Light of the early morning brings the fullness of hope. The colors of the heavens are shone upon by the light; they are brought out in their excitement and newness by the overlays of the light. Light penetrates every being, interweaves its warmth and laughter and power so that it makes anew what was old, makes shine in new glory what was fading of its own strength.

There is a need to grasp a certain sort of spirit—a philosophical spirit, or a spirit of some philosophical thought—in order to be able to do philosophy in a certain way. It is not a way of proceeding by definitions, taking careful steps. It is being swept away by the force of a thought, and being attentive to the core of the idea. Being precise is in a way working about details. Assuming that we got our suppositions right that is! The work of working out systems of ideas is not always the most important work in our pursuit of truth. If there is no other way to proceed in the way of truth, then so be it. We must only ever take small steps, making every step count for something. But why assume that that is the only way? Suppose we can grasp truths about the world by many means! Suppose in fact non-minute intellectual movements are necessary. We do harm to our efforts in reaching the truth to the degree we disregard thinking well broadly and intuitively. If in fact we do think broadly and intuitively, and we must, then let us get this right as well.

There are things and ways that one can only understand in the blessed state because understanding them requires one to be in the blessed state. Why is it the case that? I’m not so sure but one thing is that it requires the perspective of the blessed one to understand how one relates blessedly with the things about which he speaks and explains. In such instances, the blessed one does not merely speak about things, but speaks them specifically as he relates to them and speaks them by means of his relating to them such that if it were not the case that his relating to them is understood, the things spoken won’t be understood either.

Timeless days I’ve spent in the presence of the Lord. They were neither fast nor slow yet stretched from one corner to the other and my life was full in them.

There is no drawing near to God while rejecting His creation. His children carry His Light, and how shall we despise them yet claim to love God? We shall find that though with words we say we wish to love God, to come to know Him, they are empty and unfulfilling until we find our peace with those who are of God. Ah but the unspeakable, far surpassing Love of God! What is the darkness of petty hatred before His Light? Nothing!—We shall find. Blessed be the Lord! I am blessed in Him and I bless Him and His great and glorious creation. Amen.

There is much that prevents us from being true in God. To be true in God is to be upright in heart so that one is able in faith to do what one has willed in the Lord. One is led by the vision of the Lord, and one pulls together all the different parts of one’s life to the core of one’s being where God is, and lives in faith as one converses with God through life and hears and obeys Him. Then one speaks in faith and acts in faith as the goodness and the love of God move one to speak and act, and one is free in heart and mind to do all things as one so lives by the Lord.

Suppose for now we have no way of making things that we believe make sense together or work together. Do we then believe the best that we can? But what is the best that we can believe? Suppose we must update our beliefs somehow in the face of something new we’ve learned. Trade-offs are noted and compromises are made. We can, as it were, bring the hosts of Heaven down to find that they too are but dust and earth. But what if they shine too brightly in our hearts and no degree of compromise is possible to smother the brilliance of light and the fullness of life they produce from within? One lies to oneself in declaring that for rationality’s sake one has found them to be nothing but the dirt beneath us, just as mundane, just as insignificant. For these, to be rational is to be faithful to the inner testimony of the beliefs also—for it seems that different beliefs testify differently. And so perhaps for these, no compromise that soils the hosts of Heaven can be a rational one. But why should beliefs have different inner testimonies? Why not stand indifferently with respect to all beliefs? Why not assign equal significance to each fairly and squarely? But can we? After all, by the time when we take up the project of self-evaluating our belief systems with adequate evaluative notions, we have already accrued within us innumerable beliefs of different degrees. In favoring one set of compromises over another, we are led by the beliefs that already speak more strongly within us. Alas! Our beliefs have already been updated by the lives we’ve lived and the choices we’ve made. And our beliefs now will constrain us to the sort of rationality that accords with themselves. If beliefs color our sense for rationality, then our colored sense for rationality colors beliefs back. But then suppose now we decide to simply put some beliefs we previously held strongly on neutral ground. What would this mean? None other than to decide to hold those beliefs that make us think that one set of beliefs is more rational than another. It seems that to hold the same rationality standards is to believe those things about rationality over which the same standards of rationality supervene. If such supervenience holds, then it follows that we cannot agree on the standards of rationality without agreeing on the beliefs about rationality over which those standards supervene. Our beliefs come already structured by the time we get around to thinking about what makes a well structured beliefs or what counts as a good structure of beliefs. The structure itself reflects the specific beliefs that are held by us. We cannot undo the belief structure, not in the way it really matters, without altering the base beliefs.

