their need to not only to tend to the Earth’s welfare, but to tend through it too. Nature, according to this Saint’s words teaches us many things, but the nature that he is speaking is more akin to ‘his’ learned experience. This is not intuition. At the same time, some of his, as ours, experience may at points connect with the Truth of Intuition and not merely prove his, or my, point. To replace one law with another one is merely changing gloves. The ‘Schoolmaster’, to borrow from St Paul again, is our tutor into the liberty of living in union with the Heavenly life of Christ, Anointed One of knowing, ‘Place your affections upon those things in the heavenlies, from whence our life is lived.’ If one lives her whole life under the burden of the stake always being moved so you’re never able to consistently hit the mark, the stake, then you’ll become the beaten, abused child of love, so called, or like a mule whose attention is never gotten a hold. Do we desire to be tutored by beatings, chastisements, purifications of the Lord? If you say, ‘Yes,’ well that’s obviously your choice, yet I must ask the question to such a one, ‘Why?’ Because someone told you the this is ‘good for you’, much like the innocuous words of a parent as they’re raising their hand above your head, and rear, ready to apply some ‘instruction’, saying, ‘This is going to hurt me more than you.’ Bull shit. It only hurts the parent whose hand knows better to miss than their own pride needs to make sure that the one person unable to sufficiently fight back is adequately ‘taught a lesson.’ ‘Lord have mercy,’ I pray that I or they never need taught an eternal lesson like this one.
'We are judges of all things, yet not judge of any person.' Here’s a literal, though wooden, translation of where this passage comes from, St Paul to the Christians living at Corinth, his first letter to them chapter two, towards the end of the chapter: '...The spiritual one judges all things, though is by no one judged. Because who did know the mind of the Lord? Who shall teach him; but we, who have Christ's mind know all things.' Earlier he spoke: 'Things that eye has not seen, and ear has not heard, and into the heart of man(as in mankind, not gender) came not, which God prepared for those that love him. But to us God has revealed by his Spirit. Because the Spirit searches all things even the depths of God. Because who knows the things of men save the spirit of the man which is in him. So also the things of God no one knows save the Spirit of God. In contrast we have not received the spirit of the world, but the Spirit which is from the God, that we might know the things God.'
The Prophet Jeremiah says, ‘The heart is wicked above all, who can know it? The Lord knows it and tries the reigns thereof.’ The Prophet is addressing the unrepentant people of the nation Israel, at the time under slavery to the Babylonian and Assyrian rule, primarily through their religious leaders, hence the need of a Prophet, not one of their elders, priests or teachers. Do not the Christian Scriptures instruct us to test all things, prove all things; hold fast onto those things that are good to hold fast to?’ Did not our Lord Jesus say, ‘It is not what goes into a person that defiles them, but that which comes out of a person?’ Why? Because ‘it is out of the overflowing of the mouth that the heart speaks.’ It is from the spirit of a person that can be said, as our Lord has, ‘Wherever your treasure is that is where your heart is also.’
Yes we have teachers. To be one’s own teacher is much like a lawyer representing themselves. The teacher, as well as the lawyer, has a fool for a teacher. St John the Beloved in his first letter to the Christians living everywhere, tells us that one who has received the ‘anointing’, the ‘sealing of the Holy Spirit’ has no need of a teacher, because the Spirit teaches one all that they need to know. Yes, true, but one must remember that St John the Evangelist is merely a man, teaching us that we have no need of a teacher. Every teacher given easily to pontificating as though they have a message from God (obviously, I am such a person) that all must hear, and not just hear, but obey, should carefully be guided by these words. The teacher is not a necessity for the one who has received the anointing, and, yes, continues in this anointing with each breath, each heart beat, ‘Lord have mercy.’
