Contents

Editorial Notes

Preface

Teresa’s Introduction

Overview of the Interior Townhouse

Your wonderful housemate

Your townhouse’s layout

Bottom section

Top section

Inner hallways

Inner stairway

Outside your townhouse

Porch, patio, community commons

Rooftop

Your townhouse’s purpose

Climbing skills

Insight: self-understanding

Bugs in the brain’s software

Wonderful endowments

Balanced Self-understanding

Humility

False Humility

True Humility

Purified holy desire

Your center of gravity

Secure attachment

A Tale of Two Worlds: the outer world and the inner world

Prayer as inner dialogue

Metaphors for prayer

Teresa’s Prayer

What is your prayer seeking?

Quieting your mind

The Divine Two-Step Dance

Jesus is your ultimate spiritual guide

Appreciating Jesus’ human nature

Courage

Inner spiritual experiences

In the top section

A brief glimpse

The higher spiritual emotions

Spiritual (and non-spiritual) fruit

On the rooftop

The divine embrace

Relapse Prevention

Deeper dives

Editorial Comments

The Bottom Section: Your Mainly Human Floors

Purpose

Gradient

Permeability of townhouse walls

Vulnerability to worldly allures

Pollutants masquerading as good air

The capabilities of your interior townhouse

A shift in center of gravity from psyche to spirit

Dwelling 3 can be secular or spiritual

Diverse references to a Divine Companion

The rooftop

The rooftop vs. the top section

God reveals God to you through a relationship

After the wedding embrace

Improving inner insight

Making peace with your human limitations

Missing your subtle lack of humility

Seeing only the bottom section of your interior townhouse

The distortions of the lower floors

Harmonizing your bottom and top sections

Along the climb

Willing to suffer like Jesus did

Hard times: your assayer and teacher

More About Relapse Prevention

Spiritual advisors

Treasury of Metaphors

Intimate Partners

Oasis metaphor

Tree Metaphor

A wisely cultivated inner garden gets better

Caterpillar Metamorphosis

The Divine Fingerprint

The Soft Wax

Gravity

Inner Sovereignty

Dilation

Inner Martha and Inner Mary:

Muscles of your mind

Crystal Walls and Crystal Globe Metaphor

A mash-up of metaphors

Rooftop metaphors

Miscellaneous Metaphors

Poetic Passages

Limitations of my words

Your Brief Stay in your Interior Townhouse

More Varieties of Spiritual Experiences

Further rooftop experiences

Hearing specific words

Flight of the Soul

Emmaus walk

Pierced by the Divine Lance

The Illustrated Interior Townhouse

Asides

Three Difficulties

The Inhabitants of the Interior Townhouse

Your human parts

Your human core

Your Divine Companion

AI Notice: This work is copyright of the author; the use of this work to “train” generative artificial intelligence technologies is expressly prohibited.  The author reserves all such rights.

Editorial Notes

Introduction

This book, The Interior Townhouse, is a paraphrase of The Interior Castle, a description of the inner life written by Teresa of Avila in 1557.  Studying Teresa while working as a therapist, I was struck by how well her understanding of a person dovetailed with psychological thinking.  This book imagines how she might write if she was familiar with current perspectives.  Both Teresa and psychology see your inner life as a rich ecosystem of human parts; both see that you contain a more-than-human inner presence who feels like a warm and wise inner companion who can help as you struggle with challenging issues or as you work to create a more precious life.  Teresa experienced a divine being dwelling inside her whose distinct insight and kindness far surpassed human nature.  Psychologists see the same person-like presence as tremendously more helpful than the garden-variety processes of your mind.  This book imagines how Teresa might have woven these two views together to create a rich description of your inner world.

Semantics

The word religion refers to learning about God through a sacred text and the accompanying theology developed by a group such as a religious organization, church or denomination which were consolidated by groups and committees over many years.  A main focus of religion is God’s relationship with all of humanity.

The word spirituality refers knowing God's personality through an individual's experience of God in their inner world.  The main focus of spirituality is God’s intimate relationship with an individual person.

The word psychology refers to your human nature which encompasses your baser human urges, your higher human accomplishments and your relationships with another person. Psychology usually focuses on your human nature—anxiety, attachment, trauma responses, etc.—which is often discussed without involving God at all.

Religion, spirituality and psychology need not be mutually exclusive but usually most people don’t mix them in the same conversation.

[Text in square brackets indicates text not directly paraphrased from The Interior Castle.]

Layout: main text with links to further details

The book is laid out so that you can read the main text (about 50 pages) and get the gist of Teresa’s map of the inner world.  If you are interested in diving more deeply, you can click on a link in the main text to that connects to endnotes with more details (another 50 pages).  At the end of each endnote is another link which will return you to the original link in the main text which led you to that endnote; some endnotes are fairly long so you will need to scroll down a good bit to get to the link. Teresa’s metaphors and “Varieties of Spiritual Experiences” are separated into their own sections (32 and 22 pages, respectively).

Additional material (available at divinecompanion.org)

An audiobook is available if you prefer listening to reading; the voices in the audiobook were generated using elevenlabs.io software.

Teresa’s Interior Castle described a map of your inner world.  A separate video illustrates an analogous map of your Interior Townhouse.

The lyrics of several songs have been paraphrased to express the tone of Teresa’s description of her bond with her Divine Companion (these songs are still in the process of being recorded).

Detailed editorial comments

Preface

Why listen to Teresa of Avila?

Life can be really hard.  Perhaps you feel utterly alone to the point of thinking that no one could ever love you and you’ve given up hope of ever having a healthy relationship.  Or perhaps you’ve lost any sense that your life has some meaningful purpose and that led to a lingering depression.  Or perhaps you’re afraid that you won’t be able to cope with the hard things in life and you’re quite terrified of the difficulties you imagine will come next.

Thinking that you must face these issues alone is incredibly overwhelming.  Knowing that a warm and wise partner lives alongside you in your inner world makes these issues far less intimidating.  Experiencing your inner partner’s care and love would dispel your loneliness and vanish any thoughts of being unlovable.  You would trust your partner’s goodness and forge a secure attachment.  Your inner partner’s deeper and broader perspective would give meaning and purpose to your life and help you make wiser choices at the forks in the road of your life.  Knowing that you will face life with both your own resources and your inner partner’s strengths would invigorate you to courageously face whatever challenges life brings to your doorstep and to seize whatever opportunities you find.

Teresa of Avila found and bonded with a wonderful partner in her inner world. She hoped that describing her spiritual experiences might help just one person—perhaps you—find and bond with your own inner partner who awaits within you and longs to be more involved with you and to be a bigger part of your life.  She had many names for her divine inner partner such as “Beloved” and “Divine Companion.”

This book imagines how Teresa might express herself in today’s idiom and perspective.  This book imagines a personal dialogue between you and Teresa in which she warmly encourages you to explore your inner world so that you could draw closer to your own inner companion; in which she assures you that your life will become so much fuller when shared with such a fine partner rather than trying to live alone relying only on your limited human resources.  The wording in this book hopes to evoke an intimate conversation between you and Teresa.  In this book, the word “I” refers to Teresa as she describes her own inner experiences.  In this book, the word “you” is used to suggest Teresa talking directly with a reader who sincerely wants to know God: perhaps you?

Teresa’s Introduction

Many people—perhaps you—struggle very much all on their own because they don’t know that a Divine Companion lives within them in their inner world.  This wonderful companion is a trustworthy friend, a devoted lover, a cooperative partner and a wise tutor all rolled into one.  The more I opened myself to this partnership, the more my Divine Companion lifted me up and erased personal problems that seemed permanently etched into my brain and then endowed me with capabilities far beyond anything I ever could have imagined lay within myself.  The sweetest experience of my life is knowing and feeling my Divine Companion’s wonderful love, abundant support and trustworthy wisdom; these treasures feel like the most intimate gifts from my Beloved who knows me so well and perfectly tailors each gift to just what I need to grow spiritually.  Although my most eloquent words will fail to adequately describe such wonderful love and deep wisdom, I will still try, trusting that I don’t make this attempt alone; trusting that the divine support never grows thin whenever a person tries to follow their Beloved’s leadings as closely as they possibly can.

I hope this description of your inner world and its spiritual aspects might move one person to explore their own inner world so that they can come to know God’s great beauty through their own first-hand inner experience; and then, being so greatly enriched, that they might revere God more deeply and cooperate with their Divine Companion more fully.  If you are that person who will open inwardly to God, I hope that your human-divine bond flourishes and bears the fruit of graciously serving others and really caring for a person who feels alone and abandoned. I hope that your own experiences enable you to genuinely assure others that they are not deserted and orphaned at all; but that a perfect partner is actually quite close and is longing to love them with beautiful affection.

I’m very ambivalent about presenting this idea that your inner world holds great spiritual richness.  I certainly have no special merit to be speaking of such beautiful divine matters but barely anyone seems to be describing the vibrant spiritual presence in your inner world.  On the one hand, some people—often high clergy—might think that I am a spiritual braggart who considers herself much better than everyone else.  But actually it’s quite the opposite: the more I explore my inner world, the starker my shortcomings and limitations become.  But my situation isn’t as dismal as that sounds because, the more I explore my inner world, the clearer God’s abundant blessings also become.  Please understand that I found a vibrant Indwelling God even though I have many flaws.  Please understand that no one needs to be especially elevated to connect with their Divine Companion; you will be amazed to find how much you are treasured by God just as you imperfectly are.

Another reason I hesitate to present these ideas is that some people—often secularly inclined people—consider any notions about God to be a fantasy; to them the idea that God would be involved in your inner life seems utter nonsense.  Others—often religiously dogmatic people—consider any psychological notions about the inner life to be a bunch of psychobabble.  The ideas in this book will have no meaning for secular-only people or dogma-only people; this book may, unfortunately, give them fodder for ripping people and ideas to shreds, an activity that may be their favorite amusement.

This book isn’t a good choice for a confirmed secularist who is quite certain that science explains everything that matters in life; nor is it a good choice for a confirmed religionist who is quite certain that their sacred text explains everything about God.  This book may elevate the blood pressure of a fully certain person who no longer seeks any more growth apart from their accepted authoritative sources.  My deepest apologies to them because I would hate to trigger such strong negative emotions.  Please spare yourself that distress and read no further.

Instead this book is meant for those few people who still see a ray of spiritual hope in the midst of their uncertainty and life’s harshness.  Though they may hold a mainly secular view of life, they still have a small sense that their inner world might contain something more than their purely human aspects.  Though they may hold a mainly religious view of life, they still have a sense that their religious teachings and rituals can lead further into a deeper spirituality.  If you are such a person, I hope that understanding your inner world better might help you glimpse how well your psychological and spiritual aspects can be woven together.  I hope that integrating all of who you are helps you grow closer to the God who dwells within you so that you know the joy of the divine embrace in your own experience, not from a book like this.

If I could sit with you, I’d encourage you to follow that spiritual ray of light which comes from the God who dwells within you, however dim it may seem.  If you loyally follow it, you cannot fail on your spiritual journey because the indwelling God is working even harder than you are to establish and deepen the precious intimacy which the two of you can share.  The journey begins with knowing your inner terrain, the place where you can come to know your Divine Companion’s lovely personality and become a devoted and trustworthy partner.

Overview of the Interior Townhouse

A lot happens in your inner world.  But you might not even notice all these happenings although they are right under your nose.  Or perhaps you might notice just a small piece and miss the far greater wonders within you.  Thinking of your inner world as a complex interior townhouse may help you so that you can cultivate it better.  I hope this book is like a narrated tour of your inner world which helps you find and experience the wonderful inner treasures you contain.

Your wonderful housemate

Just as living in even the finest house can become lonely without company, your inner life can feel lacking if you feel that you are all alone.  But you don’t live all alone in your interior townhouse: you have an amazing housemate, a Divine Companion who is God come to dwell on the rooftop of your interior townhouse; your Divine Companion who considers you to be the most desirable partner in all the universe.  How wonderful to be desired so much by such a perfect lover!  This human-divine relationship is what makes your one life so very precious: the more you develop this relationship, the more precious your life becomes.

Your Divine Companion doesn’t come down from the rooftop and into the lower floors (your personal space) unless you actively invite and welcome your divine housemate.  Your Divine Companion would be delighted to participate more fully in your inner life but always respects your decision about how much involvement you want and how much divine infusion you will accept into your mind and heart.  Your Divine Companion treats you as the owner of the townhouse who is free to make all decisions regarding how you manage it and who you allow in.  It would feel like a home invasion if your Divine Companion entered your townhouse without your permission and that’s something your Divine Companion would never do!

Knowing that God is so close to you may help if you feel really alone, if you feel that you don’t matter much to anyone at all.  But you must open the door before your Divine Companion can enter within you and begin to soothe your loneliness and replace it with the assurance that you are far from alone, that instead you are deeply and richly loved.  Experiencing God as dwelling within your intimate spaces can soothe crippling feelings of loneliness or being unlovable; seeing God as distant and aloof can reinforce feelings of being totally abandoned.  But such feelings of abandonment, no matter how intense they might feel, aren’t true at all.  Instead, please trust that God is so very close to you, that God is intimately woven into the very nature of you.

You are God’s pied-a-terre

God considers your interior townhouse (you, your life, your human personality) to be a paradise, a place where God really wants to spend time.  God seems to prefer personally spending time with you in your townhouse as your Divine Companion rather than spending time in a far-off exalted paradise-like place surrounded by adoring angels.  What a paradox that so many people are pining away for a far-from-Earth heavenly paradise while your Divine Companion is right now pining to live with you in your mortal human residence as if it were the paradise worth desiring.  Will you share your personal space, your human life with your divine housemate?  Your choice determines whether your Divine Companion waits outside or shares your interior townhouse with you.  Your choice to give your divine partner the full run of your townhouse, as if you are equal co-owners of your home, enables your Beloved to more fully enhance and transform your inner world which then enables you to blossom in the outer world and become more courageous and compassionate.

Not just wishful mushy thinking

[Several psychologists found something similar to what Teresa described: that your inner world contains a powerful healing presence as if you are home to someone who has more than your human resources and capabilities.  They didn’t develop this view because they had preordained religious ideas.  Several of these psychologists have a very secular view of life or are staunchly agnostic.  They didn’t develop their view of a ministering inner presence while working with well-off people reveling in lush circumstances cushioned from the struggles of life.  Instead, they saw evidence of a more-than-human presence while they were working with people struggling with extremely difficult nitty-gritty issues.  Their modern views converge with Teresa’s hundreds-of-years-old perspective that you have a warm and wise inner housemate; this convergence across the centuries suggests this view of your inner world is worth considering.]

Secular suggestions of a wonderful inner housemate

Poem: Teresa’s Love Song for her Divine Companion

Your townhouse’s layout

Your inner world is like a townhouse with two distinct sections, each one with a very different atmosphere.  The bottom section represents your quite-familiar human nature and your own unique personality.  The top section represents your spiritual capabilities for grasping God’s lovely character and for bonding with the Divine Companion who dwells in your interior townhouse; your top section is what enables you to develop a secure attachment with your Divine Companion just as you might develop a loyal and trustworthy relationship with another person.  Each section contains several floors stacked one on top of the other; each floor contains many rooms.

Bottom section

The bottom section of your interior townhouse represents your human personality with all its uniqueness and quirks.  It is quite earth-tethered: it is mainly concerned with material issues and navigating relationships.  It is quite easily entranced by the pull of earthly pleasures even if they are only a mirage; it is easily dominated by the panicked push away from imagined perils just as readily as by real perils; it can easily see others only through the lens of what they might do for you.  If you haven’t tamed these default mental operations of your bottom section, the baser aspects of your human nature (those brain operations which are sometimes called lizard mind or animal mind) likely dominate your thoughts and shape how you act.

The lower floors of the bottom section are home to some of the least lovely traits of human nature.  Perhaps you all-too-easily succumb to a need to have large helpings of worldly pleasures but you just can’t seem to ever get enough of your favorite one; or perhaps you are easily enraged by the slightest of slights, even slights that exist mainly in your imagination; or perhaps your anger over perceived unfairness creates a justification in your mind to be extremely aggressive to whatever scapegoat you blame for your too-meager lot in life; or perhaps you get really anxious and just can’t stop replaying your anxieties over and over to the point where you cripple your ability to respond well to the real challenges you actually face; or perhaps your attention wanders so much that you can’t focus for long on the important thoughts and tasks in your life; or perhaps you don’t notice the important happenings in your inner world and are oblivious and unaware of the inner forces that are shaping your life.  These quite relatable tendencies predominate on the ground floor of the bottom section of your interior townhouse which represents your human tendencies and the mainly psychological operations of your mind.

Your bottom section isn’t simply a hornet’s nest of weaknesses.  The higher floors of the bottom section are home to some of the finer traits of human nature which can be the foundation of a meaningful life: your ability to make wise decisions despite the siren call of addictive substances and activities; your resilience to persevere even after your initial efforts don’t achieve the results that you wanted; your trustworthiness in your close attachments; your altruism in helping other people who are struggling and who never repay your kindness.  Cultivating these strengths found on the upper floors of your bottom section prepare you to then enter and explore your top section.

Deeper Dive: Bottom Section

Top section

In contrast to the bottom section which is firmly tethered to earthly concerns, the top section of your interior townhouse is more tethered to heavenly or spiritual concerns; it has capabilities for grasping God, for drawing closer to God and for steadily molding your character along the lines of God’s character.  Your top section is more responsive to the pull of spirit, the gentle but ever-present tug of God on your soul; it is a bit more immune to the pushes and pulls of the material world, but not totally immune to them.  Your top section seems to have channels through which your Divine Companion can pour a sublime love directly into your heart, a love that assures you of being well cared for and also inspires you to be kinder and more loving to others.  Through these channels, your Divine Companion can infuse your mind with a deeper understanding of God, yourself, others and the purpose of your life.

The lower floors of the top section retain some of the self-absorbed tendencies of the bottom section and you might become quite enthralled with spiritual experiences of the lower floors of the top section; but these experiences are mere knick-knacks compared to the richer experiences of the higher floors of the top section.  As you climb to the higher floors of the top section, you gradually become more self-forgetting as you increasingly appreciate the wonderful beauty of God; you steadily become more preoccupied with God than with yourself.  Having reached the first floor of the top section of your interior townhouse, you can be a dilettante who lingers on the lower floors and gathers mementos to show off to others; or you can be wholeheartedly devoted to reaching the higher floors where you will experience your Divine Companion more intimately.

The high purpose of the top section is cultivating your relationship with your Divine Companion.  Your top section is home to the capabilities that strengthen all relationships: attuning to another person, wanting to be with another person, trusting another person, deeply dialoguing with another person, and fully cooperating on common endeavors.  In the top section, you cultivate and consecrate these capabilities for the purpose of deepening your relationship with your Divine Companion.

Inner hallways

Each floor of your interior townhouse has many rooms. Perhaps you spend much of your time in only a few rooms, or even in just one room, as if you are held captive by a powerful psychological gravity that grips you and holds you in a certain room.  You might feel permanently stuck in that room: perhaps you are stuck in the quicksand of stewing in resentment and you are saturated by the prevailing mean-spirited tone of that room; or perhaps you are stuck in fear’s grip and you continually absorb the anxious views of that room.  Despite feeling quite stuck, you are never a prisoner chained within a certain room; you have the ability to move to another room although not everyone makes use of that ability.  Moving from your current room to a distant room represents significantly modifying and expanding your current worldview so that you have deeper insights and healthier ways of responding to life’s demands.

You can’t move your body without enough muscle tone; you can’t make inner movement without enough mental muscle tone.  Growth (moving from a familiar room to a new room) requires mental muscles strong enough to escape the inertia of your current room, to go into the hallway and then to enter another room.  If your mental muscles are quite weak, you may feel permanently stuck in your current room.  But, step by step, you can strengthen your mental muscles enough to leave one room and move to another room. Perhaps your mental muscles have atrophied due to years of minimal use and need to be toned up so you can make such an inner shift.  Moving to an adjacent room a short distance down the hallway (making a small inner shift) can be done with a little bit of mental muscle tone; with relatively little effort, you can substitute one philosophy for a quite similar one, you can exchange one limited worldview for another slightly different one.  Moving to a more distant room requires more muscle tone and focused effort.  The more you develop that sweet gift of God—your capability to direct your inner life rather than being a captive in one room—the more you are able to move to the finer rooms of your interior townhouse.

Your core mental muscles (your capability to change yourself, your capability to change the room you spend your time in) are the crowning capabilities of being human: the amazing power to revise your worldview and choose your general mindset.  You have the choice of using, or not using, this mental capability; if you choose not to use it, you might remain in the first room for a very long time, possibly your whole life.  Not everyone makes use of their capability to move to another part of their inner world.

Inner stairway

the inner hallways enable you to move between rooms on the same floor;

the inner stairway enables you to go to a higher or lower floor

The lower floors of either section represent the immature aspects of that section; the higher floors represent your more mature aspects of that section.  On the lower floors of the bottom section, your baser human urges shape how you think, feel and act.  On the ground floor of the bottom section, you are vulnerable to caving into addictive things and devoting nearly all your efforts to pursuing them; or indulging a desire for excessive luxury and pleasure; or wanting to have social status and power over others.  On the upper floors of the bottom section, your higher human impulses begin to express themselves: taming your emotions, being more compassionate, living more creatively and searching for meaning and purpose.

It’s as if your townhouse has a central inner stairway: a way for you to move from one floor to another. The stairway goes from the ground floor of the bottom section up to the higher floors of the bottom section; and then it continues to the first floor of the top section and on up to its highest floor.  Ultimately your inner stairway will take you up to the rooftop of your interior townhouse where your Divine Companion can fully embrace you.

You make the most of your amazing interior townhouse by climbing to the highest floor that you can possibly reach in this moment.  You always have the option to take your inner stairway to a floor above rather than to take the hallway to another room on the same floor.  Just as climbing physical stairs requires more muscle strength than walking a hallway, climbing the interior stairway requires more mental muscle (more thought and effort) than walking down an interior hallway of your current floor.

Climbing a mountain path requires honing and using different skills than those used for easier hikes: perhaps using a machete to cut back overgrowth at lower altitudes; perhaps using snow shoes to cross long patches of snow drifts at higher altitudes; perhaps using climbing gear to ascend particularly steep sections.  Climbing some trails is virtually impossible without these skills.  In the same way, climbing your inner stairway of your top spiritual section requires a different mindset that the one which brought you up the stairway of the bottom section: a sense of reverence, a consecrated desire for God from which all lesser desires have ben distilled, a profound trust in the goodness of your Divine Companion.  Climbing the upper section’s stairway is virtually impossible without such a mindset and heartset. If you keep climbing, you may eventually have that wonderful first-hand intimacy that completely assures you of your partner’s goodness and unquestionable devotion.

Spiritual growth is faithfully climbing your inner stairway and cultivating the highest capabilities of your spiritual mind.  If you consistently spend time in your upper rooms, you will steadily draw closer and closer to the God who dwells with you—immediately above you—and who longs to hold you so you know and feel first-hand how much God loves you.  Persistence—steadily taking one step after another up the inner stairway—makes you a trustworthy partner for your Divine Companion.

You would never have the motivation necessary to exert the effort needed to climb the interior stairway without first having a sense of your inner architecture and all that you contain.  If you have no sense of your inner layout and of the great delights on the floors above you, you’d have little reason to climb your inner stairway let alone attempt to climb all the way to the top.  If you don’t think God is wonderful, you’d have little motivation to climb up to your rooftop, the place where God can intimately embrace you. But if you knew your inner layout and if you trusted the goodness of your Divine Companion, then you would be so highly motivated to reach your rooftop that you would never cease your efforts at climbing the stairway.

You have everything you need to reach the rooftop and bond with your Divine Companion.  But many people seem unaware of that and they are content to spend most of their time in just a few rooms on the ground floor of the bottom section; they have little or no idea of the riches they possess just a few floors above.  What a terrible waste to live in such a well-equipped home and know nothing of your especially wonderful rooms in the top section!  What a shame to live in spiritual poverty by restricting yourself to only the bottom section when your top section is so richly endowed with wonderful spiritual treasures!  Your townhouse becomes a much finer home when the insights and capabilities of your top section redeem and enrich the rooms of your bottom section.

A word of caution about sharing your inner spiritual experiences: so few people have ever entered their top section that you will likely only get blank stares if you mention the idea that the inner world includes spiritual capabilities and resources beyond the human capabilities of your psychological mind!

Harmonizing your bottom and top sections

Outside your townhouse

Porch, patio, community commons

On the other side of shared walls

You live in a row of townhouses, not in a house isolated in a large empty field.  You share a wall with the adjacent townhouses; they represent the people you interact with most often (family members, a partner) and who may influence you so profoundly as if their vibes had seeped in through the common wall you share.  Other townhouses are very close but you don’t share a wall with them; they represent friends you see frequently and affect you less.  These immediate and nearby neighbors influence your townhouse’s atmosphere: what you believe is true, how you see yourself, what you consider to be meaningful, and how you think about God.

Front porch and rear patio

Your townhouse has a front porch and a back patio which represent your interactions with other people.  Your front porch represents your public persona which you show when you interact with most people and share just a part of your personality with co-workers, neighbors and casual acquaintances.  Your back patio represents a more intimate place where you interact more genuinely with people closer to you and more fully share your personality with friends, family and an intimate partner.  The ideas and views of other people on the porch and the patio can easily flow into you when you interact with them and sense how they perceive you.  Their ideas and feelings may become so integrated into you that they almost seem to be your own thoughts and feelings rather than something which you have imported and absorbed from others.

Community commons

Your townhouse neighborhood has a commons area shared with everyone who lives in your wider community; the commons represents the prevailing zeitgeist to which everyone in your community is constantly exposed to.  The broadly-held ideas of the outer zeitgeist might passively flow into your interior townhouse through TV news programs, church theologies, internet memes, etc.  Through repeated exposure, these ideas from the commons can become unquestioned parts of your worldview. Without even being aware of the process, you can thoroughly absorb key ideas from the community commons and believe that they are true beyond question even if the ideas aren’t actually valid or accurate.  Most often the influence of the commons is one-way: the commons influences you but you have little influence in the commons.  Usually the larger community’s views are quite crystallized and will resist changing based on your input.

You have limited influence in the outer world but you have much power and influence within your townhouse, in your inner world.  Although not everyone exercises it, you have a high degree of control over what ideas and views from the outer world you allow into your interior world.  You have the final decision-making power about what views from the outer world you keep and what views you discard.  You can creatively remodel your townhouse (but not the commons) to reflect your own values and views.

Rooftop

Your interior townhouse is not hermetically sealed off from material influences; neither is it sealed off from spiritual influences.  Just as worldly influences can enter your interior townhouse through windows and doors of the ground floor, spiritual influences from the rooftop can, with your permission, enter your townhouse and seep into your heart and mind.  God is very near you; spiritual influences are accessible to you.

The rooftop represents your soul, a common space belonging to both you and God.  Unlike the lower floors of your townhouse which belong to you and are under your control, the rooftop belongs to both you and your Divine Companion.  Your rooftop is not a solitary summit where you sit alone as if you were a hermit.  Just as your back patio is a shared space for intimacy with another person, the rooftop is a common space shared by you and your Divine Companion; it is a place for experiencing deep intimacy.  You can’t reach the rooftop unless you climb high up the inner stairway and your Divine Companion extends a hand to you and pulls you up the last step.

Just as the vastness of the night sky is better appreciated from the rooftop than from a window, the great beauty of God is better appreciated from the rooftop—in your soul.  Your experience of your Divine Companion is no longer restricted by the walls and ceilings of the lower floors.  Just as you come to know another person better through a meaningful relationship in the outer world, you come to know God better through an engaged relationship in your inner world.  Your grasp of God’s personality grows by leaps and bounds in the intimate rooftop relationship.

The incredibly moving rooftop experience often feels as if you are wrapped in the wonderful embrace of your Beloved’s arms.  You experience love in whole new way that barely requires the mind or language as an intermediary; your heart (the essence of who you are) mingles with the heart of your Divine Companion (the essence of who God is).  In the intimate rooftop embrace, your Divine Companion’s wonderful affection can more fully permeate you heart, mind and soul. Receiving such love deepens your trust in God which opens you more fully to receive the divine influx of love which warms your heart and the divine infusions which clarify and deepen your mind’s thinking.

In the divine embrace, you connect with God without needing the prayer techniques of the bottom section or even the top section.  In the rooftop heights of human-divine intimacy, the human mind seems to be virtually disengaged; if the lower floors of your mind should become active during that sweet mingling, they might interfere with the deeper bonding and intimate communications that transpire in the divine embrace.

These moments of intense and interior intimacy with God aren’t a blissful cocoon which separates you from others.  Quite the opposite: your Divine Companion’s embrace will fill you with the desire to know other people well, to really listen to them and, when possible, to serve them graciously.  Closer intimacy with God inspires closer intimacy with another person.

Your Divine Companion experiences all of your thoughts and feelings

Because God dwells so close to you—in your mind and heart—God experiences all of your thoughts: both the sacred ones and the profane ones.  Your Divine Companion experiences all that you feel and think and do: your petty resentments and timid kindnesses; your rages and your turning the other cheek; your basest human urges and your highest spiritual emotions.  Even though God fully experiences your not-so-great traits, God remains patient with you and faithful to you as you gradually mature and leave your coarser ways behind.  Please make every effort to grow spiritually so that you don’t force God to endure the primitive urges and crueler ways of your bottom section any longer than necessary.

Many people treat their Beloved very terribly

The reality of earthly life is that God is often quite disrespected in the hearts and minds of many people.  Yet God still comes to every person and lives alongside them; some people do things that are quite abhorrent to their Divine Companion who must, because of such intimate proximity, keenly experience their inner thoughts and feelings as well as their actions in the outer world.  Yet God continues to love such a person with the same devotion as God loves the reverent ones who are dedicated pleasing to their Beloved.

Meditating on how terribly a person can treat such a perfect companion may be a powerful antidote when you, who although you may be wonderful are far from the perfection of God, are also treated badly by some people.  If God is often terribly mistreated, why would you ever expect to be treated any better?  Following in Jesus’ footsteps means actively and cheerfully loving people who treat you badly, praying that they can experience all the spiritual growth they possibly can (rather than maintaining a neutral attitude about them of “Too bad for them.  Not my problem.”).

Deeper Dive: Rooftop

Your townhouse’s purpose

Both sections of your interior townhouse, and all of your rooms, are good; none are to be despised.  Of course all of your rooms are good: every part of you was created by God and then entrusted to your care!  Each floor reflects God’s nature to a greater or lesser degree: the upper floors reflect God’s beauty more clearly than the lower floors but even the lower floors can reflect God’s beauty after they have been transformed by the presence of your Divine Companion.

