Greater Community Way of Knowledge
Directives
Here you must be willing to go beyond the boundaries of human thinking, human beliefs and human assumptions. Here you will enter into a new and greater arena of learning in life where your previous assumptions and beliefs do not hold and do not fit. You must leave them at the door before entering a greater room, a greater context and a greater experience.
Let your understanding of yourself be flexible, for it will most assuredly change and expand as you advance in learning a Greater Community Way of Knowledge. Your sense of yourself will go from being a member of your family to being a member of your community or network of friends to being a member of the world and finally to being a member of the Greater Community.
Do not exploit [the Greater Community Way of Knowledge]. Do not try to use it for your personal advantage. Do not try to become a master and appoint yourself the right to interpret the Greater Community Way of Knowledge for others unless we have given you this right. To achieve this you must be very advanced, which you are not.
- Greater Community Spirituality, chaps. 10, 15; pp. 123, 124, 198
Short Quotes
The Greater Community Way of Knowledge is not something that you learn in a weekend, or a week or a month or a year. It is not something that you can fully comprehend in a book. It is far greater.
Learning The Greater Community Way of Knowledge takes you to a greater certainty within you.
[L]earning a Greater Community Way of Knowledge requires courage because you must risk your ideas. You must risk your conclusions. And you must be willing to proceed even at times when you feel very uncertain about yourself or what you are doing.
To give you a real power that few even in the Greater Community possess, we bring to you The Greater Community Way of Knowledge—The Way of Knowledge as it exists in the Greater Community.
- Greater Community Spirituality, chap. 10, pp. 119, 121; and chap. 11, p. 137
Long Quotes
If you are to become a student of a Greater Community Way of Knowledge, it will require all of your attention. Not only will you have to master and understand human Wisdom, you will have to learn Greater Community Wisdom. However, every little bit that you advance towards a Greater Community understanding will make you more effective, more capable, more gracious and more compassionate as a person.
When people begin the study of The Greater Community Way of Knowledge, they want to use Knowledge to reinforce their thoughts. However, The Way of Knowledge teaches you to use your thoughts to reinforce Knowledge. It sets a different direction and a different goal--one towards freedom and redemption, towards empowerment, ability and self-love.
- Greater Community Spirituality, chaps. 10, 13; pp. 115, 154
As you advance in The Way of Knowledge, you will come to the understanding that it is what you can do with people that is the important thing. Can you participate together? Can you accomplish things together? Can you share a life together? Can you work together? Are you free and encouraged to return to Knowledge in the presence of that person? Or are you afraid, afraid that you will find out something you do not want to hear or to know? Do you welcome the truth or do you live in trepidation of it? Is the truth your friend in this relationship or does it threaten what you have established together?
- Living the Way of Knowledge (Chapter 3, The Pillar of Relationships)
Metaphors
It is like the farmer planting the fields. After each harvest, the field must be plowed under, and everything looks bleak and empty. There is no produce. There is no harvest. There is no evidence of any bounty. Everything must be replanted and started all over again so that next year there may be new and different harvests, and life may continue. This is how it will be in your education in The Greater Community Way of Knowledge. Instead of accumulation, there will be release and freedom.
[Y]ou need a greater vantage point. You need to be far above where you are now so that you can look down and really see the lay of the land.
To advance, you cannot stay at the bottom of the mountain and fantasize how it will be and imagine yourself going up and being at the top. The experience will always be different from imagination. The experience will be its own initiation. Stay at the bottom of the mountain and you will never know the mountain.
- Greater Community Spirituality, chap. 10, pp. 122, 124