Connection to God above is what this is all about...

[There's a point in this post below that is tricky. It's easy to be mistaken. I'm not saying books are nothing (they're everything when they're the Bible and the Work sources, and summit works and language like the Homeric epics that lead to them). Really what I'm saying is part of the foundational Work teaching about the need for both knowledge and being together. But it's also more than that. What I'm saying is: the Bible and the Work as they exist as words are one thing, but the most important aspect of it all is the connection you make with God and the Kingdom of God, and the dynamics and powers and activities involved in that. When you see a Bible and are weary of reading and solely taking in knowledge don't blame the Bible (or the Work knowledge, to use the Work as an example). Be weary of knowledge alone - that is OK. But don't stop there by setting the books aside and doing nothing. Increase of understanding needs increase of capacity to understand; it needs increase of level of being. This is truth for a Christian as much as for somebody who connects with and values the Work teaching. Some Christians talk about "spiritual desertion" where they think God deserts them for a while, to test them perhaps, or for whatever reason, and it throws them into a depression* and all that. But I would say that's not God deserting believers it's the result of concentrating on too much knowledge effort and making no being effort. That's what throws them into depression. Some of them then blame the knowledge (or worse, they warp the knowledge because they still refuse to make efforts to develop their being guided by the knowledge itself). Don't blame the knowledge, just make effort with what is real, i.e. what is most important at that point. For the Christian: your connection with God and His Kingdom. Just what you will think is most important when you're on the point of physically dying. On your deathbed, so to speak. Of course, the practice of a Christian is the trickiest things to learn about (i.e. what you actually do to effect active, progressive sanctification), but for people who have and know the Work teaching you have no excuse. The Holy Spirit has given you all you need.]

To stay on-the-mark with the Work I'd always ask what is most important here? and what is practical? and similar questions. With the Bible (or Christianity, or the Faith), when you ask similar questions, the answer comes up (for me) connection to God and the Kingdom of God; power from God, protection from God; all the active vertical connection involved in being regenerated and having the Holy Spirit actually come into you, and all the things that that brings (real awakening, real will, real understanding). The main point here, and what seeing this separates out from the question, is this is not about merely reading a book. Just as the Work isn't about merely reading a book. The Book is BIG. It's living language. Just as the Work language is (and on a different scale as the Homeric epics are). Notice though they all are about higher living forces and making contact with them. Whether God as the three Persons of the Godhead, and the heavenly host which are the medium, if you will, of His will; or C Influence (a more technical term divorced from the language of the Bible, but conscious is conscious, and there is only once source for what is truly conscious influence which is God Himself); or the Olympian Gods and Goddesses as a grand depicting of the active forces above and the dymanics of interaction of those forces with man, when there is an interaction.

Theology, and theological works - no matter how great and inspired - seem dead because they are merely part of the knowledge side, and as such they are less than the language found in the Bible itself, so they seem not as worth one's time. Yet understanding is understanding, and the Bible communicates real doctrine that can be discerned and understood (and taught) and you can use on-the-mark theology to learn it. The theology though becomes a trap if you stay with it after you've learned it and just keep going over it again and again (because there is a vain motive and indulgence in doing that; but you can't know that until you've actually made the effort to learn on-the-mark theology to begin with, which a person has to do).

To sum up (or try to): when I look at the Bible, the Fourth Way, and the Homeric epics as they sit together on a table I am looking at the three highest, most valuable influences one can engage and connect with and practice. Beyond that, though, you have to see the practical - the "what is most important" - element in it all as the connection you have with what is above and what those languages describe and guide you into (and in the case of the Bible effect). Whether it's God and His Kingdom or it's School as Cosmos and C Influence or it's simply higher forces -- however you describe it (the Bible is the Standard for describing it, of course) THAT is what these influences and the knowledge part is all about. Making contact with THAT and developing into THAT and having THAT now and at death.

To see the most important things you ask yourself when you're lying on your deathbed about to go through that veil, what is most important then? What is most important, unless you're still a vain, sleeping fool (which many are who are lying on their deathbed) is your connection to God and His Kingdom. Because there are dark, evil forces in His creation as well that can and will (and do) imprison you and keep you in darkness and bondage and have power over you if you don't have power over them. And to have power over them you need the power of God in you. That connection. That is what is most important. You were originally created in the image of God. That is such a foundational fact that one has to assimilate. For forces lesser than God to be able to imprison you you have to have lost contact with that image of God within you. That is what you recover once regenerated and you develop in active, progressive sanctification. You develop literally into what God is: a prophet, a priest, and a king. And you have what God has. You are literally a child of God. You aren't that just by being born a human. You're a child of Satan by default. To be a real child - and heir - of God you have to be regenerated by God; and if you find that you believe then you have.

So see these two things when you look at or think about the actual Bible or Work sources sitting on a table. They are BIG and IMPORTANT. Yet don't take them for being ALL (not that you normally 'would', but it's easy to unconsciously do that when one gets weary of the knowledge part). They are part of your connection to what is above (a big part), but to increase in consciousness, real will, and understanding they are a big, foundational means. A means to that end. The end exists apart from them though. The end is in the practice to increase level of being, and in the reality of that higher world, which WILL break in into your mundane world at times. You'll get glimpes. (I certainly have.)

*Short note on that asterisk above: depression also occurs to Christians when they just get even a 'little' glimpse of the reality of either themselves or of the world they live in. Or just a little spiritual warfare even, which exposes them to things inside themselves that they were before very comfortably asleep to. This causes Christians to think in terms of 'spiritual desertion', i.e. God has deserted them, but really it's just their first taste of the spiritual battlefield and it's depressing, no doubt, no getting around it; but it has to be fought out and ground has to be taken for development to be made.