I bless You Lord. For I love You. I love You and I worship You.

Ah, when I confess my love for my God with my lips the confession of my heart, O how the world changes about me! Do I not carry the effects of God’s Love around me? Even for them to be visible to me? Even to be tangible to me? Thank You God, I can only thank You!

All of us can only ever speak partial truths speaking out of ourselves and out of the world. We can only speak whole truths speaking out of God, however small or mundane a thing we may say.

Praise is like receiving the Light of God with our souls, and after the Light has filled us, formed our inner parts, changed our hearts, returns Whence It came, reflected out of us from our depths, out of our hearts, and through our lips, our tongues, our voices, our eyes, our faces, our lives back unto God.

How to live by God? How to live as though our souls are alive to the Lord? How to feel the fire of God alive and burning within you? It is to do the Will of God everyday, and to learn to live by the Voice of God alone.

In my morning prayer, I felt the Lord tell me to call out to Him in wailing. I whimpered and whispered His Name and could not wail–too afraid that I might wake the others in the house, too afraid of what they would think of me. I was dejected that I could not even do this small a thing. What’s there in others thinking that I’m crazy? God has shown me my limitation–I may say I will do all things for God, but I am in the way. God has revealed this of me, and He said He will make me a vessel worthy of His use. Amen. He will do it.

Do people find God unjust because He has commanded the Israelites to kill all those from the land to which they go? He spared no one: no man, woman, child, no livestock. Do they find God unjust because He commanded to kill even the innocent? “The LORD is King forever and ever; the nations perish from His land.” And everywhere is the Lord’s! It is not that God unfairly and with no cause took Israel’s side and condemned the rest. But God speaks continually that if any does evil, they will die, even the Israelites. Does not God judge the Israelites for their sins? He does! Yet, Israel is a sign to us. If He wipes out Israel, that is when He will wipe out all sinners once and for all. His choice and His mercy on Israel is His choice and His mercy on the rest of us, on the rest of the world. He means to work through Israel, and so now Israel represents His saving work. And those who oppose Israel shall be opposing God, and they will not stand. For the Lord has spoken so. Everyone everywhere deserved to die, yet God has chosen a people that He may save all who would repent and turn to Him–the lessons that must be revealed somewhere, where that somewhere was Israel. Do not say that it is not fair that the innocent should die with the sinners. Death is nothing–it is punishment to those who do evil but it is reward to those who are righteous before God. For what comes after death will be perfectly proportionate to how each lives his own life. No one, when everything is revealed and nothing hidden, will be able to deny God’s justice for all that has happened and will happen to every one of us. The Lord has chosen Israel and in Israel He has come! Praise the Lord that He should deign to save us! He deigns to save us through suffering Israel, through suffering the world, through suffering me. Who can deny His mercy?

It’s an interesting phenomenon that those who are unequivocally committed to knowing and speaking the truth about both external and internal matters seem also to have a deep-seated love in their hearts. (The sort of love that is not superficial but genuine and sacrificial.) It is as if the world and its truths have some sort of underlying connection to love, such that truth is not independent of love, and love truth.

Death, insofar as it means further separation from God, is evil; but it is the greatest good to those whose love for God surpasses all else. We were created for the latter to be our reality! Throughout our lives we choose what death would mean for us. Everyday, in every choice, we make choices that lead us towards one or the other.

God keeps on saying to me that He has a lot to give to me. But I want to give all to Him..!

Augustine says God is not injured by suffering. In some sense He suffers us and suffers our evil, but He is unchanged by His suffering—He is Holy and Good and Happy. May God’s suffering that changes Him not change us.

Our attention can only be given wholly to one thing at a time.

We seek to judge God by our own understanding of what is good and what is bad—not knowing that we cannot understand what is good apart from Him. We hurl ourselves against God with unyielding conviction, and with what terror we will find ourselves on the day when the Truth of God is revealed in full, Its Light shone upon every soul, every nook and cranny, and none can turn his head enough to hide from the eternal blazing declaration: GOOD, GOOD, GOOD!

Fire is power and life but it burns our frail bodies. The Holy Fire of the Lord is Life and Power and Love, and our souls will burn in His Presence with His very Life—and if our souls are not tested, refined and purified to be made to endure the Abundance that is the Life of God, how will His Love appear to us on the day of His unrestrained Revelation?

God spoke through dreams to save men. And some who heeded His words turned to Him. So the world corrupted men’s attitudes towards dreams, that men may not hear from God through them. As a result, men turned against dreams, distrusting them; they eliminated the possibility that God may speak through them. Ah but everything speaks of its Creator—God is not silent in His creation! He speaks through all things! So the world turns people away from all of God’s creation, lest we turn to God in beholding His Glory in creation.

If we turn from God in the world, where do we turn to? To the fake realities and hallucinations of fake realities of our own making—the world that is only true in our own individual eyes, the world that cannot stand the weight of the truth of God’s world.

There are thoughts about God that lead us to Him and there are thoughts about God that don’t. 

God loves His creation—every piece of it. Good and even very good, He observed in Love. It wasn’t just good to God. He made the world so that every piece of the world would know its goodness as He knows it: every piece full of the knowledge of the Love of God! But every piece must know its place in the creation—for to see the Love of God in itself and others, it must know what it is and what it is not. It is a hidden and sublime thing—to hear the whisperings of God’s creation that sings along the moving of the Spirit of God. Once you catch a glimpse of it, you cannot help but start to notice more. Creation absolutely resounds with the praises of the unending Love of God! They grow louder the more you pay attention.

