The Divine Presence
What is the Presence?
The Presence is your divine indwelling Spirit with Whom one develops a growing intimacy as the physical, emotional and mental veils that lie between the personality nature and Spirit are dissolved. The Presence is a responsive, loving Intelligence Who feels infinite love for us and yet remains a mystery (to the intellect). Indeed, the greatest mystery is that the Presence is our own true Self, closer to us than our own breath. For the esoteric purist the idea of developing a relationship with the Divine may seem naive and dualistic, because there is only One Life. And yet the reality is that as long as we identify with the ego personality, building a relationship between personality and Presence is the most direct means to move into the experience of Oneness. The paradox is that through the experience of this relationship all duality falls away and we become One with all Life.
Healing the Relationship
You can experience any form of relationship to the Presence while you remain in duality. Depending on your conditioning you may respond best to the Presence as a Father or Mother, Friend or Brother, Beloved or Child and the quality of this relationship is deeply influenced by the nature of your early relationships. If they were hurtful or dissatisfying it can make you defensive and resistant to intimacy and this attitude will block all relationships including your relationship to the Divine. It is very much a case of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Such blockages may be released through some form of healing that enables your heart to open again. Then you can once again experience this relationship which has always been available to you. It is we who turn away from our divine Presence and in so doing close the door of the heart which is the gateway to your Spirit. The key sin is in denying the reality of our spiritual Identity.
An Illustration
To illustrate this dilemma let me share from my own experience. Despite having felt a deep connection to God in childhood I distanced myself from people and thus from God because of problems in relationship to them. I was then shown that I had used my mind as a veil between my lower self and the Presence because I had feared being dissolved in the relationship to God. This probably originated in feeling overwhelmed by the strong personalities in my childhood because I was the youngest of five. Then as I recognised that it was only my lower self at work resisting the relationship and having done some relationship healing I consciously decided to surrender to God.
As I did this the veil between us did fall away and the experience was very powerful and the radiant outpouring of love and life into my energy field was quite overwhelming. It felt like I could have been dissolved in pure Fire but somehow my divine Self knew how much energy to use to anchor His Presence in my mind and heart. It is reassuring to know that there are protective factors involveed in initiation and that we only receive as much revelation of light as we can handle at any one point in time. That is unless you are completely impatient and try to force the issue before your centres are purified and prepared. Then there may be a more challenging education ahead of you.
Ultimately, life is about relationship and if you believe they have failed you, then you may resist the potential for a living relationship to the Divine. This amounts to a rejection of any and all relationships because the Divine is the One Life and nothing exists outside of It. If you don't have a living relationship to the Divine then you tend to feel a lack on all levels, so much of the preliminary spiritual work consists in finding ways to remove the blocks and obstacles imposed by your own experience. These blocks get laid down as impressions deep in the subconscious and act as veils over Reality.
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