Thomas Aquinas

Challenge To Your Way Of “Knowing”

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Myss | May 1 2012

I recently wrote a small piece on prayer for a particular CMED group of students. I send out a prayer each month to these students as part of their work with their Fate to Destiny Sacred Contracts class. As I was searching through my literature on prayer, I reviewed some of the writings of Thomas Aquinas, the renowned and rather old world Catholic theologian. One has to sift through his writings to find his wisdom as it’s hidden, but it’s still there. I selected only a slight passage – not much – in which Aquinas notes that prayer is made more powerful by a person’s clarity of heart and mind and secondly, by living in accordance with what you are praying for. That is, your life choices and lifestyle need to be congruent with your prayers rather than counterproductive. Prayers will not compensate for foolish life choices, particularly conscious foolish life choices. You cannot pray for health and then poison yourself with the wrong foods, in other words.

The response to this teaching was astounding, given how brief it was. The outpouring of positive comments by people especially surprised me given that the source of this teaching is Aquinas. It’s not that I think Aquinas is such a bad guy, but he’s not on the top ten list of popularly read authors these days.

But one who is far more current though just as much a “blast from the past” is John of the Cross, the wondrous Spanish Carmelite priest who was St. Teresa of Avila’s spiritual advisor. He is not remembered so much for that as he is for having authored his immortal work, The Dark Night of the Soul. The expression alone, “I am in a dark night,” has become a part of our common parlance, though many who use that phrase are unfamiliar with its origins.

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Are All Our Experiences Choices?

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Neale Donald Walsch | February 24 2012

My dear friends…

There are many areas of life, many situations, in which you may choose to have the Holy Experience.

Now that may sound like a strange thing to say, so let’s take a look at it. At first, it may seem strange to speak of the Holy Experience as something that you “choose to have.” Most people think of things that are holy as things that are rare. Or at the very least, not controllable in the first person. That is, they do not see themselves as being at cause in the matter.

In fact, they are. We all are. All of us. We are “choosing to have” all of the experiences that we are having, moment-to-moment.

Now remember, I said all of the experiences, not all of the conditions, circumstances, or events. An “experience” is something that you feel inside about something that is happening outside. Your “experience” of something is “how it felt to you.” It is nothing more, and nothing less, than that.

In the world of Duality Thinking (which is the world in which most of us live), you could imagine that somebody else is “doing something” to you, or that some seemingly uncontrollable outward condition, such as the weather, has been encountered by you, without you having anything to do with it. (This is impossible, actually, but in the world of our illusion such impossibilities can seem very real.)

The world of Duality Thinking says that there is Us. and It, or U.S. and Them. In the world of Non-Duality Thinking there is only Us and Us. There is nothing else but Us in differing form.

If there is only Us, then nothing can be happening To us, and everything must be happening Through us.

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