St Paul told St Timothy that the ‘Law (the old testament laws in commandments) is good for the lawless.’ St John in his first general letter to Christians says, ‘Sin is lawlessness,’ (Grk., anti-nomos, meaning: over against law, not the translated, ‘the breaking of the law,’ something entirely different and not what the Greek text says or had in mind. It is not ‘The Law’ that is difficult to keep. Frankly any person is able if they choose to keep the’ ten commandments’, or properly, ‘words’. The writer of the Proverb collections in the old testament that ‘The Law’ and or the ‘keeping of the Law’ is the beginning of Wisdom. The Proverbs also tells, ‘The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge.’ How nice. Yet if the fear of the Lord is connected with the keeping of the Law, which is doable, and therefore we are not, on the minimum side, harming and showing disrespect of God or our neighbor, then it is simply a way of opening the door into the ‘more perfect law of liberty’ or as St James, the speaker of these words goes on to call, ‘the royal law of liberty.’ It is not difficult to keep ’10 restrictions upon behavior’, what is difficult is to keep all of the regulations that came along with this summation of the law of commandments that is said to have come down from a mountain from God through Moses to the people Israel. Eight-hundred plus laws, not counting all of the Talmudic laws and interpretations of the Law and the Talmudic laws and the laws upon laws upon laws, most of which had nothing to do with loving God purely and our neighbor from the same innocence centered intuition of heart. It is easy to not murder your neighbor. You don’t kill them. It is easy to not allow yourself to contemplate their end of life in this world and their present body. What’s not so easy, is to love them and to hope for their well-being, period, whether it is to our benefit or not. Yet, St John says that ‘,to want another’s demise is to hate them, and to hate your neighbor is to be a murderer; and we know that no murderer has eternal life housed within themselves.’
Can one’s mind ‘retrained’, ‘religioned’, ‘reaffirmed’, ‘recapitulated’, ‘restored’, brought back, to start with, into ‘The Garden’ be trusted? Can such an intuition still exist within each person? Is it possible for one who has lost the ability to know themselves and therefore God come to a place of innocence, to use St Paul’s words, chapter five, and to ‘know’, ‘Where there is no law, there is no sin to give account.’
The answer to the above introduction by way of a process of questions, some overt and some implied by way of the process of the narrative is transparent. It is as far as my own conclusions at this point in my walk in this life as I know it and do not know.
Please indulge this step into the expanse of God’s glory revealed to and in us, his adopted Children. St Paul in the fifteenth chapter of his letter to the Christians living at Corinth reminds us, first, of what we should already know. We are each, in our species, children from the Earth as Adam was and is (Hebrew words ‘adama’ and ‘arretz’ are play on words for what we simply translate ‘Adam’ or ‘Man’, which is in Hebrew, ‘one from the earth’ and ‘man’, not distinct from wo-man, man with a womb as goes the story, but ‘man’, as collective personage relative to the collective one God, saying, ‘Let Us make Man in Our image; male and female created he them’.). By the Gospel, the God Spell, the Good Spell, the Good Word or God Word, we have come to know the beginning of the power of the resurrection of Christ, a power that transforms life into life-giving rather than martyrdom towards the grave, back to the dust from whence we all have had our Genesis. This is still a ‘this worldly good news’, how this world returns ‘Back to the Garden’. Note that St Paul goes on to open the door of a reality akin to the Burning Bush, The Torah, The Holy of Holies, The Most Holy and ever-Virgin Theotokos (Greek, literally, ‘God-bearer’), this mere Woman through whom a New Man has come, the Heavenly Man, similar to the Man from the Earth, but something more. The Apostle Paul expands this holy mystery of the Incarnation to our potential transformation by and in union with this Heavenly Man, Christ Jesus the Lord. We not only get to go back to our Genesis, the Earth, our first Mother of being and the beginning of innocence and true intuition. Through the Heavenly Person we Persons walking in and with Him move beyond a Garden from a particular geographical location in the time-space sphere of knowing and are invited into a knowing where teachers are students and students are teachers, where God is a Person within our created species and we are each a Person in the God Family who have our being in the perpetual movement of nonknowing, nonspace, nontime, nonbeing, the being and knowing of the I AM THAT I AM, adopted into the relationship of Person as God. Hence St Athanius words, ‘God became one of our species, in our nature, that we might become God in his (nature).’
A friend of mine said something this morning, or afternoon, after Liturgy, about a trustworthy ‘intuition’. He said something like this: ‘In our being, the being that was naked in the Garden and had no need or desire to be clothed, in our Genesis, we had, and still have an intuition that is trustworthy and therefore true.’ He went on to say, ‘At any point that we no longer hide from God, that God no longer has a need to say, ‘Where are you, One from the Earth, and you One from the One from the Earth?’ – here we rediscover what was never lost. Hard to find, hard to know, hard to believe? Yes. But not truly lost, unknown, unbelievable.’ Often when we believe that we are always falling, failing to use a poorer, yet more used word, we awake out of a deep sleep to find that we are safe I bed. Yes, we truly feel like we’re falling; but the truer truth is that it is a misperception, a feeling.