Appreciating your interior townhouse

Perhaps sensing that your Divine Companion sees you (your interior townhouse) as really wonderful might help you more fully appreciate what a great gift your human life is.  Seeing yourself through your Divine Companion’s eyes might help you really grasp that your life is a precious gift which God gave specifically to you.  Seeing yourself more clearly—appreciating the full possibilities of your interior townhouse—might motivate you to explore and make the most of your very well-designed and well-furnished but temporary residence.  Even if you neglect and debase this precious home, God still treats it (you) as a desirable dwelling because that is where God can mingle most intimately with you if and when you invite God in.  This place of close mingling, your inner life, seems to be where God wants to be: right with you in the midst of your life.  Your Beloved Companion always sees you through divine eyes—not through the eyes and standards of other people or religious dogma or your own limited self-concept.  Your Divine Companion sees you as a wonderful and desirable partner who deserves to receive the finest love which only God can give.

You—that lovely combination of human strands mixed with divine strands—have such amazing beauty that the human mind can barely appreciate the full magnitude of your own beauty.  You simply need to trust that God meant exactly what God said when God said: “You are made in the divine image.”  As if God is assuring you that you are made quite beautifully.  Those words aren’t just some sweet nothing uttered by God.  God means exactly that!  Your mind and heart are created along the basic lines of God’s nature: you can be creative; you can connect with another person; you can direct your life through the choices you make.  Of course, although you are created along the same pattern as God, you clearly are not God!  You’re actually quite far from God’s sublime divine nature but you contain seeds of God’s great character which you can cultivate.  And, if you strive to become a bit more like God each day of your life, you can miraculously make slow and steady progress in forging your character to be a bit more like God’s character.

The high purpose of your townhouse

The high purpose, the best use, of your interior townhouse is to accept your Divine Companion’s standing invitation to live your one precious life as partners in full.  If you cultivate that relationship and make it as vibrant as possible, you will blossom.  You will develop a better understanding of yourself and others; you will grasp the deeper meaning of life; your character will strengthen and you will bear more abundant spiritual fruit.

A young child is born with many capabilities, such as language and thinking.  A child blossoms in different ways depending on how they cultivate their capabilities: perhaps musically, intellectually or athletically.  Over time, a child can do many things which they couldn’t do when they were younger.  In the same way, you are bond with spiritual capabilities to know and bond with your Divine Companion; these capabilities are woven into your interior townhouse.  If you cultivate your innate spiritual capabilities, over time you will take your relationship with your Divine Companion to deeper levels.

Living cooperatively with your Divine Companion in your inner world always seems to enlarge your heart so that you are gracious company to others you encounter in life.  It’s as if your Divine Companion makes your back patio much warmer and welcoming to people in your outer world; a place where another person can relax and spend time with you trusting that you will be kind; an intimate place where they can come and be heard without judgement; a place where they can come and be cared for, where they can come and experience some of the same esteem which God holds for them.  Having experienced the richness of your own interior townhouse helps you appreciate that the interior life of another person is also quite rich; seeing a person in that way enables you to engage more warmly with them, even if outer appearances don’t immediately show how precious they are.

Many things, I am not sure of; many things are beyond my comprehension.  But of this one thing, I am absolutely sure: you can find and bond with your Divine Companion in the sacred and intimate spaces of your interior townhouse.  Just as you can bond with another person in the outer world, you can bond with your Divine Companion in your inner world.  And in that closeness, you will personally experience the great beauty of the divine character; you will fall deeply in love with God.  As bonding with God becomes your highest value, your surest motivation, your trustworthiness as a human partner to the divine will take a quantum leap; and your graciousness and compassion for another person will also blossom.

Lower purposes for your townhouse

But many people use their townhouse for a lower purpose: creating an elegant exterior façade intended to impress others with their house, with their personality.  An impressive public-facing front porch is seldom a warm and welcoming place for another person to come and share their concerns and fears or their dreams and hopes.  Being excessively invested in maintaining your public-facing appearance often (not always) involves neglecting your interior world because you have less time and energy available to develop your real character which is rooted in your inner world, not in the trappings of the outer world.  Many outwardly-focused people have almost no interest in actually developing a worthy character; they simply want the reputation of having an admirable character.  A person so absorbed in presenting themselves favorably is likely to be quite self-centered and not very concerned with another person.  A well-manicured front porch may look impressive at first glance but it often feels gaudy after you have actually spent time socializing on that seemingly grand porch.

The sweetest blessing

Your Divine Companion is always extending an invitation for sharing and intimacy.  You always have the prerogative to accept or decline the divine overtures.  Human-divine intimacy never happens unless you actively accept that precious invitation and welcome your Divine Companion into your interior townhouse.  A spiritually stagnant person defers or declines the divine invitation for living their life together.  Even then God still retains hope that a person who strongly dismisses the reality of God may eventually see and appreciate the goodness of their wonderful housemate who is so close to them.  Like a gracious housemate who is neglected by their host, your Divine Companion waits for you but never coerces you to into a relationship if your final choice is to decline.

This situation—that a perfect divine lover should be so delighted to enter your far-from-perfect townhouse and really want to spend time there with you—is so amazing that only the word “miracle” seems adequate to describe it.  This great grace—God accompanying you in your humble but precious-to-God abode—can’t really be fully grasped by the emotions of the human heart or the logic of the human mind or through the second-hand hearing of others’ spiritual stories.  You really have to experience the indwelling God for yourself to have any sense of how wonderful God is and how nourishing the relationship with your Divine Companion can be.

The finest use of your interior townhouse is climbing the inner stairway to draw as close as possible to your Divine Companion and to align your ways as much as possible with your Divine Companion’s ways.

Your townhouse belongs to God

The interior townhouse is a metaphor for every aspect of you: your thoughts and feelings, your dreams and fears, your beliefs and views, your strengths and weaknesses, your accomplishments and failures.  So the townhouse might seem to be your personal possession that belongs to you and no one else.  But your townhouse is really God’s house—an abode created and formed by God—on loan to you for your use during your earthly life; you are actually the renter, not the owner of this wonderful interior townhouse.  It is under your control for you to do whatever you wish to do with it in your allotted life.  But the townhouse remains God’s house and God dwells atop it patiently waiting to share it with you.

Wisdom is understanding that you, your very life, belongs more to God than to you; that your townhouse is God’s property which you are privileged to live in while on Earth.  If you are very self-centered and consider yourself quite wonderful, then that perspective may grate on your nerves.  But if you revere God, then that perspective is very reassuring.

Your precious but brief stay in your townhouse

Climbing skills

Climbing the inner stairway into the top section requires different traits than needed for climbing the stairway in the bottom section.

You can climb the bottom section stairway through psychological mastery: deepening your insights into human nature and mastering the glitches of the human brain, such as taming unhealthy impulses, unreasoned anxiety or aggressive tendencies.  You can climb the bottom section stairway motivated by an intense competitive drive to be better than others or to reach a material goal.  These methods and motives enable you to climb the bottom section stairway and develop your human nature; but you need additional capabilities and motives to climb the top section stairway and develop your spiritual nature.

Your life becomes precious when, using your bottom section as a launching pad rather than a prison or a final resting place, you continue climbing further up the inner stairway into the top section motivated by your desire to know God as intimately as you might know a good friend.

Climbing the top section stairs requires capabilities and traits which aren’t required to climb the bottom section stairs, including:

insight (accurate sense of your inner world),

understanding the spiritual parts of your interior townhouse,

trusting that God has drawn close to you, close to your townhouse;

humility, self-respect and reverence for God,

intact instinct for awe and worship,

minimal desire for high social status or popular acclaim;

holy desire (your highest desire is largely purified of baser desires),

wholehearted devotion to God (any ambivalence is resolved),

a growth mindset (vs. a fixed mindset that is stagnant and fully content with your current status);

unswerving loyalty to God,

following God when faced with any other pleasurable options,

making your Divine Companion your inner leader,

a willingness to collaborate with spirit;

kindness, caring and compassion,

ability to be other-centered (attuned to another person),

delight in serving others without any recognition.

[Each of these capabilities are explored in more detail in the following sub-sections.]

Without developing these capabilities, you may be an excellent climber of the bottom section stairway but not the stairway into the top section.  You can continually develop these spiritual capabilities as you climb the top section so you are better prepared for intimacy and collaboration with your Divine Companion. Cultivating your spiritual capabilities and purifying your desire enable you to better understand God and become a better partner to your Divine Companion.

Your top section is richly endowed with all the spiritual capabilities you need for the climb but they must be cultivated and developed so they are strong enough to reach the highest stairs.  Spiritual devotion is the heart of climbing the top section stairway: a purified desire for God; welcoming and absorbing God’s views; and enthusiastically living by God’s ways.  Your highest desire motivates you and energizes you to put forth the effort needed to climb to the top of the stairway.  Your highest desire gives direction to your minutes, hours and days; your highest desire shapes who you are becoming.

A rare exception to effortful climbing

Insight: self-understanding

Understanding the various aspects of your inner world really helps you deepen your inner conversation with your Divine Companion, helps you collaborate more fully, helps you become more wholeheartedly betrothed.  Although psychologists know a great deal about the human aspects of a person’s mind, they seldom seem to consider the spiritual aspects of a person’s mind.  Spiritual sages can help remedy this blind spot by shedding light on your spiritual aspects so that you don’t miss the wonderful floors in the top section of your interior townhouse.

Initially, your bottom section probably feels like the very foundation of who you are.  As you climb higher up the inner stairway, your spiritual section may come to feel like the foundation on which every other part of you rests.  Like the sun warms surrounding planets and brings life forth on them, your soul lies in the center of you and can warm all other interior rooms and bring new life to them.  Like the central power plant that warms every room in a building, your soul enables infusions of spiritual warmth to penetrate into every room of your interior townhouse.  You are far more likely to experience spiritual uplift if you understand how the top section can be the foundation of your life, the sun that brings forth more life, the central power source that warms you heart, mind and soul.

You are a mixed bag

As your spiritual capabilities grow stronger, you become more aware of your limitations and lapses not so that you would loathe your human self but so that you can make yourself stronger at your weak places.  Remember, God is a God of creation and love, not a God of destruction and rage.  Be like God and don’t wage war on yourself; trust God’s ways that love is a far better remedy for human weaknesses than repressing or hating parts of yourself.  The weak parts of your mind can undermine you as surely as the attacks of those who persecute you in the outer world; but you have much greater power to disarm such inner threats compared to your much-more-limited power to stop others in the outer world from undermining you.

As you come to know your interior townhouse better, you will have a fuller appreciation of both your weaknesses and your strengths: a deeper appreciation of how the weaknesses of your bottom section can be so detrimental to your growth and a compensating appreciation of how the spiritual endowments of your upper section create wonderful possibilities for your life, even up to bonding with your Divine Companion.  Knowing how richly God endows mortal frames such as yours may make your love for your Divine Companion stronger; God’s rich endowments of your interior townhouse show how much how God loves you and prepares you to participate in intimacy and companionship.

Self-understanding is closely connected to spiritual blossoming

How well you understand yourself and God determines whether you are nearly withering or greatly blossoming or somewhere in between.  Many people wither spiritually because they have no sense of God or any awareness of all that happens within their inner world; because they lack understanding, they don’t value God or themselves as precious and valuable.  You may assist anyone to see their wonderful value but only that person can revise their views and reverse their spiritual withering.  It seems impossible (to my human mind and its limited perspective) that a person who is ignorant of go and of their inner world would be able to bond with their Divine Companion.

Full perspective

Even if you know a great deal about your human nature and your personality, you will only understand your full extent when you also know your spiritual nature and its capabilities.  Your mainly human tendencies (greed, anxiety, aggression, anger, indifference, addiction; loving attachment, altruism, creativity, cooperation, learning) become quite distinct when juxtaposed against your spiritual capabilities (awe, reverence, collaboration, service, co-creativity).  Seeing your human strands and spiritual strands side by side clarifies the core choice you face in this life: which strands will dominate and shape your character?  Will you live for your own pleasure or will you live to be pleasing to your Divine Companion?

Helpful vs. unhelpful spiritual direction

The worst error a person who considers themselves a spiritual director can make is to prevent a person from freely and fully exploring all of their inner world, that precious gift which God gives each person when they are created and life is breathed into them.  The most helpful thing a spiritual director can do is to encourage a person to explore their inner world as fully as possible and to really notice all that happens within themselves, in both their human aspects and their spiritual aspects; to encourage a person to become a skilled navigator who understands their inner world as their home rather than being a person who, unfamiliar with the language and layout of their inner world, feels like a foreigner even when they are on their home soil.

Bugs in the brain’s software

QUOTE [Dwelling 4, chapter 1; paragraph 11]

“We should not be distressed by reason of our thoughts, nor allow ourselves to be worried by them: if they come from the devil, he will let us alone if we take no notice of them; and if they are, as often happens, one of the many frailties entailed by Adam’s sin, let us be patient and suffer them for the love of God.”

PARAPHRASE

“Don’t worry when your mind fails you, perhaps by entertaining thoughts that you know your Divine Companion abhors; perhaps by too much wandering and too many ramblings; perhaps by doubts about being able to accomplish anything worthwhile; perhaps by losing hope or losing any sense that you matter; perhaps by finding it hard to trust people or God.  Such failings are inevitable because of the bugs lingering in the software which we call our mind.  How wonderful when you still love God as best as you can even with your buggy software.”

=========================

Quicksand metaphor [Dwelling 4; chapter 1]

The ground floor of your interior townhouse can sometimes act like quicksand that constantly sucks you ever downward; if you’ve been lax and have fallen deeply into that quicksand, you may find it nearly impossible to pull yourself out of its powerful suction.  The soil of the lower floors may seem appealing at first but putting roots into it always ends in misery for someone: perhaps for yourself as you erode your character or perhaps for the others you hurt as you try hard to win the material games of life and neglect all else.  It’s hard to bear good fruit (to love God and to be kind to others) when you have burrowed your roots into the mud of the lowest floors of your townhouse; from that mire, you can only bear paltry fruit compared to the wonderful fruit you can bear when you are well-rooted in the finer soil of the higher spiritual floors of your townhouse.  If you understand the quicksand-like nature of your bottom section, you will be better able to avoid being sucked down into your own quicksand.

Thorn metaphor

Paul used having a painful thorn stuck in his side as a metaphor for having a psychological flaw that he couldn’t shake and which continually caused him mental anguish.  Perhaps you too have your own particular thorn: a psychological issue that constantly troubles you; the pain from such thorns will be magnified into even greater suffering if you believe the distortion that God should remove that thorn for you so you can have a more pleasant and difficulty-free life on this Earth.  The same pain from your thorn may be more bearable if you allow your weaknesses and limitations to increase your humility.  Such hard-earned humility deepens reverence for God.  Because of his thorn’s ability to humble him and deepen his perspective, Paul found peace with God even though he still lived with a very painful thorn, a mental glitch that interfered with his ability to follow God as closely as he wanted to.

You help your spiritual growth by accepting how very real your mental glitches are: those coarse or unholy thoughts which your mind frequently wanders to, often when you are stressed out.  Knowing how real they are helps you own your central role in taming them rather than being mastered by them; helps you be keenly aware of the consequences of unwise choices and poor habits that developed earlier in your life before you tamed them.  Recognizing and owning these all-too-human but far-from-perfect ways of your mind helps you much more than pretending that you are too perfect to contain such defects of mind or complaining that you are too wonderful and shouldn’t have to endure them.

Wonderful endowments

All this talk of quicksand and thorns may give the (wrong) impression that your interior townhouse is a shoddily-made place with few good features.  But nothing could be further from the inspiring truth about how you are made!  You are quite beautifully created: your interior townhouse is endowed with several wonderful features, most especially your capability to have a first-hand encounter with your Divine Companion who, in your own inner world, faithfully reveals the personality of the God of the Vast Universe.  The God of the Highest Heaven seems to enjoy revealing the lovely divine nature through relationships long before a person approaches heaven.  God draws very close to you on Earth so you can begin to grasp some of God’s character through a personal relationship with your Divine Companion.  How wonderful that your interior townhouse is built with a rooftop for your Divine Companion and with the capability, through an intimate closeness, to have a first-hand experience of God’s wonderful personality!

Grasping God’s personality through a relationship with your Beloved may be accompanied by infusions into your mind that bring a quantum leap in your understanding of God’s nature. Grasping God through spiritual infusions is quite different from, and can complement, learning about God through human theology: a second-hand familiarity with others’ thoughts and experiences.  Each way of learning (through your own relationship with God and through an appreciation of the accumulated wisdom of spiritual sages) is a healthy part of spiritual development.  Your Divine Companion’s infusions may deepen your sense of God’s personality which may be quite different from the prevailing sense in your community.  When your sense of God that flows from your first-hand experience of your Divine Companion conflicts with the theological opinions of others, please give more weight to your own experiences (unless, of course, you are quite egotistical or often deluded).

If you are blessed by the embrace of your Divine Companion, some spiritually ignorant clergy or lay people may try to undermine you by implying that their knowledge about God is more reliable than your own experiences.  Please trust your own first-hand spiritual experiences no matter what seeds of doubts are sowed by either spiritually inept people or arise from your own lack of confidence and low self-respect.  The validity of your experiences with your Divine Companion is attested to by their air of deep certainty, by how they so profoundly assure you of that God dearly loves you (and everyone else too!).  This spiritual certainty isn’t rooted in the analytical capabilities of the human brain; it doesn’t rely on material proof yet it feels more real (it has more beauty, goodness and truth) than material things that have actual physical proof.

If you remain in a quandary about whether your inward sense of God is accurate, the fruits of your experience are always the best litmus test for their validity.  If you have a deep sense of inner peace and have an easy and gracious compassion for others, then the insights from your experiences are quite likely valid.  If you are neurotically obsessed with every single detail of your internal experiences (and less moved by the heart of these experiences: that you can share your life with such a wonderful divine companion which motivates you to become a more worthy partner) and have little interest in or genuine concern for others, then you might benefit from reexamining any ideas that you developed from that inner experience.

Perhaps you have felt God’s inner presence but don’t yet have an in-your-very-bones certainty that God dwells within you; trust that as you climb higher on the inner stairway, your small assurance will grow stronger.  You help strengthen your assurance when you sincerely trust that God cares for you and when you more enthusiastically welcome God’s infusions.

Knowing that you are continually drawing closer to your Divine Companion as you climb the inner stairway may give you the stamina to keep striving to reach the floor above you where even deeper spiritual insights and richer nourishment await you.

More on improving inner insight

Balanced Self-understanding

The peril of minimizing your weaknesses

Being totally unaware of your weaknesses is one way of not clearly understanding yourself and who you really are: imagining that you have no Shadow parts; that you have no Shadow work to do.  Perhaps the Psalm of David (“Blessed is the one who fears the Lord”) might also be phrased “Blessed is the one who fears the vagaries of their own human mind.”  As in all such matters, a balanced view helps tremendously: a simple and healthy awareness of your weaknesses is far better than a neurotic obsession with them which exaggerates your sinful nature and obscures how precious you are in God’s eyes.

The peril of exaggerating your strengths

An overly inflated sense of yourself is another way of not clearly understanding yourself.  This mistake is writ large in the lives of powerful politicians and high clergy.  Having risen in their perspective social ranks, they come to think of themselves as quite amazing and superior; they come to think of nearly everyone else as quite inferior to them, especially those who are different from them.  Being so disdainful of others for the slimmest of reasons, they lose the benefit of collaborating with another person or even with their Divine Companion.  They lose their savor because they look down on others; they may even get high on their contempt.  Their disdain may extend to God; they may stop looking up to God and lose any reverence for how God is so much more wonderful than they are.  If their self-importance becomes too exaggerated, they may even lose their soul, their opportunity to bond with their Beloved on Earth.  Their destructive earthly legacy may continue to degrade society or religion even after they die or lose influence.

A paradox

Your inner world is a place of such paradoxes.  Overly esteeming your strengths actually erodes your character; realistically owning your weaknesses and flaws (as well as your strengths) actually elevates your character.  Seeing yourself from only one angle (either exaggerated self-esteem or excessive self-loathing) can be quite destructive.  It is much more constructive to see yourself from both angles: knowing your weaknesses decreases the darkness your Shadow casts in your inner world; knowing your wonderful endowments increases the light of your Divine Companion can shine into your inner world.

A sweet spot between excessive self-loathing and overmuch self-esteem

It’s not wise or helpful to endlessly obsess over your human weaknesses; neither is it wise to forget your human frailties altogether.  The sweet spot lies somewhere in the middle: noticing how your human nature contains both weaknesses and tantalizing spiritual possibilities.  Notice how you have a twin nature: you have a human nature and a spiritual nature; you have one foot in the earthly soil of your human existence and one foot on the heavenly soil of your soul; you have one foot of clay and another foot of the strongest and most wonderful spiritual gossamer; you have one foot in your interior townhouse (your current human existence) and one foot on the spiritual threshold of the rooftop (a hint of your eternal spiritual existence).

Full and clear self-understanding includes knowing and owning all of your mixed bag of strengths and weaknesses.  Your strengths are your capabilities to connect, choose and create.  Your weaknesses are underdeveloped or distorted capabilities.  Worldly “failure” (a life of being dismissed by others) increases the odds of losing sight of your strengths and value; worldly “success “(being admired by others) increases the odds of losing sight of your weaknesses and need to grow.  The sweet spot of accurate self-understanding is clearly seeing all of yourself and knowing how dearly your Divine Companion loves the mixed bag which is you.

Humility

Humility—or lack of humility—powerfully affects your spirituality: your readiness to form and to maintain a healthy relationship with God.  It’s hard to imagine any meaningful relationship with your Divine Companion without humility: it’s quite laughable imagining an arrogant person trying to smugly interact with the indwelling God, as if they think they are on equal footing with God!  The interior townhouse seems to operate according to a universal law: too little humility weighs you down, exaggerates your self-centeredness, making it hard to climb up towards God; sincere humility lightens you, reduces your self-importance, and removes impediments to collaborating with God.

Humility is like the sister of reverence: really grasping how great and good God is as well as how precious but limited you are.  Humility and reverence go hand in hand.  The blend of humility and reverence create a strong trust in God’s goodness; together they create the desire and motivation to seek the personal embrace of your Divine Companion; together they create the patience necessary to wait and persevere until you are ready for the powerful and life-changing intimacy of resting in God’s arms; together they breed courage and banish timidity: how can you fail in climbing the path to God when you have such a magnificent partner!  Deep reverence for God and true humility are so tightly coupled that I can scarcely imagine one without the other.

It boggles my mind to realize that God also has humility: God is humble towards you and treats you as a wonderful and precious person.  God’s humility is utterly amazing: your Divine Companion (who is God of Highest Heaven come to personally dwell with you in your interior townhouse) humbles Godself before you and allows you to control the course of this human-divine relationship.  God doesn’t ask you to do anything (in this case, to be humble) that God isn’t also already doing.

Humility is just as important for a spiritual master as for a spiritual novice.  Humility remains essential even after you have ascended the interior stairway all the way through the top section and have rested in the arms of God on the rooftop.  Losing humility at any point in your spiritual development will send you cascading down the inner stairwell and you will quickly find yourself on the lower floors.

False Humility

Timidity

Timidity can masquerade as humility.  Feeling timid, you might imagine that you shouldn’t pursue an intimate connection with your Divine Companion because you are too wretched a soul; or because others might interpret your aspiration as a sign that you consider yourself better than them; or because you don’t have the requisite spirituality and you will make a catastrophic mistake.  These attitudes might seem to be humble.  But they really aren’t.  True humility is recognizing the greatness of God compared to you and also trusting that you can connect with God no matter how far from perfect you may be.  False humility is loathing yourself when you are actually a person who is exceedingly precious to God; false humility diminishes God by thinking that God is too weak to heal and uplift someone such as yourself who you consider to be unworthy and not “advanced” enough to merit God’s love and attention.  Timidity distorts the lovely nature of God.

Taking timid baby steps up the inner stairway is not the same as humility; such timidity simply prolongs your time on your lower floors and delays you from experiencing the deep joy of the divine embrace.  Ascending the stairway requires courage to face any fear aroused by the unknowns of your upper floors; perhaps you fear finding that God really doesn’t care for you or know what you need.  Timidity can immobilize your courage if you cave into your fear’s perspective and stop climbing the inner stairway.  But you can revive even the most dormant courage by bravely trusting in God’s gracious personality and refusing to cave into timidity’s distorted ideas about God.  As your timidity and fears shrink, your courage expands.  And then you can take bold steps with genuine humility because you know that you are leaning on God who adds to your strength.  Fear’s distorted views of God can make you lose sight of God’s powerful healing powers which are quite capable of healing even your most profound weakness.  Yet even God, who is so powerful, cannot heal you without your trust and participation.  Don’t be so timid that you don’t do your part, the part that only you can do: simply and bravely take the next step on the inner stairway.

Self-loathing

Self-loathing is another kind of false humility which is rooted in obsessing over only one part of your interior townhouse: your bottom floors.  When you solely focus on your baser human urges and cravings, you only see a sliver of your full inner world and you lose all awareness of the wonderful top floors built into your interior townhouse, built into your very nature.  If you are trapped in self-loathing, you always have the option of turning your focus from your ground floor to the rooftop where your Divine Companion awaits.  Seeing both your human limitations and God’s great desire to draw so close to you is a powerful antidote to the terrible distortions of despising yourself; seeing both your humanness and your spiritual potential for a personal connection with God can cure even the most profound self-loathing.

Humility strengthens your immunity to self-loathing by humbly acknowledging your limitations, not in a self-flagellating way, but simply noticing the all-too-human ways of your mind.  Don’t worry too much about your limitations: God has endowed you with the capability to outgrow them!  But you will only outgrow them if you seize your self-remodeling capabilities and make good use of them.

Avoiding your Shadow

Self-loathing is excessive and unhealthy dwelling on your limitations as if they are all of you.  Avoiding your Shadow is the opposite: imagining that you have no limitations or flaws at all.  Perhaps you avoid looking too closely at your Shadow; it’s no fun staring too long at your flaws and owning your limitations.  It may seem easier and more pleasant to distract yourself from your own flaws with endless gossip about other people’s flaws; or to consider yourself to be spiritually above others and entitled to rub another person’s nose in their flaws, hinting at how they should be more like you.  But these easier and more appealing amusements won’t help you grow.  Don’t immerse yourself in these distractions from your own limitations; indulging in such distractions only delays your climb up the inner stairway.

You ascend the stairway and draw closer to your Divine Companion by courageously and honestly looking at your human flaws through God’s eyes: seeing them as understandable human limitations and trusting that you are still dearly beloved by your own Divine Companion despite your immature traits, whether they are few or many, whether they are minor or major.  Please trust that each person’s Divine Companion is far better able to address their errors than you are; you will be more spiritually helpful when you help a person see their worth rather than identifying and highlighting their flaws.

Humility enables you to see your flaws and limitations with a balanced perspective.  Humility enables you to see another’s flaws as just one aspect of them, not as all of who they are.  When someone senses that you see them as precious and as having their own Divine Companion (rather than seeing them as a bundle of flaws unworthy of God’s love), that alone may be all they need to lift their spirits and to improve their interior townhouse.

The unhumble detest collaborating

The unredeemed ego, your default mindset, is often overly independent and detests collaborating and sharing; it can be obsessed with retaining absolute control over the interior townhouse; it can be very hard-headed and refuse to share decision-making power with anyone, including your Divine Companion.  Your ego may stir up tempests and dramas to stop you from climbing up the inner stairway that leads to deep cooperation with the God who dwells within you.

Humility minimizes the ego’s resistance by helping you see and appreciate the goodness of another person and the great beauty of your Divine Companion.  A humble perspective opens you heart and mind so that you are willing, even eager, to collaborate with another person or with God.

Jealousy

Jealousy flows from the near-total absence of humility: thinking that you are much better and more deserving than others.  Spiritual jealousy resents another person who has experienced more intimacy with their Divine Companion.  The longer you indulge in being angry at not being graced with this finest of all experiences, the more jealousy solidifies and hardens your heart.  A jealous heart grows cold because it can’t graciously delight in the spiritual good fortune of another.  A sense of awe and gladness over another person’s spiritual experiences could soften such a hard heart, bringing you a step closer to your own first-hand experience of similar spiritual joy and intimacy.  Unfortunately, a hard heart is often loath to assume the humble mindset that sees another person with awe.  Jealousy of another’s spiritual progress greatly slows your own ascent up the inner stairway.

Please be very much delighted when someone has ascended higher up the inner stairway than you.  Let their progress assure you that spiritual progress is possible for everyone, including you.  Instead of resenting them, pray that they continue to ascend and experience even more spiritual intimacy.  Without the humility that recognizes another’s more mature spirituality, you will nurse grudges against a more spiritually advanced person, grudges that will keep you firmly tethered on the lower floors of your interior townhouse.  Comparing yourself with others is like having thick mud caked on your boots so that every step you take is much harder than it need be if you weren’t so concerned with who is better and who is lesser.  Humility lightens your psychological baggage which makes your spiritual journey less tiresome.

True Humility

Humility is not debasing or demeaning yourself; true humility is simply considering God as greater than yourself.  Humility counteracts the human tendency to esteem yourself quite highly, often more highly than any other person or even higher than God.  God wants you to see yourself with profound self-respect: trusting that you, your townhouse, is extremely precious to God.  Humility balanced with self-respect (being quite clear how great God is compared to you and deeply appreciating how wonderfully made you are) may be the most valuable pair of traits you could ever cultivate.  Blended together, humility and self-respect enable you to deeply revere God and see yourself and other people as wonderful.

Humility is being less concerned with yourself and less wrapped up in how you stack up compared to others.  A humble person is quite content to be equal to every other person, trusting that each and every one is equally loved by God.  How could any special earthly status or ranking be more wonderful than having this precious life, however simple it may seem when measured by the world’s ways of valuing people?  How could anything be more precious than this life’s opportunity to personally bond with your Divine Companion and reciprocate God’s love?

Humility moves you from a self-centered life to an other-centered life.  True humility is reflected in a person’s sincere joy in the accomplishments and growth of another person and equally sincere sympathy should a person’s faults be flaunted by others and gossiped about behind their back.  Another sign of a humble soul is being barely moved by either personal acclaim or condemnation of the congregation; not being elated by effusive praise or deflated by intense criticism.  [Teresa: “Fame and blame are the same” to a God-devoted person.]

God’s grace is no zero-sum game in which more grace for another person means less grace for you.  God has set an inexhaustible buffet table of unending graces with plenty to feed every single person who desires God; no matter how much other people before you have filled their plate from the spiritual banquet table, the graces and food will never run out.

