Awestruck Podcast » objective consciousness

The Heart Wants

October 22, 2022 by Brian Shipman in Contemplative Christianity, Spirituality, Uncategorized Post Comment

Late have I loved you, O Beauty ever ancient, ever new, late have I loved you! You were within me, but I was outside, and it was there that I searched for you. In my unloveliness I plunged into the lovely things which you created. You were with me, but I was not with you. Created things kept me from you; yet if they had not been in you they would have not been at all. You called, you shouted, and you broke through my deafness. You flashed, you shone, and you dispelled my blindness. You breathed your fragrance on me; I drew in breath and now I pant for you. I have tasted you, now I hunger and thirst for more. You touched me, and I burned for your peace. St. Augustine

Created things pull us outside ourselves. We fix our attention on objects, and so our mode of consciousness becomes objective. We assume that the pursuit of the external will, in return, bring us reward as the objects of our attention come to us.

And yet, no matter how hard we try, the external cannot cross the threshold into our inner being and satisfy our real need. Possessions can go no further than an ephemeral caress of the ego. And this maddening tease drives us to toss aside one failed object for the next, leading us on an endless and fruitless pursuit.

Saint Augustine awakened from objective consciousness, from his madding pursuit of created things, to discover that looking outside himself for meaning only drew him away from himself. And the way back to himself was to yield to the divine call that comes only from within.

Today, we turn our attention away from created things out there– letting go of objective consciousness – and look toward the treasure that lie within, where the Creator of all things calls to us.

Source Scripture

Matthew 6:19-21; Luke 12:33-34

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Extras

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Paradise Now – Tim Mackie of The Bible Project

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.