We either live for God or we don’t live at all.

Be not anxious. This is what the Lord commands. How can this be said? We are prone to anxiety upon seeing the world. How can this be said?

Heaven comes to a weeping man and says ‘Be not anxious.’ Heaven cannot say otherwise! Heaven cannot exhort to abide in hell. Heaven can only invite into its inner courts.

Some ideas in me are wordless. They are clear as daylight to me and I can individuate them from the other ideas that I have. But I feel that I must labor to clothe them in words.

The way of the Lord is mysterious and perfect. He balances the whole of the universe such that the tiny bugs are abundant enough to feed the spider in my lawn–all the while teaching men to take care, lest they forsake the way of the Lord.

Am I not ready to die for the Lord for my faith in God? If I believe that God provides and that God calls me to an action of faith that risks worldly stability, would I not live risking extravagantly? Daily I will depend on God and know that His faithfulness is not like the safety of the world! Praise the Lord!

Why do I find fault? See not where the Lord does not see. Judge not what the Lord does not judge. To see as the Lord sees is to see the full and unadulterated truth. To judge as the Lord judges is Love and Righteousness.

People want to be demonstrated, shown to them that they are loved—whatever it would be to them for God to love them in their particular place and particular situation. As if, if those ways did not occur, it is not the case that God loves. If we would stubbornly cling to the truth of God’s love for us, would we not have to reevaluate what it would be for God to love us?

Past the crashing waves and the roaring winds you sail out onto the quiet ocean. It is smooth sailing in gentle yet ever weightier Serenity.

Lord, where do these winds come from? Lord, they come from You. Round and round they ride the currents above. Along the rivers of heavens, they weave through the clouds, touch the sun and the moon. They touch our spirits too, and rush back to the heavens, round and round the currents back to You. Ah, how marvelous You are! I do not know whether it is my spirit that proclaims so or the winds. But there is no greater truth. Ah, how marvelous You Are!

The spirits of men cry out in abject poverty of the Lord. I hear the hunger and the longing. They wring their hearts in earnest desperation to be satisfied by God. But what comes out of their mouths is: give me wealth, give me comfort, give me sex and pleasure, give me power and recognition from others. And they go on hungrier than ever.

Oh God, take away the weariness of my soul that I may delight in You!

We hold back in giving because we fear. More exhaustively we use up our resources in doing the will of God, more we learn to see that God fills the empty spaces of our lives. It’s not that God replenishes our resources. No, God Himself fills the material emptiness, the emptiness of our souls, and He becomes All in all. What shall we lack then? We will come to see that we never needed those things we are called to fully give up in the first place. Praise the Lord.

In the beginning of prayer life, prayer is done as a novice typically does: one only understands the form of the things that need to be done and not yet the heart. So a man comes to pray before God many times haphazardly, trying many things and saying many things and asking many things but not truly praying. As one grows in understanding, one comes to learn that prayer is done by the calling of God. God calls and draws the soul of man to prayer, and when he listens and follows, he prays the prayer that is led into the Presence of God. It is an ebb and flow of God’s breathing out and your receiving and responding. Thus you learn to speak with God.

Trivially if we grant that there are many ways of knowing things about God, God Himself only seems to care for this one way from us. In fact, it is the only way that is required of us. This is the kind of knowing that is predicated on our personal interaction with Him. As a man would know his friend, He desires that we know Him. In this way, no part of our lives is meant to be left out of our knowing of God. And our interactions, if properly ordered, bring us into unity with Him in His love.

Mere descriptive knowledge keeps our inner lives at bay since descriptive knowledge is only like a foam on the surface of the water of our souls. It does not penetrate deep enough to the depths whose activities are what truly determine the whole movement of the entire body of water. God must be at the depths of our souls, moving us and guiding our lives in accordance with His Will. And our outer trivialities must be driven out of us by the weight of God’s glory within us. This ought to be the living reality of Christians. This is the reality of Christians. Amen.

They say a man who has nothing to lose is to be feared. Why do Christians live as if there is so much to lose?

I cannot bother with fake things any longer. I must live my life in full as God would have me live it. Be my strength O God!

We ought to always encourage people to do whatever best thing they can do in their circumstances and limitations. To require less of them would be to sin against the image of God within them.

If we should lift up our eyes from the dread of a sinful world, we would find the true face of the laughing world, filled with the delight of God—the world of divine wonders bursting with life and joy of the Lord!

Heaven is ever bidding, “Come and see. Come and see. Come and taste. Come and taste.” In the end the people of Heaven can only also ever bid, “Come and see. Come and see. Come and taste. Come and taste. Come and join your Heritage, your Right, your everlasting and true Home.” No word will be good enough for what we wish to share. But you cannot remain where you are and also join us. Come, taste and see for yourself that the Lord is good!

I will do what God has set before me and return to my Father.