Humility preserves reverence

Revering God is essential for climbing every step of the spiritual path; reverence is appreciating the greatness and goodness of God.  In the growth spurt that follows your Divine Companion’s infusions, you might begin thinking quite highly of yourself and forget how very much your growth and success owes to the vast contributions made by God.  The ego is a sly trickster and may tempt you by saying “Why not elevate yourself and enjoy your success after you everything you’ve done and accomplished?”  Safeguard yourself from the ego’s sophistry by always remembering how much greater God is than you no matter how much you have grown and done in your lifetime.  Meditate on how, without the tremendous contributions of your Divine Companion, you would not have grown very much spiritually or accomplished anything of much spiritual value.  Humility safeguards your reverence from egoistic delusions by maintaining your sense of perspective so you still fully appreciate how everything hinges on God.

Imagine how useless it would be to ascend to the rooftop without humility and reverence.  Without reverence, you cling to human trifles and blinders you to the greatest treasure of all.  How terrible to lose this most precious human-divine relationship which is so close to you, which you possess within yourself, simply because you didn’t have sufficient humility to recognize how good and beautiful God is.

Clear attribution

Jesus taught that you should give unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and give unto God what is God’s.  In the same way, you should clearly attribute your human traits to your lower floors and your spiritual capabilities to God.  Appreciate how your finest strengths and accomplishments come from God; although you are an essential partner in developing them, you could never produce the smallest spiritual fruit without God’s participation.  Your humility grows as you grasp how much God contributes to producing your spiritual fruit.  Hubris, the opposite of humility, falsely claims your best qualities as your own solo doing; hubris overvalues the bottom section of your interior townhouse and undervalues the top section.  Human nature seems quite vulnerable to holding for this false inflated view which praises yourself more than God.  God desires that you see yourself with a profound yet humble self-respect: deep respect for yourself because you, your townhouse, is extremely precious to God; and also deep humility because you know how much greater God is compared to you.  This balance of self-respect for your townhouse with humility before God may be the most valuable possession anyone can have.

Purified holy desire

People often have simultaneous desires competing to be the dominant one that determines what you do with your time (and, ultimately, with your life).  Your townhouse might seem inhabited by many boisterous children engaged in a never-ending free-for-all.  As if a desire for a squared away household fight with a desire to relax for the day; a desire to be heard may overwhelm a desire to listen to another; a desire for security may war with a desire for adventure; a desire for closeness may struggle with a desire for independence.  Ambivalence is the state of mind when neither desire is firmly elevated above the others.

Your life is a balancing act with one foot resting in this material world and one foot resting in the divine world.  Ambivalence is being murky about where you place your weight; about where your treasure lies; about what you value the most; about what you desire above all else.  Ambivalence forms very easily and hinders your relationship with your Beloved.  You may lose sight of the wonderful role God can play in your life.  Perhaps you put most of your weight on material footing and only occasionally put a little weight on spiritual footing.  Vacillating between pressing earthly pursuits and subtle spiritual concerns, you may spend most of the hours of your days or months in selfish or material pursuits.  If you begin making some time in your days for God, you can steadily shift your weight onto your spiritual footing; you will be amazed at how that shift also improves your worldly footing.

Holy desire is a consecrated yearning for God purified of any ambivalence, a yearning for the divine that definitively supersedes all other humanly yearnings.  Pure holy desire is a love of God devoid of traces of self-concern and self-absorption.  Holy desire becomes purified when it has distilled and removed any selfish and baser desires that would contaminate it.

Purifying your desire requires relinquishing all smaller desires that dilute and diminish your love for God.  Purifying your desire requires letting go of all your other oh-so-treasured desires because you realize how inferior other treasures and pursuits are compared to your Divine Companion and the vibrant relationship you can share.  Your motive matters.  Relinquishing material desires so that you will get wonderful spiritual consolations is manipulative and insincere, as if your Divine Companion would then be obligated to reward you for being a martyr who sacrificed your lesser desires.  Relinquishing material desires because you adore your Divine Companion without any ulterior motives is true love that desires only partnership, not the goodies that may come as well.

The opposite of purified desire is ambivalent desire.  You might tell yourself that you really want one thing above all others but actually you easily forget that one thing when you encounter something flashy and you fall under its spell even though it has little lasting value; you forget your first desire and no longer consider it more valuable than the flashy thing.  Or you ease up pursuing your one desire when you encounter an obstacle along the way or if the overall effort to attain it seems too demanding.  Only purified desire creates a faithful heart that doesn’t vacillate under the allure of other things; only purified desire creates the steadfast character of a trustworthy person who perseveres no matter what challenges you encounter, no matter how long it takes to find your partner or how difficult it may be to bond with the one you desire.

Earnestly engaging in an inner dialogue with your Divine Companion diminishes the power of worldly attractions to captivate your finite pool of desire and warp your character.  In these intimate inner exchanges, you will discover that God’s love for you is completely trustworthy: that God will never abandon you even though many “friends” in the outer world may have abandoned you.  Even so, your mind can forget the reassuring experiences with your Divine Companion.  How is that possible?  Such are the vagaries of the human brain.  Should the memory of God’s personal love for you grow faint, please keep seeking your loving Divine Companion who awaits your full commitment; please remain assured that you have a perfect partner who nurtures your soul and strengthens you to cope with life’s challenges.  Demonstrate that you are a worthy partner to such a wonderful One by always trusting in the goodness of God no matter how hard your earthly circumstances are.  After all, God has done the same for you (God first entrusted God’s heart to you before you were a wonderful partner) and God never stopped trusting that you are good even when your goodness was barely apparent.

Perseverance: the fruit of purified desire

Desire is like the magnet of your mind: it aligns you in the direction of what you value.  Your alignment enables the desired thing to pull you more strongly and draw you more closely to it.  If you value many things, you will be pulled in many directions.  If you highly value a certain material thing, it will pull you very strongly towards that and distance you from the pull of other things.  If you value social acclaim, you will be pulled very strongly towards that and pulled away from God’s drawing power.  If you highly value God, you will be pulled steadily towards your Divine Companion and removed further from the allure of worldly things.

Ascending your inner stairway requires purifying what you value most: aligning your magnet of desire with God above all other people and things; diminishing any desire to return to the alluring pleasures and comforts of the lower floors; turning away from a desire to stay where you are and indulge yourself in the novelties to be enjoyed down the hallways of your current floor; taming your ego’s relentless desire for recognition that constantly tugs at you to ignore the divine pull.  A desire for God thoroughly purified of such competing desires motivates and energizes you to persistently putting forth the effort required to keep climbing the inner stairway.  When many human desires have been purified into a single desire for God, your persistence in climbing becomes more robust because spiritual beauty draws you more powerfully and worldly attractions are less and less appealing.

On the higher floors of the bottom section, you experience less psychological conflict because you see more clearly the false promises inherent in worldly allures that seemed so appealing on the ground floor; you more clearly see the ground floor’s misaligned values and you reorient your magnet of desire to better things.  The same process continues as you climb the stairway of the top section: internal conflict decreases as you see lesser attractions for the mirage they are and your desire for them fades accordingly; being less enthralled by them, you can align your magnet of desire with the spiritual values of God’s ways.

Purifying your desire changes you and elevates what you want: to love God and to be pleasing to God; to love others and to graciously serve them.  Purifying your desire enables you to bear the higher spiritual fruit which is more wonderful than even the best fruit you produce when your desires are aligned with worldly things.

Your center of gravity

Your values—what you desire more and what you desire less—create the center of gravity of your interior townhouse. In the bottom section, your townhouse’s center of gravity is usually yourself.  In the top section, the townhouse’s center of gravity becomes God and others.  Self-forgetfulness is moving away from the self-centeredness of the bottom section towards the God-centeredness and other-centeredness of the top section.  A spirit-dominated mindset and heartset (your heart’s dearest desires) enable you to forge a very vibrant relationship with your Divine Companion.

Self-forgetfulness

God seems to blaze into your heart, mind and soul when you’re so unconcerned with yourself that you’re nearly oblivious of yourself; when you are wholly caught up by a profound desire to know God better and to do whatever God wants accomplished in your earthly life.  When you are so fully preoccupied with God, a whole new mindset seems to blossom within you: a holy mindset quite different from even the most altruistic mindset of the bottom section (the human psyche that is unconcerned with God).  Being less absorbed with material concerns, your mind can more readily become absorbed in the mind of God enabling your Divine Companion to impart wisdom beyond what you can grasp with only your own mind, the mental capabilities of the bottom section.

Shifting your center of gravity towards other-centeredness

Your ego is strongest in the lower regions of your interior townhouse.  Being so self-centered and obsessed with your personal status, your ego’s myopic vision distorts your perspective of what matters most in life.  As you climb higher up the inner stairway and reach the middle regions of the top section, your ego loses its power over you.  As your perspective is broadened and distortions are clarified, you become much more concerned with securing your relationship with your Divine Companion, something that your ego cares little or nothing about.

In the top section of your interior townhouse, God seems to enhance your mind, endowing it with new capabilities so you can understand in ways that no amount of your own efforts in the bottom section could ever achieve.  In the top section, your Divine Companion—the ultimate healer and therapist—helps heal psychological wounds, especially those that diminish your trust in God, the trust which is absolutely essential to securely attach to your Beloved.  These wonderful gifts which God imparts in the top section assure you of how eagerly God wants to give you absolutely everything you need so your relationship can deepen.  The fruits of your Divine Companion’s infusions are long lasting, unlike the short-lived moments of elation which come mainly from the human imagination or even from the spiritual thoughts of the top section’s lower floors.  Only your divine partner could produce such genuine and incredibly moving delights (moving as in experiences that move you along in your spiritual advancement); only God could infuse the indescribable peace and sublime joy that is so much more than (mere) human happiness.

When you are genuinely other-centered, you’re better prepared to help another person appreciate their own interior townhouse and encourage them to seek the God dwelling within them.  You are keenly aware that you are most helpful when you have assimilated God’s spirituality into your humanity; you are quite clear that you aren’t very helpful relying only on your human-only resources.  The opposite happens far too often: a solidly self-centered person with delusions of being a magnificent spiritual sage can hinder another person by leading them to an inner stairway that doesn’t bring them closer to their Divine Companion or by leading them to an interior dead-end that doesn’t lead to appreciating and loving God.  Many people may hold a low opinion of God as a result of following and trusting such a deluded person.

When you aren’t very concerned with your worldly status is when you are most spiritually helpful to another person.  Not being too wrapped up in other’s opinions of you, you are quite content to serve simply and graciously without expecting appreciation or applause.  You feel honored that service is your lot in life; it isn’t a stepping stone to a higher position.  If you happily accept this as your lot, you will be filled with joy whenever you can serve.  People who think very highly of themselves seem to be far less spiritually helpful to others because their main concern is maintaining the high esteem of their group.  Thinking themselves to be quite elevated, they lack the sweet and humble fragrance of God’s other-centered ways; their “service” is tainted by their desire to be praised and applauded for what they are doing.

Assessing your center of gravity

A quick gut check for whether your center of gravity is self-centered or other-centered: Are you excessively upset when you aren’t acclaimed?  Do you feel that you aren’t as appreciated as you should be?  Are you secretly (or not so secretly) coveting positions of higher honor in your religious or spiritual organization?  Are you jealous of another’s popularity or spiritual fruit bearing?  If so, you may need to correct your center of gravity which has shifted away from God and towards yourself.  Such a misaligned center of gravity will only pull you further away from your Divine Companion, who is the source of being content with humbly serving others.

Rephrasing these quick gut checks on your center of gravity: Are you quite unruffled when you are dismissed by others as being “not much”?  Are you quite content with whatever your position you hold in your religious or spiritual organization?  Are you happy for another’s popularity or wonderful spiritual fruit bearing?  Are you delighted to serve those who are forgotten and who are considered lowly by so many (where your service will go largely unnoticed)?  If so, then don’t be overly concerned with your center of gravity and stay the course you are taking.

You can be more assured that you are doing God’s will if you have a sincere and growing love for another person, especially a distraught and “lowly” person who is dismissed by others and can’t boost you in the eyes of others.  Distortions in your sense of yourself can be corrected by honestly and ruthlessly evaluating your compassion for others who are low in the social ranks; such compassion seems to diminish in direct proportion to holding a self-inflated estimation of yourself.

The connection between purity of desire and your reaction to hard times

Your love for others will be sweeter when it is yoked with a deepening love for God.  A love for God that has been purified of any lesser attractions feeds a love for another person that has been purified of any ulterior motives.  These two loves (your love for God and your love for another person) seem to grow—or regress—together.

Secure attachment

A child naturally develops a secure attachment to a healthy parent; the child implicitly (without language) trusts that their parent cares for them.  But a child develops an insecure attachment when raised by an unhealthy parent; the child senses that their parent’s care will fluctuate so they can’t really trust that their parent will reliably be good to them.  Much of the security of a parent-child attachment hinges on the psychological health of the parent; it’s very hard for a child to feel securely attached if their parent’s psychological issues impair their ability to love their child.  [Much, but not all of attachment is rooted in a parent’s love: sometimes a child’s limitations, not a parent’s limitations, determine how secure the parent-child attachment is.]

A secure child-parent attachment forms by spending time together: being held in a parent’s arms; being the object of a parent’s tender gaze of love; spending time playing together on the floor; being reliably cared for, especially when a child is upset or ill.  The bonds of secure attachment form in a relationship between two people spending time together.  A secure attachment with a parent becomes a child’s foundation for exploring the larger world and forming healthy connections with other people.

In an analogous way, you may be securely or insecurely attached to God.  But in the case of the human-divine relationship, all limitations to the security of that attachment come from you, from your willingness to trust God.  Your Divine Companion has no imperfections that limit the security of your attachment.  Like the attachment between two people, a secure human-divine attachment is formed by spending time in your Divine Companion’s arms; receiving God’s tender gaze of love; fully sharing your inner life with your Divine Companion; knowing from your own first-hand experience that God reliably cares for you.  A secure attachment to God is your foundation for growing spiritually and graciously engaging with others.

Trusting God’s good heart for you

Trust in God, simple childlike trust and delight in God, draws you closer to the divine embrace than even the finest theological erudition or the most masterful discipline of your mind’s chatter.  Your ego may interfere with trusting in God.  The ego (the default mindset of the ground floor) often mistrusts that anyone else, God included, can run your life better than the ego can.  The ego often doubts the goodness of others, God included, and is easily suspicious thinking that they have inferior thinking or ulterior motives.  Trusting God means releasing your suspicions about God; laying down your own plans and agenda; putting aside your dreams of comfort, happiness or social status.  And replacing those things with trusting the goodness and faithfulness of your Divine Companion’s love for you and trusting your Divine Companion’s wisdom in guiding you in your life.  Trusting God means gladly laying down your plans because you are quite sure that following God’s plans and agenda is much better and more delightful than whatever plans you had concocted on your own.  Trusting God means trusting that the divine ways are better, much better, than your own human-only ways.

When you are securely attached to your Divine Companion and you fully trust God’s care for you, you are far better able to cope with the difficulties of the world and seize the opportunities life brings to you.  Secure spiritual attachment to God helps you tame your personal weaknesses (whatever is your particular thorn in your flesh) and helps you not think poorly of others because of their personal weaknesses (their particular thorn).

QUOTE

from the Prologue [Starr’s translation (p. 30)]

“for the past few months, I have been suffering from such a clattering and fragility in my head.”

same line [Dalton translation, 1852]

“… suffering from such a … noise in my head”

Sensing the presence of God in another person

Being securely attached to a parent creates a firm foundation so you are better prepared to form a caring relationship with another person.  In the same way, being securely attached to your Divine Companion creates a solid foundation for being able to really care about another person based on how much God treasures them, based on knowing that a Divine Companion dwells within them just as one dwells within you.

Knowing that God is present within you is one way of being assured that the divine is present in another person, even someone who is despised or dismissed by society.  Glimpsing how fervently God reaches out to you assures you of how much God wants to draw near any and every willing soul.  Your first-hand interior experience of God’s love is precious evidence of a truth that is often only dimly sensed based on exterior experience alone.  That encouraging truth grows stronger each time a person—you in your inner world or another in their inner world—grasps how God draws so close to a person and mingles with each of us in our interior townhouse.

Each person, from the least spiritually developed to the most spiritually advanced, is equally precious to God.  Just as each child in a family, from the wildest and least mature to the most talented and mature, is equally precious to their parents and is equally loved by their parents.  What a joy to mature as a child of God and be both a producer and consumer of such wonderful love!

Ascending the inner stairway is synonymous with becoming more and more securely attached to your Divine Companion; with knowing God’s lovely character more fully through your own first-hand relationship with God; with trusting God more completely by vanquishing any trust-corroding doubts that arise from your experiences in imperfect relationships with parents, friends and partners.

Becoming trustworthy

One part of secure attachment is trusting that your Divine Companion is good and will be good to you: that God won’t be mean or overbearing.  The other part of secure attachment is being a trustworthy partner who appreciates the great goodness of your Divine Companion and will be loyal in any and all circumstances that you might encounter; being faithful and loving your Divine Companion above everything else even when you have the option of some other alluring thing.  Trust is required to share yourself fully; sharing deeply is essential to have a vibrant relationship with and a secure attachment to your Divine Companion.

Uncultivated human nature can be very fickle: your mind can be at peace one moment and then become highly enraged in the next moment over a trivial provocation; your devotion can be very pure in one moment and then your desire may be contaminated with baser desires in the next moment.  Your Divine Companion is constant: unwaveringly loyal and desires a partner with the same constancy.  You limit your human-divine partnership if your mind vacillates all over the place, if your emotions swing wildly from extreme elation to deep despair, if your loyalty waxes and wanes.  Your vacillations limit the security of your attachment to your Divine Companion; resolving your ambivalences makes you a trustworthy partner and make your attachment to your Divine Companion more secure.

A Tale of Two Worlds: the outer world and the inner world

Persevering through hard times in the outer world

When you live mainly on your lowest floors, you may think that you are only surrounded by enemies and cold-hearted people.  You may intensely feel that life is perilous and insecure; you may think that your days and years ahead are uncertain and unsafe.  You may feel that you must be on constant guard and be armed to the teeth to protect yourself from all the untrustworthy people who dwell outside your townhouse.  With such a mindset, you will be perpetually fearful and emotionally exhausted.  Although this kind of mindset is to a certain extent understandable, it’s a terribly demoralizing way to live.

No matter how well you cultivate your interior townhouse, the outer world can be very difficult and other people may be very harsh.  At such low points, the tone of the outer world may dominate your townhouse’s atmosphere and you may feel very isolated and insecure in this life.  In such times, you might be encouraged by knowing that you hold the key to changing your inner atmosphere: by recalling how God dwells within you in a very real way. The world’s hardships, frenemies and enemies don’t dominate your townhouse’s atmosphere so thoroughly as you draw closer to your Divine Companion and are reassured that, no matter how trying your outer circumstances, your Beloved always remains your sure and loving companion through all that you must endure in your life on this planet.  Despite the outer world’s often stark appearance, you are not alone.  Far from it: you have the best possible companion who is affectionate, trustworthy and devoted to you.  Thoroughly savoring that precious interior companionship can thoroughly outshine any worldly darkness.

Clearly distinguishing your inner life from outer conditions often clarifies your life experiences; not distinguishing between them may confuse you and hamper a secure attachment to your Divine Companion.

Persevering through low points in your inner world

Even in pleasant outer circumstances, you may fall to a low point spiritually.  Your active participation in your relationship with your Divine Companion is essential to keeping you spiritually afloat.  Your physical fitness depends on continually using and exercising your body’s muscles; without exercise, they get weak.  In the same way, the fitness and vitality of your relationship with your Divine Companion depends on you regularly engaging in inner dialogue.  Because human ardor can vacillate so much, you must expect that your relationship with your Divine Companion will have lows and highs.  At such low spiritual points, you might be encouraged by knowing that you hold the key to changing your inner atmosphere: by reviving your inner dialogue with the God who dwells within you.

Like all growing things, the results of cultivating your relationship with your Divine Companion take time to be seen.  You must patiently wait for God’s spiritual fruit to ripen within you; like a child, you must patiently wait during the maturation periods required for each phase of growing up.

Fortunately—blessedly—you are never alone in cultivating your relationship with your Divine Companion; your Beloved is always working hard to cultivate your relationship but is limited by how hard you are working on the relationship.  Your Divine Companion has patience beyond imagination for your human weaknesses.  Although your Divine Companion surely would appreciate your fuller cooperation, no error of yours—no matter how great—can ever totally isolate you from your Beloved and sever your connection.  Your Divine Companion, like a loving and devoted mother, is an untiring advocate for you and your growth.  Why would you ever allow yourself to displease such a loving divine parent by neglecting your relationship?

Even the spiritual giants of the ages sometimes stumbled mightily after their spiritual growth spurts.  But they are spiritual giants (rather than a spiritual flash-in-the-pan that faded quickly and then was forgotten forever) because they were resilient and got up after each stumble and turned again towards their Beloved.  Like them, you can be a faithful and worthy partner to your Divine Companion by appreciating and returning the divine affection after each lapse in doing so.

Prayer as inner dialogue

Typical self-talk

You may have an ongoing self-talk in your mind.  It may be mindlessly random or obsessively focused on minor matters.  It may be a narrative of current events or an endless re-run of past events.  Perhaps your self-talk is very critical and stops you from attempting what you dream of doing; this very negative, often unrelenting, critical self-talk is so common that I sometimes wonder if it’s baked into our human brains.  But I hope that you are blessed with a very encouraging self-talk that inspires you to persevere in pursuing your dreams even when you encounter setback after setback; unfortunately, so few people seem to naturally possess such self-talk.  Self-talk is very powerful: its focus can make your life either better or worse.

Moving from monologue to dialogue

Self-talk is often a first-person monologue (“I am so mad!”) spoken with no interest in having a conversation.  A monologue often becomes stagnant and keeps you stuck.  Many people have found that shifting self-talk into the third-person (“Sam, you are really hurting right now”) is more helpful and enables them to move forward.

Morphing self-talk into a human-divine dialogue

You can think of prayer as shifting your ordinary self-talk into a more uplifting inner conversation.  Prayer can transform a repetitious inner monologue ruminating on your mainly human views into a vibrant dialogue with your Divine Companion in which spiritual views mingle with and uplift your human views.  Vibrant dialogue, whether between you and another person or between you and your Divine Companion, requires your full participation.  Few people seem to have an innate gift for dialogue; engaging in a two-way flow with another often requires practice.  Cultivating this most sacred artform of inner human-divine dialogue makes you more receptive to your Divine Companion; it cross-fertilizes your human mind with divine infusions; it enriches your life.

Metaphors for prayer

Prayer as a mindset

You could also think of prayer as a kind of mindset.  First, consider more common mindsets: perhaps you sometimes enter into an artistic or poetic mindset which enables you to appreciate beauty and be creative with words, drawing or music; or perhaps you sometimes enter into an analytical mindset which enables you to understand the world scientifically and design solutions to concrete problems.  In the same way, you can also enter into a spiritual mindset which enables you to sense the wonderful character of God and respond with appreciation, awe and full-hearted devotion.

Prayer as a sacred inner place

You could also think of prayer as spending time in the most sacred place of your interior house where you are closest to your Divine Companion. The upper floors of the bottom section (the human section) are good for meditating on holy ideals but aren’t especially suited to fostering intimacy with your Divine Companion.  A deeper prayer is like spending time in the top section (your spiritual section) which is more attuned to God’s personality and ways.  The most sublime prayer is like entering the most sacred place within you, the most elevated place of your interior townhouse, where you come to know God through first-hand experience.

All kinds of prayer help you

Just as a child first crawls before they walk, you first pray at a lower level of your interior townhouse before you pray from the higher levels. Even when you pray from a higher floor for short periods, you later return to praying from a lower floor.  The finest human-divine dialogue first began with feeble attempts.  Your prayer may often be quite noisy: you might feel intense emotions, sob, even convulse and see vivid images; at other times, your prayer may be deeply peaceful.  Most parents are delighted when their child first begins to crawl; they don’t cringe because their child isn’t up walking, running and dancing just yet. All prayer helps you spiritually so it makes no sense to disparage one kind of prayer as lesser than another.  All prayer draws you closer to your Divine Companion.

The tone of prayer

Sincere prayer always has a tone appreciative of how wonderful God is.  It’s hard to imagine genuine prayer having an arrogant tone, like the smug tone of a rich person speaking to someone they see as inferior to them.  Sincere prayer has a vibrant tone.  It’s hard to imagine genuine prayer having the tone of robotic repetition of other’s words rather than using your own heart-felt words to express your own feelings to God.  The tone of sincere prayer is full of deeply considered thoughts.  It’s hard to imagine genuine prayer having the mindless tone of babbling with no real thought put into what you are saying to God, with no real depth to what you are expressing.  Prayers lacking the appropriate reverent tone hardly merit the exalted connotations of the word prayer.

Mentally regurgitating esoteric concepts and mystique-tinged jargon don’t make your prayers any more pleasing to your Divine Companion’s ears.  An esoteric tone probably pleases you more than God; your Divine Companion prefers your authentic full-hearted trust.

The main purpose of prayer is to love God more wholeheartedly, to become a more worthy partner for your Divine Companion.  Prayer with overly much erudite thinking about God may not deepen your love for God; it may not help you approach God with a child’s trust and affection.  Your thinking about God will likely be refined after you give your heart more fully; clearer ideas of God are the fruit of prayer, not a prerequisite for prayer.  Clarifying your theology seldom seems to deepen a person’s love for God.  But, of course, many things are possible: theological understanding may possibly deepen some people’s love of God. But, for many, theological erudition seems to cool, rather than warm, their hearts.

Prayer is a two-way affair

God unstintingly gives you as much of the divine heart and mind as you can absorb and assimilate.  How much God can give you is limited by how whole-heartedly you trust the goodness of your Divine Companion.  The more you give your heart and mind to your Divine Companion, the more of the divine heart and mind you can receive.  How much your Divine Companion can share with you is limited by how fully you trust that God will be good to you.  The more fully you share your human life with God, more fully then God can share the divine nature with you.

Your full participation blossoms the human-divine intimacy allowing love and understanding to flow directly between you and God.  The more fully you give yourself to God, the more blessings and gifts God can bring into your inner world.  Those precious gifts create a sublime peace within your heart and mind and a powerful motivation to graciously serve others.

The deepest intimacy requires your fullest efforts in aligning yourself, your interior townhouse, with God’s ways.  Your Divine Companion reciprocates your every effort and contributes even more the higher you go until, when you reach the final steps, your Divine Companion seems to be doing all the work and pulls you up onto the rooftop.

Teresa’s Prayer

PARAPHRASE [Dwelling 2; chapter 1]

“May my soul always cultivate a clear intention of vanquishing and taming my lower nature rather and not allowing my being to be conquered by—and ruled by—my lower nature.

May I set a clear tone in my inner world so that every corner of my interior house reverberates with a sincere desire to give up every last worldly pleasure and material security so I am prepared to embrace and serve my Divine Companion.

My deepest longing is to always be growing spiritually;

to always be developing a truer and stronger character worthy of my Beloved’s companionship;

to never settle for the lower forms of “courage” like the “courage” of marching into battle which is often the poisonous fruit of the mob mentality of an enraged crowd or a church hell-bent on holding an Inquisition.

Instead, let me courageously and steadfastly climb my inner stairway relying on those inner spiritual tools and ways which work so much better than any human-only tool or psychological ways when you reach the top section.  Let me rely on the warm light of God which banishes the darkness of my human-only mind, that warm divine light which illuminates so much more clearly than my human-only light.  Let me replace my previous ignorance and doubts with the assurance of the saving and uplifting presence of my precious Divine Companion who dwells in my interior townhouse.”

What is your prayer seeking?

“Prayer” dominated by your desire for personal benefits is barely prayer at all, such as praying for gratifying your human desires for pleasure or even for more exotic spiritual experiences (perhaps an out-of-body experience or astral travel).  Such prayers are solidly centered on yourself and getting what you want; they barely include what God might want.

Such prayers don’t bring you closer to your Divine Companion.  They don’t develop you into a loyal partner worthy of your Divine Companion’s affection and devotion.  How ironic that your great desire for the trivial spiritual manna found on the lower floors of the top section actually delays you from reaching the rooftop banquet where much better nourishment is prepared and waiting for you.  As your attraction to spiritual trivia fades, God can then feed you with food much more wonderful than the best manna found on the lower floors!

Prayers that seek minor spiritual experiences or prayers that complain about spiritual aridity miss the great truth exemplified in the life of Jesus: that the spiritual path (the arc of your soul’s development) almost always involves great material or social challenges, rather than great material comforts or social ease.  Embracing the particular hardships of your life enables your Divine Companion to embrace you more fully because you have accepted your personal cross just as Jesus did.  Bearing your crosses forges a loyal character which remains steadfast even under great duress or when much is required of you.  An easier path may seem more desirable to your immature human mind but the trustworthy character forged in challenging times is far sweeter to your Divine Companion.  Be grateful for the occasional spiritual favors you experience in this life but seek more (not less) difficult challenges so that you become ever more trustworthy and loyal; so that, after an eternity of growth, you eventually love your Divine Companion with the same wonderful love as your Divine Companion loves you with right now.

Rather than lazily asking God to remove life’s hardships, you might pray that God would uplift your mind so that you are better able to bear up under the inevitable and inescapable difficulties of life.  Even if your Beloved did as you foolishly asked, no healthy relationship can be built when one partner always contributes far more than the other.  How shameful to ask your lover to do both their part and yours!

Spiritual aridity

You can learn much about what you are seeking in prayer by noticing your prayer attitude when you feel endlessly stuck in a spiritual desert.  Do you feel sorry for yourself for having to endure such unpleasantness?  Or do you seize it as an opportunity to be faithful in hard times just as God has been faithful to you when you have been spiritually dense?  Are you mainly concerned with your feelings?  Or are you concerned that your Divine Companion might be “suffering” because of your spiritual immaturity?  Are you sorry that life has disappointed you?   Or are you sorry that you have fallen short of what your Divine Companion needed from you?

You may have been blessed with one, or even a few, powerful experiences of your Divine Companion’s warm caresses.  Perhaps, as time passes without having more such experiences, you begin to obsess over the fact that you aren’t having them as often as you want.  You can free yourself from such fruitless ruminations by shifting your focus to how you might best serve God and assist in making God’s plans come to fruition rather than pining away for another caress or embrace (which will surely come but not likely according to your imagined schedule of when it is due).