We keep on repeating to ourselves that we do this and that in order to live for God’s glory. But do we ever care to ask God Himself what it is that He desires from us? Anything can be for the glory of God. But nothing can be for the glory of God without what it takes for anything to be for the glory of God. Not with words but with truth. 

Understanding for us is always what we understand through ourselves. We always enflesh the bare and ghostly ideas suggested to us with the contents of experience with which we are familiar. How do we dress them? How do we fill up the words and concepts spoken to us? Richly breathing the divine wind and gazing on the eternal holy loving light, we see not just a tree but a tree brimming with life divine. We look into the heavens, and there it is! The depth of the tranquil love of God. Think not that only the unfit minds failing to meet certain standards of rationality favored today inject inappropriate interpretations into things that do not inherently warrant them. Filled with the Love of God, one sees His Love in all things. Suppose someone filled with the Spirit of God exclaims, “God is Love!” Each hearer will understand this to the degree his own life can testify and fill up its meaning as to what it would be for it to be true that God indeed is Love! Poverty in one’s life experiences about the things one could experience (but does not) is ultimately a poverty in the capacity to understand descriptions or pictures or concepts or parables or imageries meant to communicate lessons or teachings predicated on having had those experiences. (To those who have more will be given but to those who have not even what they have will be taken away.) Not only so, but often it is the case that we are to grow in certain aspects of those experiences, such as divine love, but in which, without having had even a partial experience, one cannot hope to grow. (All receive the love of God. But not all experience the love of God. Perhaps it is the case that there is a need for a particular turning of our attention or adopting a way of looking at things that is expedient for coming to know God’s love. Perhaps such a way is even necessary to come to know God’s love.)

Our lives are pieces of meaning through which we receive, embrace, and grow in God’s giving of Himself to us. God gives and gives. And we receive through the kinds of lives we’ve lived—because no matter how generously God gives, we can only receive those things that we are capable of understanding. Think of our understanding as a net. We can catch no more than what our net is capable of catching. The net of understanding is made out of experiences of one’s life. And experiences are threaded by the choices one makes—the choices of forgiveness, meekness, understanding, righteousness, kindness, and love. The bigger the net, the more we become capable of receiving what God pours forth from Himself! He always and abundantly gives. He does not cease. His Light shines bright for all eternity. And the cycle of growth begins from the receiving of God. One opens one’s net (however small or big) to God and receives from Him His Love. Then our lives are filled with His Love and we become strengthened to live by His Love. Then we thread our nets more and more with the choices that we make, those choices coming from God. These threads form life experiences that are made out of the material of the thread (if of love, then experiences of love; if of hardness of heart, then experiences of such things). Newly threaded portion of the net makes for a larger net! And our nets grow larger to receive more of His gifts. All our experiences gradually get brighter and brighter, full of life and hope. And so on as our lives get threaded with pieces of God, we become like God, shining bright with His glory. Praise His Name! Open wide your arms and receive the blessings that come from Him. May the Love of God fill our hearts and lead us to greater measures of His Love. Amen.

Empty of certain characteristic experiences, one can’t understand others who speak in a manner that presupposes access to them. It is something like this: Those who share a very specific context that is associated with some song, when hearing it, have an experience that highlights or reminisces the particular context with which they are all familiar. Hearing the song in their old age brings them the peculiarly colorful memories that only they can understand, the color of which only they can recognize. And their enraptured discussion of it is hardly understood by those who do not share the experiential context. Their talk presupposes the same sort of reminiscing, the same sort of color of the memory it brings.

Why the talk of sin with such frequency as it is talked about in Christianity? One is conscious of one’s own sin, and feels its fiery torments upon one’s soul. One lives one’s life avoiding a direct confrontation with the fact of one’s own sin at all costs. One gives only side glances every once in a while very much conscious of its ominous presence, and lives almost as if one venerates it. One does everything one can to avoid facing up to it. Yet one deceives oneself that that isn’t one’s reality. One denies the existence of the sin and all of the associated conduct consequently make no sense. They are given different justifications; for to leave them unexplained is to leave remnants of reminders of their true cause. Only if one knew that upon facing the sin directly, one would’ve done quite well if one could keep oneself from laughter: “All these past struggles for a thing so small as this?” The truth sets free. Only when one skirts around the sin as if it were some imposing master to be respected that it has power over the individual. For one imposes behavioral constraints upon oneself believing this and that about sin, which one is too afraid to check for the fear of looking directly into the eyes of the beast. Sin’s power is in deception. Its power is to lurk in the shadows of one’s soul always amorphous to the soul’s ken. There is great beauty and glory in every single person. O how everyone lives in the consciousness of sin, and thus live motivated by the darkness of one’s soul. One wears the darkness on the face, and hides the light that could shine and so bring joy to the world. Cast away the darkness. But if one would deceive oneself that darkness is not when it is, it does one no good and again brings oneself to live a life respecting sin rather than the true Light that resides in all.