Oh God speaks to us! But how shall we recognize His voice within us? Would His voice ring with a heavenly note? Would there be light and brilliance about the words that you won’t be able to deny? Would His voice thunder or resound such that His speaking drowns every other noise irrelevant, less than a murmur in the background a thousand miles away? These things may be so. But would God’s voice also seem to us dark and looming sometimes? Would He ever speak so softly that He is barely heard except through the extremest of focus to hear Him? Would He speak in a voice so similar to our own that we can hardly tell apart? Would His voice sound terrifying and full of fire of judgment and condemnation? Would His Love and the demand of His Love appear to us the unquenchable fire of hell? One thing does not change: to obey His voice is life eternal and to live apart from it is death–for God speaks Life.

God speaks Himself; God is Eternal Life. 

It is certainly very true that our prayers are not the words that we speak for them and are essentially more than them. So not all prayer-like words are prayers. We may also pray a certain prayer in our hearts but yet say words that do not reflect the true prayer that our spirit prays within us. God hears all of our prayers and may grant some of them as He wills. What is the prayer that we say He always hears? He hears the true prayer of our hearts and grants some of them in accordance to His Will. Words we may say insofar as they are merely words strung together that happen to come out of our mouths–which have no real connection to our souls or our souls’ destiny or any real abiding to our inner lives–are no more than empty noise to God as they are to our own souls. In order for our prayer relationship with God to be straightforward and by extension our relationship with Him to be straightforward, we must learn to speak the truth of our hearts both to ourselves, to others and to God. First our words must be aligned to our hearts–we must speak out of our hearts whether ill or good; if not all at once wholly, then partially as we can, and that more and more. Then our words of prayer can begin to reflect the true prayers of our hearts. Then, when God grants the prayers that please Him, we shall know more simply which prayers please the Lord and we can begin to grow in the knowledge of the matters that are pleasing to the Lord.

There is no Christian way other than being wholly given unto the Lord.

My mind is set on the Lord. I will praise Him forever. My soul is turned to God. His Face shines brightly upon me. The Lord calls His people to Himself. Blessed be the Name of the Lord forever and ever! Amen.

O turn to the Lord and be saved!

We must be severe about sin. We think it love to cover over sin as if it doesn’t matter much. But this is no love. Sin will destroy life. God saw it necessary to die to save us from sin and would we make light of it? Would we tolerate it in our lives so lightly?

Shall we look to the Lord? We must look to Him and live. Amen.

Living by the Will of God—there is neither easy nor hard, but rather a simple Yes and Amen.

Ah watch yourselves! Watch yourselves and see where your intentions go. Start acting by pure intentions. This way you will crowd out double-mindedness—your soul cleansed from fractured multitudes of deceits.

We must sing the praise that God draws us to offer to Himself! Amen!

Silence is praise when given unto God. Singing is praise when given unto God. No part of our lives will be left out as praise to God Who is worthy, Worthy! Amen!

I want God above all else. That is all. Every part I perceive as part of myself that seems to indicate otherwise, I cast out as not my own. I am a lover of God totally and without qualification, and if anything would object within me in the slightest, that is no longer a part of me–be it ‘love’ for others or things, desires, thoughts, beliefs any and all; no longer is any of these things who I am or what I am. I will evict any that does not coalesce and subject itself to the love of God from this temple. This is a temple of the Most Holy God. He will be glorified.

If we give ourselves wholly and solely for God, do we lose everything else? Only seemingly so in the faint notions of possession that cannot stand the true test of purifying fire.

Man, in his self hatred, denies his right and duty that all the visible universe is to serve him and he to govern the world to the glory of God. But in sin man denies himself saying, what is man that all things should serve him. Empty and treacherous words he speaks for in truth he forces all things to serve him now not by right and humble acceptance of our Lord’s ordering but by vile sin, now for selfish interests rather than the glory of God. The world awaits to be filled with the beauty of the Lord. Man denies himself in self hatred and hatred of God, and so does not know how to subject the world in the way of God’s Love. He does not know how to subject himself in the way of God’s Love.

If God’s perfection, even in His creation, remains, then whatever deviates from His perfection is pushed to the outer fading existence away from the solidity of His perfection. Partially existing and partially not—confusion and misery abound until they are restored to God.

God invites all to Himself. Do we listen?

When an author is full of imageries it means that he richly sees the world and richly remembers it.

We must learn to lose what we do not currently possess as we ought. The loss can be genuine in that we really risk not receiving them back. But we ourselves will be changed, and when we can possess perfectly by having sacrificed all unworthy possessions, it will be that we shall have nothing and yet the whole of Creation will be ours.

Shall we not respond to the Goodness of the Lord with praise!?

We are to go from light to greater light, from glory to greater glory! Praise the Lord! If we do not despise the darkness from which we came we shall not be able to move forward. For you cannot love the light and fail to reject the darkness that opposes the light.

There is no bitterness nor any deep anguish that will not prove sweet to our souls in eternity that has helped to goad us along the Way towards You. Every way that leads us to You is a path paved with gold, the pure and true gold of Heaven.

Sin will be swallowed up by the Glory of God. Sin will be destroyed by the Joy of the Lord. Sin is a fading shadow in the full strength of the Light of God’s Love—it will be no more when the true Sun rises in our souls, the Light that shines through all things and illuminates all things and comes forth from all things. It will be nowhere to be seen, not even a trace. 

You overcome my sadness with Laughter.

Meditate on the truth of the Lord that gives life.

You cannot live for God if you are merely being dragged along by the forces of this life. The choices that you make must cut through like solid iron amidst a multitude of worldly demands and those choices themselves must be sincere and true offerings to the Lord. Then not only will you confess that the Lord is your strength, you will come to know the truth of such confession–you will feel it within you. You will feel the mysterious and firm power within your choices that will brighten your eyes and strengthen you to make your life even greater an offering to the Lord.

