Walking the King's Highway

A comments thread from a Work blog:

6 Comments


03 February 2008 20:48
Blogger ct said...

Same exact thing happened to me a day or two ago. I had the same reaction too. I'm so easily provoked. And then you look at the person who did the provoking and you know it's all mechanical and stupid. You see yourself taking things seriously that are miles beneath your understanding. But you can 'see' how it happened. The trigger was something with a history. Some frustration, long-running. Maybe you've been selfless in dealing with something, then you get an insinuation that you've been lazy or not dealt with that thing. Blam. Indignation. Resentment. Outrage. The voice raises in volume. You feel righteous in indulging all the drama.

A new link is in the margin of my Fourth Way blog. The notes to von Clausewitz' On War as that work corresponds to doing the Work and spiritual warfare and inner development.

When you read those notes you can see immediately that many things are missing in the common Work approach where one gets konked over the head over and over *in the same ways.* We're not recognizing the battlefield. That we are ON a battlefield, to begin with. We aren't discerning the forces on the battlefield. We aren't keeping in mind what we are doing there. The aim. Practical things of war.

In our defense the correlation between Work efforts (like accumulating energy) and fire fights is more nebulous than it would be for a soldier in a war. A common soldier has alot done for him to. We have to do it all for ourselves. A soldier can sleep knowing others are on guard or others have made a wall and so on. That a higher command with more information exists and all that. We have to build the fortification and we have to guard ourselves even when we inevitably have to fall asleep. And we have to be our own higher command while at the same time wade into the thick of battle. (Separation.)

Definitely we need help. Help from above. Which is Real Will.

I say again: prayer. Asking God to help you when the inevitably unpredictable, difficult event(s) occurs. I mean asking beforehand. Asking for all the things the Work teaches. Asking for understanding and wisdom and strength and watchfulness too. Work language, biblical language. All of it.

When you know from experience what *can* and probably *will* occur then you begin to have the advantage. You can make contact with God who is above time to deal with such things when they occur. But that gets serious. To be in contact with God is not playing around. I think we unconsciously know this and kind of step back from it for that reason. Valuation comes into play.



07 February 2008 09:37
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Blogger ct said...

In the difficulty and failure things are being learned. New things. That we are part of an army. Soldiers of Christ. Not alone. That prayer plays a role. That angels play a role as well. That we need the literal armor of God of which prayer seems to be part (Eph. 6:18).

These are connections between the Work teaching and biblical teaching. Just putting two and two together, really. Obvious, but not so until you start to put it together.



07 February 2008 10:31
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Blogger + (Paul) said...

Yes. There is a great deal that is being taken in and learned through failure. We need to feel it severely. In a very obvious way, we'd love ourselves too easily if all we did were sail calm waters. Events like we describe are so necessary. They hammer home fundamental truths about reality - and as much as we may know such things intellectually, we need to understand these things emotionally and deeply. We so easily forget, if we ever realised, that this is a strange and dangerous land. The centre of gravity of the emotional centre is Will. We take these batterings, we lose these battles and strangely through such events we learn to develop Will because we are shown so positively how negative the common state of identifying with everything really is - we learn how to obey the Work. Thank God!



07 February 2008 23:41
Blogger ct said...

I have as a part of my Work history a real time event of Real Will manifesting as a result of prayer and asking God for it.

I've written about it before, but to have it in your 'history' is of course a big thing. It increases valuation and also understanding obviously. But it has to be remembered.

When my father began his real decline there was all kinds of chaotic forces that came my way from family members. It triggered alot of that. So without even knowing future events I felt a need to use a portion of my day(s) to go for a walk and to pray to God for wisdom and strenght and understanding and ability to act from the Work (or His will), Real Will, when it became most necessary to be able to do that.

And then sure enough a major event occured (motivated by money) where I was bizarrely accused of trying to kill my father, and I found myself surrounded by five policeman, full of false witness about me from two rather malignant siblings, and they were looking for *any* sign of unstableness or anger or whatever, and I knew this, and I was calm as one could be, diplomatic, not even a trace of sarcasm, as I was being continually taunted by the policeman.

In the aftermath I could see a direct correlation between my prayers on those walks and my ability to remain cool, calm, and collected in that weird event.

I could also see the event was used (by God, I'll say) to totally humiliate my 'enemies.' They were totally knocked down in the eyes of neutral family members, I was raised up, and I had all the power from that point on.

Then of course the danger for me was to indulge resentment over it *later* in time, always a temptation, and I did that *somewhat*, maybe lessening my advantage a little, but not to any critical point.

That was Real Will, though. Everthing leading to that event was geared to make me explode. And I didn't come close to it. I was acting from above. As the result of prayer. But making those prayers and requests beforehand showed understanding itself, and was a kind of 'doing' in a real way. So Real Will might also involve doing now what you know will have effect in the future. Like a farmer planting a crop. He doesn't make the crop grow, but the act of planting it has a role in that Real Will. God's will.



08 February 2008 12:23
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Blogger ct said...

Then as I wrote a few months ago I experienced a real instance of how God lets you know you you fall off the wagon. You don't lose your justification or standing in the Kingdom of God when you sin, but you DO get a message from God that you are not living up to your own new standards. And they are things you don't want to do anyway. They are beneath you, and beneath your interests and desires. But one *can* fall into old ways, but then you have to deal with the consequences.

It makes me see how you can actually walk in a circumspectful, tactful, understanding way so as to actually maintain a direct line - the King's Highway - that is raised above the accident and chaos and negative forces and violence of the world around that Highway.

That 'straight line' sense of walking that you, Paul, alluded to in a link on something or other you sent once in email.

08 February 2008 12:31