Top Christian Spiritual Resources

[Bill W]

Hi All,

I've just started reading Mere Christianity by CS Lewis. I've not read his stuff before. I wanted to share a quote from the book.

Comfort is the one thing you cannot get by looking for it. If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end: if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth - only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin with and, in the end, despair. 

 

[Zigzag Idiot]

Maurice Nicoll's Psychological Commentaries on the Teachings of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky.

What some call the Work. He called it esoteric Christianity.

 

GIVING UP SUFFERING III 

“To serve the Work means to obey what it teaches you to practice on yourself. You want to be gloomy and moody, to object, and so on, and you observe your state and begin to separate from it—then you are serving the Work. And in so doing you are giving up some of your mechanical suffering.” V. 3, p. 855 

GIVING UP SUFFERING IV 

“By work on oneself . . . one rises in the ‘Ladder of Being’ represented by the Ray of Creation. But this rising is only possible by sacrifice. To behave as you always do, and expect to rise, is impossible. One must, to begin with, sacrifice one’s suffering. All self-pity, all self-cradling, vanity, secret absurd fears, all self-sentimentality, all inner accounting, all pitiful pictures, all sighs, inner groans, and complaints, must be burned up in the fire of increasing Consciousness.” V. 3, p. 1090 

 

GIVING UP SUFFERING V 

“All our mechanical suffering is fraudulent only we will not admit it. Fraudulent suffering is the keynote to what we have to sacrifice. Real suffering is utterly different and always opens us up to a higher level: fraudulent suffering closes us.” V. 3, p. 853 

WATCHING EMOTIONS 

“In yourself everyone else is helpless. You can, as it were, drag a person into the cave of yourself and do what you like with her or him. You may be polite naturally, but in the Work, which is all about purifying or organizing the inner life, it is not enough. It is how you behave internally, invisibly to one another that really counts...Your most negative and most dangerous ‘I’s may come forward when you are alone. . .when you feel that no one is looking. Yes, but you must look.” V. 1, pp. 216, 256

 

[Bill W]

 

[Bill W]

@Zigzag Idiot is that text direct from the Nicoll books?

[Zigzag Idiot]

@Bill W Yes. There is a condensed version that was given to me by a Teacher from a Fourth Way study group a couple of years ago in PDF which I'm having trouble with pasting here

Gems_of_Wisdom

http://www.gurdjieffwork.com/site/index.asp?page=623765&DL=243 

This is a link to a clunkier version for the time being reducing nearly 2000 pages down to a little of over a hundred. Really rich stuff. I enjoyed the Five volumes so much I read it twice.

[Petals]

@Zigzag Idiot thank you very much for this link! did you get the collection for a reasonable price?

[Zigzag Idiot]

I picked mine up one at a time used through Amazon. I just looked,,,

https://www.amazon.com/PSYCHOLOGICAL-COMMENTARIES-GURDJIEFF-OUSPENSKY-2015-05-04/dp/B01FKRWWSK/ref=sr_1_5?qid=1569118107&refinements=p_27%3AMaurice+Nicoll&s=books&sr=1-5&text=Maurice+Nicoll

$200 probably as cheep as you can find for a whole set.

Here is a used volume 4 for $25

https://www.amazon.com/Psychological-Commentaries-Teaching-Gurdjieff-Ouspensky/dp/0394726952/ref=pd_sbs_14_3/143-8002126-3163130?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=0394726952&pd_rd_r=c53c9bf0-4d80-499d-8c38-c1501cac1ef6&pd_rd_w=RbQta&pd_rd_wg=rbavr&pf_rd_p=d66372fe-68a6-48a3-90ec-41d7f64212be&pf_rd_r=DHKREJH2D681XTFK1WVM&psc=1&refRID=DHKREJH2D681XTFK1WVM

[Zigzag Idiot]

An excerpt from an excerpt from an article.

" Sustained encounters with objectless-awareness are in fact meaningfully relevant to ongoing transformation,"

Here, Samadhi consciousness exists as the peak form of non-dual attainment. That being said, it administers a very serious ultimatum. If one does not come down from absorption into the formless, then an inability to function in the causal world may result. Due to the notorious hardships of Samadhi subjects who endure this precarious experience, Ramakrishna believed that the subsequent “fall from grace” back into phenomenal reality could beneficially actualize an intermediary consciousness. Surmising that sustained encounters with objectless-awareness are in fact meaningfully relevant to ongoing transformation, he suggested Samadhi’s function, after having been summoned back to ordinary consciousness, was to gradually integrate the experience into Bhavamukha. This zone of liminal reception allows for a transformed multiplicity to join in with absolute One-ness, resulting in a sophisticated mode of non-dual perceiving. Through bhavamukha, personhood remains in-tune with the phenomenal world, as Ramakrishna himself, their life spared from complete absorption into One-ness for the continuing enlightenment of all beings.

https://wisdomwayofknowing.org/resource-directory/on-the-imaginal-by-joshua-tysinger/

[Zigzag Idiot]

5 hours ago, Petals said:

@Zigzag Idiot thank you very much for this link! did you get the collection for a reasonable price?