There is such a time when the Goodness of God seems to come down softly upon you like a blanket of light. You turn your head heavenward as a gesture of thankful reception. The light seeps deep into your soul and you are given a fresh strength. Blessed be the Name of the Lord! Who is like Him?

What makes music come alive? This is just as much a matter of the soul that receives the music as much as it is about the music itself.

If you live by dead words merely approximating the true and living Word of God, you will become like the things that you live by: on the outside seemingly approximate to the Truth but in reality empty and powerless. Be near the Lord, the true and living God! Receive His Word by His Spirit. His Word will make your heart firm in the matters of truth. His Word will clear away the mist of inner darkness and confusion. Amen.

Somehow the bee knows which flower it has visited and which it has not.

My failures, even my failures point to God.

Why is there such power in singing songs of praise to God? It indicates something within us. That somehow it is the consummation of something we were meant to do from eternity past. It does us good to sing to the Lord.

There is so much space in the world for life to expand into.

Why is God such an object of love? Why is it that in coming to know God truly, one cannot but be compelled to love Him? There is an inevitable attraction that draws all things to the Life of God. If our desires would be proper, we are naturally led along into ever closer Proximity to God. We cannot help ourselves. Nothing can help but be so.

Every step taken away from the Lord is a strained and hellish effort—all the more so because it is an empty and vain effort. There is nowhere where God is not. Yet if the soul cannot withstand the living fire of God’s glory and love, what torment His Love will appear to be.

So much of the world passes through me. I have far more than I know what to do with. Will this spill over to the glory of God?

Heaven’s road seems infinitely narrow and constrained from the outside; from the inside, one sees no end to its boundaries and freedom.

Even the devil is desirous of God; even he cannot deny the Goodness of God. He merely wants this Goodness for himself in a twisted way. He wants to be like God. Don’t we say we desire to be like Jesus; like our Father? We can be devilish even in our want of God.

Proximate spiritual realities force their realities upon us. They crowd about our heads and press against us to make us their mouthpiece to give voice to hidden and mysterious things. They seek to cause us to speak marvelous things to us with our own tongues, almost anxious, almost frustrated that we would be so dense and ignorant of the things of heaven or the matters of hell.

I am blessed! I am granted and given to behold great beauties and praise God for them!

We can functionally think of the ego as at least the thing to which the totality of the experiences of the world of a perspective is tied. (Perspective of a body? availed by a body? soul of a body? A perspective is a perspective of a set of perceptive devices. But the perceptive devices relay information to form a more or less holistic and single perspective. Being locally constrained to a body is just one of the considerations.)

A life that is full of truth, goodness and righteousness consists not in the emptying of false and worthless things but in being filled to the brim by the Spirit of God. The former is necessary one way or another though the light of truth may shine away the falsehood and the goodness crowd out the unworthy ways within us.

Experientially God appears to me as love. What does this mean?

The Spirit of God fills the world. Who can understand this?

One knows oneself better to know the desires of one’s soul. And one can only sometimes observe one’s soul desiring and notice that such is one’s desire.

Augustine’s discussion of time. It is at least true that we cannot experience the past or the future as we experience the present. Successive experiences of the present seem to uniformly march down a certain direction and we have no say at all as to this seeming.

Experience is one thing. Recognition or reflection of the experience constitutes more than an instance of time, unless it is said that recognition is an illusory amalgamation of discrete experiences.

A mother fears for the child that in the dangers of the world she would lose him. So she does not take risks with her son. So the son never learns what he can only learn by risking his life. We were meant to grasp by the sacrifice of this life things that are far greater than this life.

At the tidepool I looked at the waves crashing. I saw the waves slowly push themselves onto the rocks. God said to me, even these things you do not understand in whole. I felt the weight of the waves. I felt their bigness. But God is with these things. No created thing can understand God. Yet He is not lonely. Even His own children cannot understand Him. But His Joy is full to the brim. This seems a great mystery.

Your mental state is largely determined by the thoughts that occupy your mind. Preponderance of heavenly matters will cause your inner man to conform to characteristics of a man befitting of heaven, the byproducts of which are joy, peace and love.

Some ideas appear so real and viable as you examine them in the very moment of their examination. The force of their sense of veracity causes confrontation with their possible truth unavoidable.

Only those who are desperate to seek true life will find it. Everyone who is desperately seeking God will find Him.

Heaven is a Place that is unfailingly directed towards God. It is a Place unaffected by sin, overcomes sin, and, despite the existence of sin apart from itself, does not waver in its desire for God and in its devotion to God. It is a Place that completely embraces the Love of God. Heaven is a Place that calls others from their sins into God’s Love. 

My Love is full in you. Speak what is in your heart. And I will be with you. Do not be afraid of what you cannot see. Believe in Me. You shall surely live! Amen.

God is so unspeakably beautiful.

No matter what may happen God is indescribably beautiful. As a greater light consumes a lesser and leaves behind no trace of the latter dimness, He is Beauty so magnificent Who glories out of existence any thought of imperfection.

What the Lord has spoken to our souls, let us not despise! If in our soul we say the Lord’s truth is my truth, then it will be so as the Lord has spoken indeed! It is what the Lord offers to us, and our obedience is our act of receiving.

