An email appeared in the inbox this morning from the other side of the planet. It still amazes me when things like that happen and I’m glad it does. I don’t ever want to take people, life or this Work for granted. There is no question in my mind that I have been and am being blessed. It’s a strange term to use, blessed. From my current perspective, which I know will change, I do not subscribe to the belief in divine favor as something one may receive apart from everyone else. God is no respecter of persons suits me just fine. Somewhere along the way I had to relinquish my little god for a great Unknown and Unknowable. Though from time to time I have religious twinges and regressions I am not sorry to see it go. It was sentimental and full of idiotic contradictions that hindered my forward progress in the process of transformation. Now I have other things that can hinder my progress. What is purification if it’s not removing the hinderances to our progress?

What I mean by blessed is that I have the good fortune to be grateful. Obviously, being grateful is not something everyone can be. If they can be there seems to be something that hinders them from being grateful. Probably the same things that cripple my ability to be grateful now and then. Mostly accounts, feeling owed or some other form of negative emotions--the attractive poison that we can’t seem to resist for long. It’s an addiction. The email was about a Podcast that I made back in February of this year. As I listened to it to see about what the emailer was talking I had to die a little more to my idea of myself, my sense of myself. This is never really pleasant but it is necessary. As the apostle Paul wrote, I die daily. If we’re on the right track we should be dying on a daily basis as well. It’s so hard to stay on the right track when there is so much in us that wishes to run screaming from the path.

He had some question about something I’d said about negative self-remembering. The thing that I found unpleasant was the tone of the podcast. A kind of superior tone that arises out of a certain despair in which little I’s love to wallow. If it were up to my pride and vanity I would remove all the podcasts that didn’t show me in the best possible light. Perhaps Peter would have had the account of his denial of Christ expunged from the Gospels at some point in his spiritual development. I like to think that he wouldn’t because he realized that his discomfort was not as important as the lesson it could teach, the inspiration it could spark in someone, somewhere, sometime. The podcasts, like the essays I write, are reflections of my own personal pattern of growth, development. Because I am not fully mature they reflect the blemishes in my personality. Sometimes I am the author of unpleasant manifestations. I don’t like that but it is true and I want the truth above all else, even more than my own personal comfort. Is it possible to develop and guard our personal comfort? I think not. It is times like this morning that Emerson’s essay, Self-Reliance, supports and comforts me. He wrote, A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. When I first read those words forty years ago, they struck me as true in a powerful way. If you haven’t read Emerson’s essay, Self-Reliance recently may I suggest you give it a read?