Good day to you and blessings be upon you.
Love Love has always been central to the Judeo-Christian religious path. It shows up in the summary of Jewish law "You shall love the Lord your your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength; love your neighbour as yourself," in Jesus` "Love your enemies," and a new commandment I give to you, that you love one another", in St Paul`s "If I speak in tongues of men and angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal", in Augustines`s "Love and do what you will," even in the Beatles still current sentiment " All you need is love". But rarely does anyone really live by what it means.
One possibility, the golden rule, or, "Do as you would be done by", says nothing about what another person might want or need, and so is clearly not about love in its usual sense.
Vanstone defines love negatively, because you can say when love is absent, as not controlling being vulnerable and not being self sufficient.
Love can be defined as "Do not be that which stops other people being their real selves, or, more catchy, "Be so others can be".
Zen means stilling the mind through meditation. The experience of finding oneself through becoming able to see truly, that is to say without mistaking things that aren`t really you with yourself.
Here the word "zen" is being used to refer to the entailment's of Love: the stilling of one`s being by accepting the needs of other people to be more important than you own, and the focusing on becoming your real self by allowing your dependence's on people & things that aren`t you to be dissolved rather than followed.
There is not meant to be any specific relationship with Zen Buddhism, except insofar as Zen Christianity is to Christianity what Zen Buddhism is to Buddhism. Everything in Zen Christianity is to be justified as an interpretation of Christianity rather than because it may be seen in Zen Buddhism.
However it is clear that za zen, the meditation style used by zen buddhism, can be used in christianity, and is relevant here at least in spiritual progress.
heaven "Being in heaven" has to be defined as the most real state of being, and for us there can be no other meaning of "real" than being without dependence on things that aren`t us.
That that is possible must be a matter of faith. We have Jesus` example of someone believing absolutely that being human is not barrier to being in heaven. However, it is "the pearl of great price" to which everything else we might want is secondary.
Change we know we are not our real selves now because we know we sometimes do that which we really do not want to do & are sometimes dependant on things that are not really us. That's true for examples, of both high and low Self esteem - both are dependencies on what other people think of us.
Of course we are not alone in that to progress towards the ideal is necessarily mutual, complex and gradual, with some being able to drop a particular need as a trigger for others becoming able to drop one of theirs. I see people like Jesus as at the forefront of the ability to let go of their attatchments to things & other peoples` natures, in this case to the extent of physical death, which is why he and others like him have been central to real progress in human life.
Some people react to the need for inner change by trying to simplify their exterior lives to the minimum by joining monasteries etc. Nowadays there are many ways to lead one`s life that need for a particular individual for a specific set of tensions & motivations is best net by the variety of situations that ordinary life creates. Anyway, it is necessary to connect with the world in general so that the world in general changes as we change.
attonement At-one-ment; is about being at one with God. It also refers to what Jesus achieved by dying on the cross. The view here of what Jesus acheived is based on "Greater love hath no man than that he lay down his life for his friend" Loving someone entails wishing them to become who the truly are, which means helping them to believe that letting go of their unreal dependencies will lead to them being more real, even though those dependencies currently define reality for that person. In allowing himself to be put through physical death Jesus showed us the greatest possible faith in the actual source of reality.
from Sikhism
One universal Creator God. The name is Truth. Creative Being Personified. Fear. No Hatred. Image Of The Undying, Beyond Birth, Self-Existant By Gurus Grace.
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Peace and love cannot depend on man and in saying that I shall also declare that today - which the birds are singing in at this moment - will be a great day for us.
My love to you who read this and to all beings. Peace and love, pass it on.
Your brother Peter
It will seem that life isn`t long enough for significant change. Many people go through it changing only right at the end, or perhaps on marriage or some other significant event, and many without apparently making any progress at all, though one can never entirely tell. Faith in our potential suggests reincarnation could be believed in as a way in which God gives us enough time, not only to change sufficiently but to do so within our own free will as our desires mature towards "storing up our treasure in heaven not on earth."
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