The people of God long for Heaven because it is the dwelling place of God.

Worries splinter our minds and cause us to be less than whole.

All things are sufficient for us to love as we ought—if only we would turn our hearts to it no matter what.

God’s anger is far more terrifying than any human anger. Though terrifying it is, His anger is not like our anger—the anger of the Lord is set for our salvation. Our salvation is the intended purpose of His anger. The anger of the Lord is just to the ways our sins further remove us from Himself. In His love, He takes offense that we would choose ways that constitute our own destruction; His love desires our perfection in goodness and beauty and sin causes its host to be deformed and defiled and vilely evil. God’s anger is set against all that turn us to the path of our own destruction. His fire stands as an unyielding sign of His burning zeal for our goodness that for our sake we must not continue in such a way but turn away immediately.

We do not experience God’s anger while we face Him wholeheartedly or when we face Him with repentant hearts. Instead, His unspeakable Love is our reality. Turned towards Him, there is no remembrance, no thought of His anger because there is no thought of sin or its consequences. If the blood of Jesus covers us, sin has no more power. In a way, broadly speaking, the anger of God and the Love of God are about spiritual realities that govern our lives. And even God’s anger is His Love the very moment we turn towards Him. All will be revealed that God is Love; there is nothing done that is done apart from His Love. What can I say? My words fail.

A repentant heart is a state of the heart that need not be recognizable as such to oneself. A repentant heart is primarily a heart that is turned towards God and need not necessarily be self-defacing or sorrowful or self-condemning. A repentant heart is a God-directed heart and can be superseded by a heart full of the Love of God in contexts where sin becomes irrelevant. An ecstatic soul in the fullness of God’s joy and love is trivially repentant (if such can be said for it at all in some sense) if having turned from one’s past deathly ways he now faces and desires God wholeheartedly.

Do we have direct intuitions of God? (What does this mean? Direct mental encounters with God? Things of God? Truths of God?) Do we have direct intuitions about the truths of God?

We are straining too hard to put into words matters that can barely be put into words. 

Truth is light. Truth that is light makes a phenomenological difference in the soul—it lights it up, viz. you feel that there is a brightening that happens within you.

Truth will always exact its cost. It will force itself upon those who pretend to live and die by its honor.

Those metaphysical principles entailed by a reductive and empirically regimented epistemological outlook will reveal something about the world under such an outlook and all the worlds that can adopt such an outlook as a modest assumption about what can be minimally or reductively known about those worlds. As an epistemological common denominator, reasoning minimally in such a way can prove a powerful tool if one’s desired conclusions can be obtained from just on the basis of it.

Knowing God is a blessed state of being. Insofar as the goal of rationality is concerned, there is no greater thing than to know God. It is one and the same thing to know God and to be infinitely happy as a rational creature (and you cannot know God and not love Him, and being loved by Him is always a given). Enjoyment of God is inherent in the knowing of God in this way. And this state cannot be obtained through mere creaturely efforts; that is, there is no ascension to the knowledge of God from merely ground up intellectual activity attempting inference to God and the matters of God from the world within the world with only the materials of the world, however great the attempt may be.

The sort of knowing that makes a copy in our minds about a thing based on what we think we understand about it is not one that constitutes the blessed state of knowing God. Knowing God is having a living connection from the Source of Knowledge, Who is God Himself, to oneself like an ever flowing stream of living water. God is directly and intimately involved in the knowing of Him that constitutes the blessed state. 

Knowing something via mere representation does not require a direct interaction with it insofar as there is preservation of pertinent information. One can be as far removed from the object as one would like. So in some sense it is possible to consider the things of God from a vast distance away in this way of knowing. But God cannot truly be said to be known in this way as He is not finite. As far as mental modeling is concerned, God is like an object that is far away whose features we can more accurately discern closer we get. Our discernments get sharper and richer every step we take towards it. But God is infinite Love that has always been. There is no amount of steps we can take towards Him that will ever exhaust our discerning of Him in whole.

Infinity is also an approximation of an aspect of God which indicates some truth that points in the direction of His inestimable nature. God is not infinite as we reason about infinity in relation to quantities and measurements and all that we can mathematically derive from some ways of concretely talking about them. Infinity with all its earthly wonders and mysteries is still a this-worldly metaphor for Something greater than it.

Given what we can reductively infer about our world, we can either look up from there or look down. If we say: this and nothing more, then we look down and at best this will be all we get.

How then to look up? You must pay the price of your life in order to be given the chance to seek God. 

A man is blessed to know God in having forgone many lesser good things in the world. When such a man becomes curious and desirous of the lesser goods, it may be said to him: You already have a better portion; why do you desire those things? In seeking the lesser goods, one may lose the greater blessedness. The lesser goods are goods to whom they are given, to contribute to their own blessedness.

It never can be said well enough that God is worthy, He is beautiful.

There is a natural exaltation that bubbles up from one’s soul when faced with undeniable goodness. If one allows oneself for the goodness to seep into his heart, the goodness bursts forth like an abundant spring, full of life, from within. And when one meets goodness observed with goodness received within, it comes out with the words ‘thank you’, or as a song formed by the goodness given, the goodness received and as the goodness being returned, or as love beholding goodness, desirous of more. Holy is the Lord who made us thus. As He is, He desires us to be.

