Progress as of November 10

I haven't been writing a lot recently since a lot of lines of speculation have been looking promising whose outcome will affect the content of some essays being worked upon.  As usual, I was writing the essays, being led by the Spirit, and got the leads that I am currently pursuing.  Here's a quick rundown of what's cooking for those who the Spirit can lead, or at least follow the rabbit-trail I'm cutting through the underbrush preparatory to laying down the highway:

1. I have definitely established essay writing as a personal communications protocol, and speculate that perhaps any creative endeavor can be a vehicle by which the Holy Spirit communicates.
2. I am becoming more and more certain that the reborn human heart can backslide, and either must be re-educated to goodness, cleansed by the Spirit, or deleted and replaced (rebooted?  restored?) , after which extra care and effort must then be expended to maintain heart purity.  This means applying Variance Management with a vengeance continuously and at all stages of "heart maturity", not allowing the slightest deviation from the Scripture standards of purity, morality, and obedience. 
3. It is starting to look (but I am not certain) that the last 4% of temptations I am having with regard to porn are due to the heart not being fully loyal and subverting the work of the Spirit.  In fact, as I am reading through scripture, I am finding more and more verses where Jesus or Paul are talking about doing stuff "from the heart" or requiring agreement "from the heart".  In a sense, we don't need to increase our faith, but we do need to fully utilize what faith we do have.  However, full utilization requires "alignment" between the heart and the inner man, which is what Jesus was demanding when he said that we should not doubt "from the heart" when we wanted to move a mountain with a mustard seed of faith, and then talked about the master and the servant.  Perhaps THAT is what jesus was driving at?  That we should master our heart and make it our servant in the same way we should be servants of God and be mastered by Him?  Viewing the heart as the Misbehaving servant of the Inner Man is worth looking at.
4. The current method I am using to "align the heart" that seems to be successful is quoting Psalms 51:10 every time I get an undesired heart response, and mean it. ("Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me.")  The key to making this method work requires adopting a thoughtful intentionality while reciting it, and avoid a thoughtless repetition similar to gurus saying "ommm".  The idea is to be tough with the heart, display zero tolerance for even the slightest temptation, and demand total replacement of it from the Holy Spirit if cooperation is not forthcoming.  The model is to regard the reborn heart as immature that has to be "trained up in the way it should go", and display tough love when any deviations come up.
5. An interesting measure of "heart alignment" is, quite unexpectedly, the phenomenon of "drunken glory".  I have spoken before of individuals for whom the Spirit induces a sensation of their addiction as a form of spiritual Methadone to counteract their otherwise overpowering natural addictive/compulsive inclinations.  The two individuals I follow that I deem reliable are John Crowder (youtube channel here), and Benjamin Dunn (youtube channel here), although entering "drunken glory" as a search term into youtube will bring up a multitude of others.  Former drunks describe this sensation as being "drunk in the spirit", and former addicts talk of "getting high on Jesus".  My take was that this was a great grace being granted to these people to keep them from falling back into addiction.  However, based on a single video of John Crowder where he jumped on those who talked about having "sex with jesus", I wondered if these guys weren't being too narrow minded: I've never taken drugs nor been drunk, so *I* am supposed to left out in the cold?  Not to be too detailed, but when I started getting tough with my heart, I began to feel some incredibly pleasurable sensations at times that I would describe as 'afterglow', along with the "appropriate" physical manifestations.  Obviously, this definitely needs a lot more work.
6. I am coming to the conclusion that there are two important signalling protocols in scripture whereby the believing human sinner communicates definite intentionalities to God that God takes as a signal to enter into and work with the believer.  The first is baptism, and the second is Communion.  Baptism was insisted upon by Jesus to "fulfill all righteousness", after which ALL records state that he received the Holy Spirit.  Certainly, this is a signal on the part of the believer that they want the Holy Spirit, and it appears that the reception of the Holy Spirit and Baptism were tied inextricably together in the minds of the early church (certainly in Peter's mind!).  Writing a post-baptism book for new believers on the practice of Symbiotic Christianity is looking better and better, with some end-of-chapter paragraphs on "backfitting" the advice to older Christians to make it more general.
7. I was reading Teresa of Avila's "The Way of Perfection", and noted her passion about the benefits of Communion.  Certainly, her being a Roman Catholic nun who believed in the priest turning the bread and wine into the literal Body and Blood of Jesus played a big part of this, but the Spirit had been leading me to take personal Communion since I saw a video where a "drunken glory" preacher who holds the book of Enoch as Canonical extolled the virtues of taking it daily.  As a Protestant, I don't believe in Transubstantiation, but Teresa's comments led me last week (November 4) to take personal communion as a deliberate signal for Unification with Jesus.  You don't need a priest or pastor to do it, since Paul said that the Corinthians got into trouble by doing it wrong, rather than doing it without a minister.  Doing it right, Paul said, requires perceiving the body and blood of Christ in the bread and the wine.  I use the BIG mazoh bread "crackers" and grape juice, and eat the entire square entirely without pre-breaking it into smaller pieces BEFORE I drink the juice: the method of Intinction, the way the Catholics and Methodists do it, is not the way Jesus did it in the Last Supper and how Paul describes it.  As I chew, I picture my sins grinding Jesus dead as my teeth grind the bread.  But more importantly, I visualize how the bread and juice become me.:  What part of me can be said to be the bread and not the bread?  Impossible.  The bread and wine literally become part of me, as Unification means Jesus becoming a part of me and I of Him by way of the indwelling of the Holy Spirit.  Finally, the purpose of his sacrifice was to to give life to us, and what do bread and juice provide but nourishment and energy to the body?  Thus, I visualize that connection between me and Jesus feeding me.  I know this sounds very selfish and self-centered, but to avoid the idea of Jesus benefitting me after dying on the Cross to actually and literally benefit me, is being Peter telling Jesus to not wash his feet: to be a part of Jesus requires that he cleanse you and serve you.  I must say, I have had very interesting results after I started doing this, and especially after enforcing heart alignment (see #4 above): the key is deliberately thinking and approaching this as a covenantal signal to the Spirit to "unify", down to the molecular level.  We are always unified with God, of course, since He never leaves us nor forsakes us, but it appears that this seems to be inviting a special level of intervention/interaction.  My only change is that I'm gonna go with mazoh crackers sized more like soup crackers than the mazoh bread 'slices' that are about 6 times worse for my diet.  Oh, and one interesting detail that I didn't notice until now: I didn't feel anything immediately after eating the bread and wine, but started getting "something" between ten and twenty minutes after eating it.  Like, after I start actually absorbing actual nutrients from the bread and wine!

Now, one of the most irritating things about all the above is that I am having problems establishing the truth and falsity of the above using the older techniques, which was to see how effective my prayer life became so as to help Ken and Glenn with their situations.  I have been praying for several others since I have started this, BUT I keep seeing such quick results that I cannot believe it really is due to these changes.  If the most recent results are an indication, I have (metaphorically speaking) upgraded a bb-gun to a shot gun and am having problems with the noise the new instrument makes. 

I am now stuck in a situation with having new hypotheses to test and nobody in really deep distress to stress test their effectiveness. 

2010-11-10 07:21:06 by Gerald

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