The purpose of prayer is strengthening your enthusiasm for the spiritual path no matter how steep the climb might feel; purifying your determined decision to follow God whenever you face a choice in life; remaining hopeful despite many setbacks; graciously serving another person who has lost their self-respect.

Mindset and prayer

Your mindset is what you are seeking in life; it is your core attitudes about yourself, God and others.  Your mindset is your main contribution to the human-divine relationship.  A spiritually fruitful mindset is desiring that your will (your human values and choices) become more and more aligned with God’s will (the divine values and plans for your shared life).  A spiritually fruitful mindset is happy to follow God’s lead even when it leads through difficulties and challenges.  A spiritually fruitful mindset brings you into the top section of your interior townhouse where you will more fully grasp the wonderful personality of your Divine Lover.  An ease-seeking and pleasure-seeking mindset bears little or no spiritual fruit; it doesn’t bring you into the top section of your interior townhouse.

God’s mindset contains much more truth, beauty and goodness than yours.  God’s ideas about what you need are far higher than your own. God’s plans for you and your growth are far richer than your own plans for how your life should go.  You improve your prayer by attuning your human mindset to God’s higher divine mindset rather than asking God to align the divine ways to give you what you think you need based on your lower human mindset.

Your prayer’s center of gravity

Some prayers’ center of gravity is firmly anchored to the bottom section; they remain firmly rooted in your human nature.  Such prayers are like a dialogue dominated by a lower floor mindset in which your theological musings and scriptural erudition strongly color your prayer.  Such prayers are good and beneficial because they strengthen a person’s love for God but they are only the beginnings of prayer, not the epitome of prayer.

Prayers so thoroughly rooted in the bottom section don’t soar to the higher levels of prayer you can reach when your center of gravity shifts from yourself to God, when you give God free rein to reign in your interior townhouse.  In moments of rich prayer, your mind spontaneously spills out praise for the beauty of God’s magnificent character; your heart overflows and rejoices over God’s plans which include you and every sincere soul; your deepest yearning for closeness to God washes away any desire other than to honor and elevate God.  Loving God often feels good, even rapturous; those blissful feelings are side-effects of prayer; they are not prayer itself.   Such deep joy is a gift from your Divine Lover but that joy is not love for God, merely a wonderful benefit. Loving God is less about pursuing moments of bliss and more about remodeling your interior castle to be most hospitable to God by removing whatever is an affront to God and adding whatever is pleasing to God.

Rote prayer

You can miss the richer levels of prayer if you think that all you must do is to keep your human mind fixed on God, perhaps by repeating set prayers or a mantra.  Rote repetitions may help you at some points but without other prayer, they inherently miss or dismiss the possibility of prayer as a deeper dialogue with your Divine Companion.  Knowing the full blueprint of your interior townhouse helps you grasp the possibility of a prayer richer than rote repetitions.  Knowing the blueprint gives you a sense of the beauty that lies right above you and within you.

Rote prayer requires little or no trust in God.  Deeper prayer requires your trust in your Divine Companion and your hope/desire that you can dialogue very intimately. The wisdom and guidance of spiritual sages (a person who has spent considerable time in their top section) can help you grasp your own interior blueprint and enrich your prayer life by adding dialogue praying to rote praying.  Beware of posers: don’t be taken in by charismatic people who pose as sages but know nothing of the top section.

QUOTE [Dwelling 4, chapter 1, paragraph 7]

“It is not so essential to think much as to love much: therefore, you must practice whatever most excites you to this.”

PARAPHRASE

Being able to formulate profound thoughts about God may—or may not—enrich your connection with God.  Such thoughts are not essential to forming or cultivating the human-divine relationship.  But any prayer or spiritual practice that quickens your impulse to love will certainly bring you closer to God (and prepare you to graciously serve others).

Quieting your mind

Many people highly recommend ceasing your mind’s continual train of thought (that incessant chatter of mindless self-talk) to remove human roadblocks that interfere with spiritual growth.  Mind-quieting practices may be a helpful element of prayer, but I doubt they help very much without the additional element of truly loving and desiring God above everything and everyone else in your life.   What good is a clear and tranquil mind if it isn’t cleared with the intention of opening a place for God to enter you who then is better able to reveal the lovely divine character to you?

When you begin climbing the inner stairway, you must use your human mind, your thoughts and emotions, that wonderful set of mental and motivational capabilities which are God’s endowment gifted to you for your use and cultivation.  Your human mind is a good thing: how could you ever grasp your inner world or God without them?  But that same mind can become a hindrance if you value only emotions and analytic reason and leave no room for God’s ideals and ideas to take root in you.  Be humble—not all full of yourself and your “oh-so-magnificent” mind.  Your mind is a wonderful tool for knowing and loving God; but don’t confuse the tool with the creation it can make: a vibrant relationship with your Divine Companion.  Excessively focusing on quieting your mind is like obsessively sharpening a tool but never using it for its highest purpose.

Trust that your Divine Companion listens to your inner self-talk, knows your thoughts and clearly sees your values (what you desire).  Quieting your mind and also purifying your holy desire can create a receptive mindset that makes room for God and joyfully welcomes your Divine Companion into your inner life.  Pursuing only mental stillness without also wanting your Divine Companion’s presence might strand you in a pristine but sterile mind.

Prayer and meditation techniques help you grow unless they are rigidly practiced without love.  Gently (not severely) quieting your mental chatter and warmly welcoming God seems to be the sweet spot of actively stilling your mind while also remaining spiritually open to God’s infusions.  Even the finest spiritual practices may backfire when they are practiced with a harsh dictatorial mindset; the same practices are spiritually fruitful when they are practiced with a loving mindset.  You can almost effortlessly attend to what a human partner says when you are in love with them; you don’t need to discipline your attention (to scold your distracting thoughts into quieting down) because your love effortlessly brings forth your best attention.  Loving God with all you heart can also create the same effortless attention to God in your inner dialogue.

God created you with a mind; using your God-gifted mind appropriately seems far wiser than trying to charm your mind into falling asleep.  Certain mental processes are essential for the first stages of spiritual growth but, in later stages, they aren’t necessary and will easily slip into the background in moments of deep prayer without any focused efforts to banish them.

God wants you to use every one of your capabilities which God has endowed you with, including the reasoning and emotions of your human mind.  God doesn’t ask for—or want—a love that requires you to forsake and neglect any of the capabilities of your own mind.

Inner chatter and lower desires

Suspending the operations of the human mind may be helpful but it isn’t sufficient to experience the divine embrace.  More is needed than simply (which isn’t so simple!) quieting your inner chatter.  You must become less fascinated and infatuated with your bottom section; you must let go of all desires for what pleases you so that you wholeheartedly pursue what pleases your Divine Companion; you must let go of your dreams of gaining worldly security (power) and abundant pleasures.  From the perspective of the bottom section, relinquishing these desires may feel as if you are utterly demolishing your entire interior townhouse but you are actually only clearing your inner rooms of those “treasures” which prevent your Divine Companion from entering.  Tossing out the sentimental treasures of your lower floors may feel like the death of what you cherish if you are quite attached to them; perhaps that is why so few people ever do a really thorough interior townhouse cleaning.  But obliterating your worldly desires feels like liberation when you grasp that you are preparing yourself to host your Divine Companion and cultivate that sublime partnership.

I doubt whether anyone can fully remove all traces of their lower desires because they are often like zombies which, even after you think that you have completely removed them, they still spring back to life when you least expect to encounter them.  Don’t be too surprised if your less-than-perfect human nature reemerges even after experiencing the divine embrace on your rooftop.  In this life, you’re never totally immune to human tendencies such as self-centeredness, self-absorption, thinking yourself quite wonderful, and judging others harshly rather than sympathetically.  Beware of spiritual pride that you aren’t actively doing evil; sins of omission, of not being loving when an opportunity arises, are just as offensive to your Divine Companion as explicit sins of commission.

The Divine Two-Step Dance

The two-step relationship dance with your Divine Companion

Spiritual development is like a two-step dance that alternates between an inner step and an outer step.  The first step of the divine-human dance happens in your inner world by opening yourself to your Divine Companion; this step includes receiving and reciprocating the divine love.  The second step of the dance happens in the outer world by treasuring another person as you have been cherished; this step includes graciously caring for another person as you have been so wisely and abundantly cared for.

Even an exquisite dance quickly falls apart when one step is omitted; the dance of spiritual development falls apart when either step is neglected: either when you focus much on your inner world without caring for others or when you serve others very much without cultivating a vibrant relationship with your Divine Companion.

You need to take complementary steps to climb to your upper floors: the inner steps of embracing God with all your heart and the outer steps of graciously serving another person.  Taking only inner steps (pursuing your personal spiritual development) or taking only outer steps (doing service work) creates an awkward lop-sided gait incapable of ascending the inner stair way very far, incapable of bringing you as close as possible to your Divine Companion, incapable of sustaining your spiritual savor when you attempt to serve others.

Graceful dancing always requires being attuned to your partner in the moment: your Divine Companion in your inner world and to each person you meet in the outer world.  Graceful dancing requires being attentive to and responsive to the lead of your Divine Companion who is a much more accomplished dancer than you; in moments of high human-divine attunement, you may feel as if your mind has gone offline although more likely your mind is quite content to play second fiddle to your Divine Companion’s melody and you graciously move in unison without overly much thinking on your part.  Graceful dancing requires being attentive to and responsive to the needs and wants of each person you interact with rather than assuming you already know what they think, feel and want.

If you are overly focused on dance technique, you might neglect attunement with your dance partner and be less aware of the beautiful harmony of the divine music.  Perhaps you are so focused on silencing your intellect or mindless chatter that you become overly focused on your steps (the human happenings in your mind) and become less aware of God’s steps (the divine actions within you).  If so, your dancing becomes more graceful by focusing more on aligning your mind with God’s mind, like a dancer who focuses on following the lead of their partner.  Perhaps instead you aren’t doing much to prepare yourself spiritually, thinking that God will do everything in the dance and you only need to be passively present.  If so, your dancing becomes more graceful by imagining and mentally rehearsing your steps in the divine two-step so that you are ready to follow your Divine Companion’s lead when the dance begins.

Climbing requires both legs

Climbing a set of stairs, like dancing, is far smoother when you use both legs.  Climbing the inner stairway requires harmonizing the inner and outer steps: seeking to know God more fully in your inner world and serving others more graciously your outer world.  One-step spiritual growth is as awkward as hopping up a set of stairs using only one leg!  If you steadily climb your inner stairway with both inner and outer steps, you will surely eventually experience the sweet embrace of your Divine Companion for yourself.

Bee metaphor

Just as a bee flies back and forth between flowers and the hive, you must also move back and forth between your psyche and your soul, back and forth from your lower floors to your upper floors to your rooftop and back again.  The view from your rooftop makes clear the depravity or primitiveness of your very lowest floors and highlights the far sweeter qualities of your higher floors.  The contrast between human nature and the divine character makes God’s beauty starkly clear to the human mind that can sometimes be so oblivious.  The beauty of your God-enhanced inner world compared to your human-only inner world encourages you to keep reaching for God.  The larger perspective of the rooftop’s higher vantage helps you better appreciate the amazing miracle that, fully aware of your lower floors, your Divine Companion still seeks your company so arduously.  The rooftop perspective grants you some immunity (but certainly not total immunity) to the pleasing but less filling allures of the world and the shallow appeal of whatever false narratives about God might be circulating in your day.

Rooftop experiences of divine intimacy are quite wonderful.  But too much of a good thing, even a spiritual good thing, isn’t a path for continued spiritual growth.  Spending time dealing with life as you find it and being kind to imperfect others is just the right antidote to becoming overly obsessed with rooftop experiences.  Like a bee needs time with flowers and time in the hive, you need engaged time with people as well as intimate time with God.  Like a bee needs to use both its legs and wings, you need to exercise both the psychological muscles of your legs and the spiritual muscles of your wings.  You are created to both tread the earth (to meet the demands of your everyday human existence) and to soar to spiritual heights (to fully share your life with your Divine Companion).

You supply the desire, God supplies the capability

Climbing to the top section seems, to me, impossible unless God were to enhance your spiritual capabilities.  Don’t worry that you have insufficient capabilities for the upper reaches of the climb because God will generously enhance your spirituality as you climb and will provide just what you need for each stage of your spiritual ascent.  God enhances your capabilities but only you can supply the desire for climbing the inner stairway that brings you ever closer to God.  You are the only one who can replace your desires and values with God’s desires and values, who can replace your will with God’s will.

Usually, spiritual progress up the inner stairway happens gradually, step by step.  However, at rare but very precious times, you might have a spiritual quantum leap.  Such a spiritual growth spurt comes after you more fully give yourself over to completely following God’s ways and leadings no matter what challenging tasks are required of you or what deep sacrifices you must make.  When your heart is fully dedicated to your Divine Companion, then you will know an inner peace so deep that it seems as if you are already living in perfect heavenly circumstances even though you may still be living in harsh earthly circumstances, such as poverty, or unrelenting sickness.  But even such deep spiritual peace won’t spare you from the pain and torment of seeing God so widely disrespected and ignored on this Earth; nor will it spare you from the grief of losing a cherished member of the Beloved Community, that wonderful group of individuals dedicated to helping people see the beauty of their own Divine Companion.

Jesus is your ultimate spiritual guide

Jesus said: “Whoever has seen me, has also seen the Father.”  So if you can’t find a good spiritual director or church that illuminates God’s beautiful nature, focusing on the life of Jesus will enable you to see the very nature of God the Father.  Notice how Jesus lived the life of an average human being; he didn’t come to Earth as royalty with great wealth and political power; he didn’t seek a job as a widely acclaimed teacher at the most prestigious institution of the day.  If he had, his life wouldn’t be very relatable to an average person.  Instead, he came to Earth to experience a fairly typical life with a mix of both considerable hardships and some favorable circumstances, a life that isn’t so different from yours.  His extraordinary life in average circumstances makes him a very relatable model for your own life; his character vividly portrays God’s nature in a way that you can more easily grasp.  If you know and appreciate how Jesus lived and interacted with people, he can become your ultimate spiritual guide.

Although Jesus was far, far wiser than anyone else, he taught using the simplest possible concepts; he didn’t overwhelm people with more than they could possibly understand.  He was quite drawn to helping people, often one person at a time; he was quite moved by the hardships a person lives with.  Jesus was very approachable; grasping Jesus more clearly can be rich spiritual guidance.

With reverence and reluctance, perhaps Jesus’ words could be paraphrased as: “When you really see me, when you really grasp how I lived when I dwelled on Earth and how I befriended another person, then you will more clearly see the personality of God who dwells within you as your trustworthy Divine Companion and wants to befriend you.”  Jesus would do anything—including enduring extreme disrespect, torture and a cruel death—to help a person understand how much the God of Highest Heaven loves them.  In the same way, your Divine Companion will do anything, including enduring your indifference and disrespect, to help you understand how dearly God loves you and wants to share your life as your full partner.

The most direct path to intimacy with your Divine Companion is thoroughly appreciating the life and person of Jesus.  Other paths to your Divine Companion may be too vague to be very helpful.  The God of Highest Heaven, Jesus and your Divine Companion all share the same divine nature and possess the same core traits.  But because Jesus is the only one who was human and could be seen with human eyes, you may find it much easier to grasp the divine character through his earthly life, the most comprehensible guidance for your spiritual development.

On this oft-cold orb, many people won’t lift a finger to help you even if it would be easy for them; perhaps they consider even a small effort to be too much of a bother. Consider the ultimate irony: that God, who (to a human perspective) seems likely to have many more important concerns, so eagerly and personally reaches out to you by dwelling within you as your Divine Companion who very much wants to be with you.  Such a paradox: that God reaches out to you with such vigor when other people have zero interest in reaching out and can’t be bothered by your needs.  In this way, your Divine Companion is virtually identical to Jesus who enthusiastically reached out to individuals many years ago.  Grasping Jesus’s wonderful personality may help you make a leap of faith and trust that your Divine Companion is reaching out to you in love right now.

So much rich spiritual guidance flows from grasping Jesus’ heart: his singular motivation do God’s will paired with his wholehearted desire to serve another person whenever the opportunity arose.  Meditating on Jesus—really understanding his motives—helps appreciate him as a model for your own life.  He completely dedicated himself to loving God and serving others; no other personal goals motivated or distracted him.  He wasn’t in the least motivated by a desire for more acclaim for his service or a wider audience for his teachings.  What a precious model Jesus is for your own motivations!  Fully appreciating his earthly life will heighten your own motivation to reach out to and more compassionately care for another person.

If Jesus wasn’t motivated by the hope of having more positive experiences for himself, how arrogant for any of us, who are so much less spiritually developed, to think that God should be providing us with more religious success or spiritual goodies.  Instead, let us be delighted to be highly motivated servants aware that God has already paid us in advance by breathing life into us and enriching our inner lives with a personal divine presence.  How rude that we, who could never begin to repay such a rich advance, might ask for any additional recompense (although God is quite generous and sometimes gives wonderful bonuses beyond what we might seem to merit).

How arrogant to complain about a perceived deficit in the human-divine balance of trade: that God somehow “owes” you something more and that God has fallen behind in delivering blessings as frequently as you think they should arrive.  How spiritually myopic to think that your spiritual life is arid as if you haven’t already received a rich spiritual endowment in the form of the precious gift of your life.  How ungrateful to have received so much that was so freely given and to then complain that you are being short-changed and that you deserve to get even more heavenly gifts.

Jesus regularly went off to commune with God the Father; even Jesus clearly needed continual spiritual nourishment to sustain his work.  Notice how he was spiritually nourished through a vibrant relationship with God, through an intimate dialogue with the Father.  If Jesus required daily connection with God, how much more we must need the daily spiritual engaging which nourishes and strengthens our soul.  Jesus’s regular and persistent prayer life is a model for cultivating your own relationship with your Divine Companion through ongoing dialogue so that you gradually come to recognize the personality of your Divine Companion.

QUOTE [Dwelling 3; chapter 1; paragraph 1]

“Blessed are those in awe of God.”

PARAPHRASE

“Blessed are those who are deeply moved by Jesus’ life and awed by his sublime character.  How wonderful to appreciate the personality of Jesus which is the most readily comprehensible presentation of the divine character, the divine heart and mind, the divine motive to love.  Knowing Jesus will prepare you to recognize the strains of your Divine Companion’s song when it reaches your ears from the divine dwelling place within you.  How blessed you are to recognize that faint melody because you first attuned yourself to the melody of the motivations of Jesus’s heart.”

Grounding yourself in Jesus

Sometimes your mind can get stuck in a rut.  A person caught in the throes of traumatic memories often finds it hard to escape the clutches of their terrible memories.  Grounding techniques help them get out of that endless looping: noticing their breathing, tension in their muscles and the details of the physical world around them).  Sometimes your spirit can get stuck in a rut.  Perhaps you feel spiritually orphaned and alone; or you are quite entranced with your own erudite theological insights. Spiritual grounding yourself in Jesus can help get you out of spiritual ruts: meditating on the human life of Jesus living in a harsh material world, grasping how he communed with God, appreciating how he reached out to a person in need.  Grounding helps you escape the clutches of unhelpful thoughts that stunt your growth; but even such helpful techniques can hinder your spiritual growth if they are practiced too rigidly.

Making yourself useful by serving others is another spiritual grounding technique to help you avoid getting too tantalized by the wonderful but partial joys of the spiritual states often experienced on the lower floors of the top section.

Salvation

Salvation is grasping God’s abiding love for you, really experiencing how precious you are in God’s eyes and heart.  Salvation rescues you if you are experiencing life’s cruelty; feeling as if you drew the short stick in the lottery of life, you really appreciate and welcome being loved by God.  Salvation has little appeal if you are awash in many material goodies; feeling as if you won the material lottery of life, you don’t think you need anything else in your life.

After you leave this planet, the fullness and goodness of God’s love will become blazingly obvious.  How wonderful to have had the vision and courage to have first trusted God before God’s wonderful love became so very clear!  How wonderful to have trusted God when your human-divine relationship was in its infancy and its great glory wasn’t obvious!  How trustworthy a partner you become if you desired God when you only glimpsed a tiny bit of God’s great beauty and goodness.  And how horrified you might be to realize, after you leave this planet and your sight is greatly expanded, that you had brushed off the God who sought your partnership because you dismissed God as unworthy of your consideration.

Willingness to suffer

No servant is greater than the master; no student is greater than the teacher; no follower is greater than Jesus.  Jesus always readily served others even if it involved humbling himself in the eyes of the world as clearly shown when he did the lowly work of washing feet; he readily did what others considered beneath their status.  No one who professes to follow Jesus should consider themselves to be exempt from serving others; or, even worse, to consider themselves as entitled to be served by others, the “lowly” ones, who they erroneously think are beneath them.  Simply contemplate how Jesus, God-come-to-Earth, so willingly and enthusiastically served the needy ones and forgotten ones.  His way of engaging with people illustrates how he sees everyone as equal in God’s eyes; if Jesus never looked down on a person, how misguided would you be to consider even one person as inferior to yourself.

More about willing to suffer like Jesus did

Appreciating Jesus’ human nature

I have no doubts that Jesus was surely divine.  But I worry that downplaying or forgetting that he was also human diminishes the great value of his life as a model for your own life.  Jesus is easier to understand because he lived in a human nature much like ours and he had worldly experiences not terribly different from ours.  In his life, he used his human nature to create a path to closeness to God, a path by which you too can draw closer to God.  If Jesus only had a divine nature (but no human nature), the spiritual path he created would certainly have been quite beautiful but it would likely be beyond the reach of nearly every human being.

Really appreciating Jesus’s human nature seems absolutely essential to climbing the last steps of the inner stairway and reaching the rooftop.  His life—coming to Earth and doing everything to assist and enrich each person he encountered—is like a light for you to see your steps on the treads of the upper stairway.  Or, in another metaphor, the human and divine life of Jesus may be the actual treads of the upper stairway: places where you can put your feet and gain purchase to continue climbing towards your Divine Companion.  Without the steady purchase of Jesus’ human-divine stair treads, perhaps you might never reach the rooftop at all. It’s a virtually overwhelming climb all the way up the inner stairway: a long journey from your default human nature to being fully aligned with God’s ways.  But Jesus, who is the Way to God, makes that journey feasible.  Jesus seemed dedicated to making it less difficult for you to reach the Father who lives in you as your personal partner. Without appreciating all of Jesus—his human nature as well as his divine nature—deprives you of the rich and feasible way that he created and made clear for forging a relationship with your Divine Companion.  Just as Jesus was the ultimate friend and teacher to everyone he met in person while he walked the Earth, revering him and meditating on his life enable him to again be, in this moment, the surest friend and wisest teacher on your spiritual path through life and on the stairway of your interior townhouse.

On the stairway, meditating on Jesus’s human nature can inspire you as you climb: knowing, from his example, that your human nature can cultivate a spiritual nature along the lines of God’s character.  Such meditations are helpful as you climb the stairway, but they are no longer needed in the actual moment of the divine embrace when they will fall away on their own.  On the rooftop, you will experience the fullness of God more directly as if you are immersed in the divine personality and swimming in its beauty and goodness.  The same meditations will once again be very helpful in the ensuing months and years when the immediacy of the rooftop moments has faded.

In the flight of the soul, God lifts you into the heavenly realms and shows you life from the divine perspective.  The rich and wonderful joy experienced on the flight of the soul evaporates even the pain of knowing how terribly Jesus suffered in his life on Earth.  That the joy of the flight could outweigh such a travesty shows how much good God can create from the most terrible circumstances, even from Jesus’s cruel treatment and death.  The perspective of the flight of the soul assures you of what a beautiful character God can create even from the most limited beginnings of a flawed person.

Courage

Some people mistakenly think that spiritual growth means a life of ever-increasing bliss; as if the spiritual journey is like skipping from one peak experience to another, collecting them like you would collect souvenirs from national parks that you visit.  Of course, joyful and wonderful inner experiences are a part of the spiritual journey but they are incidental; they are not the core of the journey of drawing closer to God.  Bravely facing difficulties and welcoming great challenges are the core of the spiritual journey; they often feel challenging because they involve giving up what pleases you so that you can do what pleases God.  God seems to want you to have the fullest spiritual journey possible: experiencing joys as well as embracing challenging work.  A lesser spiritual journey seeks only personal joy and wants to shirk any responsibilities that might intrude on your blissful feelings.  The fuller spiritual journey is not so much an easy walk in the park as an arduous climb up steep paths that builds your stamina and leads to the exhilarating high views that can only be seen from the heights.

Everyone who has been embraced by their Divine Companion seems to live a life chock full of difficulties and perplexing challenges as they attempt to align with God’s ways.  The apostles were embraced by Jesus and then faced many difficulties and challenges as they followed in his footsteps.  But those difficulties didn’t paralyze them and your own difficulties need not paralyze you either: even life-threatening situations can invigorate you when you are wholeheartedly devoted to pleasing and praising God, when you are following your Divine Companion’s leadings wherever they take you.

Difficulties as spiritual fertilizer

Life’s difficulties are an affront to the ego but they are fertilizer for the soul.  The entitled ego responds to difficulty by complaining: “Life is so unfair that I should have to put up with such a hardship!”  This attitude betrays the ego’s lack of courage.  But difficulty ennobles your spiritual character preparing you to share deeper intimacy with your Divine Companion.  In contrast to the ego, a devout soul is grateful when assailed by hard times, thinking: “I am assured that nothing on Earth can in the least endanger what I treasure most: the companionship of my divine Beloved.”

Good fortune as a spiritual teacher

Periods of exceptionally good fortune can be more spiritually hazardous to you than hard times because you can so easily become very attached to the worldly goodies and status that often accompany good fortune.  In the soft living of good fortune, you lose the courage to take up challenging work.  But if you are the rare person who isn’t beguiled and deceived by good fortune, you will remain spiritually safe because you desire God so much more than any wealth or social status; you will simply shrug when you either gain or lose some of your fortune or reputation.  But such indifference to good fortune seems quite rare because the human brain is wired to be easily enthralled with gaining and keeping the easy life.  But easy times can so readily drag you away from God and hard times can draw you closer to God.  So many people seem to have this relationship completely backwards: please avoid that appealing, but very confused, outlook!

The spiritual growth and character forged in suffering or hard challenges is quite robust and enduring; but it requires strong unwavering courage to accept and embrace these difficult experiences.  Suffering and struggle reveal the hollowness of earthly pleasures so clearly that you become less tempted by them.  Unfortunately, spiritual growth made with less effort and without facing hard challenges doesn’t create courage or a trustworthy character; easily-attained spiritual growth can be easily lost when, tempted, you immerse yourself in worldly pleasures which gradually depletes your desire for the spiritual purposes of life without even noticing what is happening.

More about climbing the inner stairway

Poem about climbing the inner stairway

Inner spiritual experiences

[Teresa used different names for spiritual experiences to indicate their depth of human-divine intimacy; for example, she reserved the word rapture to indicate the deepest intimacy between her and her Beloved.  In this book, the phrase a glimpse of the divine is used to indicate the early spiritual connection experienced in the bottom section of your interior townhouse (in your psychological mind); the phrase the divine caress is used to indicate the richer spiritual connection experienced in the top section (in your spiritual mind); the phrase the divine embrace is used to indicate the deepest intimacy experienced on the rooftop (where, for a brief time, you seem to leave your human nature behind and escape its limitations enabling you to experience God’s lovely personality more directly and fully).]

I describe some spiritual experiences in this book but many others are possible because God, who is the author of these experiences, creates and personalizes them so they are best suited to nurture each person’s connection with God.  God’s endless variety of spiritual experiences ensures that each one is perfectly custom-tailored to reveal the divine nature according to each person’s receptivity and capability.

What a terrible error if these descriptions of spiritual experiences should create the false impression that this list is exhaustive or represents all possible interior experiences of the divine.  God is far too creative for any list to define and limit what God can do within a person’s inner world.  But considering a few of the many possibilities might help you when you are trying to make sense of your own unique experience.  Without knowing what others have experienced and without a map of your inner world, your one experience can be very confusing; it is so uncommon that you might not understand it and grasp its great value.

You may better understand a spiritual experience when you connect it with where you are in your interior townhouse when it happens.  Roof top experiences are quite distinct from those of the interior townhouse.  Even when you are in your top section, you are still within your interior townhouse with all its human limitations.

Rooftop experiences

When you reach the rooftop, you rise above your interior townhouse for a brief period to be with God more directly.  The rooftop represents leaving behind your human self and all its limitations so that little remains to interfere with fully blending yourself with your Beloved.  The divine embrace might be compared to the deepest intimacy of lovers when nothing stands between them that might impede their intimacy.  Rooftop moments deeply connect two beings: you touching your Divine Companion and your Divine Companion touching you; communicating so much in the warmest gaze of love exchanged between two fully committed partners; the deepest resonance of your lover’s voice in your own heart.  Intimacy with your Divine Companion reveals so much that it’s as if God much prefers revealing the divine personality through a deep personal connection rather than any other means.

Top section experiences

Wonderful closeness happens between you and your Divine Companion in your top section where you are more spiritually receptive compared to the lower floors; but, even there, you aren’t as capable of the deeper human-divine intimacy of the rooftop.  The closeness of the top section might be compared to the loving moments that partners share as they go about their daily lives: an appreciative glimpse watching the other doing something; a tender loving caress; a gentle gaze of deep affection exchanged between you; hearing—really listening to and being moved by—your lover’s voice or song.  Although these moments aren’t the ultimate divine embrace of the rooftop, they are still incredibly moving: they stir your higher spiritual emotions; they whet your desire for being ever closer to your Beloved; they nourish you and inspire you to produce wonderful spiritual fruit.

In the top section

A brief glimpse

Even before the ultimate embrace on the rooftop changes you so thoroughly, the human-divine closeness experienced in the top section begins changing you in profound ways.  A brief glimpse there of your Divine Companion can uplift your inner life tremendously: how you see and value yourself, how you see and appreciate your interior townhouse.  Your Divine Companion’s brief caress in the top section is more than enough to assure you of how deeply you are loved and cherished.

Your own first-hand top-section experiences of God’s presence speak volumes about God’s love for you.  Just as seeing a friend’s kind look speaks volumes about their feelings for you, a first-hand glimpse of your Divine Companion’s nearness speaks volumes about God’s desire for closeness.  Just as working on a project with someone speaks volumes about your shared connection, a first-hand sense of your Divine Companion collaborating with you speaks volumes about how much God wants to work alongside you to lighten your burdens and enable you to accomplish far greater tasks together.  Even briefly glimpsing God or briefly cooperating with your Beloved reveals so much more about the divine personality than reading second-hand experiences of others ever could.  Your own personal experiences speak volumes and convey much about spirituality that can only be grasped first-hand.