Our Genesis of being is where we see our kind, our species living, walking, talking, playing, as it were, with God, with each other and with every creature within this sphere of knowledge. The potential was to be God, sharing in the Family of plurality of Love, growing into this likeness of perpetual movement, always Truth, never stagnant, the Kingdom of God superspatially exploding, making an exponential curve, even infused by a quantum leap over any and every possible domino effusion to be less dynamic than redundancy. The Story of the Serpent, the sadness of the lie, was that the One from the Earth and the One from the One from the Earth were deceived of their natural innocence and intuition. The lie was not that they could or would become God(s). The lie was that they could circumvent the movement needed to know perpetual movement within The God, becoming not only Image Bearers of The God, but Ones with The God’s Likeness, personality, as well. The other lie was that they did not already have within them, in their Genesis, the beginning of the purity of Love. The story of sin is, I believe, the story of being betrayed by the Truth, or doing the deception upon another’s God-Human Nature-Person. When I reject the reality, the Truth that there is One God, then I will ultimately not see the One Person before my face, the Icon of more than what and who the Icon appears to be. When I reject the Person of the God and or Genesis of Creation before my face I will most likely ultimately reject the uniqueness of Personality. When I reject the Multiplicity of Synergistic Truth of Being, that God is God who is One God, and God is One who is known through more than One Person, Personality, then I will most likely reject the Multiplicity of Personhood of my neighbor. Here I’ll be found making them little more than allusions, and finally illusions of some supposed reality where the Only Truth is the I, where the truth if be known is merely the ‘Me’, the whole of the illusion is ‘My’ dream, God that ‘I AM’. Collective Consciousness needs not be a code phrase for ‘,I know nothing,’ to borrow from a sixties weekly TV series. The lie of the Serpent is the lie of self-loathing, ‘I’m not good enough,’ the lie of I deserve it, ‘That’s my tree and my fruit…I take care of it,’ the lie of inclusion and care for my neighbor in order to succeed at all costs, ‘Come a eat, it tastes good, we’ll be like God(s), knowing,’ the lie of segregation and bigotry, ‘Obviously The God doesn’t think that there is anything wrong with this, otherwise The God would’ve have stopped us,’ the lie of Monism at the exclusion of Koinonia, Fellowship within community, ‘The One from the One from the earth ate of the fruit…...And she gave the fruit to the One from the Earth, and he ate the fruit,’ and the lie that ones actions, behavior, deeds are ever truly in secrete, ‘They hid from The God-Elohim, with whom they had every morning heretofore strolled through the Garden…..Naked.’
Jesus does what the First Adam from the Earth did not and could not do. Jesus the God from Heaven and the Man from the Earth, forever the God-Human Person brings us forward, not back, to The Garden. The Garden where Heaven and Earth are wed, where Intuition is reinformed, where potential likeness of being the Creator is not only possible but has be accomplished, hence the newness of this new day is already passé. But we must first be willing to be naked, as my friend said, naked before eternity, time, space, creation, creator, looking within the mirror of Truth, not merely my ‘me’ and my ‘life’ and my ‘way’, and begin to experience the metamorphosis of Truth Incarnate.
Lofty? Yes. Lofty? No. Is God knowable? Yes. Is God knowable? No. Am I, are You knowable? Yes and No. How complex is it to be naked in the Truth? As complex as we choose. How profoundly simple is it to be living naked in the Truth? It may be as simple as I or We choose to be present, sufficiently to hear the ‘still calm voice rustling in the cool breeze of Heaven’s Garden’ that I or We are ‘in movement’, like a dance through Fall’s leaves, seemingly almost haphazard, though not one soul is estranged by the other, able to leap, roll, spin, jig and sit watching, all part of the cacophony of synergistic rhapsody of The Divine, The God, The Elohim.
