THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF GOD’S PRESENCE AND ITS EFFECTS

The true meaning of Jesus' words cannot be known from simple intellectual studies and analyzes. Study and analysis are useful, and to some extent necessary - but they are not sufficient to create spiritual life. No saint, mystic or seer of God has thus acquired its knowledge of the Kingdom of Heavens. The power dominating the world, the religious enthusiasm, the dynamics of the martyrs and apostles, the courage of the true mystic who ignores the impossible, the cross transformed from a symbol of ignominy into an epic of glory, the positivism of the great messengers of the kingdom of God - none of this derives from a purely theoretical study, but an intense and profound consciousness of the presence of God. The man who does not know God intuitively, through direct and immediate experience always has something to fear, to speculate and calculate meticulously, so that his petty personal interests do not suffer, and his idols are not thrown from their thrones - but who has personal contact with God through mystical experience, has nothing to fear; death itself, that ominous spectre for every profane man does not inspire terror to the spiritual man - the initiate on the things of God - for he already lives the immortality here on Earth; whether having a body not because makes no difference, since he knows, and not only believes, that is not his body, but his soul. And so, the spiritual man can immerse himself in the immense ocean of deeds for the kingdom of God, in the certainty, that no harm will happen to him.

All this supposes that he does have personal experience with God, which is only acquired in prayer or cosmo-meditation, therefore, it is indispensable that man, unwilling to delude himself should be united with increasing intensity, in God, to the point of being able to say: “The Father and I are one”, and to live a life of perennial communion with God, who “always pray and never give up praying”.

For human life to be able to take place in this atmosphere of God’s consciousness, the initiate in this art must give some time to daily meditation, during which it isolates itself from the outside world and withdraws completely into God. During that time, man must impose complete silence on his psychophysical feelings, focusing his spiritual consciousness on the only Reality, God, allowing the Eternal Light to illuminate his soul, to give him strength and make him more and more aware of his essential identity with God.

This task of total ego-emptying will be hard work, and often the beginner will find itself on the verge of discouragement, seeing no visible result. However, continuing unperturbed and increasing intensity will see its life gradually transformed under the silent action of divine leaven. From that mystical heat, it will feel that this time of meditation will eventually be necessary.

Initially, this divine light will be limited to the time of meditation. When returning to daily life, it will feel its extinction and the disappearance of spiritual strength as it moves away from that time. But little by little, with the progressive intensification of absorption in God, part of that divine light spreads over the remaining hours of the day until it is totally enveloped by that clarity. It will then find that under this mysterious colloquy with God, the daily tasks, even the most prosaic and boring, will end up becoming pleasant and enveloped in light. Finally, those who meditate realizes that everything is beautiful in this world of God when placed in the light of God's experience ...

This awareness of God’s presence is necessary for man's spiritual sanity and, therefore, the only possible regeneration of society since any other attempt is illusory.

The true life of meditation requires discipline, equivalent to surgical intervention in the sick organism of the soul. Whoever meditates will either cease to be a sinner or cease to meditate. Either meditation ends sin, or sin ends meditation, as it is not possible that they can coexist within the same soul. They are like fire and water, light and darkness. Man cannot pray in one way - and live in another. The main reason why the vast majority of human beings do not pray is that their life is not compatible with the spirit of prayer. Because it is easier, under the law of moral inertia, to abandon prayer than to leave sin, it is normal for sin to continue and prayer to be sacrificed...

Prayer, or meditation when genuine, implies the greatest sincerity of the person who prays, and its aim is not a childish attempt to change the will of God - but a sincere effort to conform the human will to the will of God. The purpose of prayer is not to be petitionary, to get some external object - but to heal the subject itself because who is wrong is the conscious and free human being, with its actions and reactions. And this divine colloquium is not a substitute for work - it is rather the most arduous of all work, and at the same time, the secret spring that drives the force for all other positive and efficient work in human life.