Love is not a mere desire. What is of love desires the goodness of the beloved. There is no ill wish or compromise of goodness in love. In love, one desires the greatest good one can desire for the beloved. Love bears fruit in the desire for the beloved to be good. Love bears fruit in the giving of oneself for the goodness of the beloved.

To those who are alive to the Spirit, the Lord dispenses knowledge as He deems necessary. This seems to happen even collectively and even globally sometimes. It happens sometimes that there is some mysterious agreement amongst those who are alive to God about matters that appear odd that there should be such deep agreement. 

To daily speak and sing of the mercies of God makes us glad.

Classical and Medieval responses to skepticisms of their days may no longer seem applicable. There is some real underlying impulse that motivates intuitions for the truth of skepticism, and on the strength of such impulse new hypotheses surface. Can we be wrong about everything? We can’t be radically wrong about everything in the sense that there is absolutely no coordination between how we think things are and how they actually are.

We are the thing of His grace. His Love is freely given; given, not as though we are owed love from Him, but given in the mysterious generosity of the Father. If we demand to be loved by the Father as we desire to be loved and not as He loves in fact, we may securely deceive ourselves that we are not loved at all. For His Love is generous yet free and not what we can coerce out of Him in our anxiety and fear.

There is nothing that God cannot redeem, repurposed in the goodness of His Love, made to sing a new song of sweet and resounding praise.

The will is the power that turns our inner orientation in some relation to the world or parts of the world as represented in us. The will somehow has the power of changing us to align us with its objective. To some degree it has even the power to affect how the world is represented in us, if not directly then by availing us information that would, by making more of the world or the truer face of the world available to us in changing our behaviors to those that better position us to see the world in such ways.

How do we form new beliefs, update our beliefs, or change our beliefs in general? The world seems a certain way to us at every waking moment. How the world seems will constrain what we think when we reflect on what we think we can formally or systematically say about the world. Our own construals will in turn further filter how the world seems to us, whether for ill or for good. 

There is a sense in which we choose to relate ourselves to the world by one set of perceived constraints rather than another. We choose to talk about the truths of the world under the constraints of this system or that and we tend to think that all there is to beliefs are those that are exhausted by what can be said under them. But this filtered world-speak may not always be truly reflective of how the world seems unfiltered by us—which world may more primitively be tied to how we live, and thus explain things better about ourselves.

Not every way the world may seem to us is equal. How the world seems to us is conversely an explanation of us as it is our explanation of the world.

How the world seems can always be changed to be more aligned with how the world actually is. But it requires a holistic edification of the person, and merely intellectual engagement is inadequate. No one can properly and sincerely model aspects of the world that one does not see to be part of how the world is for him.

God is ever facing us. His facing us is His love. Wherever we are, He faces us and yearns for us, calls out to us with tenderness (and also not without severity if we should so need). When we turn to God and gaze upon His Face, we are transformed by His Love and we are made to love Him in return. If we turn our backs to Him, we make our stand against His Love; though He loves us, we no longer see the Light of His Love. 

The call to obedience to God is holistic and perfect. It accomplishes all that is good, more perfect the obedience. For our sake, obedience leads us to a place of deep recognition and understanding that God is Love and that He is Good. Praise His Holy Name! Amen.

Grace upon grace we live.

Does God love even the devil? It is a strange thing to think about. But I think He does. God reaches out to every piece of His creation in His Fullness out of His Abundance and Life, and His reaching out is Love. Even the devil cannot escape it—yet the devil is eternally anguished for it for he opposes His Love. The devil cannot change God so he changes the recipients. He deforms the world, he deforms people such that God’s Love is as he meets it, unyielding Fire that seeks to burn away all that is not of Him. If you love this Fire, it is Life, eternal Life. What remains will be purer than the purest gold. And when we are made strong enough to endure this Fire that is eternal Life, we will see God in evermore unadulterated and ever purer Love.

Generally speaking people mostly live in the truths that they come to find but almost always only live out the truth that they can bear.

The world of God is just too beautiful for a man to be convinced of himself that he is content being cooped up inside until he dies.

When you behold the Beauty of the Lord, the praise just flows out of you. It is so natural that one would be straining in ceasing to praise. It is easy; it is right. It is the great current of the world that imparts ever greater life to those who partake in it. God rejoices to share His Glory in those who would walk step by step with Him. Praise is our portion—praise is His gift to us; for praise is the expression of the fullness of Love in His creatures. Our hearts are full and overflowing. God’s Love endless and radiant, fills the world and breaks every seam. What is a creature to do, a mere clay vessel, catching a glimpse of this unspeakable Glory? Praise is ill-fitting of a small mouth as this. Yet He delights, He laughs, He brings up a song out of me. I am His forever. Amen.

The hillside has bloomed a gentle foggy bloom—a golden haze of the afternoon. The warmth expands and enfolds. The day ends in peace in the sweetness of the embrace of the drowsy sun. 

Wittgenstein asks, ‘How do you know the contents of your own beliefs?’; or more precisely: How do you know that you have beliefs of this or that content? And Russell (in return, maybe) asks more generally: How do you know you have some mental attitude of this or that content?

