Prison
The Body as Prison
"If you think that your vehicle is your self, you will hate the vehicle because it will seem to trap you and you will feel imprisoned, bound and limited by it." [1]
"People only love their bodies when they serve a higher purpose.To love your body for any other reason is simply to use it for selfish reasons, which will breed resentment.Your body must enable you to extend your sense of relationship in life. If it does not do this, it is a prison."[2]
"If you do not know your purpose or your greater reality, then you will think of your body as a prison and you will exercise your self-abuse by misusing your body. It will then become an image of your self-neglect or self-abuse." [3]
The Prison of the Mind
"What keeps people from being free is not their external circumstances. It is their own mind and their own thoughts.They are prisoners to their thoughts."[4]
"Without a greater authority in your life, this is what the mind will do. It will calcify and become hard and brittle. It will become impenetrable and impermeable, something that defends its point of view without any regard to reality or to changes in circumstances. This imperils you and imprisons you. This denies you and isolates you. This prevents you from having access to others and learning from them. This denies your gift and your ability to receive the gifts of others." [5]
"Most of the miseries that confound and imprison the human mind are escaped as one advances in The Way of Knowledge, but not all suffering is escaped. Life continues to be difficult and problematic. Your body has its aches and pains. Your mind has its problems and troubling thoughts, feelings and experience, but they do not dominate your attention now, and as you advance they cannot hold you back or limit your experience." [6]
The Doorway Out
"People ask,“How can I rid myself of these terrible judgments? I see I have these judgments.They are binding me, imprisoning me, weighing upon me.They torment me. How can I get rid of them?”Well, you cannot get rid of them where you are, but you can do something else in life where they are not necessary, and then they begin to evaporate. God has a Plan and how the Plan works is that it gives you something meaningful to do in life."[7]
"The door to your prison cell is open. You can push it open at any time. You can walk out into the light of day. For this to happen, however, you must be willing to have a different experience of yourself and a different determination within you. You must be open and desiring of a greater life—a life that is not in keeping with your past and that will bring you out of the confinement of living within your personal mind. As a result of this escape, even your personal mind will be refreshed, renewed and restored, for your personal mind’s greater purpose is to serve Knowledge."[8]
"In the state of interdependence, you are able to give and receive in a truly meaningful way. Here devotion is possible because from a position of responsible decision making, you can give your life to something. Gaining the ability to do this represents the real value and purpose of independence. Without this, your independence will only isolate you further and further within your own mind and your own thoughts. It will become a great prison house from which the possibility of escape will seem increasingly difficult and remote." [9]
Further Study
References
- ↑ Wisdom from the Greater Community Volume One, Chapter 31: Healing
- ↑ Wisdom from the Greater Community Volume One, Chapter 6: Health
- ↑ Steps to Knowledge Continuation Training, Step 50
- ↑ Wisdom from the Greater Community Volume One, Chapter 20: Inner Listening
- ↑ Greater Community Spirituality, Chapter 13: What must be unlearned?
- ↑ Greater Community Spirituality, Chapter 19: What is Religion?
- ↑ Wisdom from the Greater Community Volume One, Chapter 23: Forgiveness
- ↑ Greater Community Spirituality, Chapter 25: What is Grace?
- ↑ Greater Community Spirituality, Chapter 22: Where can Knowledge be found?