The spiritual initiation of mankind and its progress in this field depend essentially on the ability to pray. Since God is the only Reality, the more powerful it is, the closer the union with God. Prayer is the dynamo that generates all energies because it establishes the connection with the divine source; cutting the connection with the light source, all the lights switch off. The reason why chaos is experienced is because of the abandonment of communion with God.

All churches have lost the sincere spirit of prayer, believing they can solve problems through conferences, congresses and theological discussions. Any measure - political, economic, social, scientific, etc., is inefficient if it does not run parallel and is based on an intensification of the communion with God, and this is mathematically correct. However, it is considered ridiculous by the materialistic “scholars” of this world, who think to manage the destinies of humanity. They are failing to fulfil their mission in this regard. Scholastic theology practically crushed mystical intuition. Scholars have replaced saints. Intelligence killed the spirit. Many are the religious who know brilliant things about God, few are the Christlike men and women who know God because it is one thing to study theology about God, another thing is to have an experience of God.

Meditation releases any content from the human ego, in the certainty, that plenitude happens where there is an emptiness. The total ego-emptying inevitably produces the fullness in God in the direct reason in which it empties itself. This fullness is not man's work - man's work is only self-emptying; everything else will happen automatically in that divine communion.

Certainly, the man who does not practice this communion with God regularly and intensely is not spiritual, and his activity in the social field will not produce lasting results. For this reason, cultivating a life in prayer is the main requirement for the regeneration of humanity. There is no insoluble problem for the man of prayer.

Beginners need to know that this emptying of ego-consciousness without maintaining spiritual awareness leads to a trance that nullifies any spiritual effect. Whoever meditates must be 0% thinking and 100% conscious. The thought is a process of mental continuity - whereas consciousness is a state of spiritual simultaneity. Continuous thinking makes us restless - simultaneous awareness fills us with profound tranquillity.

After a certain period of daily meditation, intensely lived, great discoveries happen because whoever meditates will find that it is free, or in the process of liberation, from the two greatest enemies of happiness: hatred and fear. It will find that no longer hate anyone, nor fear anything. Any psychologist, psychiatrist or psychotherapist of today knows - as the ancient philosophical and religious geniuses already knew - that these two factors, hatred and fear, make a man sick, spiritually and psychically, and, often physically. Asylums, hospitals and prisons are testimonies of this truth; thousands of households are real hells because of these treacherous enemies of humanity.

Hate and fear are negative soul procedures, and it is known that every negative action or reaction, when fed ends up poisoning its author. The man who hates turns against the person from whom he thinks he has received an injury and who, for this reason, considers his “enemy” seeks to pay evil with evil, and possibly with the greatest physical ailment, death. And he ignores the fact that he inflicts on himself a much greater evil than he can inflict on his so-called “enemy”. The person most affected by hatred is always the subject, not the object of that hatred, since the first is the active and productive cause of the evil and the second is only the passive victim who suffers it. The object of hate can, at worst, lose its physical life, but the subject of hate, in any case, whether it kills or does not kill the hated person, loses the health and metaphysical integrity of its Self. Hate is a process reflective, not merely transitive; its destructive action does not end with the hated but reverts to those who hate; the hated is, at most, hit on the surface, in the material part, of his ego, while the hater receives the full impact of this terrible “atomic bomb” of his own making, which he intended to launch against his “enemy”.

“Don't pay evil with evil, love your enemies, do good to those who harm you.”

Some consider these imperatives of the Sermon on the Mount to be ethical idealism, practically impossible and absurd. These ignorant do not know that, in these words, there is a high practical philosophy of human life and the only efficient wisdom. Jesus well knew that there is no health and happiness in the man who breeds hatred and resentment.

The Christlike man comprehends this divine wisdom and has abolished hatred and resentment; he is no one's enemy, although others claim to be his enemies. Judas was an enemy of Jesus, but Jesus was not an enemy of Judas, so much so that at the moment of betrayal, Jesus calls him “friend” and returns the kiss of betrayal with his sincere friendship.

