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Relationship to Personal Awareness

In its response, Revenue Canada seems to be indicating that its concern with our worship is that it is more psychological (personal awareness) than religious. This is a complicated question with which many theologians have tried to wrestle just because there is a close relationship between knowing oneself and knowing God.

I would remind you of the definition of a deity in the Encyclopedia of Religion which I quoted on p. 3, as well as Gaboury's explanations on p. 8-9. Because we are made in the image and likeness of God (Gen 1,27) , coming to know ourselves deeply is coming to know God more deeply. Or, as the New Dictionary of Theology says of Teresa of Avila:

The engaging Spanish Carmelite mystic and reformer Teresa of Avila provided a balanced exposition of the mystical life. Writing in the vernacular, Teresa was an incipient psychologist who created categories and images to communicate her subjective, interior responses to the experience of God, an experience which was basically ineffable.

Teresa observed that our greatest problem was the lack of self-knowledge. God is at the center of our existence and as God is approached the individual increases in self-knowledge and enters more fully into the reality of existence. God is met and the self is born on this journey. The individual does not collapse into an Absolute but is differentiated and stands forth as union with God deepens.

This idea of self knowledge is the lesson we learn from the Paradise Story (Gen 2,3ff): "Now both were naked, the man and his wife, but they felt no shame in front of each other" (Gen 2,25). Later, when they had sinned, they realize they are naked. That is they can't accept their limitations. The lesson we learn is that God wants us to live an authentic (naked) life. That means to live honestly, accepting our limitations as well as our qualities. Or, as the Benedictine monk, Pierre Arnold says, "to familiarize oneself with a terrible nudity"

This nudity is the process of learning more about who we are, both qualities and limitations and accepting all of it. In knowing that we are not our limitations, we come to know more clearly who we are. The psychologist Jung would call this the Self, and the limitations, the Shadow; the process of accepting the Shadow to discover the Self he calls the individuation process. Religionists would call it the Soul, or the spark of the Divine and our sinful selves or, in the words of the Christian motto: "Love the sinner, not the sin."

Jung's accounts of psychotherapy demonstrate how the individuation process almost always begins with this humbling integration of the shadow in one's unconscious self, the first and most important task on the road to psychic health.

. . . obviously . . . (Jung) did not intend to reduce the almighty, transcendent Divine Being into a psychological experience, a mere archetype of humanity's collective unconscious; rather, his purpose was to show how the image of God exists within the psyche and acts in suitable God-like ways, whether one's belief in God is conscious or not.

Jesus the Christ, during his ministry, repeated the message of the Garden of Eden in the Jewish Bible, but in a new way:

And they brought the children to him, that he should touch them; and his disciples rebuked those that brought them. But when Jesus saw it, he was much displeased, and said unto them, Suffer the little children to come on to me, and forbid them not: for of such is the Kingdom of God. Verily, I say unto you, Whosoever shall not receive the Kingdom of God as a little child, he shall not enter there in. And he took them up in his arms, put his hands upon them and blessed them (Mk 10, 13-16).

In his tape packet The Wayshower, John-Roger says:

The two selves are inside of us and if we are going to be true to both of them, then we do not reinforce our negative self. That is really being true to it. If we reinforce it, we get ourselves in a constant state of trouble.

. . . Once you have found your True Self, you have found your Christ light within, you have found your own God centre, you have found that all things are right and proper. But one thing you find that is immeasurable, is a serenity within you that urges you upward.

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