How wonderful that your top section enables you to enjoy God’s companionship now, here on Earth: to be able to glimpse God even fleetingly; to experience your Beloved’s caresses even briefly; to collaborate with your Divine Companion even in limited ways.  How terrible to be unaware of your top section and have no clue that you can have your own precious first-hand spiritual experiences; then you might think (quite erroneously) that no one cares about you and wants to be with you.

Willingness to be annihilated

In the top section, you may strongly desire annihilation because you don’t want your human nature to limit intimacy and cooperation with your Divine Companion.  Accepting your own annihilation is the exact opposite of wanting to be raised up in the world and exalted in other people’s opinions.  Of course, your Divine Companion has no desire to annihilate you but instead sees your willingness to lose everything as a sign of the fullness of your desire, a sign that you will hold nothing back and pour all of yourself into the human-divine relationship.  Your willingness to be annihilated (if that would assist God’s plans, not because you despise yourself) seems to open wider the channel through which your Divine Companion’s graces flow from the rooftop into your top section.  In the sweetest spiritual paradox, when you are willing to give up every earthly possession or human achievement, God then gives you much more than you had.  Your complete commitment to God opens the human-divine channel of spiritual nourishment which enhances you, rather than diminishes you or annihilates you, so that you can accomplish more spiritually than you ever did before.

What a terrible thing to cling so tightly to your ego’s self-importance that it creates a wall preventing your Divine Companion from drawing very close to you.  What a terrible thing to hold so tightly to your lower desires of the bottom section that your Divine Companion might be forced to withdraw into the far corners of your interior townhouse, further away from the pollution of your mind.  It would tear my heart apart if I offended my Divine Companion so severely that I caused our relationship to be permanently severed; if I so severely damaged myself spiritually that our relationship was beyond the repair of even the Divine Doctor.  Annihilation is not about totally devaluing yourself; it is simply another way of saying that all of your ego’s treasures pale in comparison to your Divine Companion’s great beauty; it is simply a desire to remove any and everything that might dilute your heart’s desire for God.

Two kinds of knowing

The rational mind uses logic and analysis to understand the material world; developing this kind of understanding usually requires years of study and scientific experimentation.  Your spiritual mind is fully compatible with science and logic but also uses other means to understand God and the divine ways.  Your spiritual mind sees by the light which your Divine Companion shines into your top section so that you can see spiritual concepts more clearly and can grasp wisdom more deeply.  Unlike the rational mind usual ways of learning, the spiritual mind’s understanding sometimes comes instantaneously, as if your Divine Companion instantly downloaded a flash of insight into your mind.

God never hides spiritual insights from you; God isn’t a brake which slows your spiritual learning.  Quite the opposite, God seems to revel in revealing as much of the divine nature as you can absorb; God would love to accelerate your spiritual learning.  But just as a brilliant mathematician must begin teaching kindergarteners basic arithmetic rather than advanced calculus, your brilliant Divine Companion must gradually reveal the divine nature in ways appropriate for your stage of spiritual development rather than presenting advanced concepts that would be lost on you.  God teaches this way so that you aren’t overwhelmed but are able to grasp and understand all that is taught and revealed.

Even your early limited sense of God helps

Suppose you cherish a certain belief about Jesus or God which, unknown to you, is immature or primitive.  Even that conception of God is wonderful when it leads you to love God and to serve others graciously.  The fruit produced by your spiritual concepts matters more than their ultimate accuracy.  Surely, even the most spiritually advanced person living today will come to see God with more clearly as they progress spiritually.  You can be certain that your concept of God, no matter how well developed it seems today, still falls far short of fully appreciating the grandeur of God.  Your concepts of God always need to grow deeper and clearer.  Be grateful if your sense of God today is inspiring you to more spiritual devotion and gracious service than your previous sense of God.

It’s foolish to focus on the perceived flaws in a person’s view of God (your own view, another’s view or a spiritual sage’s view) rather than to appreciate their view of some aspect of God, however limited that may seem to you.  Trust that their view of God will deepen and become clearer as they grow.  You can do terrible damage such growth by hammering away on the flaws you imagine in their view of God.  Even a poor portrait of a good friend drawn by a marginally talented artist is better than having no portrait at all to help you remember that friend when you are apart.  In the same way, each person’s portrayal of God (even if they aren’t very spiritually artistic) deserves your respect because it helps them keep the invisible God in their sight.  Every sincere soul, whether they see little of God or much of God, is seeing and loving the same God as best as they can.

[Those comments in the paragraph above refer to respecting each individual’s view of God; they don’t apply to a group’s theology.  You need not accept the horrific distortions of some theologians and churches who portray God as uncaring, judgmental, cruel and distant; such great theological errors are proved totally false by a single glimpse of your Divine Companion who perfectly embodies God’s lovely character.  In some ages, the church has emphasized the sinfulness of human nature and neglected to illuminate how much God dearly cherishes each imperfect person; many poor souls have been terrified by such hard-hearted teachings about God.  The comments in the paragraph above don’t mean that you should blanketly accept such horrific distortions as gospel truth.

Those comments about accepting each individual’s concept of God don’t mean condoning and adopting the mob mentality of religious organizations that want to persecute and exile anyone who holds different beliefs.  In some places and times, churches have gone to war and slain other devout believers simply because they adhered to a different creed.  What a travesty that a religious organization, claiming to represent Jesus, does the very thing which is so abhorrent to him!  What a terrible misrepresentation of Jesus for a “Christian” group to slay people when he forgave even the soldier who drove spikes through his hands.  Your own first-hand sense of God—even with all its limitations—is good protection against falling for such gross distortions of God’s character.]

Two opposing emotions after a spiritual experience

A first-hand experience of really grasping the loveliness of God may give rise to two opposing emotions.  With the first emotion, fear, you feel that you are too coarse and offensive to the finer senses of One so lovely; you might fear that your Divine Companion will find you severely lacking and bid you a final and irrevocable “Adieu.”  With the second emotion, spiritual joy, you bask in the afterglow of your embrace and have an overwhelming desire to do whatever pleases God so you can enjoy more of the precious divine company.

Fortunately, the first emotion of fear and unworthiness seems to seamlessly morph into the second emotion of spiritual joy and heightened holy desire; experiencing the divine caress or the divine embrace eventually produces a perfect calm that easily quells the initial dissonance of feeling grossly unworthy of your amazing partner.  God’s close presence removes any emotion associated with the error that you are repulsive to God.  Be slow to give much weight to inner experiences that don’t eventually produce joy, peace and spiritual fruit in their wake.

A sincere soul is greatly humbled to have felt the caress of their Divine Companion; feeling quite stunned that God should so generously bestow such perfect affection on such a flawed person; feeling quite fortunate to have an opportunity to quietly reciprocate the divine touch; deeply moved to become more reverent, to be in greater awe of God’s tremendous goodness.  A sincere soul responds to the divine caress with complete indifference for any goodies, either material or spiritual benefits, that might come along in the slipstream of this profound grace; instead, the sincere soul is only concerned with doing whatever their Divine Companion desires; they are concerned with doing for God not getting from God.  In contrast, a less mature soul becomes quite full of themselves, after having felt the divine caress.  An inner law (or an inner process) seems to operate so that the divine caress produces spiritual fruit in proportion to a person’s complete devotion to God (marked by moving from a self-centered set of values to a God-centered set of values).  The divine caress likely produces spiritual confusion in a person who isn’t consecrated to their Divine Companion.

Humility and spiritual impatience

A humble and reverent attitude seems like a prerequisite for intimacy with God.  Humility flows from recognizing that you could never create such closeness all on your own; your Divine Companion plays a much greater role than you.  Thinking that you deserve that rich intimacy reeks of a lack of humility, as if you are so very fine that God somehow owes you this precious favor.  That is like a far-from-perfect lover, sitting around impatiently tapping their fingers, thinking that their perfect lover should come and deliver a very magnificent gift to them.  How absurd!  Only a foolish lover would bestow a gift which would spoil their partner.  Be fully assured: your Beloved is not a foolish lover at all!  So, if you haven’t received a spiritual blessing that another person has experienced, trust the wisdom of your divine lover in withholding that particular gift for this time and patiently wait, accepting and appreciating all that your Divine Companion has blessed you with so far.

Totally trust God’s wisdom rather than implicitly critiquing your Divine Companion by thinking that you are overdue for receiving a magnificent gift, such as a rooftop experience.  How inappropriately presumptuous!  Such thoughts concretely exemplify wanting your will to be done rather than wanting God’s will to be done.  Far better to be truly delighted with all the endowments God has already entrusted to you and the many blessings God has already given you; and, with deep appreciation, to fully utilize those divine gifts you already have to serve others.  God’s fullest gifts so far exceed what the human mind can grasp that God wisely withholds them if they would so overwhelm you that they would warp you psychologically rather than help you grow spiritually.

God bestows gifts abundantly in the moment when they will help you become a more loyal partner to your Divine Companion and a better servant to others; divine gifts are not given to give you pleasure or to elevate you to guru status in the eyes of others.  A sincere soul considers themselves quite honored to have the opportunity to serve their Divine Companion without any recompense of peak spiritual experiences; the foremost thing on their mind is doing God’s will and the last thing on their mind is getting any additional graces and blessings.  An insincere soul serves God to obtain more goodies for themselves; such ulterior motives don’t strengthen your relationship with your Divine Companion and never produce good spiritual fruit.  If you are preoccupied with obtaining more spiritual experiences, such as reaching the rooftop or having visions of God, you are vulnerable to conjuring up some image of your own making and then erroneously interpreting it as a divine infusion when it is simply a product of the human mind.

The higher spiritual emotions

Human emotions

You are quite familiar with your human emotions of the bottom section (the feelings of your psychological mind): elation and deflation; joy and sorrow; tenderness and aggressiveness.  Those emotions are essential.  Without them, your experiences would be nearly lifeless and colorless: no one thing would be any more meaningful or beautiful than another thing.  Without them, no person or ideal would enkindle your heart to warmer affection: no person or ideal would elicit any more devotion than another random person or ideal.  Human emotions are how your psychological mind codes what you value and love and what you disregard and dislike, as if your mind colors what you love with bright beautiful hues and colors what you despise with ugly tints.

Spiritual emotions

Your top section (your spiritual mind) has its own emotions that color what is more spiritually beautiful with richer tones.  Your spiritual emotions are somewhat analogous to your wholly human emotions of your bottom section but your spiritual emotions are of a higher nature.  Spiritual emotions are responsive to the presence (or absence) of divine beauty, truth and goodness; human emotions are responsive to worldly pleasures and pains.  The higher spiritual emotions attract you to what is God-like and repel you away from distortions about God.  The spiritual emotions imbue the human-divine relationship with bright beautiful hues; they light the spiritual path so you know where to turn where the path diverges.

The range of emotions from selfish to spiritual

Emotions are your inner motivators: they spur you to movement, either to move further away from something distasteful or closer to something pleasant.  A negative human emotion motivates you to avoid something that you fear or dislike; a positive human emotion motivates you to seek out what you like and value.  Your human emotions operate on the basis of worldly appeal.  You also have higher spiritual emotions that are analogous to your human emotions but your spiritual emotions are concerned with spiritual matters: they spur you to movement, either to move further away from something spiritually distorted or closer to something spiritually rich.

You contain a wide spectrum of emotions:

emotions associated with your human nature

seeking the material pleasure of satisfying our basest instincts (Teresa’s first dwelling)

avoiding hard times through addictions

seeking the human pleasures of loving relationships (Teresa’s third dwelling)

avoiding loneliness by investing in poor relationships

emotions associated with your spiritual nature

the higher pleasure of spiritual consolations (Teresa’s fourth dwelling; the first floor of the top section)

the sublime joy of glimpsing or embracing your Divine Companion (seventh dwelling, or the rooftop)

Spiritual kindling and sparks

Your soul is like a fire circle that holds your spiritual kindling; your Divine Companion is like the firelighter who sends sparks into it to create flames.  Your soul receives the infusions your Divine Companion sends which produce your higher emotions: spiritual stirrings that warm you and motivate you to live your most precious life and to graciously serve others.  The intensity of the flames in your soul (the strength of your spiritual emotions) depends on how well you have prepared your kindling.

Your soul’s flames burn more brightly when you have gathered and prepared your kindling so it can readily burst into flame when even a small spiritual spark lands on it.  You prepare your spiritual kindling by purifying your desire for God from all ambivalence so your reverence can easily burst into spiritual flames when you encounter your Divine Companion.  In intimacy with your Divine Companion, divine sparks land and set your soul aflame with bright fire; you experience the sweetest and strongest spiritual emotions.

Moisture from your lower desires dampens your spiritual kindling (dilutes your holy desire) so that even a powerful divine spark can only create a small smoldering or a bare flicker of a spiritual flame within you; you experience only the milder spiritual emotions when you have barely prepared and dried your kindling.  Your Divine Companion’s finest sparks can’t create a bright flame (a strong spiritual emotion) until you have readied your soul for your Beloved.

You don’t have to do all the work of making spiritual flames on your own.  God built the fire circle to hold the flames: God created your soul.  God produces the sparks to ignite the fire: God sends infusions into your soul to enliven your spirituality.  God contributes more kindling after you provide some kindling of your own.  During the divine caress or the divine embrace, your Beloved seems to place more kindling in your soul; the combined human and divine kindling burns brighter and its warmth produces the higher spiritual emotions and finer spiritual fruit.

Your Divine Companion as the wonderful flame tender

The flames of your love for God may feel as if they were ignited and fed by God rather than by your own means and efforts.  What a wonderful situation because God is far better at keeping the spiritual flame alive without getting scorched or allowing it to burn down too far.

God’s breath on our small flame of spiritual desire

God seems to be so touched by the troubles of an ardent soul, that God cannot resist alleviating some of your psychological turmoil and wounds.  With the concern and tender care of a loving parent, God blows a spiritual breath onto your own inner flame of holy desire so that it flares up and heals your mental burdens.  The divine fire can also burn away your selfish and sinful habits (assuming that you recognize and regret your errors and missteps).  Like the phoenix, the divine fire doesn’t destroy you but only accelerates your rebirth as a person who can now draw closer to your Divine Companion.  The divine fire doesn’t destroy your mental abilities, such as reasoning and emotional regulation; it only removes what is unhelpful and inhibits your growth; the divine fire selectively removes only what limits you.

Spiritual jubilation

You may likely feel the spiritual emotion of jubilation (a powerfully moving emotion of joy in your spiritual mind) after either a divine caress in the top section or the divine embrace on the rooftop.  This higher spiritual emotion is a paradoxical blending of exhilarating joy thoroughly infused with very deep peace; and simultaneously wanting an ever more intimate connection combined with being completely satisfied with the richness of your Beloved’s companionship right now.

Spiritual jubilation is a twinned joy at both finding God and finding yourself; both sensing God’s nature much more vividly and knowing yourself more completely than you did before.  You overflow with joy when you grasp how richly endowed your townhouse can be when you fully share it with your Divine Companion; as if in discovering more of the indwelling God’s personality, you also discover more of yourself, more of your interior townhouse, more of what your life can be.  And you also discover the true nature of every other person: that they too are endowed with their own Divine Companion; that they too can form a vibrant bond with their Divine Companion if they choose to.

Jubilation: the highest distillate of emotions

In a laboratory, you put a mixture into a distillation flask and place it over a fire to purify the essence from its contaminants.  The embrace of the Divine Companion is like a fire that distills your higher spiritual emotions from your lesser human emotions; higher spiritual emotions rise out of the flask and are purified of lower emotions which remain behind.  The higher spiritual emotion of jubilation includes a soothing gentleness unlike human-origin exuberance that can thoroughly unsettle you.  Higher spiritual emotions have a tone of humility and deep gratitude to God for being so generous to you.  God-centered emotions aren’t like self-centered human emotions which foster a sense of being better than others and wants to parade your “spiritual” experiences and emotions in front of others as proof of your superiority.

The long half-life of spiritual emotions

The happiness of the bottom section often fades shortly after the circumstances pass which brought on that worldly happiness.  But the higher joy of the divine embrace reverberates within you long after that sublime experience has ended.  These spiritual reverberations may ebb and flow from day to day but they continue to pulse throughout your interior townhouse.  The difference between the ebb moments and the flow moments (between low and high spiritual moments) makes absolutely clear just how much your Divine Companion lifted you up via the rooftop embrace.  In the ebb moments, the divine embrace fades from your awareness and you feel the meagerness of life without God.  In the flow moments, you vividly recall the divine embrace and you recognize how elevated you are when God is vibrantly alive within you.  The stark contrast between these moments makes very clear how being close to God uplifts you so very much.

Being keenly aware of how greatly your Divine Companion enhances your townhouse is a powerful antidote for neutralizing your ego’s tendency for self-admiration and self-absorption.  Without this antidote, the human tendency for self-aggrandizement can grow so much that you might actually come to minimize or belittle God’s contributions to your life and exaggerate your much lesser contributions; a grotesquely overgrown ego may even dismiss how much you depend on God to bear spiritual fruit; such an overblown ego is prone to thinking that you are quite wonderful all on your own and greedily seek to retain total control of your interior townhouse.

The spiritual jubilation flowing from your rooftop experiences may be so powerful that it’s utterly impossible to contain your joy: your soul can’t stop from singing; you can’t stop from sharing it.  The joy of the divine embrace seems to flow down from the rooftop into your bottom section, into your human personality, and it changes your inner atmosphere.  Jubilation wants to flow out through you to another person so that they too might feel the joy of being caressed and embraced by God; so that they know they can bond with their own Divine Companion and experience spiritual joy for themselves.

The only desire of jubilation is to make the inner presence of God more real to another person.  You don’t want to hoard divine intimacy and use it to extol yourself over others.  You aren’t satisfied if only you experience this jubilation; you share your joy so that others might not be deprived of experiencing their own first-hand joy.  Like the father who held a feast for everyone because of his great joy of being reunited with his Prodigal Son, in your great jubilation of knowing your Divine Companion so intimately, you may have a tremendous desire to let everyone know about the great inner feast which their interior townhouse holds for them.

Two potentially conflicting feelings

Your jubilation after these sublime inner experiences may give rise to two powerful but opposing urges:

1) the urge to draw as close to your Divine Companion as you possibly can;

2) the urge to withdraw from your Divine Companion so that your flaws don’t offend your wonderful partner.

Please trust that your Divine Companion’s devotion to you far exceeds any distaste of you; I doubt whether distaste for another person is even a spiritual emotion at all.  Please trust that collaborating with your Divine Companion surely makes your interior townhouse more spiritually hospitable and makes you a more trustworthy partner.  Please trust that you can always become more pleasing to God if that is your genuine desire.  You can resolve the push-pull of these conflicting feelings.

Sharing with discretion

Be careful that your desire to share is matched with a person’s desire to hear; sharing this precious joy with someone who has no spiritual hunger is very tone deaf and doesn’t help a person’s spiritual seeds to germinate.  The same inner banquet that you found so nourishing often has little appeal for most other people.  This wonderful jubilation is often best shared by listening to another person with deep respect; that indirect sharing is a rare gift among people.

Knowing that each person’s townhouse contains spiritual riches makes it hard to stay silent when they don’t realize that truth.  But please be gracious and discerning because zealousness overwhelms a lost person like a rich spiritual banquet overwhelms an impoverished person.  A starving person desperately needs food but they can only digest a simple meal at first.  Although a zealous approach (like attempting to give an IV infusion of jubilation directly into a person’s mainstream) may help a few already ripe souls, that approach is sure to repel many more people from even considering opening their hearts to God.  Overemoting about the divine embrace may feel good to you but it may accomplish little for others (which is the whole purpose of expressing your jubilation).  Far better to modulate your intensity to match a person’s appetite and their ability to digest rather than trying to force-feed them with the whole banquet all at once.

Others will dismiss your experience

Your spiritual experiences, such as your Divine Companion’s caress and embrace, have a quality of spiritual authenticity which assures you that they are real.  But other people, even a spiritual director, may tell you that your experiences are imaginary or not spiritual at all or even that they offend God.  Their totally off-base opinions may sow confusion and doubt which seep into your mind and undermine your certainty about your own experiences.  Such doubts may grow stronger on the lower floors when you leave the blended human-divine mindset of the rooftop and return to your own human mindset.  If you incubate such misinformed ideas by ruminating on them, they will corrode your ability to discern the truth about your experiences.  When people tell you that you manufactured these rooftop experiences in your own mind, simply pause and consider how even the most accomplished person couldn’t manufacture something so wonderful all on their own.

Sharing and praising with kindred spirits

Those cautions about restraining your jubilation apply to sharing your experiences with someone who has no sense of their spiritual mind or God.  You don’t need to restrain the fullness of your spiritual emotions in the company of those who also know and treasure their Divine Companion.  Fully praising God with kindred spirits enriches everyone in the group; your full-hearted expression likely induces or increases praise in another’s heart just as one person’s yawn can induce yawns in others in the same room.  What a sublime joy when kindred souls gather together and each one’s expression of reverence for God elevates each other’s devotion to God!

Quicksand and anchors of the mind

Sometimes your mind can be completely preoccupied by a certain train of thought.  The mind of your bottom section is vulnerable to being so thoroughly stuck in the quicksand of hopeless or misguided ruminations that only much mental effort can pull you out of that suction of harmful thoughts.  The mind of the top section has its own analogous but helpful mental momentum: anchors which keep you so solidly absorbed in praising God that nothing can pull you out of worshipping.  In these precious moments of wholehearted consecration, you forget all about yourself and any worldly concerns as you give every part of you over to praising God and collaborating with your Divine Companion.  Your intense drive to praise God consumes everything else; it colors your praise with joy.  This anchor, the profound drive to praise, never feels like an onerous burden placed on you; it is not a heavy requirement or a distasteful chore.

Attraction to a hermit’s life

Since so much of the material world is incompatible with God’s ways and is inhospitable to your Divine Companion, you might have a desire to withdraw completely from the world and live like a hermit so you are less influenced by the material world.  But an isolated life isn’t feasible for most people and, even if it were, you would still be face-to-face with the unspiritized part of your bottom section no matter how far you are from civilization.  Short periods of time away from the world, like a retreat with kindred spirits, may help you grow spiritually; long periods of isolation from almost everyone may retard you spiritually.

Being so isolated from people, you couldn’t assist even one person to find their way into the arms of their own Divine Companion.  It’s hard to do the divine two-step dance when you can’t engage with other people.  Not being able to share your great spiritual treasure or graciously serve others carries its own quite intense pain.  It’s usually better to be immersed in this imperfect world where amazing opportunities to serve God exist right next to worldly distractions and temptations.

Emotional intensity alone isn’t proof of spiritual depth

The divine embrace rouses powerful emotions which are sometimes accompanied by the tears of being quite deeply moved by the beauty of God.  Genuine spiritual tears may fall when you are absorbed in deep praise for God.  Like reading a moving passage or seeing a wonderful sight, these tears fall of their own accord; they don’t need your efforts to manufacture them.  You feel no need that you—or anyone else—take much notice of such tears.  Spiritual tears can be like a rain from heaven that waters the dry soil of your soul so it becomes more receptive to the seeds from your Divine Companion.  Such spiritual tears are a sweet blessing to be enjoyed when they fall of their own accord.

Intense emotions alone aren’t a sign of a genuine spiritual experience.  Intense emotions rooted in your human nature seem similar but they are quite different from spiritual emotions; they don’t motivate you to prepare your interior townhouse for your Divine Companion.  An emotionally volatile person feels the commonplace emotions of the bottom section intensely; they readily have bouts of intense crying and long periods of sobbing; such tears are not the tears of jubilation.  No amount of human-origin tears can produce even a small puddle of spiritual irrigation.  Don’t mistake intense lower emotions as the movement of the spirit: they will likely only distract you and delay you on your spiritual journey.

A person who feels their emotions quite intensely, thinking that strong feelings indicate a strong devotion to God, may nurse and amplify their over-emoting.  Such manufactured emotions are usually a human indulgence which can be recognized because they bear minimal spiritual fruit.  In contrast, spiritual emotions help you ascend your inner stairway and make you more gracious with others.  Some religious groups, like some emotionally intense individuals, try to amp up the shared emotional intensity in their worship services but I am not sure how often that actually increases a person’s devotion to God and their compassion for someone in need.

It’s backwards to try manufacturing tears or cultivating strong religious emotions, thinking that they will bring on a genuine spiritual experience.  That sequence (that human intensified emotions precede spiritual experience) is like forcibly trying to produce the sublime emotions that only God can create.  A better sequence is to, first, simply welcome your Divine Companion’s presence and actions within your interior townhouse; and then entrust the presence, or absence, of spiritual emotions to God. Rather than trying to force a certain emotional outcome, it’s better to be content with whatever emotions are the natural consequence of loving God with all your heart.

Spiritual (and non-spiritual) fruit

A glimpse of God always promotes growth

You will be profoundly changed when you are blessed to see God more clearly, whether by a glimpse of God in your bottom section, a caress of God in the top section or the full embrace in your Divine Companion’s arms on the rooftop.  Such is the growth-enhancing nature of even the smallest encounter with God!  Just as even a few sun rays shining on a plant on a cloudy day surely help it grow, even the slightest contact with your Divine Companion surely spurs your spiritual growth.  Just as, even after the sun sets, the plant continues to grow from the nourishment absorbed during the day, your soul, long after the divine embrace, continues to grow and blossom from the spiritual nourishment absorbed from your Divine Companion.  Of course, you may not bear spiritual fruit in every single moment after the embrace, but you will consistently bear more fruits when viewed from the perspective of days and weeks.

The highest spiritual fruits require the finest spiritual nourishment: those personally tailored infusions which your Divine Companion gives to you in the divine caress or embrace.

A sincere soul loves to work and labor for their Divine Companion; they gladly undertake difficult or tedious tasks.  Work aligned with God’s desires satisfies them so fully that they have no care whether their labors bring any perceivable blessings into their life.

On the rooftop

Your townhouse’s rooftop is partway between human nature and divinity; it’s the most intimate meeting place for you and God.  The rooftop is human-adjacent: it perches above all the parts of your townhouse and is loosely rooted in your human nature.  The rooftop is also God-adjacent: it’s the dwelling place of your Divine Companion, God who comes to personally live alongside you.  Rooftop experiences involve largely leaving your human nature behind temporarily so it no longer limits how fully you can experience and grasp your Divine Companion’s character.  You experience the divine embrace, the deepest intimacy between you and God who dwells within you, on the rooftop.

The rooftop dwelling of your Divine Companion is not an empty space; quite the opposite, the rooftop is richly adorned with many wonderful divine embellishments, each a spiritual gem which will stagger your human mind.  After a brief visit to museum with a vast collection of art, you may struggle to describe even one item in much detail yet you are certain that the museum holds many beautiful works of art.  In the same way, after a brief visit to the richly endowed rooftop, you may struggle to describe any one thing in much detail but you will be certain that the rooftop holds amazing spiritual treasures.

Of course, you understand that the gems of the rooftop aren’t physical treasures seen by the biological eyes but spiritual treasures perceived with the spiritual eyes of the top section.  You will “see” amazing spiritual beauty on your rooftop but don’t imagine you have seen all of the beauty contained in God’s vast creation.  Certainly no one sees, in this lifetime, even on the rooftop, more than a tiny fraction of the many gems which must be contained in that magnificent dwelling place of the Father, the God of Highest Heaven.  But how blessed we are to see even a tiny fraction of those amazing treasures!  That infinitesimal fraction is more than enough to satisfy you, it seems, for all your years on Earth.

Opening the door to the rooftop

You can’t just waltz onto the rooftop when you aren’t spiritually ready.  The rooftop’s door only opens when your Divine Companion turns the door handle on the rooftop side as you turn the handle on the top section side of the door.  As you wait for the rooftop embrace, you might (mistakenly) think that your Divine Companion has locked you out and is withholding that great grace.  But it’s more like a parent who withholds the key to the family car from a toddler; entering the rooftop before you are ready would likely leave you extremely confused, unable to grasp and integrate anything you experienced there.  It’s more accurate to think of your Divine Companion as waiting patiently to turn the knob until you are able to benefit from (and not be befuddled by) the divine embrace.

You might also imagine that the rooftop door as needing two keys to open it: one divine key inserted on God’s side and another human key inserted on your side.  Your Beloved inserts the divine key as soon as you are ready for the rooftop; your counterpart key will materialize in the exact same moment, when you have purified your heart and you desire God above all else.  In that moment of highly consecrated holy desire, God will surely open the door so you can grasp the rooftop’s great spiritual beauty: that God has really come to dwell inside you and alongside you as a Divine Companion to you and you alone.

If you aren’t psychologically strong (if your bottom section’s capabilities aren’t well developed and mature), then experiencing the divine embrace would only overwhelm your mind and be so disorienting that it would do more harm than good.  Please appreciate the futility of reaching the rooftop before you are ready. Please trust that your Divine Companion, who is infinitely wise and compassionate, only delays deeper divine intimacy until it can produce good spiritual fruit in your life.

As you climb higher on the inner stairway, the ceiling in the upper reaches of top section becomes thinner as if the rooftop is opening wider, as if your Divine Companion is removing all remaining obstacles to your intimate sharing.

The divine embrace

In the outer world, you really grasp someone’s personality and character through a close relationship.  Spending time together and doing things together enables you to really grasp who they are far better than you can through a casual conversation, hearing about them from others or reading a detailed psychological profile.  Being deeply connected with someone also enables you to grasp how they feel about you.  Perhaps a child feels assured of being loved through a parent’s hug which soothes them when they’re overwhelmed; or perhaps an adult feels assured of being loved when their partner holds them as if nothing or no one else matters.

In your inner world, you most fully grasp your Divine Companion’s lovely personality through the intimate rooftop relationship much more than even a long study of sacred texts ever could reveal.  Spending time in your Beloved arms deeply conveys how very much God loves you.  The divine embrace is a metaphor for those sublime moments when the love of your Beloved enters into your very being; such vivid intimacy assures you that God certainly dwells within you and how greatly God cherishes you.  Feeling the powerful draw of your Divine Companion lets you know how much God wants to partner with you, in this life, in this moment. The divine embrace assures you that God is very real.  And really close!

Difficulty adequately expressing spiritual matters

The divine embrace seems to so surely produce a quantum leap in your grasp of God (whether or not you can adequately articulate it) that I doubt that any inner experience, no matter how amazing or intriguing, is truly spiritual if it doesn’t help you grasp God more clearly.  Your grasp of what really matters increases exponentially in the divine embrace even though whatever you say feels like a very weak representation of what you grasped.  You may never be able to express some of your enhanced understanding in human words and concepts; these insights remain, like unopened presents: delights to be opened and enjoyed later in your spiritual journey.