My conclusion is that Intuition, true intuition, like Faith, Hope and Love, is the Mother of every Genesis coming from our Being, flowing from the Genesis of our Being. It is more akin to a She, an intimate friend, lover, confidante or yes also confidant. She, Sophia, the Wisdom of God, is trustworthy because she is tender enough to weep with our tears, never telling us to stop because good children, or good gods, do not cry. Sophia is strong enough to birth the Uncreated in our Being, forever being both one just like us, yet forever being the one uniquely whose womb became more spacious than the heavens, containing the uncontainable God, and her Son. Intuition is like a Man too. Like the Man who gave ‘names to all the species that God gave Genesis in the Garden, and then cared for being the vice-Sovereign over the whole of the created world. Intuition sees through the glass dimly and knows safety. Intuition needs not be told that to love your neighbor here are some things that you shouldn’t do to them. Intuition knows as it is known, to love always flows from love, and from negation is impossible to impugn another in the slightest of manner. How can One Icon of God initiate harm to One other Icon of God, save if we reject intuitive creatureliness wed to the genesis of heaven’s love lived out with and in this and every world. Intuition, both in its iconographic genesis, before nakedness was traded for a clothed relationship with the Divine; and in its transfigured, recapitulated, resurrected, new day, the Lord’s Day, is trustworthy. I believe this to be the Truth. I do not know how naked I am willing to be before and in this Truth.
Note: All quotes from Christian and Jewish writings are my own translations, hopefully as literal as possible, and are therefore subject to the flaws of the translator. Wherever there is interpretive parenthesis, it is my opinion as to what would be a more correct understanding of the text, thus highly subjective. My approach to translating, not a liturgical text that is to be sung, chanted and read aloud, but one to be looked at critically from any angle, is to do the work as literal as possible, no matter how wooden or constrictive it might appear. Wherever there are definite or indefinite articles in the text of the writings I have most often placed them, even if redundant, so one is free to see the subtleties not always easily observed in our common texts of such scriptures. My style of writing is extremely prosaic, for which I make no apology in the positive or negative. This is most natural for me, the way that I happen to think, and I do believe, think most clearly. Those who are critical of this style of writing, when making their criticisms will wax verbose, leaving nothing for a passionate soul’s imagination, at the end debauching prosaic writing as too passionate, poetic, personal. I like the prophets, the prophetesses, the seers, the desert monks, mothers and fathers, even the ‘Yoda’ of the Star Wars movie series, as well as the Stylites, those individuals that spent their lives atop a platform atop a poll, the fools for Christ, rarely having a word to say to anyone, yet transforming anyone that allowed them, that have no place in our sophisticated world of bells and whistles that measure goodness by the bottom line.
'Where do we find the Kingdom of God?...’The Kingdom of God does not come by observation….The Kingdom of God is within you.' 'Repent, for the Kingdom of God is upon you.’
‘Let not your good be spoken of as evil’. Because the, ‘Kingdom of God is not of eating and drinking (that is, vegetarianism in contrast to omnivorism and drinking of wine and or alcoholic beverages in contrast to complete abstinence from such drinks, as well as keeping fasts and feasts and holy days or none, and any variations); also it is righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit. There is no ‘the’, definite article in the Greek text. The absence of the definite article ‘the’ prefacing ‘Holy Spirit’ might be more important than it appears at first.’ Here’s the exact order in the Greek text: ‘a Spirit Holy’ or ‘a Spirit that is a Holy one’, neither a definite article with ‘spirit’ or ‘holy’, hence not necessitating a reference The Holy Spirit, thus changing the emphasis to the life within a person being lived out freely over against a life being lived out constricted by commands from outside of our being.
How is the life of God lived out, day after day? St Paul to the Christians living at Rome, chapter eight, tells us, ‘What the Law could not do (could not do more than to make us law-keepers or law-breakers), in that it was powerless in the flesh (to give the doer the ability and joy to continue); The God, having sent his only Son, in the likeness of the sinful flesh, and in behalf of sin, judged the sin in the flesh, that the requirement of the Law should be fulfilled in us, who not according to a flesh is walking, rather according to a Spirit. Because they that are according to a flesh (keeper of the law or otherwise, in the context) do mind the things of flesh; and they (that walk) according to spirit –mind- the things of The Spirit.’ Note: The life of God, the righteousness of God, even the legal requirement found within the Law of commandments, again the Life of God is, by the Son’s death and life, fulfilled ‘in’ us, not merely ‘for’ us. The point of St Paul’s words in this chapter as well as the previous chapter is to encourage the person who finds themselves at the short end of the stick. These folk ‘miss the mark’, they ‘sin’, no matter how much they try, like the Saintly Apostle Paul, in chapter seven in the Roman letters, ‘the will is always present (to obey God), but how to perform that which is good, I find not.’ The Law, especially the whole of it, not only the ten words (Decalogue, literally, ‘ten words’, not ‘ten commandments’, which shifts the emphasis to more of a ‘guide’, rather than an anvil ready to come down upon your head when you ‘transgress’ it), will ultimately do one thing. Condemn. Why? Because it must continue to be followed, no matter how many more laws are attached. It does not, it can not ‘bring us back to The Garden.’ ‘There is NOW (my emphasis) therefore no condemnation to those in (in communion, as in chapter 6, by baptism’s transformation of death’s burial and life’s opening of it’s tomb in order to live, not just live again, but live abundantly in step with the crucified risen God) Christ Jesus, who walk not according to the a flesh (that is, the whole of the law), but according to a Spirit. For the Law of The Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set me free from The Law of the sin and the death.’