Wittgenstein asks: What is the connection between a thought about something and that thing itself? One idea: Everyone has restricted mental mapping/picture/model (or plurals of these things) of the things that they encountered in their lives and more broadly of their surroundings and most broadly of the world, all the relations and in-betweens inclusive. Their individual representations are restricted because they are partial and beset with inaccuracies. If something in their own mental picture of the world most functionally approximates or mirrors the thing itself in the world, then that is how the mental thing can start to be about the thing itself.

W: “How do I know that this is a thought about my brother in America?” That that thought appears in the space of your mental world with the most intimate association to your brother. Suppose you have a thought about someone you barely know. You may then rightly doubt that your thought is about that person, or you would think that it has the content that appears to you as such with a low degree of confidence.

It is a different question how or whether the mental world hooks up with the world itself that it purports to be about or represent.

Wittgenstein says: When people think about reasons why they think that they know they have beliefs of this or that content, they think of representation and not causal relations.

Causal relations of perceptual inputs and their information traces in our brains or minds seem low level; representation or similarity seems high level or more abstracted. Our own thinking seems to appear to ourselves as abstractions over low level causal details, glossing over information that make no representational differences with respect to contributions to decisions that impact the good of the individual.

What is a fact in the mental space? Do people possess facts simpliciter and perform various mental operations with them directly? Or are facts only proxied in the minds of those who are said to possess them? Mentally speaking, facts seem to be similar to instantiations of geometric objects in that they are more imperfect instances of certain abstractions than the abstractions themselves.

God I gaze into Thy Face; You are beautiful. The world is waking up, You are the One who arouses it to life every morning. Your Lovingkindness never a moment untrue, Your Love pervades the earth and fills it full. Every sunrise remembers Your Love Oh God! I bring praise to Your Holy Name. Amen!

Life is as God gives it and life is as God takes it.

The same tree that I see everyday at times appears to me somehow ‘more real’, ‘more alive’. A strange and unutterably beautiful light surrounds it—warmly radiates from it. Has the world changed or have I? As if there is a glory of the world that I’m not normally privy to, that I am allowed a peek from time to time. 

The world is received as an extension of one’s heart. The heart is the spiritual condition of a man. The inexhaustible goodness of God’s handiwork is made accessible to a heart that can sincerely behold goodness and continually made anew by Him.

The truth structures our thinking. It makes it clear, even well lit. There is no straining in the path of truth. With deceitfulness one struggles with every step taken. Bright is the path and easy is the journey that is lighted by truth.

Being truthful is not about adherence to facts; it is about requiring truthfulness of oneself.

All who would enter God’s Heaven must learn to enjoy God’s ways of life.

We transmit the truths of God to one another through His love.

I hear much about the feeling of loss of self or the dissolution of self in some religious experiences. One idea could be that when one begins to have not any particular thoughts, absolutely no thoughts about any particular thing, even while the underlying awareness persists, this may constitute the feeling that the I no longer exists.

When particular identifications are stripped one feels that one receives the contents of experiences as they are. No more I who see the tree and the grass and I who feel the breeze and smell the flower’s sweet scent but rather TREE, GRASS, BREEZE AND SWEET FLOWERY SMELL. These things just are and the sensations occupy the whole of the world simple and full. No my-experience-of-them. They just are. The feeling of identity or possession does not exist. I meld into the experiences; I am the realities of those things. Such is the feeling anyways. What if one perceives or experiences God in such a way? The boundary of identity and possession seems to disappear: the realities of God just are, in fact the nature of the experience is such that they are more real than real, but no longer God and myself but God’s realities simpliciter. No wonder that beliefs arise that oneself is God.

There is power in nature to draw out the soul of a man and make it be like a newborn baby in the unknown and wondrous world of great beauty. The angelic beings sing over you a song of magnificent welcome and love.

The deep and endless blue sky says: Blessed are you!

Your soul recognizes which gifts are from God. For these, thanksgiving comes naturally and easy—soul’s proper reaction to the goodness it sees.

Somehow every beautiful thing makes me consider the Beauty of the Lord.

Do the stones speak? They sing.

Loose talk is ill fitting for rigorous analyses. But for those who are capable of understanding the heart of what is said, loose talk serves its communicative purpose just the same and communicates attitudes besides that cannot be contained in the talk itself.

Why do we hurl ourselves into misery? In some sense, we sense when something is leading us to misery. But we oblige as if our minds are slowly dulled with false concessions that nothing of significance will happen as a result.

Wittgenstein says no essence behind the word but rather family resemblances of the things to which the word applies. It may be that some two member pair of the word extensions does not share any essence candidates with one another. But why not broaden the essence criterion to include some dominant essence candidate(s) and say that any member of the word extension class must have quality overlaps that can be traced back to the dominant essence candidate without gaps in the trace within the members of the class? This is one way of defining the class.

I think I am more and more convinced that there is no good to be shared in ministry except the Life of God that fills us individually. It is as if we are basins and the water that comes to fill us is God’s very Life and Spirit. What we give to others is this water itself, and nothing of ourselves. We receive God’s Life through one another if indeed that is what we share. But there is no life to give for those who do not have it.

What is truly necessary?

What you need is a living relationship with God. But how do you get it? One way: it is transmitted among people by way of example–people only come to learn how to discern what is real and not by intimately observing and walking beside those who have the real thing.

How does the Life of God come to be born in a man?

The singing of the soul is the gratitude of the heart.

The soul sings and praise rises and thanksgiving bursts out of your face! How great is the Lord God Almighty! Amen!