The inner experience of your Divine Companion is quite profound but it can barely be described in words.  It is so different from your other experiences that you might doubt whether the divine embrace was real: was it just some kind of mental aberration or perhaps simply wishful thinking?  But the spiritual fruits flowing from the embrace assure you of its validity; they enable you to do far more than you could even imagine before; they heighten your courage and conviction so you can actually do the wonderful things you dream of in your now enhanced mind.  Allow the changes flowing from the embrace to help you trust that it was quite real (perhaps far more real than the palpable things of the material world).

Please don’t allow the bottom section’s inability to articulate spiritual matters create lingering doubts which will diminish the embrace’s spiritual fruits: the changes in your personality (in your interior townhouse) wrought by your Divine Companion.  Regardless of your ability to articulate your inner spiritual experiences, they are quite real.  Please trust your own first-hand experiences; have wholehearted faith in God; deepen your trust in your Divine Companion.  Your full trust is more than enough to compensate for your mind’s struggle to describe the divine embrace with words worthy of its great beauty.

A private intimacy

Much like two lovers close the doors to all else so that they have a private place just for the two of them to enjoy their intimate entwining, the doors of the lower rooms seem to close so only the final door between you and your Divine Companion remains open.  Lesser matters fade from your awareness so that it can be completely occupied with the presence of your Divine Companion and disturbed by nothing else.  The babbling of the bottom section would only interfere with the full rooftop sharing of your human heart with the divine spirit.

Jesus recommended seeking a private place to commune with the Father in Heaven as if the sweet joys of the divine embrace are best enjoyed and savored in a quiet and sacred place reserved just for you and your Divine Companion.  Making your experience public may bring on feelings of being inadequate or being undeserving of such a great grace; such feelings will certainly diminish the intimacy and immediacy of the embrace.

Spiritual activity eclipses mental activity

Your brain’s typical processes may be suspended during the divine embrace, as if those mental operations are placed in a deep coma and can’t be roused.  But cocooning, rather than being inactive in a coma, better connotes the very active and productive inner state during the divine embrace when all other mental activity ceases.  The seeming loss of mental activity is short-lived for the duration of the embrace; it is followed by a much longer time of greatly enhanced inner vitality, a liveliness that flows from a spiritual, not biological or purely human, source.  In the immediate wake of this intimate cocooning, you may feel something like inebriation and be completely unconcerned with the practical matters of this world.

Much like during the intimate entwining of lovers, during the rooftop embrace your Beloved implants some divine seeds in you.  In a complementary way, during the rooftop embrace, God may absorb the best of your personality into the vast divine web.  God seems to delight in cross-fertilizing: incorporating divine seeds into a human being as well as incorporating human elements into God’s vast creation; as if God needs your personal contribution to make the fullest universe just as much as you need God’s personal presence to live your fullest life.

The mental operations of the bottom section seem to go offline during the divine caress or the divine embrace as if the human mind would be discombobulated by such spiritual intensity and closeness to God.  Perhaps that’s why it’s so hard to adequately describe it afterwards.  But such spiritual experiences are so precious, that I feel compelled to try to explain them in case knowing about them might help even one hungry soul though what I say is likely meaningless to many thousands.  Attempting even a barely adequate expression seems far better than saying nothing at all about the spiritual treasures of your inner world.  Being divinely embraced feels like becoming much more alive than you ever were before.  In the moment of the divine embrace, this heightened sense of aliveness has very little to do with the bottom section although after the embrace you will find your bottom section thoroughly and wonderfully remodeled.  My fervent hope is that this description might help one person experience that wonderful intimacy and the aliveness it brings.

QUOTE [Dwelling 6; chapter 4; paragraph 10]

“… when the spirit is very closely united to God, it is introduced into this mansion of the empyrean heaven which must be in the center of our souls for since God resides in them, He must own one of the mansions. While the soul is in ecstasy, our Lord does not appear to wish it to apprehend these mysteries and its inebriation of joy in Him suffices it. But sometimes He is pleased to withdraw it from this rapture when it at once perceives what the mansion contains. On returning to itself, the mind can recall what has been seen but is unable to describe it, nor can it, by its natural abilities, attain to see more of the supernatural than God has chosen to show it.”

PARAPHRASE

You may feel as if God has given you full ownership of your interior townhouse: that you have full rein to make what you wish of your life.  Although that may be true of the lower floors, you don’t have full ownership of the rooftop: it is a space co-owned by you and your Divine Companion.  You cannot, on your own, remodel the rooftop to your liking; you cannot alter divine ways and operations of the rooftop.  The rooftop retains the feel of the highest heaven where your Divine Companion lived prior to descending to your rooftop.  How great the generosity of God: to bring such an undiluted piece of paradise to within the reach of you, a humble human being!  How wise God is to share ownership (rather than give you full ownership) of the paradise that rests atop your interior townhouse!  How blessed you are to spend even an instant amidst the treasures of heaven contained on the rooftop where they can be experienced even by a humble person on Earth!  God seems to limit such experiences so that you aren’t so overwhelmed by the divine nature that it would only disorient you rather than clarify your thinking.  How perfect that your access to the rooftop is directed by the Divine Companion whose wisdom so greatly exceeds even your best insights.

The afterglow

In the fullness of the feelings that still glow after the divine embrace, your spiritual passion may overflow.  Your passion to do whatever your Divine Companion desires may reach new heights of fervor: you would gladly do anything at all if it pleased your Beloved.  You may wish that you had thousands of years of life on Earth to serve God no matter how demanding the circumstances would certainly be.  Sacrificing any remaining human loyalties becomes so easy that the word sacrifice doesn’t even seem to apply in the least.  Sacrifices, even bearing the cruel treatment of others, seem quite easily borne after receiving such an influx of spiritual nourishment which so greatly strengthens your human frame.

Sharing the intimacy

If you have only felt the effects of partial spiritual glimpses and brief divine caresses in the top section, then you can’t really imagine the far stronger effects of the full human-divine embrace of the rooftop.  After that much more powerful experience, you may want everyone to share the intimate experience of God’s closeness and overwhelming goodness; you may want a chorus of praise for God to erupt over the entire planet with each soul contributing their unique notes to create a magnificent harmony.

In my experience, people react to hearing about the divine embrace in one of two ways.  A few people may be delighted and praise God for reaching out to share life so intimately with a human being.  Treasure these kindred souls!  Even after enjoying the sublime company of your Divine Companion, you still need and benefit from the company of such spiritually attuned human companions.  Communion with kindred spirits is invaluable when the spiritual flame of the rooftop embrace burns low; they will lift you up when you join your heart with theirs and praise God in unison.

Being attacked

But more commonly, most people react to hearing about your personal spiritual experiences by condemning and discrediting you.  Even such faithless attacks serve a purpose on your spiritual journey: they will clearly prove that the human soul (the rooftop of the interior townhouse where your Divine Companion dwells) cannot be touched by even the vilest attacks of the meanest person; the inner resting place of God within you can withstand any and all human attempts to defile it.  People can easily attack your body, steal your possessions and ruin your reputation but even their most vicious attacks are totally powerless to harm your connection with your Divine Companion in the slightest.  It feels as if your precious companion and all of God’s powers come to defend the sweet gift of your partnership with the divine.

How unfortunate that this highest and most precious treasure will, like the scent of blood that draws in a shark or a mountain lion for the kill, draw in those people who want to mock this finest gift of God to an individual as something trivial, delusional or even condemn it as a spiritual poison.  It’s painful to see God’s precious gift of intimate presence be so misrepresented and distorted.  But that pain never diminishes a sincere soul’s assurance of the gift of God cohabiting with you in your interior townhouse.

Bearing such pain is worth it if, in the midst of the attacks, one hungry soul hears words that nourish them spiritually.  If they have never been to the rooftop, simply knowing that it exists from your words and experiences may give them hope that they too are hosting their own Divine Companion and motivate them to apply themselves more wholeheartedly to climbing the inner stairway.  Then they too will be thoroughly changed by bonding with their Divine Companion who uplifts their motives for living very profoundly.

The divine embrace is the peak experience anyone can have with God while on Earth, an experience worthy of being highly valued and sought over any other experience.  Much damage is done when someone who imagines they have experienced the divine embrace (but really hasn’t) tries to lecture others about the inner world.  Their descriptions of the Divine Companion’s lovely personality will lack the savor of the Beloved’s great beauty.  Such posers cause the inner presence of God to lose credence in the minds of those who hear this impoverished and distorted description of the spiritual possibilities of this earthly life.

Rooftop deepening

On the rooftop, you move from a top-section engagement which can be cancelled to a resolute betrothal, a bomb-proof commitment that you will virtually never back out of.  Because you so strongly desire to do God’s will, your Beloved reveals more of the divine nature so that you can “see” the person of God more fully.  How else could you do God’s will or manifest God’s qualities without fully experiencing who God is?  How else could you imitate the tone of God if you never experienced it yourself?

More Varieties of Spiritual Experiences

Relapse Prevention

As you ascend the inner stairway, it’s tempting to become proud of your progress.  But pride, perhaps especially spiritual pride, distances you from your Divine Companion; pride stops your growth because it blinds you to how much more you still have to learn about your inner life, how much you still need to cultivate new capabilities, and how much more completely you still need to cooperate with your Divine Companion.  If you have excessive pride, if you claim your growth as your own efforts (your best growth is more accurately described as the combined achievement of you and your Divine Companion), then you lessen your awe for God and you swell your esteem for yourself.  You might even come to think of yourself as now being nearly on the same level as God.  Such pride and spiritual arrogance surely clog the channel through which your Beloved’s divine infusions flow into you.  Human pride is terribly destructive of the reverence required for intimacy with your Divine Companion.

In each moment of your life, you can progress higher on your spiritual stairway or you can regress to a lower floor.  In each moment, your choices can be guided by spiritually meaningful values so you revere God or you can relapse and be motivated by baser values, venerating material goods and social status.  In each moment, your spiritual muscles can strengthen or atrophy depending on how much and how wisely you use them.  In each moment, your human-divine attachment can become more secure if you cultivate your relationship with your Divine Companion or it can lose its vibrancy if you neglect it or take it for granted.  Being aware of both possibilities of each moment makes you vigilant and prepares you to make the best use of every one so that you keep growing.  In each moment of your life, you are either cultivating or corroding your character, bonding with God or drifting away, building your soul or allowing it to wither.

More about Relapse Prevention

Deeper dives

Editorial Comments

This book, The Interior Townhouse, paraphrases Teresa of Avila’s The Interior Castle, a description of the inner world written in 1557.  Studying Teresa while working as a therapist, I was struck by how well her understanding of a person dovetailed with modern psychological thinking.  This book imagines how she might describe the inner life if she was writing today.  Both Teresa and psychologists see your inner life as a rich ecosystem of many parts; both see that you contain a more-than-human inner presence who feels like a warm and wise inner companion and who can help as you struggle with challenging issues or as you work to create a more precious life.  Teresa experienced a divine being dwelling inside her whose distinct insight and kindness far surpassed her own human traits.  Some psychologists think you have a similar person-like presence who is tremendously more helpful and insightful than your usual human ways.  This book weaves together these spiritual and psychological threads to understand your inner world.

With the exception of the Introduction and Editorial Notes, any first-person statement in this book is Teresa addressing the reader of The Interior Castle, not this author addressing the reader of this townhouse book.  Implied first-person statements (“How wonderful!” or “How terrible!”) represent Teresa’s comments in The Interior Castle.

[Teresa hints at certain ideas without developing them in great detail.  Comments that expand on those hints are enclosed in square brackets.  Material that is not paraphrased from the Interior Castle is also enclosed with square brackets.]

For creating this book, each paragraph of The Interior Castle was first paraphrased; then all the paragraphs were reorganized into several topics:

1) a basic overview of your inner world as several levels of a townhouse analogous to the seven dwellings of a castle;

2) practical inner cultivation: spiritual care of your interior townhouse;

3) rooftop experiences of intimacy with your Divine Companion;

4) a treasury of Teresa’s metaphors for describing her spiritual experiences;

5) higher spiritual experiences such as the flight of the soul;

6) deeper dives (additional paraphrased parts from The Interior Castle connected by hyperlinks between the main text and the additional details).

Reading The Interior Castle for the first time can feel like joining a conversation midstream: it may take time to become oriented to Teresa’s basic concepts and ideas.  The Interior Townhouse adds material not in the original text to help you join the conversation by providing context for some of the wonderful ideas that Teresa mentions in passing but without much elaboration.

Teresa’s circumstances

Teresa wrote her enduring classic in just a few months in challenging circumstances.  She was very busy with other duties and she was travelling at a time when travel was difficult and uncomfortable.  She certainly didn’t have the luxury of a long stretch of uninterrupted time in comfortable circumstances.

Teresa’s superiors asked her to write The Interior Castle.  Although a few were genuinely interested in her spirituality, she knew that others were on a witch-hunt to gather evidence to condemn her as unholy.  Being asked to write this book was like being deposed by a biased prosecutor who could then twist her own words to use them against her.  Before even reading it, they wanted to build a case that she was mentally deluded, not spiritual at all.  Knowing that she was writing for such a mixed audience, she muted her enthusiasm and made no claim of being spiritually advanced.  Quite the opposite, she presented herself as being much lesser than the priests so she didn’t provoke the ire of her close-minded superiors.  Appearing less impressive, suspicious readers would be less inclined to attack her; in such passages, she creates the impression of being a spiritual Columbo (or Elsbeth or Kathy Bates’ Matlock) whose humble manner belies their deep insight.  Those Inquisition-minded readers long gone (and, unlike Teresa who is remembered and treasured, the Inquisitioners are remembered only for their infamy).  No longer needing to disarm such antagonistic readers, Teresa’s original tone of self-deprecation is deemphasized in this paraphrase and her natural enthusiasm is allowed to flow more freely.

Teresa also wrote for another very different reader: some of her fellow nuns, her kindred spirits in the convent, who would benefit from her experiences and understanding.  Like Jesus, she needed to express herself so that sincere souls would understand what she taught without antagonizing the Pharisees of her time.

Scarcity of spiritual guidance

Because so few people intimately experience God’s closeness, you aren’t likely to find someone who can help you understand such experiences.  Teresa struggled to find someone who could help clarify her spiritual inner life.  Some people (priests who were confessors or spiritual directors), unaware of their own spiritual ignorance, quite confidently gave her bad opinions and misguided advice.  Because wise guides are just as scarce today as then, Teresa’s understanding may help you make sense of your own spiritual experiences if you can’t find someone who can personally guide you.

Teresa’s appreciation of religion

Teresa respected the great gems collected by religion over the centuries; the accumulated wisdom of the ages means that no one need start their search for God from scratch.  Over the decades and centuries, many churches began to believe that their collection of gems (their theology) was the only truth about God. Teresa balanced her respect for religious tradition with a refreshing sense that God belongs to no one religion; that despite some claims, no religion owns God exclusively.  Instead, God belongs to individuals who love God with all of their heart.

Changes from the Original Text

This book takes some license for the purpose of accurately articulating the spirit of Teresa’s ideas for current times.  The biggest change is updating her core metaphor.  A good metaphor uses what is concrete and familiar to make clear what is less concrete and less familiar.  Teresa used a walled city like Avila —essentially a very large castle—as a metaphor for your inner world.  In her place and time, castles were very familiar and served well as a metaphor to articulate less familiar concepts about the inner life.  A townhouse, which is more familiar today, is used as a metaphor in this book for articulating her concepts for current times.

In this book, a vertical townhouse is used as an analogy of Teresa’s circular castle. The townhouse’s lower section corresponds to the castle’s outer three dwellings (your psychological mind).  The townhouse’s upper section corresponds to the castle’s inner three dwellings (your spiritual mind).  The townhouse’s porch where you interact with the world and other people corresponds with the castle’s courtyard where the inhabitants interact with the outer world.  The townhouse’s rooftop corresponds to the castle’s dwelling seven where you engage most directly and intimately with God in your soul.

Teresa pictured the three outer dwellings as discrete levels of your psychological mind; in the outermost dwelling, your human nature is very primitive; as you move inward, it is tamed and develops more insight.  She pictured the three inner dwellings as three discrete levels of the spiritual mind; in the fourth dwelling your spiritual nature is barely developed; as you move inward, it deepens and shapes your inner life more.  In this book, your psychological mind is pictured as a continuum ranging from shallow to deeper insight, from being immature to being more mature, from having mainly undeveloped psychological capabilities to more developed ones.  In the same way, your spiritual mind is pictured as a continuum ranging from shallow to deeper insight, from being half-heartedly betrothed to your Beloved to being whole-heartedly committed, from sometimes following your Divine Companion’s leadings to more consistently cooperating with them.

God and the Devil

Teresa thought of God and the Devil as the two main influences on a person which either pull you closer to the divine ways or closer to baser human ways.  Those two influences can also be considered as the indwelling God who pulls you into a deeper spirituality and the selfish ego who pulls you in the opposite direction of more entrenched selfishness.  Personifying the forces that move you closer to God or further from God often makes them more personally meaningful.  You can personify the spiritual pull externally as God or internally as your Divine Companion; you can personify the worldly pull externally as the Devil or internally as the ego.  Whether you envision these pulls externally or internally matters less than being very clear that your life can move in one of two distinct directions: aligning more with your self-centered ways or aligning more with God’s ways.

Infallibility of the church

Sometimes Teresa describes the Roman Catholic Church as a holy organization, as the bride of Christ.  In some passages, she recommends an almost unquestioning obedience to the church’s hierarchy; perhaps these passages reflect her actual beliefs or perhaps they were included to appease the priests who were working to discredit her.  In other passages, she recommends ignoring a priest’s opinion because they are often spiritually barren; several priests (her confessors) were very dismissive of her spirituality.  Her closest spiritual friend, John of the Cross, was cruelly tortured for many months by his fellow clergy; he was rescued by Teresa’s nuns before he died at the hands of his torturers.  This book doesn’t include her recommendations for blind trust and total obedience to a supposedly infallible religious organization because many have harmed people in current times.  Instead, the idealized church is represented by an informal network of God-centered kindred spirits, the Beloved Community, bound together by their devotion to God rather than by their identification with and allegiance to a particular religious organization.

Changes in physical and mental state

Teresa wrote at length about how spiritual experiences were sometimes accompanied by loss of bodily sensations and a diminished awareness of one’s physical surroundings; she also commented frequently about whether normal mental operations were suspended or active during certain spiritual experiences.  Her emphasis on these aspects appears to be relevant to Teresa’s individual health concerns but may not be relevant for most people’s spirituality.  For that reason, these concerns about sensations and consciousness are deemphasized in this book.

Disclaimer

Most secular philosophers, psychologists, psychiatrists and therapists would see no value in thinking that you have spiritual capabilities or that God dwells within you; most would consider such ideas as so completely unsubstantiated by research as to be a fantasy.  Most theologians, pastors and preachers would see no value in focusing on your psychological aspects; most would consider such views as unsupported by their sacred texts.  Please don’t read this book if you dislike ideas that lack empirical data or a scriptural foundation.

This book isn’t a near verbatim replication of Teresa’s thinking; please read her own writing to hear her in her own voice.  Some purists may consider associating her name with this book to be an egregious affront to her memory.  But not crediting Teresa’s influence seems even more insulting to someone who has given so much to so many.

Some people treasure Teresa’s writings just as they are but many more people know little or nothing about her thinking.  The only reason for attempting this book is so that a person, who might not otherwise read and appreciate Teresa’s insights in their original form, might benefit from how she understood human nature.  Hopefully this book might help a few people benefit from her wisdom and guidance as they harmonize their humanity and their spirituality.  Reading her thoughts is like being aided by experienced guide who has walked a very long way along the spiritual path; her insights, developed from her first-hand experiences, may help you deepen your spiritual experiences and better understand what happens in your interior townhouse.

Return to where you were reading (Editorial Comments in the Main Text)

The Bottom Section: Your Mainly Human Floors

The main text presented a bird’s eye view of your interior townhouse, an overview of your inner world and its purpose.  The following sections describe your various parts in more detail.

Purpose

The bottom section of your interior townhouse is mainly concerned with navigating life’s material aspects (basic life skills, making a living, etc.) and social aspects (relationships with all kinds of people: some quite trustworthy, some not at all, with many people somewhere in between).  You can navigate earthly life on your own using only the bottom section without involving God at all.  If you reach the higher floors of the bottom section, you can navigate earthly life with great skill and sometimes with much success and/or altruism.

You have many rooms on your ground floor: each room appears, at first, to have reasonable ideas for navigating this often-challenging life: each room seems to offer a plausible worldview; each room seems to be quite well-intentioned.  But a closer and more insightful examination reveals that each ground-floor room has major flaws in how it sees life and how it would guide your choices.  These flaws involve varied deceptions but the flaw most fatal to your soul is the pervasive lie that you are the high point of creation and that no one, not even a Divine One, is any greater than you.  From these egotistical views flows the sense that you are better than other people and don’t need to be considerate of them.  Even a short time on the upper floors can powerfully immunize you against falling for these sophistries so prevalent on the ground floor of your interior townhouse.

Gradient

Within the bottom section, there’s a gradient of insight and mastery: the ground floor of the bottom section represents the most simplistic understanding of yourself; this floor involves so little mastery of your basic instincts and drives that they are your master and they determine how you choose and act.  The higher floors of the bottom section represent your mind when you have tamed your lower impulses so they don’t motivate you to act in short-sighted ways.  On the higher floors of the bottom section, you develop increasingly fuller insight into yourself so you better understand how your motives (your values and emotions) move you to choose one thing over another thing and to then pursue that one thing.  On the higher floors, you begin making wiser choices based on higher values.

Fuzzy initial insight

Nearly everyone seems to begin their spiritual journey knowing only the ground floor of their interior townhouse where you have little or no sense of the great light and love awaiting you on the rooftop, in the dwelling place of your lovely and loving Divine Companion.  Living strictly on the ground floor, you aren’t likely to have even a vague inkling of a divine presence.

As you move to higher floors (but still in the bottom section), perhaps a bit of the light from upper floors seeps through a tiny crack and, for a brief flash, hints at the far greater light above.  But most of the time, garish lights coming through the windows of your lowest floor blind your eyes to the subtle but far more wonderful divine light coming from the rooftop.  Perhaps a snippet of the love song which your Divine Companion is eternally singing on your very own rooftop drifts through the townhouse and reaches your ears for a brief instant before it’s lost again to your hearing; it hints at the rich and full love which God wants to bestow on you.  But most of the time, coarser voices coming from your lowest level bombard your ears and drown out the sweet tone of God who dwells atop your townhouse.

When you live mainly on the ground floor of your interior house and you are mainly preoccupied with material issues and social standing, your eyes can be unseeing like the eyes of a newborn kitten.  With your barely developed eyes—your barely developed ability to reflect on your inner life—you can’t yet see the full extent of your own townhouse; what little you can see of your inner world may be quite fuzzy and confusing.

As you mature, you gradually improve your psychological insight, your ability for self-reflection which enables you to accurately see your inner world, how it operates and how its strengths and quirks shape your life.  Developing psychological insight requires leaving the ground floor to explore and experience other parts of your richly endowed inner world.  You gain a much-enlarged inner perspective when your larger inner world more extensively.

Inner insight is part psychological and part spiritual.  Usually, psychological insight develops first and spiritual insight develops later (although some amazing but rare exceptions occur).  The acuity of your spiritual insight will improve as you climb ever closer to your Beloved.  Even when you can’t see very far when you are on your lower floors, please trust me: God is always very close to you: always!  Wherever you are in your interior townhouse, God is always closer to you than you may realize.

Permeability of townhouse walls

Intro: walls, windows, doors

When a house’s windows are left open, sounds and aromas from the neighborhood easily drift into the house.  The interior townhouse’s ground floor is very permeable as if the walls are paper thin, the windows ajar and the doors left wide open; external influences have easy access into your interior townhouse (your mind).

The thinking of other people can easily become part of your thinking. You might absorb—without reflection—the prevailing views of society, such as trust—or distrust—in government, science and God.  You might absorb—without reflection—your family, friends, coworkers and partners’ views of you.  These influences can be so pervasive that you may even consider them your own original ideas forgetting that they are the second-hand opinions of other people.

The siren call of earthly allures easily penetrates into the ground floor as if the windows are poorly sealed or even missing panes of glass to keep out the wind and rain.  The siren call is clearly heard, convincing you that the pleasures of the world are the best thing ever.  The siren call of unearned pleasure can warp your sense of what is valuable without you even being aware of what is happening.

On the ground floor of the bottom section, you have little ability to direct your own choices and actions, making you extremely vulnerable to being shaped by the ideas and values of others.  For this reason, it’s critical that you climb the inner stairway to the floors above where the walls are less permeable and insulate you from being mindlessly swayed by external influences.  At first, climbing the inner stairway may feel like swimming upstream against a current; it may feel as if worldly allures are tugging strongly on your baser instincts, calling to you and saying: “Forget the stairway!  Come and enjoy life’s pleasures!”  As you reach the higher floors of the bottom section, you will become less vulnerable—but not yet immune—to the world’s pull on your lower emotions, to the misleading idea that you must have as much pleasure as possible (the siren call of addiction), to the false promise that you deserve to escape from all pain (the siren call of unending bliss), to the false premise that you don’t need to work hard to enjoy the best that life offers (the siren call of laziness).

Levels of permeability

Totally permeable walls

At first, the ground floor of your interior townhouse has paper-thin walls that don’t keep out the cold and the neighborhood sounds.  A completely open ground floor lets in friends who help you but also lets in coarse people who will drain you or hurt you; such openness allows your mind to become steeped in poor ideas that will impair you and confuse you.  Unfortunately, healthy people or sound ideas enter less often than unhealthy people or distorted ideas which seep into you and take up long-term residence in your house.  Some examples are: the mob mentality of fearmongering; the siren songs of various kinds of material pleasures; the confident voices of fools peddling their foolishness as wisdom.  If you do nothing about the walls of your interior townhouse, these influences will easily enter your mind and dominate your thinking.

Totally impermeable walls

If you have been deeply hurt, you may have made your exterior walls nearly impenetrable to prevent harmful influences or people from entering your inner world and hurting you again.  But walls that protect you so well against more harm also deprive you the nourishment of insightful ideas of wise people and the kindness of good-hearted people who might lift your spirits.  Totally impenetrable walls seal out people who might lead you to your inner stairway where you can seek the divine therapist who can heal painful psychological wounds.

Semi-permeable walls

The middle path between completely open walls or totally impenetrable walls is creating semi-permeable walls which enable you to be nourished by helpful influences and minimize the impact of life’s harmful influences.  Semi-permeable walls require thoughtful choices about who and what you want to allow into your mind and heart (and what you want to keep out).  Designing such walls requires discerning the helpful from the harmful; maintaining them requires ongoing effort and diligence.

Discerning spiritual help from spiritual hinderance

Creating semi-permeable walls for your townhouse requires discerning what is harmful from what is helpful.  Clear discernment protects you from absorbing spiritual poisons while simultaneously enabling you to benefit from spiritual nutrients.  Semi-permeable walls are like a spiritual immune system that removes harmful influences without sealing you off from life-giving influences.  Semi-permeable walls require discernment to distinguish:

an accurate and complete narrative from distorted and partial ones;

healthy relationships from subtly mean or manipulative ones;

goals that are really worth pursuing from appealing but trivial ones.

The first gauge of the value of anything in life (narratives, people or groups, life goals) is how it affects your relationship with God:

does it help you love God more?

does it help you more deeply appreciate the beauty of God?

does it move you to praise and revere God more?

Notice that this first yardstick for gauging whether something is a spiritual nutrient, spiritual junk food or a spiritual poison centers on reverence for God.  You can assess something (a concept, a spiritual practice, a church or group) by whether it supports you in forming an intimate and loving relationship with your Divine Companion.

The second gauge of the value of anything in life (narratives, people or groups, life goals) is how it affects your relationship with another person:

does it inspire you to care more about how another person is doing?

does it deepen your compassion for someone who is struggling?

does it make you more gracious with others and help you more tenderly assist someone in need?

does it increase your joy in washing the feet of a person who no one respects?

Notice that this second yardstick for gauging whether something is a spiritual nutrient, spiritual junk food or a spiritual poison centers on whether you see another person through God’s eyes and whether you engage with the same uplifting savor for them as God engages with you.

These two gauges are sure and true guideposts for walking the path that leads to God and brings you closer to your Divine Companion.  All spirituality is about growing more loving of God and another person.

I wish that a church’s stamp of approval was a reliable gauge for assessing the accuracy of a portrayal of God or the correctness of guideposts along the path to personal intimacy with God.  That would make climbing the inner stairway so much simpler!  But I have found that church membership or ordination is no indication of a person’s understanding of spiritual matters.  Often it seems that the higher someone’s position in a church’s hierarchy, the less reliable a spiritual guide they are; they might even advise you and guide you in ways that will actually retard your spiritual growth.  Of course, that very rough rule of thumb has wonderful exceptions; but I’ve seen too many people hurt quite badly when they assumed that a lofty clerical position was a sure indication that a person was spiritually wise and personally caring.

Secular and spiritual influences

Several external voices can enter your mind on your ground floor.  Secular voices may persuade you that no great spiritual treasure can be found within yourself.  The siren call of addiction may convince you that worldly pleasures are the ultimate thing in life.  If you are swayed by such voices, you will think that you are a spiritual orphan forgotten by God.  Then you understandably might abandon spirituality and become fully absorbed with making your worldly existence as pleasant and pleasurable as possible.  Becoming focused only on material goals doesn’t require any great ability on your part: desire for success, prestige, material accumulation and security are built into the human brain because they were essential for humanity’s survival over the ages.

Religious influences—some helpful, some insipid and neutral, some harmful—can also enter your mind through your ground floor.  Religions with real savor enrich you and prepare you for spiritual growth.  Calcified religions usually discourage your personal spiritual growth because then you are less dependent on their external authority.  Most religions of all stripes provide a sense of community but the bonds of connections may not be very robust or spiritually motivated.

Unlike religious influences which enter your interior townhouse from the outer world, spiritual influences enter from your rooftop.  They are your first-hand experiences of God’s sweet nature.  Unlike external religion influences which can be either helpful or harmful, spiritual influences are always helpful; they may not lead you to an easy life, but they always help you grow closer to God.