Some things that are often construed as together are things like 'intuition' and 'trust', the kind that children may seem to have with strangers. No, I do not believe that they're the same. Children trust adults because their experience, good or bad, tells them to trust us. We adults tell them to do so. – My oldest daughter from my second marriage did not choose to sit on my father’s lap until she had reached just about four years of age. I was scolded by both family and friends, of good intentions but blind I would say, for being unloving, for refusing to ‘make’ my daughter to express this sort of love to her grandfather. Sometime after around four years of age she began to kiss, by choice, and when she chose to do so, only then, and hug my father. Guess what? She is the one closest to my father, both my true intent as well as innate intimacy for my father’s, her grandfather’s good and goodness. I am glad that I followed my intuition rather than what the constraints of the world around us, both religious and secular, whatever this means. - Intuition will tell our children and us, their parents to watch out for the person that they do not know, though their learned experience tells them that adults, Mommies, Daddies, and so on take care of little people, therefore they can be trusted. Once a friend of mine said to me, 'Yes, children seem to always like you, but children also seem to like pedophiles.' I laughed with her. Today I find the observation to be untrue. I believe that children love, period, by nature and as well intuitively express this to those they are free to love. Violators, of any sort, of children, or other trusting innocents, manipulate this purity of person for their own purposes. They betray an intuitive pure trust and betray what and who is a True Person.
I believe that intuitively we trust the Mother of our God, Jesus the Lord and Christ. (Jesus is the same name, ‘Joshua’, to get perspective. Lord, is a divine respect shown towards those in a place that expects it, like, kings, presidents, bishops and such. Christ is the Hoped for one, ‘Anointed One’, literally, again a title and or expression of respect, hope and honor. Jesus, the same name as we hear elsewhere, ‘Hosea’, ‘Jesus’, pronounced, ‘Hasus’, Yeshua, Joshua, is a the name for this person, that some also call, ‘Lord,’ and or, ‘Christ’.) When this intuition is betrayed by religious leaders, either to one extreme or the other, our innocence is betrayed no less than a rape or incestuous attack upon a true person.
Intuition blesses the children, and says, 'For such is the Kingdom of Heaven.' Violation of purity and natural intuition holds away from this Kingdom children and women coming to Christ the Anointed King of the People Israel as well as the Pagans, questions whether the non-Jews should be allowed to be part of Jesus' group and turns away those who do not measure up to their standard, even if the standard comes from God, or are said to. St. Paul reminds us in Romans chapter thirteen that 'Love fulfills the Law.' This is an intuitive life in Christ, the other, the keeping of laws and commandments, though necessary for those who choose not to love their neighbors, even especially those that hate them is merely a matter of marking time till the undertaker comes.