Wherein lies the strength of life that drives toward fulfillment? In faith and courage of course!

No man is capable of such greatness as the world wants it in the eyes of Heaven. There exists no greatness on earth that would be praised as greatness in equal measure in Heaven. Heaven counts greatness differently. What is small in the world is great in Heaven and what is great in the world is counted as nothing in Heaven.

It is often spoken that sunsets and sunrises are beautiful beyond words. But one never catches such beauty looking for it in every sunset and sunrise. The unspeakable beauty catches you! It catches one by surprise. It catches one when one does not expect it and makes one speechless.

It seems that often what I don’t understand are expressions and not concepts themselves. Gleaning concepts from expressions can be done more easily if one is familiar with the concepts. But if one does not possess a feel for the concepts already, then one must carefully construct them with the help of the material provided by the expressions—and they are disjoint concepts associated separately with parts of the expression. Experimentation and error are one’s friends, as through them one chisels a more precise sense for what could be meant by the expressions, as one eliminates inadequate images and keeps and updates better fitting pictures and overlapping and relevant parts of the pictures. A proposition then functions like the concept of the expression on the whole. And although it may be importantly related to its composite concepts used in the expression, the relation can be varied and not always straightforwardly reductionistic. Many times, what we want to do is to convey a feeling or a certain image of some big concept by means of an expression. The standard of adequacy for success of conveying some fact or some concept depends on the facts about the context in which the conveying is to take place. Genius body language readers may require no conventional linguistic exchange to communicate certain facts. (And in this case, genius body language readers are more than body language readers: better yet they can be called context readers, or simply wise men.)

Body language can be treated as a sort of language. What expert body language readers do is apply some (adequate/workable?) interpretation scheme based on overt behavioral patterns. If the behavior with proper context can be shown to imply a fairly specific decision scheme then there are implications that can be appropriately (rationally?) drawn about those who display signal behavioral patterns under specific contexts. Perhaps behavioral patterns are too sensitive to context. But this doesn’t imply that there exists a fundamental difference between semantical assignment to regularity of symbols or symbol substitutes occurring in natural languages and psychological profiling based on behavior patterns with proper contexts. If one’s understanding of the context is broad enough, then one can seem to identify the right sorts of causal or motivational bases. And one can imply all sorts of facts or information should one’s understanding be apt(?). Sciences seem to operate under the same sort of procedure. Fundamentally, they count differences and patterns of differences. An assignment of some pattern to a theoretical unit allows the theoretician to relate with the world theory-wise. And most patterns do well to capture some aspect about the world such that the theoretician can appropriate relating to the world that theory-wise.

The one who so aptly relates to the world about him is the one who understands all things rightly without being omniscient about every possible difference-maker. 

We seem to understand and think about our lives much through our own plans and desires for our lives. It often seems to us our lives are those that relate in significant ways to what we want for our lives. That is how we think of our lives but our lives are bigger than that. 

The one who often sees much beauty in many things is perhaps most likely to create something beautiful.

It seems like the way people want to structure their own lives is importantly tied to their attitudes toward morals, and the way they want to structure their own lives turns out to be the way they want to see the world structured as well. When dug deep enough into one’s own motivational structures, one can find a sense for or a notion of goodness (or at least a class of good things or vague and pervasive feelings about certain things as good) that further structures one’s beliefs about how oneself should be and how the world should be. Morality is an expression of this deeper structuring principle.

The physical world is God’s world. The theoretical world is perhaps man’s world. It is at least the world with which the theoretician would like to say: This is how the world is like, sort of. God’s world informs the man and his doxastic relation to the world. Sometimes gently, sometimes violently, the world offers itself as God’s grace and steers the path of man’s journey. 

Pondering the ways of God brings life to my soul. On the other hand, should I not think of God in what I do, all that I do become so bleak and dark, and there is no strength within me to continue in anything.

It is good to think about the Lord and all His ways.