If you have adobe, you can read it all free here.

http://www.gurdjieffwork.com/site/index.asp?page=107379

[Zigzag Idiot]

Osho's opinion on Nicoll's Commentaries

Osho:

"Nicoll was a disciple of Gurdjieff, and unlike Ouspensky, he never betrayed, he was not a Judas. A true disciple to the very last breath and beyond it too. The Commentaries of Nicoll are vast. I don′t think anybody reads them. Thousands and thousands of pages, but if one takes the trouble one is immensely benefited. Nicoll′s Commentaries should be considered as one of the best books in the world."

(Osho - Books I have Loved)

Short review by Sam Copley

Possibly Osho considered Nicoll to be one of Gurdjieff′s most important disciples, because Nicoll had a light touch in his teaching and writing and warned that anyone who adopted a serious demeanor to appear to be a follower of "The Work" probably was far from it, this in accordance with the saying inscribed on a wall at one of his group houses: "Serious things can be understood through laughable things."
In his Commentaries he writes, after having explained something to his readers, "Now you may think that this is a little solemn. Actually it is not so, but, like everything else in The Work, must be taken with a grain of salt."
And:
"What is this Work about? It is about enjoying yourself, but people cannot enjoy themselves. It is the most difficult thing to do."

from https://www.satrakshita.com/gurdjieff_books.htm

Edited September 22, 2019 by Zigzag Idiot
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[Zigzag Idiot]

Orange materialistic worldview needs to hear this.

 

 

[mandyjw]

Julian of Norwich lived through the time of the black plague, had an awakening while she was very ill (with a different illness), very cool stuff. Her book Revelations of Divine Love is the first surviving book with a female author. 

About her history, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_of_Norwich

Quotes, https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/156980.Julian_of_Norwich

The book, http://www.documentacatholicaomnia.eu/03d/1343-1398,_Julian._of_Norwich,_Revelations_Of_Divine_Love,_EN.pdf

“All shall be well, and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well.”

“Truth sees God, and wisdom contemplates God, and from these two comes a third, a holy and wonderful delight in God, who is love.”

She compared Jesus to a mother, “Our Savior is our true Mother in whom we are endlessly born and out of whom we shall never come.”

[SgtPepper]

Guess I am not the only one interested in Christianity! I got a few resources to learn from:

 

 

 

 

https://www.amazon.com/Mary-Magdalene-Revealed-Feminist-Christianity/dp/1401954901/ref=sr_1_4?keywords=Mary+magdalene&qid=1572538353&sr=8-4

Edited October 31, 2019 by SgtPepper

[Zigzag Idiot]

 

                                                                                            Metanoia

Forgiveness and Metanoia.

Practicing forgiveness means a change of heart, reversal or letting go which manifests peace.

 

A. T. Robertson concurs with Butler. Regarding the translation of metanoia as repentance, Robertson calls it "a linguistic and theological tragedy."[26] Regarding John the Baptist's call to "repent" as a translation of the Greek metanoeite, Robertson quotes Broadus as saying that this is "the worst translation in the New Testament." Repent means "to be sorry," but John's call was not to be sorry, but to change mental attitudes [metanoeite] and conduct.[27] Robertson lamented the fact that in his time there was no English word that signified the meaning of the Greek μετάνοια (metanoia).[28]

Aloys H. Dirksen in his The New Testament Concept of Metanoia argues against metanoia as merely “repentance” and for metanoia as “conversion.”[29] Other[who?] have characterized the translation of metanoia/μετάνοια as "repentance" with similar negativity. Repentance is an "unsuitable" translation.[30] It is "totally inadequate" to carry the meaning of metanoia.[31]

From https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metanoia_(theology)

 

Abandoning compulsive nonstop over analyzing.

According to Ichazo, Divine Love is “The awareness that ,,,,,,,,,,

,,,,,,,,,, As soon as the mind’s word mechanism is destroyed, love, the natural condition of the mind, appears. Love begins the moment man contemplates the Creation and says, ‘Thank you, God.’ All men feel this somewhat, no animal can feel this at all. Man alone can know that all comes from God.”

From https://www.the16types.info/vbulletin/showthread.php/48274-Oscar-Ichazo-s-enneagram-descriptions

 

 

 

 

[Display_Name]

• Neville Goddard
• A Course in Miracles

[Zigzag Idiot]

This is co Author of The Jesus Mysteries.

In my mind he ties together how Christianity was turned into Churchianity or Jesusism.

 

[Bill W]

This gives me goosebumps. It's speaks directly to my fear. 

 

[Astra]

(Not sure about the rest of the channel)

The third testament (a channeled work apparently channeling source)

- high level non dual teachings of love/wisdom in Christian words 

 

Edited December 14, 2019 by Astra

[Bill W]

New Testament.

Book of James.

Will only take you 10mins to read it. One of the shorter books in the bible. If part of your self actualisation journey is to benefit both yourself AND others, give it a read and implement as much as you can from it.

 

[ajasatya]

Adyashanti also has a strong Christian background.