Intuition is connected to nature, if what we are referring to is our genesis makeup, our core being, our essence of self, whether understood personally, or collectively. Intuition is not nature, when used as a universal assumption about one thing or the other. Not all will agree with me. That’s ok. I will not agree with you if you disagree with me, just to make sure that we’re on the same page. The holiest of our Christian champions of faith seems to align intuition and nature together. At least this is the way that he sounds when he makes his, though few, thank God, arguments. ‘Does not nature teach us, or does not teach us,’ this is one of St Paul’s arguments for whatever he’s saying that does not, did not, have universal affirmation. The other one is, ‘And I do think that I do have the Holy Spirit within me.’ He said, ‘Does not nature teach you that it is a shame for a man to wear long hair?’ Actually, no it does not. But in Roman society, as well as much of the Hellenic Jewish society of his time, men did cut their hair short. Yet this was and remained an anomaly in men’s hairdressing for most of our known history. He made the same case, in context, for the women in the Church to wear veils, and for men to not cover their heads during prayer, this latter issue being contrary to the Jewish practice of our Lord as he and all other Jewish men would have followed, both in the Temple and the Synagogue. He said the same sorts of things about a woman’s role within the teaching structure of the Church, that men are the natural heads over women. But according to whose nature? And in relation to the innocence of the male-female shared image and likeness of God before their eating of the forbidden fruit or in relation to their strained desires after the ‘fall’ from this innocence into the tensions of ‘he will rule over you, and you will seek his desire – his place,’ the result of the Garden being aloof, male and female arguing about whose place is to first and now their need to not only to tend to the Earth’s welfare, but to tend through it too. Nature, according to this Saint’s words teaches us many things, but the nature that he is speaking is more akin to ‘his’ learned experience. This is not intuition. At the same time, some of his, as ours, experience may at points connect with the Truth of Intuition and not merely prove his, or my, point. To replace one law with another one is merely changing gloves. The ‘Schoolmaster’, to borrow from St Paul again, is our tutor into the liberty of living in union with the Heavenly life of Christ, Anointed One of knowing, ‘Place your affections upon those things in the heavenlies, from whence our life is lived.’ If one lives her whole life under the burden of the stake always being moved so you’re never able to consistently hit the mark, the stake, then you’ll become the beaten, abused child of love, so called, or like a mule whose attention is never gotten a hold. Do we desire to be tutored by beatings, chastisements, purifications of the Lord? If you say, ‘Yes,’ well that’s obviously your choice, yet I must ask the question to such a one, ‘Why?’ Because someone told you the this is ‘good for you’, much like the innocuous words of a parent as they’re raising their hand above your head, and rear, ready to apply some ‘instruction’, saying, ‘This is going to hurt me more than you.’ Bull shit. It only hurts the parent whose hand knows better to miss than their own pride needs to make sure that the one person unable to sufficiently fight back is adequately ‘taught a lesson.’ ‘Lord have mercy,’ I pray that I or they never need taught an eternal lesson like this one.
'We are judges of all things, yet not judge of any person.' Here’s a literal, though wooden, translation of where this passage comes from, St Paul to the Christians living at Corinth, his first letter to them chapter two, towards the end of the chapter: '...The spiritual one judges all things, though is by no one judged. Because who did know the mind of the Lord? Who shall teach him; but we, who have Christ's mind know all things.' Earlier he spoke: 'Things that eye has not seen, and ear has not heard, and into the heart of man(as in mankind, not gender) came not, which God prepared for those that love him. But to us God has revealed by his Spirit. Because the Spirit searches all things even the depths of God. Because who knows the things of men save the spirit of the man which is in him. So also the things of God no one knows save the Spirit of God. In contrast we have not received the spirit of the world, but the Spirit which is from the God, that we might know the things God.'
The Prophet Jeremiah says, ‘The heart is wicked above all, who can know it? The Lord knows it and tries the reigns thereof.’ The Prophet is addressing the unrepentant people of the nation Israel, at the time under slavery to the Babylonian and Assyrian rule, primarily through their religious leaders, hence the need of a Prophet, not one of their elders, priests or teachers. Do not the Christian Scriptures instruct us to test all things, prove all things; hold fast onto those things that are good to hold fast to?’ Did not our Lord Jesus say, ‘It is not what goes into a person that defiles them, but that which comes out of a person?’ Why? Because ‘it is out of the overflowing of the mouth that the heart speaks.’ It is from the spirit of a person that can be said, as our Lord has, ‘Wherever your treasure is that is where your heart is also.’
Yes we have teachers. To be one’s own teacher is much like a lawyer representing themselves. The teacher, as well as the lawyer, has a fool for a teacher. St John the Beloved in his first letter to the Christians living everywhere, tells us that one who has received the ‘anointing’, the ‘sealing of the Holy Spirit’ has no need of a teacher, because the Spirit teaches one all that they need to know. Yes, true, but one must remember that St John the Evangelist is merely a man, teaching us that we have no need of a teacher. Every teacher given easily to pontificating as though they have a message from God (obviously, I am such a person) that all must hear, and not just hear, but obey, should carefully be guided by these words. The teacher is not a necessity for the one who has received the anointing, and, yes, continues in this anointing with each breath, each heart beat, ‘Lord have mercy.’