Your Divine Companion’s spiritual influences only enter when you open yourself to God by cherishing the divine ways.  Being harmed by others may have made you fearful of opening yourself to anyone else, even God.  Often your top section is sealed off when you seal yourself off from other people.  If you’ve been badly hurt in a relationship, understandably you’ll resist trusting an inner person, your Divine Companion, without some assurance that your Divine Companion won’t hurt you like other people have.  Building trust may require many small encounters with your Divine Companion before you are willing to open your channels of permeability more widely, to listen and cooperate more fully.  You may need many mini-conversations before abandoning your usual inner monologue and dialoguing more genuinely with your Beloved.  You may need to feel heard and seen by your Divine Companion before you can really listen with deep attunement instead of responding with a kneejerk discounting or with indifference.

Sometimes spiritual influences may enter your interior townhouse from the outer world through the encouragement of another person who has felt the intimate presence of God.  Such support on the spiritual path is very precious but also very rare.

Much vacillation

You vacillate a lot when you live mainly on the lower floors of your interior townhouse.  You might alternate almost randomly between prayerful and decadent moments as if you were a rudderless ship at the mercy of the ocean’s currents.  As you move up to higher floors (but still in the bottom section), you strengthen your ability to steer your mind into healthier channels, possibly even into spiritual channels, and be less at the mercy of external influences.  Having climbed to higher floors, you appreciate the mess that results when you don’t intentionally set your steps through your interior townhouse; on the higher floors, you appreciate the fruit of actively and wisely setting your course through your inner world.

When you first reach a higher floor, confusion can easily set in because you become aware of the possibilities your interior townhouse holds for you.  When you lived only on the ground floor, you had no inkling of the possibilities for how you live your life other than the ground floor life; being unaware of any other possibilities, there’s no choice to be made; there’s nothing to be ambivalent about.  Ambivalence only becomes possible once you sense that you have a choice to make: your interior townhouse can revolve around you or around your Divine Companion.  On the higher floors of the bottom section, you may vacillate a great deal about this core choice: sometimes craving material goodies, sometimes longing for God.  You might feel like the rope in a tug-of-war contest being yanked between the allures of the world and the attractive beauties of the spirit; or you might feel like a yo-yo bouncing between material lows and spiritual highs.

Vulnerability to worldly allures

If you have never left the ground floor, you are likely to be in thrall to one of the primitive worldviews which are rampant there.  These various worldviews are often based on a similar theme: that you are the center of life; that you are the most valuable or wonderful person in your circles; that no one deserves more respect and goodies than you.

Holding a self-focused worldview, you can be easily bewitched by worldly ambitions and the lower desires of the human brain, such as obsession with getting as much power and pleasure as possible.  If material goals become your only and highest desire, then they will ensnare you like vines which, like handcuffs and chains, bind you to the ground floor.  If you don’t try to escape these vines early on, you can stay entangled in them so long that they grow quite thick virtually trapping you on the ground floor unless something very extreme (and often very unpleasant) happens to you.  Wisdom would suggest that you make the effort to escape rather than loafing unto harsh circumstances jar you awake.

Worldly attractions only become a problem when they so dominate your thinking that you cannot extract yourself from their powerful allure (from their thick tangle of vines).  Complete worldly absorption prevents you from experiencing the far greater beauty of your upper floors.  The consequences of being a permanent ground-floor dweller are so terrible that you must work urgently with all your strength to refute the errors of the ground floor worldview so that you can experience all of our own precious life, your one precious townhouse.

Describing the limitations of the ground floor may mistakenly give the impression that it is a bad part of you.  But that would be the wrong impression: even your ground floor is wonderful when used wisely as the starting point of your spiritual journey.  Its abilities are essential to navigating life on Earth but they are much better when spirit is added to them.  The embrace of your Divine Companion redeems all of you, including your ground floor, so that it too helps you on your spiritual journey.

Pollutants masquerading as good air

Some human traits might appear at first glance to be a good thing, but a closer examination reveals them to be just as terrible as other traits which are obvious spiritual retardants.  For example, it may seem good to consider your baser instincts evil; but you might then go to war against them and attack yourself, a person who is very precious to God.  If you are susceptible to overly focusing on your human frailty, then you hover over any minor weakness with a powerful magnifying glass and exaggerate it to the exclusion of all your other traits.  You minimize your human goodness as if you look at your wonderful traits through a telescope backwards.  Attacking your human flaws and egotism might seem like a holy path but that seldom brings you, or anyone else, even an inch closer to God.  Instead, such an intensely self-critical attitude and disregard of your strengths distorts God’s view of you, slows your spiritual growth, and inhibits trusting your Divine Companion; obsessing over your flaws doesn’t help you be warm and gracious to another person.

The cruelty of the outer world can be quite terrible: others who are living only on their ground floor may treat you quite harshly.  But the cruel forces of the inner world can be even more destructive that the meanness of another person: your own criticism and attacks on yourself (that may seem sanctimonious from a ground-floor perspective) can do far more damage to your spiritual growth than anything or anyone in the outer world could ever inflict on you.  Please avoid being too harsh on yourself or others.  God loves you very much even though “the flesh (human nature) is weak.”

Excessive zealousness; pompous religious leaders

You can gauge whether any human tendency is good by seeing if it warms, rather than cools, your affection for other people, especially people who annoy you when you are operating from the mindset of your lowest floors.  Much religious zealousness may seem godlike but its critical and unkind views of others reveals that it really isn’t.  A religious fanatic can discourage many people from seeking God because they mistakenly confuse the zealot’s shallow “holiness” with God’s character.  What a terrible misrepresentation of God who, although supremely good and beautiful, never makes an ostentatious show to overwhelm people but instead approaches each person individually offering a gentle touch and extending a hand to help lift them up.

Someone who considers themselves a religious prophet or a spiritual leader is at high risk of exaggerating their own “holiness” and consequently seeing others as less holy.  An egotistical religious leader can even forget how much greater God is than themselves.  Then, like the naked emperor who thought he was so beautifully clothed, they are spiritually bankrupt but consider themselves quite brilliant; they have lost any ability to nourish even one person.

Gossiping

At first glance, gossiping may feel like you are sharing a special connection with someone as they confide their negative views about another person.  But deeper reflection reveals what is really happening: they are dragging someone down while implying that you are an esteemed person privy to their confidences.  Real love never operates by demoting one person and elevating another person.  You can be sure that the gossiper is just as likely to speak poorly of you when they talk with other people.  Their gossiping reveals them as untrustworthy and likely to betray you just as readily as they betrayed the person you gossiped about.

Gossiping (talking poorly about a person behind their back) is completely ungodlike: you can be quite sure that no one in heaven is sitting around and talking poorly of even the most errant human being.  Instead, they are earnestly hoping for that person’s success; they are sympathetic and stand ready to offer any assistance which that person might accept.  Gossiping is not the divine way of God, the One who is trustworthy above all others.  Gossiping is the lowly way of untrustworthy friends.  If you are following the ways of God, you will address issues directly with a person kindly and truthfully.  When your heart is moved by divine affection, you speak sympathetically of a person when they aren’t present.

These examples of the spiritual damage done by seemingly positive tendencies illustrate how easily you can deceive yourself into considering a harmful trait to actually be good and helpful: excessive self-criticism and self-loathing can be seen as prudent self-examination; a puffed-up sense of your holiness can be confused with actually being holy; gossiping can masquerade unrecognized as sharing.  Please don’t allow such self-deceptions to take root in your interior townhouse; instead, with a spirit of goodwill and trusting in the innate goodness of the inner world created specifically for you by God, honestly examine your inner townhouse to see, and then uproot, any such deceptions so that you limit the great damage which they can do when left unchecked.

Different spiritual trajectories

Perhaps you can reach the rooftop without mastering the lessons of the lower floors but I’ve only met one person who seemed to do so.  Clearly, nothing is impossible for God!  But it’s also silly to passively wait on your lower floors thinking that a rare bypass of the inner stairway will open up for you.

The capabilities of your interior townhouse

You are endowed with many capabilities.  A physical house has mechanical systems such as plumbing, electricity and heating or cooling which keep the house functioning at its highest level if well maintained.  A human being has a set of capabilities, such as logic, awe, insight and social abilities which keep the interior townhouse running smoothly if well maintained.  Unlike mechanical systems which can be used immediately after being installed, unless your human capabilities are exercised and developed over time, you will think that they are missing from your interior townhouse.  For example, most people have the capability for language but it seems missing if they never work to develop their language skills.  If you don’t develop your capabilities (such as reading, drawing, singing, building), you might not even be aware that you have them.  You might not even realize that you have spiritual capabilities if you haven’t cultivated them.  Your townhouse’s capabilities eventually wither and go dormant if they are never exercised by you, the owner of this precious abode, who is responsible for your precious residence.

Your innate capabilities (the human capabilities of the bottom section) are intended to function as your servants but if you don’t use them wisely, they can become your master.  For example, your hunger drive propels you to seek food but, left unchecked and allowed to run amok, it can lead to obesity.  Your pleasure instinct propels you to enhance your life with joy but, left unchecked and allowed to run amok, it can lead to various addictions which mortgage your future well-being for short-term pleasure leaving your life in shambles.  Fear protects you by propelling you away from harmful situations but, left unchecked and allowed to run amok, it can morph into excessive avoidance and needless worry that actually endanger you rather than protect you.  Your social drive propels you to form healthy attachments based on mutual respect and reciprocal love but, if you have grown up without healthy relationships to model, it can also lead you into unhealthy connections which operate on dominance and submission rather than compassion and cooperation.  When healthy, each of these drives protects you by seeking adequate nourishment, experiencing joy, avoiding danger and bonding with others. When left uncontrolled, each of these drives endangers you with the ill effects of obesity, the paralysis of fear, destructive addictions and unhealthy relationships.  These innate pre-wired capabilities are good servants but terrible masters.

Perhaps it’s not too strong to say that the greatest sin is a sin of omission, of failing to make the most of your interior townhouse by neglecting your full set of higher capabilities or not taming your multiple primitive drives.  You might develop your mind to a high degree in mathematics (or poetry or agriculture or the trades) but fail to develop your spirituality even slightly.  Pray to God that you avoid the path of being oblivious to your full complement of capabilities which God has endowed you with.  Pray that you aren’t an ungrateful or unaware recipient of your many wonderful gifts who neglects them and loses the wonderful possibilities they create for your life.  Pray that you aren’t the person who possesses a complete set of tools but creates nothing of enduring beauty with them.  A soul—your soul—is a terrible thing to waste.  Being blind to your amazing inner world and all its capabilities is a terrible tragedy.  The possibility of fully using your capabilities to craft a meaningful life is a gift to be treasured and fully developed.

Return to main text (Bottom section)

A shift in center of gravity from psyche to spirit

A whole new atmosphere

Your spiritual capabilities begin to predominate over your human capabilities when you enter the first floors of your top section.  Your mental center of gravity shifts from the human concerns and values of the bottom section to spiritual concerns and values.  Your top section’s atmosphere involves something so much more than your bottom section that people struggle to adequately describe it, sometimes invoking words such as supernatural and sublime.  But such words miss the in-your-bones immediacy of feeling God’s presence in your top section.

Misleading adjectives for the top section

Adjectives like supernatural convey how the top section’s capabilities extend beyond your basic human nature.  But another meaning of the word supernatural (as in “outside the laws of nature”) might also conjure up the false impression that you have bizarre capabilities which violate the laws of nature and commonsense.  Such impressions terribly distort the top section as being outside the very laws of human nature which God created; they imply that it’s a good thing to take shortcuts in your spiritual growth, shortcuts which even God doesn’t take.

Adjectives like sublime convey the lofty and noble quality of the top section.  But such words might also conjure up the false impression that your top section is some sort of Nirvana-like existence when all human weaknesses are remedied and all earthly addictions are transcended and lose their allure.  But the top section is actually quite the opposite: after entering it, you must contend even more with your human weaknesses although you will be far better equipped to master your baser drives, to recognize your weak points and to resolve your remaining ambivalences.

Although the top section is wonderfully distinct from the real world, it is not an escape route from the realities of life on Earth or from the very real limitations of your human mind.  For as long as you live, you must courageously face—not escape or bypass—the world and yourself as they are.

A better description of the top section

The addition of voice to a silent movie greatly increases your understanding of the plot but the sound doesn’t negate or contradict the visual images you saw without sound.  In the same way, the addition of your top section’s insights deepens your understanding of life and doesn’t negate any accurate scientific or psychological knowledge.

Adding color to a black-and-white movie makes the imagery richer but doesn’t negate or contradict anything in the original images.  In the same way, your top section’s higher spiritual emotions heighten your appreciation of spiritual beauty but don’t negate or contradict any valid prior experiences related to spirituality; your higher spiritual emotions only enrich your experience of spiritual beauty.  Your top section is not at war with your bottom section; rather, time spent in your top section enables you to uplift your bottom section, to expand your capabilities which help you become a better person and make the most of your one precious life.

Spiritual concepts may seem exotic from the perspective of your bottom section, but spiritual intimacy feels quite simple and direct when actually experienced in your top section where you feel personally connected with your Divine Companion.  The limited vocabulary of the bottom section can only hint at the actual experience of the human-divine intimacy.  A child powerfully feels a healthy parent’s love and affection in the child’s heart yet a child can’t verbalize the love that they know and feel because it is far beyond the vocabulary of the child’s mind.  In the same way, you can intensely feel the affectionate bond with your Divine Companion and be unable to adequately verbalize it.  The loving bond between a child and parent or between a person and God is quite real regardless of how well it can be verbalized.

Perhaps this idea of a wonderful spiritual mindset sounds too much like a wishful childish fantasy to be very realistic.  But consider how you can enter into an analytical mindset to solve material problems; or enter into a poetic mindset to express tender feelings and awe; or enter into an attuned mindset to care for a child or a partner.  You enter different mindsets many times each day.  Teresa is simply saying that you can also enter a spiritual mindset which enables you to cultivate a loving and cooperative relationship with your Divine Companion.

Two ways of processing

Your spiritual mind adds new and different ways of processing to your human-only mind.  Spiritual processing doesn’t contradict human processing; rather, spiritual processing expands on the best of human processing.  The top section’s ways build on the strengths of the bottom section, using them as the foundation on which new capabilities are added to your mind.

Your spiritual mind’s processes can grasp things that your human processes can’t.  Your spiritual grasp (such as peace beyond all understanding) deepens when you reach the higher floors and draw closer to your Divine Companion.  Such understanding can’t be created on the lower floors but it remains active even when you return there where it can quiet the thoughts and quell the turmoil of your bottom section.  Pressing worldly concerns often seem smaller and much more manageable after spending time in your top section where your spiritual processing puts them in a bigger and more enlightened perspective.

Although you are likely quite aware of your bottom section’s processes (such as your biases and desires), you can be completely unaware of your top section’s processes.

In any given moment, the two sections of your interior townhouse can be in very different states: your top section can be peaceful even when your bottom section is in great turmoil.  How blessed you are to be able to experience the loving embrace of your Beloved amidst the slings and arrows of worldly fortunes!  This other-worldly peace and assurance shows the distinct difference between your human nature (the bottom section of your interior townhouse) and your spiritual nature (the top section).

New “senses” for enhanced receptivity

In the top section, you grasp things that you couldn’t grasp from the bottom section.  It’s as if you develop new spiritual senses or sensitivities as you ascend the stairway; as if you develop a spiritual sense of “smell” that can perceive the divine fragrance and a spiritual sense of “hearing” that can perceive more notes of the divine melody.  You need two ranges of eyesight to see all of your inner world: the eye of your psychological mind which, perceiving by the lower human frequencies of light, sees only your human aspects; and the eye of your spiritual mind which, perceiving by the higher spiritual frequencies of light, also sees your spiritual aspects.

When you first reach the lower floors of your top section, these spiritual senses are barely developed and barely operational.  How wonderfully the Master Architect has designed your interior townhouse so that, upon first reaching the top section, you begin to develop the precise new senses (new receptive capabilities) necessary for appreciating the spiritual treasures of the top section!

As you reach the higher floors of the top section, you will have clearer glimpses of your Divine Companion’s lovely personality as if you are seeing your Divine Companion with a new kind of vision.  These glimpses aren’t like seeing the material world with your body’s eyes; rather these insights are more like really “getting” the loveliness of another person, the divine person; these glimpses might be very roughly compared to those rare moments when one person is finely attuned to another and grasps the inner world of another person.

What you perceive and experience through these new senses carries an air of authenticity which assures you that you are perceiving clearly and that your experiences are valid.

Gradual spiritual ripening

As you more clearly glimpse your Divine Companion’s lovely character, you may be nearly overwhelmed by an intense desire for even more glimpses and even deeper intimacy with your Beloved.  Human desire is often impatient and wants immediate gratification.  But spiritual intimacy requires patience so that you have time to sufficiently ripen and become robust enough to make you a trustworthy partner, someone who is worthy of your Divine Companion’s sublime affection.  During this ripening time, your desires for worldly pleasures diminish to the point where they seem quite lame and banal in comparison to the finer divine joys you now crave much more.

Deeper human-divine intimacy requires that your previous desires of the bottom section no longer tempt you and weaken your full cooperation with your lovely partner.  Lower on the stairway, letting go of your most prized attachments would seem like too steep a price to pay, too great a sacrifice to make.  This requirement of relinquishing lower desires has discouraged many people from undertaking even the first steps on the inner stairway.  But the higher you climb on the stairway, the more easily you can jettison your prior longings; letting go of them no longer seems like such a great sacrifice because you are reaching for something so much finer: you are becoming, and you are receiving, an intimate partner in your soul; you are becoming a full collaborator with a partner who contributes to the relationship very abundantly.

The shallow and transient happiness of the bottom section vs. the deep and enduring joys of the top section

Worldly accomplishments feel good to the human mind.  Godly accomplishments, either inner devotion or outer works, also feel very good to the human mind.  The joy of your spiritual experiences and accomplishments shares much in common with the human enjoyment of material success or friendship with another person.

Thank God that our human mind is wired so that following God’s ways brings us joy!  The similarity of the joy over both worldly accomplishments and spiritual cultivation may lead you to mistakenly consider the joy over your worldly accomplishments as a sign that they are the blessings of God or actual spiritual accomplishments.

Your highest Godly accomplishments (your finest spiritual fruits) flow from sharing everything, especially leadership of your inner life, with your Divine Companion.  A much deeper and richer joy flows from whatever you accomplish in collaboration with your Divine Companion; this joy may feel like God has pierced your heart and dilated it to become capable of richer love and real collaboration.  In comparison, the good feelings from accomplishing something mainly by your own efforts doesn’t dilate your heart very much.  Your mainly human mindset, which barely collaborates with God, can’t produce the piercing joy that flows from sharing your life fully with God.  Being attuned to your Beloved’s presence and being receptive to your Beloved’s infusions seem to be essential ingredients for producing the deeper spiritual joys of the top section.

The depth of spiritual joy varies according to the relative contribution of your human mind and your Divine Companion’s infusions.  Some spiritual joys are created with 99% human contribution and 1% divine contribution; even these joys are wonderful.  Other spiritual joys are created with a few percent human contribution and an overwhelming divine contribution; these joys are far more wonderful!  They are far more wonderful than any giddy titillation with your mainly human insights and theologies.

Bliss is a side-effect, not the heart of the top section

Spiritual growth isn’t about gathering an extensive collection of exotic experiences or achieving some novel mental state.  The heart of spiritual growth is loving God more fully and loving others ever more graciously.  You progress spiritually when you are motivated by a reverence for God and a desire to be pleasing to God.  As you grow spiritually (as you more completely give your heart and mind to your Divine Companion and consecrate your life to fulfilling your Divine Companion’s purposes), God grants you such amazing tender mercies and spiritual sweetness.  But I doubt that you can experience these precious gifts if your primary goal is to have such wonderful blessings.

The fourth dwelling can initially be disorienting

A person with a bare minimum of humility and reverence may reach the first floor of the top section where they will likely be confused because they can’t make sense of this new experience which is so different from other “ordinary” human experiences.  In their confusion, they may interpret their inner experience through the lens of external religious explanations rather than to their indwelling divine partner.  Such interpretations seldom help you deepen your bond with your Divine Companion any further.

You may be so amazed by the new experiences on the lower floors of the top section that you stop climbing the stairway that leads to a deeper relationship with your Beloved.  Instead, you become mesmerized by the wonderful, but trivial, experiences of the lower spiritual floors.  Becoming overly attached to these intriguing experiences, you may endlessly wander the lower hallways of the top section and no longer climb the stairway which brings you closer to your Divine Companion.  You may deceive yourself into thinking that you have arrived at the highest step on the inner stairway when you are actually quite far from that top step.  You may delude yourself into considering yourself quite spiritual making you vulnerable to feeling quite self-satisfied.  You may be filled with the urge to proclaim and extol your experiences; with that mindset, you aren’t very likely to graciously serve another person or further cultivate your relationship with your Divine Companion.

It becomes easier to bear harder circumstances

The human mind might wish that spiritual growth would be like quickly arriving at the loftiest state where no more growth is required of you.  But spiritual growth isn’t like that.  Even as you ascend very high on the inner stairway, you will continually need to grow; you will still face earthly difficulties which challenge you.  Spiritual growth requires that you graciously bear up under harsh circumstances in the outer world just as Jesus did.  Seen from a purely human perspective, increased difficulties might seem impossible for you to bear; your courage might understandably falter and you might stop climbing the stairway.  But the same difficulties, when viewed from a human+spiritual perspective, seem quite bearable because your Divine Companion has infused you with additional capabilities as you climb; Your Divine Companion endows you with sufficient strength and means to do whatever your Divine Companion leads you to do.

Cognitive grasp vs. spiritual grasp

Having the concept of the interior townhouse and the divine housemate are only the first steps to actually knowing and bonding with your Divine Companion.  These concepts, however wonderful, are simply words until you actually absorb them and allow them to change how you see yourself and God.  Even the highest cognitive concepts are no substitute for actually experiencing the divine inner presence for yourself.  These concepts become valuable when they motivate you to prepare your interior townhouse for the divine presence by purifying your values from all baser desires and by intensifying your holy desire so that it is much higher than all other lower desires.

Dwelling 3 can be secular or spiritual

Reaching the upper floor of the bottom section may, or may not, involve a desire for God.  You can climb to the highest floor of the bottom section and be quite satisfied with your secular development and upgraded human mindset; you may feel no desire to seek any higher floors.  Without any desire to personally draw close to God, there’s no motivation to climb to the top section and involve your Divine Companion in your life more.  Or, although the higher floors of the bottom section are much better than its ground floor, you may have an inkling that even better floors can be found if you continue climbing up your inner stairway.

Some people are fully satisfied with reaching that ceiling of human development and feel no further spiritual attraction.  Their lives are paragons of great integrity: they have mastered their baser urges and lower emotions; they are compassionate and gracious with everyone.  Such lives represent reaching the upper floor of the bottom section (Dwelling 3 in The Interior Castle).  A person can reach this level by addressing the weaknesses of their bottom section through disciplined psychological techniques; although they may participate in religious activities, they have little impact on their inner life.  They have mastered their human nature so that they can accomplish and contribute much to society; they can be a very good friend, partner or parent.

They may bear wonderful human-only fruits, those fruits of the bottom section which are made with only your human resources.  Good works done on your own can be quite wonderful if you are a person with great skills and talents.  In contrast to human-only fruits, the spiritual fruits of the top section made with both your human contribution and the spiritual resources of your Divine Companion.  Even great works derived from your mainly human strengths pale in comparison to what you collaborate more fully with your Divine Companion in your endeavors.

As you climbed to the upper floor of the bottom section, you may have sensed the movement of God in your outer world or felt the presence of your Divine Companion in your inner world.  If those experiences whetted your appetite to know God more intimately, you’ll have a desire to explore beyond your human-only floors.  You’ll need new capabilities to know and benefit from your top section; you’ll still need your bottom section abilities but they alone aren’t enough.

Betwixt the bottom and top sections

You face a critical juncture upon reaching the upper floor of your bottom section: are you content with your current functioning or do you want to climb to higher floors and grow even more?  That choice can be quite unsettling as you hover betwixt and between your bottom section (your psychological-only mind) and your top section (your psychological+spiritual mind).  In your indecision regarding this choice (in your ambivalence), you may feel torn between contenting yourself with a decently well-ordered bottom section and bravely exploring the unknown spiritual territory of your interior townhouse.

The longer you delay exploring the top section, the longer you will be exposed to the glitches of the human brain and to the siren calls of the worldly allures easily seeping in and loudly calling to you.

Such a terrible waste to have found your inner stairway only to cease climbing to where you can experience for yourself the high holy joys which completely eclipse the best pleasures of the world and the most luscious pleasures of the flesh.  How greatly God blesses you that, even with the coarse senses and mindset of the human brain that is so firmly tethered to the ground floor, you can still perceive some of God’s lovely personality while living life on this very material Earth.

Being preoccupied with material matters reduces your headspace, your bandwidth, for spiritual concerns.  Obsessing—excessively worrying about your material and social problems—almost always makes those problems worse.  Obsessing breeds anxiety which never helps you resolve the issues that you must face.  I assure you that shifting your focus to your Divine Companion will help you far more than any amount of obsessing over life’s other concerns ever could.

Return to Main Text (Bottom Section)

Diverse references to a Divine Companion

The notion that a Divine Companion lives within you may seem so strange that you consider the idea farfetched or unrealistic; or perhaps something only accessible to very saintly people.  But many people, both secular and spiritual, have experienced a benevolent inner presence of another being within themselves.  Below is a list of some of those people who have written about their experiences.  Unheralded everyday people have also experienced a loving inner presence that dramatically transformed their lives but they haven’t left a written record.  The list doesn’t prove anything; it simply suggests that the inner partner concept is worth exploring.

Secular names for your inner partner

Richard Schwartz (Internal Family Systems): the [Core] “Self”

Carl Jung: “the Collective Unconscious:” something inside you greater than your innate human capacities

Connirae Andreas (NeuroLinguistic Programming therapist): the “Gift Within”

Diana Fosha (Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Therapy): the “True Other” who couples with the you

Phil Stutz and Barry Michels (Tools): “The Source”

Twelve Step programs: your “Higher Power”

“Divina:” a slang term circa 2012 for a most amazing person and a perfect lover with qualities such as:

vibrant and upbeat (very optimistic about life, herself and you)

doesn't take the low road but shines in her upright ways of interacting with people

elevates you when you are around her

beautiful and wise

insightful; kindly understands you

you feel safe being intimate with her

caring; radiates compassion

articulates her love eloquently and is comfortable expressing it often

talented in a well-rounded way; she is quite balanced

great imagination; very creative

irresistibly attractive and alluring

Spiritual names for your inner partner

Divine Companion (Teresa of Avila, James Allen)

Divine Partner (“Divino Camperero” [Spanish hymn]; Renner.org, MicahRedding.com, Dorothy Littell Greco)

Precious Partner

Beloved (Teresa of Avila: God is her Beloved)

Henri Nouwen’s You Are the Beloved (meaning that You are your Divine Companion’s beloved)

Master Teacher; Inner Tutor

Inner Guide who provides guidance beyond your human capabilities

That of God residing within a person (Quaker)

hints that our inner life has two parts: that of human nature and that of God’s nature

The Inner Light (Quaker)

The Divine Teacher (Quaker: a still small voice; the ineffable voice)

a “God moment” or a “God thing” (Olympic Peninsula phrasing)

hints at two ways of living: motoring through life yon our own and times when God collaborates with you

Spirit Friend (Mennonite hymn)

The Eternal Thou (Buber)

The Oversoul (Emerson)

Divine Indwelling (Thomas Keating)

The Thou, a complementary archetype to our Psyche (Jung)

Jewish: b’tzelem eloheim: the spark of divinity which exists within everyone; it may be dormant or vibrant;

your role is to fan that spark within you and in other people

trust that it exists in each other even when it may not be very obvious

“the sound of the genuine within” (Howard Thurman)

Sovereign Lord, the One to whom you gladly give the leadership of your inner landscape

Master, the One recognized as far more competent than yourself who is the apprentice to the Master

Sophia: the Giver of Wisdom who is far wiser than yourself, the seeker of wisdom

Shekinah (name for sacred inner place for intimate time with your Divine Companion)

Sacred Someone, sacred presence (Adrienne Ehle)

Inner Spring of love and wisdom

Wise Woman (Valerie Kaur; Sihk) who helps birth a new way of being

Inner Mother: Audre Lord (1934-1992): a part of you that enables us to “mother ourselves”.

The Great Father/Mother/Lover Within (a play on the Great Spirit)

The Good Father/Mother/Lover Within (in contrast to the far-from-perfect ones in the outer landscape)

“Someone More” in your inner world: inner analogue to the “Something More” in life (Marcus Borg)

RA (Resident Advisor) like the RA in a dorm who helps you adjust to a new world when you first leave home

The Great Companion (Albert North Whitehead, process theology)

Fellow Sufferer, Fellow in Joy (process theology, Charles Hartshorne)

Thomas Kelly’s many names and verbs in Testament of Devotion

Richard Rohr: listen for the deeper inner voice that isn’t your voice, that isn’t your ego

Return to previous place in the main text (Your Wonderful Housemate)

The rooftop

The rooftop vs. the top section

The rooftop and the rooms of your top section are both spiritual in nature, but the rooftop has a purer spirituality. All the rooms in your interior townhouse, even those of your top section, bear a human imprint to some extent.  But your rooftop bears the spiritual imprint of your Beloved quite distinctly.  Your lower rooms reflect your human personality more and God’s personality imperfectly; the rooftop reflects God’s lovely nature much more clearly than is possible in the rooms below.

Unlike your quite human lower rooms, the rooftop is a nearly pure spiritual place: your soul where you and your Divine Companion can share most intimately; where you can begin to more fully merge your own personality with your Divine Companion’s personality.  On the rooftop, no wall or door (the limited abilities of your human mind) impedes the intimacy between you and your Divine Companion; no human limitation impedes your grasp of God’s loveliness.

Your top section is your own spiritual mind, a collection of your spiritual capabilities and what you have grasped using them.  Your top section is mainly operated by you (with guidance from your Divine Companion, of course).  In contrast, the rooftop is operated by you and your Divine Companion jointly; the rooftop can never be attained or enhanced on your own.  Your rooftop is made for two: a place for partnering a person with the indwelling God, a place for joining the human with the divine.

The clear distinction between your mind and the mind of God

If you suddenly fall into a lake, you are immediately aware that you have been plunged from air into water; you are quite certain that you are in a totally different place.  When you reach the rooftop (when you enter into your soul, the inner place which belongs to both you and God), you are immediately aware that you are no longer on the familiar floors of your interior townhouse; you have made a profound shift from your usual human mindset into a wholly different mindset and heartset (for lack of a better word, heartset indicates your thoughts combined with your values—what you love).  You know in your bones that this new mindset and heartset flow from your Divine Companion by how they “vivify” your life.  When you are on the rooftop and no ceilings exist between you and God, the brilliant divine light now shines into you, streaming into your mind and heart through the soul which you share with your Divine Companion.