Is there a sweetness to life? A sweetness of life that must be glossed over, buried under heaps of hesitations and half-truths for people to no longer recognize? As if we are tightly insulated by gross, suffocating fat that squeezes the life out of us and makes our flesh so numb that we can barely feel anything amidst the smother of nauseating and sweaty throbbings? But life is sweet all the same. Humming its heavenly tune gentle and never false, and it never skips a beat. Constant as a gift that cannot be taken away; it can only fail to be enjoyed. Sometimes those who lose many things, those who are reduced to mere skin and bones of life, find themselves catching that sweet and eternal hum and bless the God who gave it.

Nature has its own divine theorems.

Christian definition of miracle has to be something like: an event whose occurrence would not have obtained without divine intervention—where divine intervention is necessary for it to be a miracle.

If some causal process would have resulted in the obtaining of an event then God would not need to intervene for the event to obtain.

In the Christian worldview, the existence of the world, the coming-to-be of the world cannot have any probability of obtaining from scientific principles alone. It cannot be demonstrated that the world could have come into existence with any probability in any sense. This would show that the world need not be a consequent of a miracle and the world might not have needed God to exist. 

Suppose we are given a state of affairs that we think it plausible to be a miracle. When we do a sort of analysis that examines the event as a time sequence and we consider each time slice and its elements or parts, we would not find that a particular arrangement of facts constituting each time slice is in any way miraculous. Each slice has to constitute a possible arrangement of elements, which considered on its own would be nothing out of the ordinary for the exact reason that it is a possible arrangement of facts—to say otherwise would be to say something like: the elements would constitute a sort of contradiction in the composition of the world-parts. No time slice will be such that it cannot be made sense of and so the consideration of its existence in isolation does not imply a miracle. So the miracle has something to do with our expectation of the resultant or the miraculous state given its productive/causal relation to its relevant ‘causal’ precedent. But not just so. Christian miracles imply agency and intention of the Intervener Who sometimes intervenes partly with the purpose that we recognize that He intervened. Hence our relative expectation and perception of the relations between these events are relevant as well—the Intervener can take them into account. Though some event may be possible yet with very low probability, miraculous status can be correctly ascribed given that it would not have obtained without divine intervention. 

When I understand someone, I know what they say. Even though his saying is very difficult, I can more easily infer what he is trying to say by the way he says it, by the things he leaves out, and by going ahead to guess what sorts of things he would say given what I know of him.

Wittgenstein says: ‘Scientific way of looking at a fact is not to look at it as a miracle.’ Scientific way of looking at a fact precludes looking at it as a miracle. If we are trying to understand a fact in a principled manner, we are in general trying to eliminate sources of ungeneralizable elements. Divine intervention is not systematically or predictably tied to any knowledge base or model on which our patterned inferences depend. There is no reliable inference to miracles from prior mechanistic descriptions of the world.

Proving a miracle on principle is impossible without complete knowledge. We must be able to show that the claimed miraculous event is not part of the predicted outcomes of our perfect model. We can still make probabilistic arguments that can greatly sway the sense of plausibility of the miracle claim. But insofar as the claimed state is not deemed impossible, the fact that there is some chance of the claimed state occurring by natural means leaves room for a non-miraculous explanation. 

Faith is a guide to the fullness of truth. In bringing the rest of a man’s life into conformity to the truth of what is assumed by faith, what is out of joint is put right and what clings to the bone is made full with life. Faith is in Jesus Christ, the full Revelation of God! He reveals the fullness of the Glory of God! He is the Son of God. Amen.

Lord Jesus, to turn my mind to You is my salvation, my resting place. Lord, fill me with Thy graces. Let Your Will be done. Amen.

Faith is the guarantor of salvation in that, in earnest, it lifts up our lives to the fullness of the truth of God.

My entire mornings have become a prayer. May the rest of my life be so as well.

The way we give praise to something is by noticing the good in it and outwardly expressing that it is good. Though the world may reject God, it cannot cease praising Him for the world is His workmanship and is full of His goodness.

People unknowingly glorify God by being overcome by the beauty of His creation and making something of that beauty.

I don’t understand His freedom. I don’t understand His love! It just overflows, goes where it goes, accomplishes what it accomplishes and it is all good. Not bound by anything, any rule: it sets its own rules—rules of love and freedom, abounding in goodness beyond any estimation.

We will be thankful for having contributed to the goodness of even the “smallest” of the world—that my life was full because I made a passing bird a slightest bit more content and that that bird’s life was full for having made my heart just a bit lighter.

Don’t you know? To a God whose beauty knows no limit, this world is no smaller, no less dingy a place than a manger. Yet in a manger He came, that we might understand. 

In our eyes, a manger is a lowly place. Is it a more lowly place than a king’s throne for the Lord of Heavens? He assumed for Himself our own trite distinctions to show where His heart lies. To make known to us His ways. Our God is He Who deigns to take up the lowest position. Yet His Glory could not be concealed, and He magnified even the lowest that He became. From the deepest of the depths to the highest of all creation He lifts all to Himself those who will look upon His Face and rejoice! Amen. 

Living as truthfully as one can is the only way to live a full and happy confidence that sheds all shame.

I am now quite convinced that good thoughts only consistently flow from a well ordered being—good character and state of mind. We can only choose to live rightly first, and then we become good thinkers secondarily. We must be ordered by God’s Love in the deepest of our being.