If there were no other reason, it would be worthwhile to exercise daily meditation to achieve this glorious state of hatred-free.

Hate exemption? No, it is much more than that: it is true love for all beings, human and non-human. And this love is not merely an emotional feeling, nor the effect of a simple theoretical indoctrination or an artificial arrangement when necessary: ​​it is the spontaneous result of the intuition of the Truth; for the initiated is the seer of the absolute Truth, of the eternal Reality; it knows by intuition that all beings are its brothers, more or less advanced, as it is so magnificently expressed in the “Canticle of the Sun” by Francis of  Assisi, one of the most perfectly Christlike men that history knows; this initiated knows that all beings in the universe are offspring of the same Father, effects of the same primary Cause. It loves what God loves - and how could fail to do so, if it is identified with the divine Lover of all beings? How could a man commit the abominable sacrilege of hating any being knowing that that being is the object of God's love?

This universal love that animates the initiated is, therefore, the infallible result of its cosmic intuition. The vast horizontality of its ethics is based on the deep verticality of its metaphysics. The love practised is the result of the truth it lives. And that is why its ethics are not painful but easy.

This is also the reason why the Christlike man knows no fear. Fear supposes ignorance, but the initiate is the sage par excellence and knows that nothing can harm him since no being can frustrate the achievement of the eternal destiny. It is for this reason that the spiritual man, seer of the truth, lives without fear. The “misfortunes” which eventually affect his life are nothing more than surface storms, as the depths of his inner ocean always remain in peace. And because he is a man of peace, not so much for what he says or does, but for what he is, he comprehends the profound meaning of Jesus' words: “Blessed are the peacemakers because they will be called children of God”.

After a man has practised with intensity, his daily communion with God, he will find that the light of meditation dims gradually as he returns to his professional duties. And this fills him with sadness because he would like to live in that divine light all the time, almost envying the fate of the hermits who spend their lives in perennial meditation, as in a permanent ecstasy of alienation from the things of the world. However, he renounces that desire and continues to faithfully fulfil his arduous professional duties, which seem common to him after meditation.

But, as his spiritual progress continues, that divine light continues to persist partially during the day, projecting reflections on the area of ​​his common works, enlightening them. And, for the direct reason that these reflexes are intensifying, this man finds that his daily chores, even the most tedious and unpleasant ones, cease to be commonplace, taking on pleasure. It is said that the spiritual man is not practical and inefficient in the things of the world because he cannot at the same time be interested in the things of the spirit and of matter. But the man of meditation finds the opposite: he discovers that his professional work gains efficiency and dynamics in the direct reason of his spiritualization. He now does the same work with the utmost dedication that he once did with indifference, out of mere obligation and an indispensable way of life. Those same jobs, his tyrants of yesterday, are his friends today because daily immersion in the world of God gives meaning to everything. This man solved the problem of life that plagues millions of unfortunates who hate the work they do, discovering the secret of loving his professional duties.

The man of daily meditation will also discover that he is fully certain of the existence of God and eternal life. In the past, this man sought to acquire this certainty through syllogistic processes and intellectual speculations. He lined up arguments next to each other, like a traveller who throws stones at a riverbed to reach the opposite bank, jumping from stone to stone. The syllogistic chain he forged to capture God in the subtle meshes of his philosophical network was impeccable - but he found that God was not the result of any intellectual analysis, that God did not appear under the lens of the most powerful electron microscope, nor neither was it found in the bottom of test tubes and crucibles, nor in chemical formulas ... He convinced, after many disappointments, that God and eternal life are not verifiable by intellectual analysis, but by great spiritual intuition of rightly lived life, and not of a correctly constructed syllogism.

