How unconscious are you?

When you decide to awaken from the dream-world in which you're living, you become aware of how unconscious you are to this present moment.   Test this: ask yourself how much of the drive to work or home you actually remember; evaluate how much of this morning's meal you actually tasted. Instead, when you wake up to the present, when you're fully awake now to God, to yourself, to the world around you, there is a new quality to your experience of this present moment.

Jesus said, “Do not worry about tomorrow” (Matthew 6.34).

With these words, he liberates us from the pull of the past, the tyranny of tomorrow. He’s inviting you now to wake up from the dream and enter the splendor of the Kingdom of God which is here among us, within us (Luke 17.21); he is urging you to step into the gift of the Eternal Life now.

A dream-world is where most people live

We spend a great deal of our lives living somewhere other than where we are. Our minds dwell mostly on the past or walk around in the mind-made world of the future. But no one meets God anywhere but where they are now. The past was, of course, very real, but it’s not real now. And the future will be real, but it’s not here yet.

The past is only a memory and the future is merely a dream.

And so long as you spend the bulk of your time in these two dreams worlds, you’re essentially sleep walking through the present; the present moment is the only time you really have. In this "dream" state (which seems very real to you) God will be merely a head-trip—ideas and doctrines—no more real than the phantoms in your dreams.

Sadly, this dream-world is where most people live, it’s likely where you’ve lived for quite some time.

It's time to wake up.

The wireless device as tyrant

The wireless device, a morally ambiguous piece of equipment, has become a tyrant. What Thomas Merton said in 1961 is eerily prophetic: "This becomes a kind of religious compulsion without which people cannot convince themselves that they are really alive, really 'fulfilling their personality.' They are not 'sinning' but simply making asses of themselves, deluding themselves that they are real when their compulsions have reduced them to a shadow of a true person" (New Seeds of Contemplation, p. 85-6). The modern person doesn't live by text alone, but the continuous stream of texts, Facebook updates, and tweets suggest that many, too many, of us believe that WiFi is the very air we breathe.

How many meetings are interrupted now by coworkers glancing at an incoming text? How many romantic evenings are botched by a screen lighting up? How many people must die before we learn to turn things off?

Get free.

Put the thing down for awhile.

Be human.

If you can't, name it for what it is, an addiction, and get help.

Keypad as needle, wireless as drug

You'll never truly be free until you face your compulsions. Unless you can say "no" to your bodily appetites not only will you not be able to pray, but you'll not be able to resist the maddening choices that assault you every day. Your sanity and your spiritual vitality depend on being able to resist impulsive action. So long as you eat or drink or smoke whatever you want, so long as you indulge in whatever sensual stimulant arouses you, so long as you cannot turn off your cell phone or close down your Facebook page for awhile you're a slave to external impulses that overshadow, abuse, and diminish your interior identity.

There are some who are hooked to texting and tweeting as disastrously as a junkies were hooked to heroine when I was young.

The keypad is their needle and wireless is their drug.

Is it yours?

The power of solitude in the midst of a busy life

To discern the emptiness, and the vain pursuits of those who are strangers to Love, you need space, real freedom . . . solitude, silence. Not solitude that is a flight from all this in order to escape into some peaceful realm.  Rather, a cleft in the rock, a place to take your stand for the sake of others---for Love---rather than against them in judgment of them and their empty pursuits (which frankly, are often your own).

This is the path of the "peacemaker" Jesus wills you to be (Matthew 5.9)---who you really are when you are free from such spiritually alien compulsions.

This solitude is most of all a condition of the heart, and inner disposition and can be embraced anywhere with practice---though it needs the support of real solitude; a lonely place you habitually go where no one and nothing can disturb or call on you for awhile; a place where you can let go, unplug . . . be.

Says Thomas Merton: "it is in this loneliness that the deepest activities begin.  It is here that you discover act without motion, labor that is profound repose, vision in obscurity, and, beyond all desire, a fulfillment whose limits extend to infinity" (New Seeds of Contemplation, p. 81).