Daniel Day 26 - Remembering

Starting with the question, "Why don't I remember God?" a wonderful spiritual journey and experience can begin.

I can remember anything I want to remember. Why not God? I must not want to remember God. So I must look at myself and see why I don't want to remember God. In fact, I must be doing things to not want to remember God.

If I want to remember something else, I do things. Here are the things:

• I set things out of place.
• I set alarms.
• I make habits.
• I succumb to peer pressure and society's rules (caring what others think of me).
• I have a bodily need like hunger or tiredness.
• I'm addicted.
• I want it for grandiose reasons; like rewards or to please others.
• I could be avoiding pain or lose.

What if I threw everything I had into remembering God? Why don't I want to be successful? Am I incapable? No...discern further.

From ACIM:

• …confused communication does not mean anything. A message cannot be communicated unless it makes sense.
• How sensible can your message be when you ask for what you do not want?...as long as you are afraid…that is precisely what you are asking for.
• You and your Creator can communicate through creation.
• Christ is in me…

I can’t remember God because I am asking about an idea of something which I don’t know what it is. Thus, I am asking for something which I have been told I should want but do not really want because I don’t know what it is. If you say God is Love, and I do want that, I might be confused. So much of my idea of love is really self serving. If I feel like a spiritual failure and cry out in prayer, it is really my ego, not God, that I am praying to. I am begging my ego to set me free and I know this because the world of perception is the ego’s. The belief that I am a physical being (instead of a spiritual one) is the ego’s. The only way to pray is to calm down and look into my silent depths. Christ is in me.

I can support Christ in me by realizing something else. Pay attention, I am going to shift this discussion a little. I am on a 40 day Daniel Fast and today is day 26. Fasting, combined with prayer, is for life changing spiritual breakthrough. Indeed, my own life has shifted tremendously from what it was like before starting the fast. I was running 50 or more miles a week and very unhappy because I was gaining weight. Now, I haven’t been running due to a foot injury but have lost 5 pounds; thus am very much at peace. Then, I hated religion, the limitations of religious rules, and thought the monastery up the street was pansy ass. Now, I have returned to church, want to understand what my 4 year education in Benedictine life was about, and am considering becoming an oblate at the monastery up the street. Then I was just an employee at a company I disapproved of. Now, I am willing to join the team of management in running the plant without hourly people (who are on strike) in order to save the company and change our culture. Then, I was afraid of losing my retirement. Now, I see wall street adjustments as a good thing and am not relying on anything but God. AND I am at peace with all these changes; that is the miracle part.

What these changes mean in the spiritual realm is that I see myself behaving, believing and loving in ways that are not possible for my ego. I see myself do what my ego does not want to do and realize that there is something higher than my ego in operation in my life. I see that I have and need to continue to turn my thinking over to this higher beneficent power who helps me be at peace at all times no matter what is going on. My ego only wants rewards and recognition. Beneficence wants to love. Beneficence must be “Christ within me.” I must throw all my effort into allowing Beneficence to be my consciousness.

Look at the list of things I do when I WANT to remember something. If I look at the peace and love Beneficence brings, and think about it quietly, I will find I WANT that. If I WANT something, then I am perfectly capable of ensuring that I remember it. So There!