Worship

Opening yourself to the influence of what you worship – or to the influence of the ideas or feelings involved in the act of worshipping. It can also be an experience that transcends your usual sense of yourself. In this case a realisation of your wholeness.

Example: Dreamt I was with a group of people, perhaps in a house. Outside the house, in the Garden, was a small wooden shed, like a garden shed. This was empty of anything, and was used as a place to be alone with God. It felt as if we were Jewish. I went into the shed and began to call out to God by the name Jehovah. As I did so I began to cry as if in the realisation of my iniquities against God. With heart-rending sorrow that I should have gone against the wonderful love of God, I wept uncontrollably. It was like a religious experience of cleansing. Also, I remember, even though asleep, I hoped my cries were not expressing physically to disturb my wife.

Just as the appetites or disordered condition of the fat man stop him from touching his toes, even though his toes are constantly with him – so the self-will of man stops him from feeling the ever present Life within them being known. But a dog intent on finding his master and oblivious of his direction may run into a car, meaning that in the dog’s heart his pain may be associated with the love for his master, causing him now to suspect and deny his love. In the same way men and women suspect that circumstances of Life are the cause of their own distress.

To the practical mind any person is a fool who does not acknowledge dependence. For instance, a young child who does not acknowledge, even emotionally, its dependence upon parents, will soon find itself lonely, lost, hurt, misused or even killed. While an adult who does not acknowledge that his physical body depends upon food and many factors to do with their physical and mental health, may soon become seriously ill.

As an example, I witnessed a man talking to a woman he was confronting, “Religion;” he said, “That’s surely a direction for failures and people who can’t really cope with facing reality.”

And the woman he was accusing of this inability to face reality said, “You poor man! Is your mind or awareness so tiny that you have never realised the forces and processes of your own body are beyond anything you understand? Can’t you see that your very existence is brought about by things so far beyond your knowledge that it is only a statement of your impoverishment to suggest an awareness of God is an expression of some sort of smallness and failure? Have you never understood that?

Have you not seen that religion is not only an acknowledgement of what we fail to understand and yet depend upon, but it is also an opening to it, a willingness to relate to it? It can also be something far more even than that. It can be an active loving relationship with what gives you life. And such love is an exchange, a sharing, and a way of merging one with another. It is an exchange – the very substance of life.”

So worship is a way of opening ourselves to the unknown that gives us life and we are dependent upon. In computer use for instance, it is now commonplace to have an image on the screen that connects us either with information stored on the hard disk, or will evoke a programmed response linked with the image. So, by moving our cursor to an image and clicking on it we can start a program such as a word processor; or we can cause to be displayed information such as a book, music or a photograph, that is stored on the hard disk. In a similar way, by learning to use worship, or a condition in which you are engrossed in a directed fantasy – such as meditation or prayer – and by using a dream image in such fantasy, you can evoke responses from parts of you usually inaccessible. See Clicking On

Example: Gradually my being became quieter and quieter. My breathing slowed down so much it seemed almost non-existent. I had a feeling of my peripheral, changing self, slowly dying in ashes to reveal what all the world is seeking. I felt that as my peripheral self died, there was the possibility of this other part of my being shining through more brightly. My wife was still beside me, and I had the sense of my body being an altar on which the exterior me had burnt away, revealing an eternal quality, and my wife and other people, receiving it, worshipping it. There was nothing personal or worthy of self praise about this, because all have this central being. See Water Wonderland

Worshipping: Opening yourself to the influence of what is being worshipped – an idea, a person, an object.

Worshipped: Inflated sense of self.