St Paul told St Timothy that the ‘Law (the old testament laws in commandments) is good for the lawless.’ St John in his first general letter to Christians says, ‘Sin is lawlessness,’ (Grk., anti-nomos, meaning: over against law, not the translated, ‘the breaking of the law,’ something entirely different and not what the Greek text says or had in mind. It is not ‘The Law’ that is difficult to keep. Frankly any person is able if they choose to keep the’ ten commandments’, or properly, ‘words’. The writer of the Proverb collections in the old testament that ‘The Law’ and or the ‘keeping of the Law’ is the beginning of Wisdom. The Proverbs also tells, ‘The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge.’ How nice. Yet if the fear of the Lord is connected with the keeping of the Law, which is doable, and therefore we are not, on the minimum side, harming and showing disrespect of God or our neighbor, then it is simply a way of opening the door into the ‘more perfect law of liberty’ or as St James, the speaker of these words goes on to call, ‘the royal law of liberty.’ It is not difficult to keep ’10 restrictions upon behavior’, what is difficult is to keep all of the regulations that came along with this summation of the law of commandments that is said to have come down from a mountain from God through Moses to the people Israel. Eight-hundred plus laws, not counting all of the Talmudic laws and interpretations of the Law and the Talmudic laws and the laws upon laws upon laws, most of which had nothing to do with loving God purely and our neighbor from the same innocence centered intuition of heart. It is easy to not murder your neighbor. You don’t kill them. It is easy to not allow yourself to contemplate their end of life in this world and their present body. What’s not so easy, is to love them and to hope for their well-being, period, whether it is to our benefit or not. Yet, St John says that ‘,to want another’s demise is to hate them, and to hate your neighbor is to be a murderer; and we know that no murderer has eternal life housed within themselves.’
Can one’s mind ‘retrained’, ‘religioned’, ‘reaffirmed’, ‘recapitulated’, ‘restored’, brought back, to start with, into ‘The Garden’ be trusted? Can such an intuition still exist within each person? Is it possible for one who has lost the ability to know themselves and therefore God come to a place of innocence, to use St Paul’s words, chapter five, and to ‘know’, ‘Where there is no law, there is no sin to give account.’
The answer to the above introduction by way of a process of questions, some overt and some implied by way of the process of the narrative is transparent. It is as far as my own conclusions at this point in my walk in this life as I know it and do not know.
Please indulge this step into the expanse of God’s glory revealed to and in us, his adopted Children. St Paul in the fifteenth chapter of his letter to the Christians living at Corinth reminds us, first, of what we should already know. We are each, in our species, children from the Earth as Adam was and is (Hebrew words ‘adama’ and ‘arretz’ are play on words for what we simply translate ‘Adam’ or ‘Man’, which is in Hebrew, ‘one from the earth’ and ‘man’, not distinct from wo-man, man with a womb as goes the story, but ‘man’, as collective personage relative to the collective one God, saying, ‘Let Us make Man in Our image; male and female created he them’.). By the Gospel, the God Spell, the Good Spell, the Good Word or God Word, we have come to know the beginning of the power of the resurrection of Christ, a power that transforms life into life-giving rather than martyrdom towards the grave, back to the dust from whence we all have had our Genesis. This is still a ‘this worldly good news’, how this world returns ‘Back to the Garden’. Note that St Paul goes on to open the door of a reality akin to the Burning Bush, The Torah, The Holy of Holies, The Most Holy and ever-Virgin Theotokos (Greek, literally, ‘God-bearer’), this mere Woman through whom a New Man has come, the Heavenly Man, similar to the Man from the Earth, but something more. The Apostle Paul expands this holy mystery of the Incarnation to our potential transformation by and in union with this Heavenly Man, Christ Jesus the Lord. We not only get to go back to our Genesis, the Earth, our first Mother of being and the beginning of innocence and true intuition. Through the Heavenly Person we Persons walking in and with Him move beyond a Garden from a particular geographical location in the time-space sphere of knowing and are invited into a knowing where teachers are students and students are teachers, where God is a Person within our created species and we are each a Person in the God Family who have our being in the perpetual movement of nonknowing, nonspace, nontime, nonbeing, the being and knowing of the I AM THAT I AM, adopted into the relationship of Person as God. Hence St Athanius words, ‘God became one of our species, in our nature, that we might become God in his (nature).’
