Awestruck Podcast » beatitude

Haters Gonna Hate

January 12, 2022 by Brian Shipman in Contemplative Christianity, Spirituality, Uncategorized Post Comment

This is the truth for you, men of Athens; I am hiding nothing from you either great or small in my speech, nor am I holding anything back. And yet I know rather well that I incur hatred by these very things; which is also a proof that I speak the truth. Socrates

The truth hurts, and its wounded often lash out.

When the divine light of truth confronts, all masks and costumes fashioned to conceal it fall away. And in that moment, confronted with the reality of our naked being, we face tough choices: run, fight, or embrace.

Those who run search for a place where they may reacquire the familiar cloaking devices. Those who fight rush the source of the light of truth and attack, hoping that darkness may once again fall. And those who embrace the truth are transformed and experience the divine.

Truth ignites hatred in those entrenched in ego-centered living, because it calls their entire being into question. Truth is a threat to the ego’s way of life, and so the mightiest personal military forces available must be sent out to “protect.”

A life founded on the ego’s principles resorts to hatred instead of love, lies instead of truth, and insults instead of encouragement.

Today we will face the reality that those of us who speak truth, live rightly, and align ourselves with the divine will inevitably be the victims of enraged, wounded egos. And in that reality can find happiness, because it is an indicator that we are living in the kingdom of heaven.

Conversely, though, if we find ourselves unnoticed. Unchallenged. Unopposed. Unaffected by the egos of the world, then it is a haunting sign that our truth is hidden or corrupt. Our living is weak or off base. And our Jesus is an idol constructed in our own image and not the living, breathing God of the Universe.

So let’s see where we stand.

Source Scripture

Matthew 5:10-12; Luke 6:22-23,26

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Visionary Splendor

December 20, 2021 by Brian Shipman in Contemplative Christianity, Spirituality Post Comment

We have come to inhabit a hopelessly flat and prosaic and disenchanted world, even though it is anything but. It’s not the world that has become disenchanted, but rather our collective perceptual habits of mind that have created filters that have all but blocked out the soul qualities that are there whether we filter them out or not. Jack Whelan

Where is God? If he is so real, why doesn’t he show himself? Where are the miracles? The irrefutable evidence? If God exists and he really is a God of love, why does he allow so much suffering? Why do those who claim to believe in God often seem to have so much hate for others?

All of these are valid questions, to be sure.

If God is real and wants us to believe in him, why doesn’t he simply allow us to see him?

He does, but we have largely lost our ability to see.

One of the primary reasons we fail to perceive the divine is the increasing social demand that we constrain our powers of perception to only those allowed under the totalitarian jurisdiction of objective consciousness, where all that exists is reduced to the world of all objects outside of us and the reasoning power of one small object inside of us.

This new world order, which we might also call scientism, would explain the metaphysical away by definition, leaving us devoid of the divine and disoriented by disenchantment.

This oppressive force serves as a creeping, collective cataract that increasingly blinds our third eye.

Today, we will offer a surgical procedure to remove the cataracts of objective consciousness and restore divine sight to the those who long to see.