Spiritual certainty does not come from tests and demonstrations; it comes from the intimate experience of each human being, in the things of the spirit. Whoever meditates discovers this eternal source of all religion. He comprehends the certainty that the great religious geniuses had of God and eternal life. And this certainty gives to the initiated a deep feeling of power, security, tranquillity and happiness, that the profane and inexperienced have no idea. Often this man will have to hear from dogmatists that this “certainty” is just a beautiful mirage and subjective illusion; that true certainty comes from unconditional obedience to ecclesiastical authority. The initiate knows that his certainty is solid and valid, although he cannot communicate it to those who have not had the same experience.

Jesus failed to convince the doctors of the church of what he knew about the kingdom of God. It is that he sensed God, whereas the synagogue leaders only knew certain things about God. No initiate can transmit to the profane what he knows since direct experiences are not transferable. If they were, there would be the possibility of “smuggling” or illegitimate intrusion into the kingdom of God. Still, that kingdom, however, is the only one where there is no smuggling and illegality. I cannot pass power of attorney to anyone, nor can I entrust the minister or priest of my church to have divine experience in my place and then transfer it to my personal account, as this is smuggling, extortion. When more advanced than me, my friends and supporters can assist me in this adventure, but they cannot do it for me. Ultimately, I’m the only one who meets God face to face, in deep silence and solitude.

This is how the initiate in meditation discovers that personal freedom and spiritual certainty, two seemingly incompatible things, merge in a grand synthesis and in perfect harmony.

The strangest experience of those who meditate is the appearance of a mysterious voice that is revealed despite its profound silence. That intimate voice is heard every time that man is in danger of slipping to a lower level or making ambiguous commitments to the profane world. At first, it is weak, imperceptible. Still, as the man refines his spiritual ear in concentrated meditation and righteousness of life, listening to the silence of the soul, he will notice that this voice is louder and becomes more and more intense, arriving to become a true guide and tutelary angel. In a moment of doubt, it is enough for him to concentrate for a few moments, get rid of all personal selfishness - and soon, he will have an answer to his doubt and the path forward. That intimate voice is God who reveals itself through human conscience. But he must get used to hearing the voice of conscience and not interpret the message falsely, as this falsification may occur every time that man seeks to take personal advantage of his actions in the particular interest of his ego. For this reason, those who meditate must strip themselves of all selfish motives when they hear the voice of conscience; otherwise, they will take their subjective desires for the revelation of God.

However, it is difficult for the ego’s detachment, and it presumes an intimate sincerity. Human beings like to delude themselves by interpreting their desires through the voice of conscience. But the honest man, who avoids the manoeuvres of the ego, is free from danger and, following the path indicated by the mysterious inner monitor, will unfailingly reach the kingdom of God.

Parallel to these glorious achievements ensured by profound meditation, there is a process of gradual liberation from the tyranny of the ego and the environment.

The profane man does not even know how he is enslaved since he lives anaesthetized by the emptiness of his busy life, not only because of the external circumstances of the social environment but because of the internal circumstances of his physical, mental and emotional ego. He painted with gold the bars of his prison and is convinced that he lives in a palace in complete freedom. He has become so accustomed to this prison that he adores his mental and emotional tyrants.

It is only after he has glimpsed true freedom that is when he realizes that he is a prisoner and feels the desire for liberation, does he sigh by asserting the sovereignty of his divine substance over all the tyrannies of human circumstances. Only then he comprehends the meaning of Jesus' words: “You will know the truth and the truth will set you free”, consequently freeing himself by seeing the truth about his being - and freedom is happiness. He no longer thinks through the minds of others; a new spiritual intuition replaced the old intellectual analysis; he is now thought by the Cosmos and not an ego-thinker.

He knows what is essential and what is secondary in life. Select the facts, the impressions, the thoughts. Does not welcome everyone equally; accepts what favours true evolution and rejects what is useless and harmful. Comprehends that “being someone” is not some external achievement, but an internal organic process, based on discovering the Truth, from which freedom and happiness the profane does not know.

Man, once accustomed to this daily communion with God, can no longer live without it. Only from men of this quality can humanity expect guidance and redemption amid the chaos in which it is struggling.