Cycle of Call and response…

Do your part — the rest will be done for you. God does the rest.  Create an atmosphere or a state of mind that invokes, evokes a response… helps to clear the mess, invites presence: removing the coverings that keep us from recognizing God’s presence In fact, your doing is also God, and your Is-ness is God.  So:  Just Be…

• Prayer is ALREADY the response to God’s call
• completes a circle of energy:
• Prayer invites Grace: prayer is already grace; is the              
• response to ever shining grace…
• Prayer is God consciousness singing in/through you… your prayer is God praying you  

Fact you seek… is already grace. We might think that we are seeking something… or we expect something.  your doing is the response, and call.  your seeking grace is already grace

Essay: The Progressive Stages of the Quest

(The Working of Grace) [excerpts] .

The very fact that a person has consciously begun the quest is itself a manifestation of Grace, …. He is not really walking alone. The very love which has awakened within him for the Overself is a reflection of the love which is being shown towards him.

Thus the very search upon which he has embarked, the studies he is making, and the meditations he is practising are all inspired by the Overself from the beginning and sustained by it to the end. The Overself is already at work even before he begins to seek it. Indeed he has taken to the quest in unconscious obedience to the divine prompting. And that prompting is the first movement of Grace.

but… PB Continues…

…Only if a person falls in love with his soul as deeply as he has ever done with another person will he even stand a  chance of finding it. Incessant yearning for the higher self, in a spirit of religious devotion, is one of the indispensable aspects of the fourfold integral quest. The note of yearning for this realization must sound through all his prayer and worship, concentration and meditation. …A merely formal practice of meditation is quite insufficient although not quite useless. For without the yearning the advent of Grace is unlikely, and without Grace there can never be any realization of the Overself

The factuality of Grace does not cancel out the need of moral choice and personal effort. It would be a great mistake to stamp human effort as useless in the quest and to proclaim human inability to achieve its own salvation as complete. For if it is true that Divine Grace alone can bring the quest to a successful terminus, it is likewise true that human effort must precede and thus invoke the descent of Grace.

His initiative pushes on toward the goal, whilst divine Grace draws him to it. Both forces must combine if the process is to be completed and crowned with success. Yet that which originally made the goal attractive to him and inspired him with faith in it and thus gave rise to his efforts, was itself the Grace. In this sense Paul’s words, “For by Grace are ye saved through faith, and that not of yourselves,” become more intelligible. …

… What is needed to call down Grace is, first, a humility that is utter and complete, deeply earnest and absolutely sincere, secondly, an offering of self to the Overself, a dedication of earthly being to spiritual essence, and, thirdly, a daily practice of devotional exercise. The practices will eventually yield experiences, the aspirations will eventually bring assistance…. 2.9.67 [+Instructions for Spiritual Living]

The twofold way is indispensable: on the one hand the way of self-effort, working to overcome the ego, and on the other the way of Grace, through constantly seeking to remember your true identity in the Overself.    (23:5.193)

The Overself is not a goal to be attained but a realization of what already is. … No effort is needed to get hold of the Overself, but every effort is needed to get rid of the many impediments to its recognition. We cannot take hold of it; it takes hold of us. … 22:3.9

 

Invite a Response

“May that peace and tranquility, which already lies deep within you, covered over …  may that reveal itself to you.”  –PB

What he has most to learn at this stage is, in one sense, easy and simple. Yet in practice, it turns out to be hard and elusive. It is to let go, to cease from striving, to let his will relax, to stop thinking that the Overself is something he must grasp and to let himself be grasped by it. Moreover, he is not to limit this attitude to the meditation period only, but to bring it into his ordinary life briefly several times a day.  –PB; “The Adventure of Meditation”

For the object of all this thinking is to awaken within him a mood of soul, a mental atmosphere and even an emotional condition of aspiration towards Truth which will provide an appropriate stage for the entry of illumination.: The Quest of the Overself

M: Meditation will help you to find your bonds, loosen them, untie them and cast your moorings. When you are no longer attached to anything, you have done your share. The rest will be done for you.
Q: By whom?
M: By the same power that brought you so far, that prompted your heart to desire truth and your mind to seek it. It is the same power that keeps you alive. You may call it Life or the Supreme. I Am That Ch 16

• Make divine your partner Do your part! But… Don’t do it alone! Access and Express…

Remember that no enterprise or move should be left to depend on the ego’s own limited resources. The humble invocation of help from the Higher Self expands those resources and has a protective value. At the beginning of every day, of every enterprise, of every journey, and of every important piece of work, remember the Overself and, remembering, be obedient to its laws. Seek its inspiration, its power. To make it your silent partner is to double your effectiveness.  18.1.54

Heliotrope/ Seed of God turns to God:

• Prayer is the turning of the ray of divine Sun back, 180 degrees, to its source. Spirit awakening to itself in/through/as YOU
• Proclus: prayer of the Sunflower: all things have natural emblem of God’s Love… pray in their own way… already… the very movement of the bee wings is the energy of God’s Love which expresses itself in the organism as prayer. Prayer is the erotic attraction of all that lives to God:
• I Am not a finite local limited person seeking divine: I Am a ray of divine appearing in/as/through the person.

The Prayer of the Heliotrope: by Proclus the Neoplatonist

“Each thing prays according to the rank it occupies in nature, and sings the praise of the leader of the divine series to which it belongs, a spiritual or rational or physical or sensuous praise; for the heliotrope moves to the extent that it is free to move, and in its rotation, if we could hear the sound of the air buffeted by its movement, we should be aware that it is a hymn to its king, such as it is within the power of the plant to sing.”