If wisdom is that part of someone which provides guidance for how one ought to live by presenting what would be good to pursue, then to prefer God’s wisdom rather than one’s own is to submit one’s sensibilities for goodness to the gracious guidance of God. It is to embrace the truth of one’s weakness despite the seeming strength to our own eyes, and to relate to God in the realest way possible for us—to seek and ask God to reveal and teach His goodness.

Grace is an aspect or a part of the Love of God.

If wisdom has much to do with one’s plans for one’s life, then receiving God’s wisdom has partly to do with letting go of one’s own plans.

There is a way of thinking about beliefs that treats them as ways of describing the believer. To say what one believes is in a way to say how one sees oneself as relating to the world. (Of course verbal beliefs don’t really count straightforwardly. Things that are really believed by the believer are perhaps wholly counted as ways one relates to the world. And the things that one thinks oneself as believing are the ways that seem to oneself as how one relates to the world. Verbal beliefs betray partly what one thinks one ought to believe, or at least what one wants to seem as believing.) 

What I do not understand is too great of a thing that I should spend my attention on it. It is formless. It is chaotic. It is confusing. It seems good to me that I should proceed step by step from what I do understand. 

Pain makes us say things like: I don’t want to experience this. And a way of accepting life comes sort of like this: God, may Your will be done. It is being accepting of life, even a painful life.

Though my words are weak and slow, Your Spirit is alive in me! Blessed be Your name. Amen!

I strive to achieve communion with the Lord—that inner wholeness that flows from within and fills my whole being and shines forth outward. One calls it happiness. Another joy. Yet another calls it a sense or a feeling of peace. Call it what you want! What matters is that it is something real with which you deal—that you really do abide in the Lord.

If we were to represent the world of God, then the representation is the Christian picture. I utter the language of the Christians; I speak the language of the soul–the language of life!

Be honest with your current desires. They are expressions of who you are now. If you bury them and hide from them with ideal pictures you purport to pursue, then you do yourself a disfavor from actually engaging yourself to attain the ideals. Only by dealing with the truth of yourself now will you know the truth. 

Do I see beauty in me? Do I see beauty in others? Why do they seem so intimately interconnected? If I were to see beauty in God, would not I see beauty in all things—the very Beauty of God?

Goodness that shines forth that is seen springs up from deep within. Even what you see of yourself that seems to you good or bad is the fruit of the heart.

There is Love in your heart. Speak out of it! And Love will grow. For more you give place and power to Love within you, more it will come to fill your heart, and overflow. And overflow indeed! Blessed be the Lord, God is Love. Blessed be His Name!

There is a certain sort of inner rejection that amounts to a rejection of the truth that rings in one’s soul. It’s hard to describe what this phenomenon is—both the ringing and its rejection. It is sort of like an aching, a longing, a subtle and gentle pull that feels right.

옳게 살아라. 그러면 네가 옳게 변하리니.

How could it be that the work that I do becomes the fruit of the love within? I might evaluate my work with various criteria—its influence or reception in the context I deem to be of higher value. My aim determines what sort of fruit my work would turn out to be. Ah would that I be broken in my paths to destruction lest I finish my course there. Lord, I surrender to You, so that Your Way be my way. Amen.

Certain desires (often selfish) are like the fog of the mind. They crowd one’s mind-space whether one wants them to or not; they are always there in some form or to some degree—they force their presence upon the present attention such that I cannot be wholly with what is before me. I cannot be with the work that I do now, I cannot be wholly with another person before my eyes, and I cannot be wholly with my God in my prayers. What to do? How to be free from such desires? To be free from them is to be truly fine whether the objects of such desires come true or not. This requires surrenderance and faith. Surrenderance, because to accept well however the world may turn out to be in relation to one’s desires is to surrender the course of the world to how it shall be. Faith, because to accept well however the world may turn out to be is to believe that the course of the world as it shall be is still in the hands of God—i.e., His goodness still prevails, indeed overflows, over the world should one participate in it!

One can be thankful if one can accept wholeheartedly what comes to one. And one can be happy if one is always thankful. For thankfulness characterizes both the heart and how the heart relates to what one receives. One is thankful in seeing the goodness in something, and if one sees goodness in all things then the heart is filled with goodness and thus is happy.

Only under the guidance of God, can I ask questions that pertain to knowledge.

Through our particular passions we come to know more general features of the world—the features over which differences can come under the same whole in harmony. 

O would that I abide in the faith of my Lord even through the darkness of my soul’s ways. But does He not say that He holds me? Does He not respond to me that even darkness is like light to Him? He is my Light. Amen.

