![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Daily Advice 11.19.20
Nov. 19th, 2020 08:52 am Today's advice is from a much more recent work, Progress Through Mental Prayer, a Catholic guide to meditation. Writing in 1935, the author, Edward Leen, reminds us:
This is written, of course, for practicing Catholics, but Father Leen's words apply to all of us. Material things are present to one another if they are physically in the same place. But it is not so with immaterial things. We have present to our soul only that which we have engaged with the soul's powers of attention, thought, affection and imagination.
And the corollary to this is: Whatever occupies our attention, our minds and our imagination is what is present to us. If we are spending our time focusing on the news, say, and filling our emotions and our thoughts with the details of the Latest Outrage (there always is one), then that is where we are, far more than our physical surroundings or whatever we claim our values are.
This is bad enough. But if we also take the views that the immaterial is higher and more real than the material; and that mental patterns are, in fact, living beings-- spirits-- with their own life cycles, habits and agendas, then we need to ask what sort of spirits we are inviting into ourselves by our attentions.
I suppose this is why another one of the great initiates has told us,
Our soul has present to it only those objects about which its faculties are engaged. We can be said to be present only there, where our thoughts, affections or imaginings are. It is in the very same way we are present with God. We are in God's presence only during the time when the faculties of our soul are exercised about Him or His attributes or in something that has a bearing on our relations with Him. The meaning therefore, of having placed ourselves in God's presence-of course mind having ascended to Him--is that God has become for us an object of loving, or at least interested, thought. This imports as its correlative aspect, the withdrawal of our imagination and our senses, our will and our intellect, with the acts that flow from them, from all objects other than God.
This is written, of course, for practicing Catholics, but Father Leen's words apply to all of us. Material things are present to one another if they are physically in the same place. But it is not so with immaterial things. We have present to our soul only that which we have engaged with the soul's powers of attention, thought, affection and imagination.
And the corollary to this is: Whatever occupies our attention, our minds and our imagination is what is present to us. If we are spending our time focusing on the news, say, and filling our emotions and our thoughts with the details of the Latest Outrage (there always is one), then that is where we are, far more than our physical surroundings or whatever we claim our values are.
This is bad enough. But if we also take the views that the immaterial is higher and more real than the material; and that mental patterns are, in fact, living beings-- spirits-- with their own life cycles, habits and agendas, then we need to ask what sort of spirits we are inviting into ourselves by our attentions.
I suppose this is why another one of the great initiates has told us,
Pray without ceasing.
