GRACE DISGUISED = RAISED CONSCIOUSNESS

Coming In On a Wing and a Prayer...one of my favorite World War II songs...describes how I am feeling this morning.

Here's my personal paradox:  I am realizing...in wonder!...that ego deflation in depth is the birth of raised consciousness. Lest we forget: Ego Reduction In Depth (ERD) is personally, thus excruciatingly, painful, and it is such because it is reasoning-mind embarrassing...humiliating if we're doing it right.

When, not if, we try to make an end-run around the pain, know this: ERD cannot be sought-after, prayed for, "welcomed" in a word. No matter how we imagine ERD, it never shows up there. Plain and simple: It is not of this world. If it were of this world, we would go for control, try to get on top of the situation, stay stuck in ego paradise in fact. 

My mentor used to say...and I lovelovelove the phrase...Showing your ass in public is also spiritual.  

I'm coming from experience when I share that showing our bum in public can be as spiritual as it needs be, but actually doing it is pure pain. 

But here it is...the birth of the wondrous news. After my honest-and-true doing the deed...given the necessary deflation time for God to usher in his spiritual principles (or for a good friend who calls to talk about it), I am peaced. The peace that passes understanding. 

The fact of the egoic humiliation still stands...but it is weeping now for it has lost its power, its meaning, its reason for living.

This, then, is the spiritual necessity for ego reduction in depth: To raise our consciousness.

To raise our consciousness another inch or another mile, makes no nevermind...we are in God's territory again. 

Fear not the pain of ego deflation. After the fact, never before, we realize that was grace disguised as  humliation and trailing peace behind her...ah, another Angel Unaware.

Until we meet a benevolent God and a benevolent universe, until we realize that the foundation of all is love, we will not be at home in this world. That meeting of God, that understanding experience, cannot be communicated by words. It is a gift given through encounter with Spirit. -- Fr Richard Rohr, Daily Meditation, December 11, 2022

Thank you.