What is it that I really want here and now? Do not my desires reveal the edges of my world? The terminus of my understanding and vision? Let me see the world, let me see others, let me see the Lord my God! Lest I should only ever see lesser and lesser, first only of myself and then only of an evil piece of myself. Redemption comes from looking towards Heaven! The Light comes from above and shines down to the deepest of the cracks of the heart. Where will one hide from the Lord? He is there. His Light shines. I will abide in Him. I abide in Him! Thank the Lord. He is my Lord and God forever. Praise His Name! Amen. Amen.

What is it to be truly pious? It is to be really concerned with the things of God.

Oh lift your gaze to heaven and pray. Set your mind on God and is He not there? Blessed be the name of the Lord. Amen.

When my head is stuck in heaven filled with visions of wonders of heaven, all my earthly movements are tainted, as it were, by the things of heaven.

We rejoice when we see the works of God. We rejoice when we see that God works. It is the work of the Lord that we rejoice to see. If we are too stubborn in our own ways to see the works of the Lord, then it is through our helplessness that we will come to rejoice. For in our helplessness we will see that it is indeed God who works and God who does all good things. And our joy will find its place in Him. Amen.

In some strange but real way, to lose here and now is to win in the Kingdom of God. The way is strange to us because we are not yet fully in the Kingdom of Heaven.

People are more pushed to express their latent beliefs in hostile ways to certain other expressions of beliefs. Doesn’t mean that they have different beliefs than in the past when certain ways of expressing beliefs were not so hostile. It’s just that now they find verbal high ground to be much more near to their convenience and ease.

It’s not about getting glimpses in the right way. What it is about is that what is seen through the glimpses become one’s whole reality.

A part of what it is to fear the Lord is to be mindful of the Lord’s ways. One cannot be mindful of the Lord except truly.

I think a part of what sustains a vivid life of faith is making choices that are outflows of one’s relationship to God. This relationship ought to be personal because ways in which we construe what is most important to us is personal. We relate to things that are closest to our hearts in personal ways.

Those who attain to the truth are not those who seem predisposed to know well and believe well (i.e., the so called geniuses and smart men) but those who persist in the striving for the truth to the end. 

There are deep mysteries to this life that I cannot understand. But somehow I am made to understand this life one mystery at a time. Beauty and wonder and glory of this life unravel one by one, and I am led to the praise of its Creator in whom I am led to believe is unsurpassed Beauty and unspeakable Wonder.

Nature sings of the happy divine love of God. I wish to come to know this happiness.

God’s rain comes softly to cool the heat of my anxious heart.

I hear the Lord say, “You are free son.” Out of love, I can do all things—all that I desire.

You are within me oh God. And You speak to me from within me and I hear Your voice. To abide in Your voice is true happiness—inexpressible peace of my soul, bliss of my being. Troubles of the world do not bother me. I am one with You, and You fill me with true and deep satisfaction. I bless You oh Lord, my God. Your blessing flows out to me. Amen.

In my prayer I asked God that He would give me in words all the answers to my questions. Yet He gave me Silence and through Silence a deep sense of peace and the sense that all was good. What good are words? It was as though He saw my true need, true desire that laid behind the answers of words I sought, and He gave me Peace. I cared to answer the questions because they troubled my heart. Instead of the lesser answers, He gives the true Answer: Himself. And I am satisfied. When all who seek an answer of the deepest longings of their hearts receive Him, all will be satisfied. Amen.

Places where I empty myself in my life God fills with Himself.

I am a temple of God. God resides within me and when I abide by Him I become a place of His glory.

The Lord is enough for me! Amen.

In living we will come to knowledge and understanding.

The righteousness of the Lord is like healing salve to my soul! Bless His name. Amen!

My happiest thoughts are the thoughts about God. Perhaps it is better said that they are thoughts that God blesses or He is with. Somehow the thoughts about God are about the goodness of the whole world. Or in my thoughts about God the Goodness of God from within me swells up and reaches for every part of the world. O how beautiful He is! O how beautiful His Creation!

Thoughts are of one importance. But they are not nearly the whole of life.

With God I can do all things. Praise His Name! Amen.

Amen.

There is none like God! Sing to Him! You shall find strength eternal.

Truest repentance is full abiding in God. There is no anguish there, no guilt but the all encompassing Love of the Father and the richness of His Presence.

The Lord has heard my prayer, and answered all my heart’s desires. Blessed be His name. Amen.