Black Madonna Blog .On Self Mastery, Mental Prayer, Meditation and Memoriam and Ordinations and more: May 2023

Partially Transcript :

Especially : this part

Death to self and all the cares of the world.

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around and around the fact and it cannot escape the fact that death is the end of it and then death comes and death is the

end period see a life that has nothing but a straight line

towards the grave and a lot of little circular lines to forget the grave as you travel towards

the grave see distractions and so forth and uh is a life of care and it's a life

of ever increasing care and it's a life of frustration and it's a life of futility see

and this is what is meant by the world in the bad sense of the word now ideally speaking the hermit life is

supposed to be the life in which all care is completely put aside first of all because it is a death see it accepts

completely death as a a completely built in fact in life it is

a death to society it's a death of certain constellations of society and so forth it's a death to certain kinds of

support and it is a renunciation of even care of a person doesn't go into solitude simply

to practice a lot of virtues see if that's what's supposed to be happening i'm probably not going to be

able to make the grave but you go into solitude in order to cast

your care upon the lord which is what i was saying last time let me read this this sentence

a couple of sentences from corsad which give the whole essence of it and these this is absolutely applicable to the

synovic life as well as the solitary life because both are operating on the same principle

first of all self-abandonment which is this is what we're here for see this business of

surrendering totally to god self-abandonment is that continual forgetfulness of self which leaves the

soul free to eternally love god untroubled by those fears reflections

regrets and anxieties which the care of one's own perfection and salvation gives

now what he's saying there of course i should read that through five or six times because each word is important but

we haven't got time now what he's saying there he is accusing monks actually

of what we do we come from the world and we leave behind worldly cares and we come into a little

world of the monastery which is full of its little cares of its own see the the the trouble with our life

whether solitary i mean a solitary life can be the same thing you can just be devoured by care there too

the trouble with the monastic life is that it's supposed to be a life without care and we have filled it with care we

fill it completely with care we are devoured by care see

care about our job care about our life of prayer care about how we're getting on care about what other people are

doing care about this care about that we're devoured with these and then the

kind of thoughts of the fears reflections regrets anxieties see fears

reflections this constant business do you deny that our life is a life of

care well then do you deny that we're constantly constantly going over reflecting reflecting he said this and

he made this sign and i made this sign and next time i'm going to make this sign and he'll drop dead because it's going to be a real sign it's going to

get a cross and this is care see there are things

we're caring about we're we're caring about this we're caring if they're going to get that red cheese

instead of that other cheese if it's that red cheese for supper i'm going to throw up right in the middle of

the reflection and so forth well this is care thing and what we are

here for is to get rid of that and of course you get rid of it by going through it now here is this beautiful passage which i i think

it is my opinion at least what i think that i'm supposed to do living up on top of that hill is purely and simply this

and this is what i'm what i'm asking you to pray for that i may do it because i think also it's what you're supposed to

do down here and what we're all supposed to do one way or another since god offers to take upon himself

the care of our affairs let us once for all abandon them to his infinite wisdom that we may never more

be occupied with ought but him and his interests period see

since god offers to take upon himself the care of our affairs that is the monastic life and that is

above all the solitary life that is what the solitary life means see

it is a life in which you no longer care about anything because god is taking care of everything see

he takes care in the sense i mean this is why you don't have a great deal of context with that

with the world you're not terribly occupied with a lot of people you're not terribly occupied with a lot

of works and projects and so forth you are simply letting god take care of all those things see all that needs to be

taken care of he will take care of with the help of the interior seller once in a while

but uh the informarian and so forth they will run up with the band-aid if necessary

but but you cast your care upon the lord now this is what love is see let's face

the fact let's let our hair down which is which is non-existent but let us let us let us face the fact for once

what we're here for is love see and what is love when you love another person you simply

forget yourself and think about the other person you are not concerned with yourself and you and if you love this

other person and you know that it's mutual you know the other person is thinking about you see so that what happens is in love

is that each one forgets himself in order to live in and for the other and he doesn't have to think about

himself because the other will think of him now this is what god asks of us he asks us to live in such a way that he

will do the thinking about us that we don't have to think about ourselves he will think about us

and what i think that we should learn to do i think as we get along in a spiritual life is we have to learn to do this even in matters of virtue see

cosad whose doctrine we're following here at the moment even says that actually you should reach the point where you don't think about virtue at

all you don't think about whether you're doing good or at all you just do what you do see well this presupposes that

you have been practicing some virtue and a presuppose that you're leading a fairly halfway decent life you're not in

jail all the time and you're not don't have the cops on your tail all day long and that sort of thing you're more or less in the clear

see and you because anything you do god will take care of you do things the the

obvious things that that call for that are called for by your situation and then god puts virtue into this see so

you are no longer worrying about whether you're virtuous or not you just live

you live without care and without concern for anything of yourself see now of course this is not exactly easy in

the solitary life because one of the things that you're liable to get into in a solitary life is precisely care about yourself see you're liable to worry

about a lot of things and this is one of the things about a solitary vocation as a person who can't be in the solitary life without

caring about himself all day long hasn't got location see you have if you're going to be in the solitary life you

have to be able to simply to forget yourself and enjoy it so that is the thing see to have god as

the whole content of one's own life see to forget oneself not to care for oneself

and to have god as the total content of one's life now what this

does and i know so far from what experience i have of it it does

it means that in fact it is sometimes possible to see

that actually things become transparent see so that

they are no longer opaque and they no longer hide god and this is true

the thing that we have to face is that life is this simple see we are living in a world that is absolutely transparent

and god is shining through it all the time and this is not just

a fable or a nice story it is true see and this is something we're not able to

see but if we abandon ourselves to him and forget ourselves

we see it sometimes when we see it maybe frequently see that god manifests himself everywhere in

everything in people and in things and in

nature and in events and so forth so that it becomes very obvious that he is

everywhere and he's in everything and we can't be without him you cannot be without god it's impossible it's just

simply impossible the only thing is that we don't see it see now this is again what we're here for

and what is it that makes the world opaque and makes it

not transparent anymore it is care see because everything becomes opaque in

proportion as we regard it as an individual object and we become concerned with it see there's this

individual thing there's this day that i have to live through it's a particular day it's not here and so it's opaque see

it comes to me it's it comes to me in a big opaque package and i spend my time opening it up

and then when i've taken all the package apart then it's the evening it's the examination of conscience and i examined

myself and i took off all the paper off the package and there wasn't anything in it

and then so then the next day comes along and that's what we do and then a big event comes see

uh i don't know i uh i get the job of teaching

uh something to the rabbits and then this becomes a great thing and i take the paper off of this piece by

piece by piece to sort of and then there's nothing in it either well you have to leave the rabbits what

they are rabbits if you just see that they're rabbits you suddenly see that they're transparent and that the rabbitness of god is

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