Wednesday, November 17, 2010

What are we attracting?

Our present world seems consumed with theories of attracting (accumulating?) wealth, fame, power, prestige, etc., etc.,—in short, the things of this world. Are these things not the substance of LoA[1] pitches and promotions? Finding favor with the Universe? Tuning in to energies that will materialize our material desires—grant our wills and wishes? But do we ever ask what the Divine Mentor attracted? What His Will and Desire was?
If the world hate you, ye know that it hated me before it hated you. If ye were of the world, the world would love his own: but because ye are not of the world, but I have chosen you out of the world, therefore the world hateth you (New Testament John 15:18-19).

Jesus saith unto them, My meat is to do the will of him that sent me, and to finish his work (New Testament John 4:34).
Consider also the words of Isha Schwaller de Lubicz:
Many are those who project their imaginings outside themselves and create gods “in their own image and likeness.” The powers they would adore are those that can grant them all the boons they yearn for in this world and the next. They are answered by Christ’s word: “Ye know not what ye ask” (Mark 10:38).

Their wish is for an idol to protect and favor them, or else for a divine being who can be loved possessively. But paradises, like gods, are made by men according to their desires, and their misfortune will be that they will often find what they have imagined. But what we can imagine is no part of the inexpressible Divine.

An omnipotent desire is one which animates the very cells of your being and makes you able to seize and grasp the object of your affinity. Such a desire has magic power, and, like the sorcerer’s apprentice, man uses it imprudently. For the god, or power, which answers him is of the same nature as his desire. The money-grubber invokes the powers of money, the social climber the powers of the social order, and the thinker invokes intellectual powers. Thus the seeker is ruled and restricted by his affinity. This is his hell, or purgatory, in which he is already confined in this present life.

As for the so-called “spiritual desires,” the potency of “the Desire” must not be confused with these anemic wishes for spirituality, or emotional longings toward some God or other who is expected to reciprocate, to show good intentions, and to provide all the scenic effects which lull the pious into an illusion of beatitude.

… When the illusory vanishes, reality appears. The necessary experience is to recognize the real in the midst of the world of illusion.

To do this I must clear my own ground, eliminate all that is not my true self, and create in myself the milieu which can attract the Spirit …[2]
--------------/
[1] Law of Attraction
[2] The Opening of the Way: A Practical Guide to the Wisdom of Ancient Egypt by Isha Schwaller de Lubicz (Trans. from the French by Rupert Gleadow), © 1981, Inner Traditions International, New York, p. 78.