A friend of mine said something this morning, or afternoon, after Liturgy, about a trustworthy ‘intuition’. He said something like this: ‘In our being, the being that was naked in the Garden and had no need or desire to be clothed, in our Genesis, we had, and still have an intuition that is trustworthy and therefore true.’ He went on to say, ‘At any point that we no longer hide from God, that God no longer has a need to say, ‘Where are you, One from the Earth, and you One from the One from the Earth?’ – here we rediscover what was never lost. Hard to find, hard to know, hard to believe? Yes. But not truly lost, unknown, unbelievable.’ Often when we believe that we are always falling, failing to use a poorer, yet more used word, we awake out of a deep sleep to find that we are safe I bed. Yes, we truly feel like we’re falling; but the truer truth is that it is a misperception, a feeling.
Our Genesis of being is where we see our kind, our species living, walking, talking, playing, as it were, with God, with each other and with every creature within this sphere of knowledge. The potential was to be God, sharing in the Family of plurality of Love, growing into this likeness of perpetual movement, always Truth, never stagnant, the Kingdom of God superspatially exploding, making an exponential curve, even infused by a quantum leap over any and every possible domino effusion to be less dynamic than redundancy. The Story of the Serpent, the sadness of the lie, was that the One from the Earth and the One from the One from the Earth were deceived of their natural innocence and intuition. The lie was not that they could or would become God(s). The lie was that they could circumvent the movement needed to know perpetual movement within The God, becoming not only Image Bearers of The God, but Ones with The God’s Likeness, personality, as well. The other lie was that they did not already have within them, in their Genesis, the beginning of the purity of Love. The story of sin is, I believe, the story of being betrayed by the Truth, or doing the deception upon another’s God-Human Nature-Person. When I reject the reality, the Truth that there is One God, then I will ultimately not see the One Person before my face, the Icon of more than what and who the Icon appears to be. When I reject the Person of the God and or Genesis of Creation before my face I will most likely ultimately reject the uniqueness of Personality. When I reject the Multiplicity of Synergistic Truth of Being, that God is God who is One God, and God is One who is known through more than One Person, Personality, then I will most likely reject the Multiplicity of Personhood of my neighbor. Here I’ll be found making them little more than allusions, and finally illusions of some supposed reality where the Only Truth is the I, where the truth if be known is merely the ‘Me’, the whole of the illusion is ‘My’ dream, God that ‘I AM’. Collective Consciousness needs not be a code phrase for ‘,I know nothing,’ to borrow from a sixties weekly TV series. The lie of the Serpent is the lie of self-loathing, ‘I’m not good enough,’ the lie of I deserve it, ‘That’s my tree and my fruit…I take care of it,’ the lie of inclusion and care for my neighbor in order to succeed at all costs, ‘Come a eat, it tastes good, we’ll be like God(s), knowing,’ the lie of segregation and bigotry, ‘Obviously The God doesn’t think that there is anything wrong with this, otherwise The God would’ve have stopped us,’ the lie of Monism at the exclusion of Koinonia, Fellowship within community, ‘The One from the One from the earth ate of the fruit…...And she gave the fruit to the One from the Earth, and he ate the fruit,’ and the lie that ones actions, behavior, deeds are ever truly in secrete, ‘They hid from The God-Elohim, with whom they had every morning heretofore strolled through the Garden…..Naked.’
Jesus does what the First Adam from the Earth did not and could not do. Jesus the God from Heaven and the Man from the Earth, forever the God-Human Person brings us forward, not back, to The Garden. The Garden where Heaven and Earth are wed, where Intuition is reinformed, where potential likeness of being the Creator is not only possible but has be accomplished, hence the newness of this new day is already passé. But we must first be willing to be naked, as my friend said, naked before eternity, time, space, creation, creator, looking within the mirror of Truth, not merely my ‘me’ and my ‘life’ and my ‘way’, and begin to experience the metamorphosis of Truth Incarnate.
Lofty? Yes. Lofty? No. Is God knowable? Yes. Is God knowable? No. Am I, are You knowable? Yes and No. How complex is it to be naked in the Truth? As complex as we choose. How profoundly simple is it to be living naked in the Truth? It may be as simple as I or We choose to be present, sufficiently to hear the ‘still calm voice rustling in the cool breeze of Heaven’s Garden’ that I or We are ‘in movement’, like a dance through Fall’s leaves, seemingly almost haphazard, though not one soul is estranged by the other, able to leap, roll, spin, jig and sit watching, all part of the cacophony of synergistic rhapsody of The Divine, The God, The Elohim.
posted by Timothy's at 7:09 AM
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