The rooftop provides a much more intimate sense of God

You can experience so many wonderful spiritual things in the top section of your interior townhouse that you might mistakenly imagine that the rooftop couldn’t offer anything more.  But it does: the rooftop experiences convey a much more intimate spirituality than you could ever see even from your highest floors where your spiritual sight is still limited to some degree by the walls and ceilings of your interior townhouse (your human nature).  But, on the rooftop, no such human barriers limit your spiritual sight.  When these limitations fall away, your view of God from the rooftop will be far more penetrating; you will grasp God’s character through moments of rich connection and intimacy; any human limitations which interfere with directly experiencing your Divine Companion will fall away.

When you reach the rooftop, you may feel as if scales have fallen from your eyes because you now see more clearly, more broadly and more deeply.  You may feel as if an extended range of vision has kicked in: a new means of seeing/sensing which enables you to better grasp God’s nature and understand divine matters.  This enhanced “sight” enables you to discern the heart of living in alignment with God and assists you in removing any human distortions about what it means to live a life pleasing to God.  This enhanced “sight” also enables you to see and appreciate the spiritual gems of all religious traditions no matter how tarnished they are or how obscured they are by religious trivia.

Soul: a synonym for the rooftop

Your top section (your spiritual mind) is your human possession; the rooftop (your soul) is the shared possession of you and your Divine Companion.  Your soul isn’t totally human or totally divine; it’s both human (yours) and divine (God’s).  Your soul is the place which straddles your human terrain and your Beloved’s divine terrain; the soul is the bridge that connects a human being with God.  Your soul is the crucible where the human-divine bond is forged and strengthened until the point where it becomes so secure and solid that it will persist throughout eternity, even after your life on Earth ends.

In your top section (your spiritual mind), you develop the spiritual capabilities (humility, reverence, purification of desires) which prepare you for meeting your Beloved on the rooftop.  In the top section but before the rooftop, you commit yourself to God but you still retain the option of not going through with your wedding vow to fully cooperate with God; you still keep open the option of reserving some of yourself for you, parts of yourself which you don’t give over to God.  But, on the rooftop, all of your reservations are sacrificed; the collaboration between you and your Divine Companion is total and finalized.  You are at the point of no return: the point of never returning to your prior human-only life, the point of never abandoning your Beloved.  The cooperation within the soul is much more harmonious and full than the best cooperation you might achieve even in the upper rooms of your top section.

Sharing your spiritual wealth with another

When you grasp how generosity is such as essential trait of God, you want to embody that trait as much as you can.  You are morally obligated to share what you have experienced with others who haven’t ascended their inner stairway as far as you have and haven’t received all that God desires to give them.  You are called to share with them for the purpose of activating and energizing them.  Don’t lull them to sleep with shallow sweet nothings (spiritual trivia); instead, alert them to the often-intense warfare between their ego and God which will require their finest efforts to resolve so that they may enjoy deeper intimacy with their Divine Companion.

Always stay humble.  Others have ascended farther up the inner stairway than you have.  You are also morally obligated to learn from them.

Brief rooftop experience, enduring effects below

Lasting benefits of short time on rooftop

Embracing your Divine Companion is like going up to the rooftop of your interior townhouse where your Divine Companion dwells.  Your life will seem quite spacious and vast when you see it from the wide-open sacred rooftop of your house where life seems so large that it far exceeds your fondest dreams.   If you reach the rooftop, you will likely only be there for a little while, perhaps a few minutes or hours.  But even a short time on the rooftop dramatically changes you.  When you inevitably return to the lower floors, you’ll find them much improved as if spiritual angels were busy remodeling your lower rooms while you were in the arms of your beloved Divine Companion on the rooftop.  As Jack Kornfeld says: “after the ecstasy, the laundry.”  But you will find yourself changed as you resume doing laundry because your lower floors are enhanced by your intimate time with your Beloved.

The wisdom of bouncing between the rooftop and the lower floors

People seldom spend very long on the rooftop no matter how much they may desire to stay there.  I’ve never met anyone who remains permanently absorbed in the loving embrace of their Divine Companion.  Although I don’t know everything, an extremely prolonged stay on the rooftop doesn’t seem possible in this life, on this orb.  But again, clearly nothing is impossible for God!  Alternating between enjoying the rooftop embrace and serving others in the world seems to build a more robust and loyal character, traits which please your Beloved.  As you go back and forth between the rooftop and the floors below, you can remake your townhouse to be more hospitable to your most wonderful house guest, your Divine Companion.

God reveals God to you through a relationship

The divine nature is best revealed through an intimate and personal relationship

In the intimacy of the divine embrace on the rooftop, God communicates to you the full extent of God’s love for you and how God will go to any lengths to nourish you and bond with you.  Just as the loving embrace of a parent can communicate love for a child in ways that even the most eloquent words cannot, the divine embrace on the rooftop (in your soul), can communicate God’s love for you better than the most erudite theology can.  Experiencing God so directly through this embrace enables you to fully grasp how valuable God is so that you can place God above all other values, the place which God so richly deserves.

What a blessing beyond all others: that God has blazed an inner path so that even a humble person can grasp God’s amazing character through the intimate experience of a supremely loving relationship in their inner world.  What a blessing beyond all others: that God, who is such a perfect lover, desires you so much that God fully binds Godself to you who, even if you are the finest human being on Earth, aren’t even close to being God’s equal in terms of being a good partner.  God voluntarily and irrevocably binds Godself to you hoping that you will, in turn, bind yourself willingly and irrevocably to God.

The experience of the divine embrace may seem silent because all the usual operations of your mind cease and only spiritual processes are active; spiritual processes may seem silent because they don’t require the language of the human mind.  A deep sense of secure attachment pervades the silence.

Teresa’s wedding vows

Your Divine Companion can communicate with you in many different ways and different circumstances.  After receiving communion once, Teresa had a vision of God in full splendor and beauty in which God communicated to her that God wanted her to care for God’s affairs as if they were her own; and God assured her that God would care for her affairs as if they were God’s own.  This communication, which happened during Mass, was as vivid as the rooftop exchanges which she experienced in private prayer.  The words of this vision seem like wedding vows to each other:

If you care for my affairs as if they were your very own,

I assure you that I will care for your well-being as if it were my own.

God vouchsafes the certainty of the human-divine bond

The higher spiritual bonding of the rooftop is only possible after you have resolved any remaining ambivalence in your devotion to God enabling you move from a temporary non-binding engagement (akin to a declaration of strong interest between two people who are dating) to a permanent and irrevocable marriage commitment (akin to a marriage relationship that cannot be severed).  Once you have fully committed yourself to your Divine Companion, God then vouchsafes the enduring permanence of your connection: your consecrated relationship will endure for your life on Earth and afterwards.

Sometimes two things can merge and then be separated: two candles can touch and form one flame for a moment and then the two flames can be separated when the candles are pulled apart.  Many human friendships and marriages are like this metaphor.

Sometimes two things can merge never be separated again: rain from the sky falls into a lake forming one body of water which can never again be separated into what was rain water and what was lake water.  The water of a river becomes forever part of the ocean when it flows into the ocean; the river water can never again be separated from the ocean water.  The light which enters a room from two different windows becomes so fully merged that the combined light can never again be separated.  A human-divine bond which God has vouchsafed is like these metaphors: you and God cannot be separated from that point on.

If you are blessed to merge with God, you’ll hope that you never separate (unmerge) from God; that there’s no end to this sublime mingling of human and divine, of you and your Beloved.  You will be quite happy to lose your solo personal identity so that you can assume the joint human-divine shared identity, much as the caterpillar readily dissolves its caterpillar existence to assume its butterfly existence.

God seems to abhor a vacuum and so God pours the beautiful divine nature into the vacuum created when you empty your interior world, when you abandon yourself (your ego’s lower wants) and all your smaller desires.

Jesus: “Merge with God as I have”

Jesus prayed that each apostle would be fully one with God in the same way that Jesus is fully one with God.  Jesus wants you, like his apostles, to fully merge with God in the same way as Jesus has.  How beautiful to be willing and eager to give yourself up and fully merge with your Beloved, God who dwells within you!  Merging enables God to lead you, just as Jesus led the apostles, and guide you when you come to a fork in your lifepath and must make a key choice.

Your Beloved gives peace beyond human understanding

Your Divine Companion extends a salutation to you when you enter into your soul: “My peace I give to you.”  The peace of this salutation is far richer than these words could ever express or even hint at.  The salutation acts within you, relieving any doubts and assuring that your Divine Companion is both warm and wise.

The peace beyond human understanding persists despite inner conflicts

The inner world abounds with paradoxes: you can have both deep peace in your soul and still face inner conflicts on your lower floors.  A king can sit in peace on a throne in his castle while wars rage elsewhere in his kingdom; you can sit in peace with your Beloved in your soul even though intense conflicts may rage in the lower rooms of your interior townhouse or the fires of conflict may consume another house in the neighborhood.  These metaphors aren’t sufficient but they suggest how two opposing feelings could exist at the same time within you: experiencing intense and disturbing psychological conflicts and at the same time surely knowing that you are securely attached to your Divine Companion and being completely assured of your Beloved’s true and wholly dependable affection for you.

God is faithful and always shows up on the rooftop

God the Father, Jesus and your Divine Companion are totally trustworthy and loyal partners.  Whenever you reach the rooftop, you will never find it abandoned; your Divine Companion will surely and always be there to welcome you with warm and accepting arms.

But people aren’t as reliable as God. You might not consistently respond when God beckons; you might not consistently seek to reach the rooftop and enter into the shared soul-space to mingle your heart and mind with God’s.  The human-divine relationship only falters due to a person’s limitations or ambivalence; it never falters from your Beloved’s limitations or withholding.

The divine embrace carries the assurance of God’s utter and total reliability as your loyal partner.  The insights from the rooftop also illuminate how your personal liabilities can sabotage this precious relationship.  Please go to any lengths necessary to extinguish psychological traits (weaknesses of the flesh, the coarser aspects of human nature) that might cause you to injure or lose this precious relationship.

Return to place in main text (Rooftop)

After the wedding embrace

[Dwelling 7; chapter 3]

It’s wonderful to have been embraced by your Divine Companion.  It’s even more wonderful when you understand your experience in depth so you know how to cultivate it.

Your relationship depends on divine nourishment

After the divine embrace, you may become keenly aware of how every aspect of your existence is created and sustained by God.  Much more than an intellectual concept, this awareness is steeped in love inspiring you to blurt out your deep affection for such a generous and reliable partner who sustains you so well.  You may feel as if you are tightly clasped to the very bosom of God who feeds you with a stream of spiritual milk which nourishes you and fuels your growth.  Your Divine Companion is quite delighted to finally be able to suckle you with this much richer milk of spiritual nourishment.  In the intimacy of the divine embrace, these streams can now flow fully in you and be absorbed so that their nourishment remains after leaving the divine embrace.

Like the reassuring presence of a loving mother, God’s intimate presence can calm your every anxiety and stimulate your highest ideals.

God’s graces nourish you and also stimulate your hunger for more nourishment

The generous gifts of your Divine Companion are beyond whatever you imagined in your wildest dreams when you lived only on your lower floors.  Your companion’s gifts both sate you and whet your appetite for even more divine nourishments.  You are acutely aware of how much you need continued infusions from your Divine Companion in order to be a worthy partner to such a perfect lover.  Your hunger to be a worthy partner widens the channel through which the divine nourishment flows into you and enables you to do what you most fervently desire: to be a partner who pleases, and never displeases, your Beloved.  You want more spiritual nourishment to continue growing because, having experienced God’s goodness so clearly, you know that your Divine Companion deserves to be partnered with someone who can reciprocate with the fullest love in honor of all the magnificent love which they have received.

Your overmastering emotion

After the rooftop embrace, the sublime emotion of love becomes your “over-mastering emotion,” the emotion which surpasses and tames all other lesser emotions.  Your love for God becomes the supreme emotion which rules all other coarser human feelings; your God-initiated love powerfully motivates all your choices; its fruits are compassionate interactions with anyone you encounter, especially those who are neglected and badly treated.

Fruits of the divine embrace

Your ego (your view of life in which everything revolves around you) is extremely self-centered.  The divine embrace can deftly replace your natural self-centeredness with God-centeredness in which your concerns now all revolve around God’s ways and doing God’s will as best as you can ascertain it and as best as you can possibly do it.  When your center shifts from yourself to God, you devote yourself to caring for God’s affairs and have barely a thought about your own affairs.  To avoid any misunderstanding about the last sentence: this doesn’t mean foolishly neglecting worldly responsibilities but wisely trusting that your welfare is safely in God’s hands.  Of course, you must continue to eat and sleep and take care of your health but you are no longer obsessively concerned with anything more beyond the material basics; excessive material luxuries or social status now have no hold on you.  You neither obsess over or neglect selfcare: it as simply a task that must be done so that you are better able to serve God.  When you are healthy and content with your social position (rather than desiring a higher position), you are better able to do what your Divine Companion desires to be done.

Your ego (your self-centered view of life) never forgets the self for an instant: everything in life seems to revolve around you and getting whatever you want at that moment; all relationships seem to revolve around what they give you.  Being self-preoccupied can seem so baked into human nature that it’s impossible to change.  Yet the divine embrace can deftly replace your natural self-preoccupation with self-forgetfulness, the exact opposite of the ego’s way of thinking.  Sweet self-forgetting has no interest in getting acclaim or recognition but instead wants all praise and acclaim directed to God.  Self-forgetfulness feeds the humility which knows that any good fruit you bear is only possible because you are grafted onto the divine stock.

Long after leaving the rooftop, you may be nourished anew by remembering—by deeply recalling—those precious spiritual intimacies.  Sometimes your Divine Companion, not you, brings such spiritual memories to mind so vividly that you feel the divine presence within you as clearly as you did in that original experience.  Such prayerful memories may feel as if your Divine Companion is recollecting you; as if your Beloved is collecting you, the one who belongs to God, back into divinely loving arms.

You may later “see” the rooftop embrace again as if you are “seeing” it through a crack in the highest ceiling in your top section which enables you to peek through to the rooftop without actually being there.  That small opening, that small crack in the ceiling, may open during the moments when you are in the top section in deepest communion with your Divine Companion.

Accepting and even enjoying difficult spiritual work

The human mind usually shrinks away from tasks that involve suffering, either physical pain or social shunning; or from tasks that don’t quickly produce pleasure, either physical pleasure or social status.  But when you are transformed by the divine embrace, a new mindset takes over that disregards suffering as a factor when deciding to undertake a task for your Divine Companion.  You might even feel a small satisfaction when you are attacked for attempting a spiritual task as if you sense that your faithfulness in the face of such attacks refines your character so that you become a better partner for your Divine Companion, so that you are more robust and remain faithful to your task even in the face of much opposition from others.  Like Jesus, you might no longer resent those who attack you; you might even feel compassion for them and wish that they could feel God’s love more acutely.  Teresa was willing to stop receiving the blessings of her Divine Companion if that meant that her attackers could receive those blessings instead.  Fortunately, the spiritual economy doesn’t operate on such stingy zero-sum principles!  But her wish indicates how other-centeredness can so fully replace self-centeredness when your Divine Companion’s love transforms you.

In the divine embrace, your Beloved acts as the midwife who helps you be rebirthed in the spirit as a new person.  A new spiritualized mindset uplifts and extends your previous mindset.

In this new transformed mindset, any desire to be quickly ascended into heaven to escape life’s hardships is replaced by a desire to remain on Earth so that you might do as much spiritual good as possible because it is so sorely needed.  “Spiritual good” is helping others to see the beauty of God more clearly and feel God more deeply.  You may even desire being saddled with hard tasks that have long odds of succeeding.  Your prior desire to experience the joys of heaven sooner are superseded by a desire for spiritual work, harder work and then even more challenging work.  You might almost forget about heaven and be wholly satisfied with doing God’s work as best as you can; you might even consider hard spiritual labor to be as satisfying as any pleasures of heaven might be.  You might become less focused on heavenly rewards because doing God’s will here on Earth seems sufficiently and abundantly rewarding.  You hope to change the prevailing disregard for God to more reverence for God.  Your own experiences assure you that God accompanies you now just as surely as God accompanies a person in heaven; the sweet satisfaction of your Divine Companion’s company can sustain you through many difficulties and challenges.  You are sure that, should you stumble in doing a spiritual task, your Divine Companion will catch you and support you in areas in which you are weak.

In this new transformed mindset, avoiding earthly difficulties or reaching heaven quickly ceases to matter very much to you.  All that matters to you is following God’s path no matter how arduous it becomes; doing what God wants done no matter how demanding it is.  In this frame of mind, you come to a point where you desire only two things: 1) intimate time alone with your Beloved; and 2) spending all your time and effort doing what your Divine Companion wishes to be done with your shared life here on Earth.  Impatience with arid times when you feel bereft of your Beloved’s companionship fades away.

When you consider how poorly Jesus was treated, you might then count yourself blessed when you are dismissed and disdained.

God gives all to you; God entrusts the divine gifts to your care

God gives everything to you when you reach the rooftop; God makes available to you every divine gift that can nourish you and assist your growth.  The continued availability of these divine gifts requires that you must reciprocate: that you also give everything of you to God; that you allow God to act within you in your inner life; and that you, of your own active and glad choosing, give yourself wholeheartedly to doing what God wants you to do.  Then, in the great circle of reciprocity, your Divine Companion can continue pouring all necessary divine gifts into you.

Your soul begins to dilate in your first rooftop embrace.  Then it continues to dilate in following embraces as if your soul needs more room for your burgeoning human-divine partnership.  Each subsequent deep communion with your Divine Companion enhances and expands your soul as if you are becoming a larger person; as if you are now a hybrid human-divine creature.  As your soul dilates, you and your Divine Companion become more fully harmonized so that your Beloved feels more at home in the rooms of your interior townhouse.

The rooftop embraces enable you to intimately experience more of God’s lovely character.  Perhaps God may call you to share that enlarged view so that others may have faith and climb their inner stairway more diligently.  Or perhaps God may wish that you hold your inner experience to yourself and allow any spiritual fruit (how you engage with another person) to speak for itself more directly than words might.

Bringing your human concerns to the rooftop doesn’t seem appropriate; that seems like a spouse bringing concerns about paying the bills into the marital bed.  Such concerns are quite real and important to deal with, but not in the bedroom or in moments of deep spiritual communion.  Of course, it’s good to bring your concerns (when you aren’t in the bedroom) to your companion who is so wise and who can guide you in resolving them; it’s good to bring your wounds to your companion who is the finest doctor of all and who will heal them as the divine wisdom dictates.  In another spiritual paradox, your Divine Companion, who is wonderfully attuned to your needs, may heal you when you simply arrive without making an explicit request.

Assurance of secure attachment

To reach the rooftop and feel God’s pure love so directly in your very soul contains an assurance and peace that nothing earthly or psychological can bring.  This assurance, both peaceful and invigorating, is a motif that appears again and again in scripture and in the lives of the holy ones who have embraced their Divine Companion.  Anyone who has tasted this sweet assurance of being so securely held in God’s arms and being so well cared for by your Beloved knows how this human-divine relationship is far more valuable than what people usually treasure.  Each person who has tasted God’s love is obligated to share the possibility (in the most gracious and unoffensive ways; never in pushy or holier-than-thou ways) with a person who is clueless about the great spiritual riches they contain within themselves.

Securing your spiritual memories

Some spiritual practices—prayers, sacred music or art, contemplating wise words—are a springboard which can catapult you up your inner stairway.  But those same spiritual practices that helped you reach the rooftop are no longer needed once you finally arrive there; they may feel superfluous rather than helpful once you are there; they may interfere with, rather than enhance, the communion you share with your Divine Companion.  Bringing your human mindset (even your finest mindset of your top section) to the rooftop may decrease the space available for your Divine Companion’s mindset and heart-felt higher emotions.

Your human mind may conjure up doubting interpretations of whether the divine embrace was actually real; but your first-hand experience can silence any such doubts.  The goodness and beauty of the spiritual infusions which accompany the divine embrace make quite clear that they could only come from God; they are too wonderful to be simply another creation of your human mind.  Another indication that such infusions come from God is that they instantly and effortlessly take root within you unlike human accomplishments that require much time and great effort to create and achieve.

Peter’s full faith enabled him to walk on the water but when doubt invaded his mind, he began to sink.  In the same way, if you seriously entertain doubts about the divine embrace, you’re likely to sink spiritually; thinking that the divine embrace was delusional will rob it of its spiritual nourishment.  If such doubts take root in your mind, please recall your first-hand experience of being lifted above your human mind and being so dearly loved; lay any doubts about the real presence of God within you to rest, once and for all.

Vibrant relationships need continual tending

It’s always possible that you might neglect or dishonor the wonderful relationship with your Divine Companion.  Just as a marriage requires continual cultivation to avoid stagnation and diminishment of the original love which sparked the connection, the human-divine partnership also requires continual cultivation so it doesn’t wither or die.  How wonderful if you continue to be a wise gardener who nourishes the divine seeds implanted within you on the rooftop; how terrible to not understand or not care and allow those precious seeds to rot away due to your neglect.  If you value the seeds from the divine embrace, you will do everything possible to ensure that they don’t wither due to neglect but instead thrive due to your diligent care and cultivation.

These seeds from the divine embrace are so valuable that you may consider yourself unworthy of being the gardener who cares for them; such a sense of unworthiness is an affront to the wisdom of your Divine Companion who surely would not have given you these divine leadings if you weren’t ready to cultivate them and use them.  You may feel as if the seeds are a mighty treasure that taxes the ability of your ship (your interior townhouse) to carry them safely; such doubts are also an affront to the wisdom of your Divine Companion who surely would not overload your mortal frame so much that you collapse under the burden.  Your Divine Companion knows your capabilities better than you do.  Allow God to banish such doubts just as God can calm the stormiest of seas and bring order out of the chaos of the universe.

Only two options: expansion or contraction

Spiritual stagnation (ceasing to climb your inner stairway) is the same as descending the stairway; spiritual inertia is spiritual decline.  Let your love for your Divine Companion motivate you to maintain your spiritual momentum on the inner stairway as you blossom into an ever more worthy partner to your Beloved.  Recognize that the stairway is not a path of rest and bliss but a path of embracing the challenging spiritual work which is found all along the way.

As you draw ever closer to your Divine Companion, you grow: you heart dilates with more love; your soul expands to accommodate more of your Divine Companion; your mind grows to grasp spiritual matters more deeply.  If your climbing slows to a crawl, all of this dilation and growth gradually fades.  If you remain stalled, you contract (the opposite of dilation) until you eventually become a spiritual dwarf: your heart constricts making it harder to love, your soul constricts and provides less room for your Divine Companion, your mind contracts and can’t grasp spiritual matters as deeply.

Nothing in the world is static; everything, even the mighty ocean, ebbs and flows.  Nothing in your inner life is static; everything, even your most ardent desires, ebbs and flows.  As long as you live on Earth, the weaknesses of the human mind pose a danger that your spiritual growth might slacken and ebb.  Those ever-present risks diminish the more time you spend in your top section and on the rooftop.  It’s good to be aware of the possibility that your human-divine relationship might falter; but it’s more fruitful to put the majority of your focus on the possibility of enhancing your relationship with your Divine Companion.

One master

Jesus said that you can only faithfully serve one master; then you are certain to do that master’s bidding because you have no conflict with another master.  In the same way, you can only have one highest value: either your Divine Companion or your own ego.  The high aim of prayer, the high aim of your inner dialogue with your Beloved, is to so fully center all your desires on God that you only serve one master, the most wonderful master of all, your Divine Companion.  Making God the master of your heart and mind is the engine that produces good fruit when you engage with others.

Serving loyally

Spirituality is the continual process of ever more fully committing yourself to becoming a better servant of God; willingly serving without questioning; doing everything and anything that the divine master asks of you.  You sacrifice your own identity so completely that it is as if you now wear a brand indicating your life is the property of God; you no longer claim ownership of the remaining time allotted to you on Earth.  If God wishes, you will go wherever God sends you and undertake whatever tasks God commits to you.  Becoming a willing servant to God involves both great humility and great-self-respect: deep humility because you are well aware of how much greater God is than you; a profound self-respect that you are able to enlist yourself to doing God’s work here on Earth.

When you elevate God as your highest value, the value of your ego declines; its dictates are demoted and have less pull on you and your choices.  Once you’ve grasped the beauty of your Divine Companion’s character, all other worldly acclaims and honors lose their appeal (lose their value in your eyes) and aren’t worth expending an ounce of effort to obtain.  Valuing your Divine Companion more than yourself, you become totally consumed with loving God and living by God’s ways (loving other people, especially those who aren’t appreciated or well loved).

Rooting out timidity, growing your courage

God seems determined to eliminate every ounce of timidity from you so that

1) you can be fully present to your Divine Companion in your soul and

2) you can engage with others with a rich passion and deep compassion.

Such full engagement requires much courage; you cannot engage in an I-Thou relationship with another person or engage in the I-Eternal Thou with your Divine Companion if you have a timid spirit.  Bravery is often developed in the hardest of times, those situations which require your highest courage.  When you become less timid with another person, you will become less timid with your Divine Companion.  When you become braver in loving your Divine Companion, you will become braver in loving another person.

You may think that you have no charisms like the great holy ones and therefore you can’t help lead a person to their inner stairway and draw closer to their Divine Companion.  Considering yourself as being unsuited for doing great spiritual service, you may become complacent with doing nothing at all.  But no matter how small you think your talents are, you can still do small things in a great way: your prayers for others, your kind tone when speaking with another, your delight in serving.  If you interact with another person when you are living by God’s ways, your close contact may be very inspiring even though you don’t preach any high spiritual words or concepts.

genuine love (not great works) is spiritual fruit

God, unlike humans, seems to value and appreciate a person based on the purity of their desire, not based on the magnificence of their work in the eyes of the world.  A small humble deed done with genuine love pleases God far more than great work done with a cold heart and self-centered mindset.

Embrace challenging work: you can do this!

Your Beloved’s love abundantly nourishes you for doing spiritual work, work which is usually very challenging because few people are really interested.  Time in your Divine Companion’s embrace prepares you for the demands of doing God’s work.

Having a very high ideal of what God’s mission could be, you may be frustrated by your body’s weaknesses or your mind’s limitations that prevent you from accomplishing all that you can imagine might be done and all that you aspire to do.  Many holy people recognize their weaknesses yet work to their utter limits; their wholehearted consecration despite their human limitations can be more inspiring that many sermons.  God’s spirit-based strengthening regime often includes the impact of your physical ailments.  God doesn’t always cure your illnesses but may very well help you better cope with your pain.  Perhaps your health struggles may even be a part of the path that brings you closer to God.

Praising God, with no thought of yourself or any benefit you may receive, seems to endow you with the strength needed for the most demanding spiritual work.  Undertaking demanding work for God is invigorating; shirking such work for worldly ease (including a plush church position) depletes you spiritually.  Please avoid the mistake of thinking that a life of ease or public acclaim is a blessing from God; it may more likely be a spiritual impediment because it satisfies your ego’s cravings which paves a path to shifting your devotion from God to your ego which may eventually become the one master which you obey most reliably.  The most admirable spiritual people serve with every ounce of their strength in very difficult circumstances, not someone perched in luxury who erroneously thinks their status and plush circumstances reflect how God is quite proud of them.  Oh, please!

After the divine embrace

The divine embrace is so wonderful that you may be tempted to think that your journey on the spiritual path has ended and content yourself with the illusion that you have arrived at the peak of the spiritual mountain, that you have reached the summit of human possibilities.  But the divine embrace is not the end of the spiritual path just as a wedding, no matter how wonderful, is not the entire marriage.

Even after being embraced by your Divine Companion on the rooftop, you will continue to experience challenges and sorrows in the bottom section.  You’ll continue to experience the unavoidable sorrows of life but, however intense, they won’t endure as long as they did before you were embraced.  They become less crushing and won’t dampen the blessed assurance of being so securely held in God’s loving arms.  Your spiritual attachment, however embryonic, endures through difficult times and—if you cultivate your inner spirituality—continues to grow even stronger and more vibrant even in barren conditions in the outer world.

God wants you to ascend very high on your inner stairway.  Jesus prayed that you might become as perfect as God the Father is; that perfection gradually builds over a very, very long time as you consistently ascend the inner stairway.  Notice that Jesus didn’t pray that you might have amazing spiritual consolations, only that you seek to know and follow the Father’s ways, that you are gracious to others and respectful of them.  Jesus taught that two cardinal guidelines underpin a spiritual life: loving God with all your heart and loving other people with much compassion and graciousness.

You must pay attention to each small step as you climb up a mountain; if you become distracted by lofty thoughts, you are vulnerable to twisting an ankle which then makes it all that much harder to reach the mountaintop with its great vistas.  Likewise, you must pay attention to the seemingly small details of the spiritual path; if you become distracted by all the lofty heights that you want to reach, you become vulnerable to being less attuned to what God wants you to do.  Losing your God-focused perspective, you are more likely to stumble and figuratively twist an ankle (lose some of your spiritual capabilities).  You become vulnerable to an egotistical desire to be an acclaimed savior or guru more than to be an unacknowledged servant and washer of feet.  Please save all of us from such self-centered plans to be great and acclaimed here on Earth!

Ever-present possibility of regression

Although it seems impossible that anyone would leave a perfect lover for a far lesser lover, people seem to be quite capable of such folly.  Be vigilant that no forces of the bottom section (your ego) reach up and drag you down from the top section or even the rooftop.  Allow nothing to pull you away from your Beloved, your perfect divine lover who always remains on your rooftop and faithfully awaits your return.  Don’t stray; don’t stay away too long!

The wonderful joining with your Divine Companion on the rooftop seems like the pinnacle of a person’s spiritual development.  But, even after the rooftop wedding, a person still might forsake their Divine Companion for their ego and the gratifications it desires.   Just as a foolish person sometimes initiates divorce from even the finest spouse, a person can lose their ardor for and devotion to their Divine Companion.

Two possibilities

Even after your marriage to your Divine Companion, two possibilities remain:

1) deepening intimacy and fuller collaboration with your Divine Companion;

2) fading intimacy and lesser collaboration.

Simply staying in a static holding pattern in this relationship is an illusion.  Such a possibility doesn’t exist: stagnation is merely another kind of a fading connection with God.  The possibility of fading intimacy is much less after the rooftop embrace, but the possibility never goes to absolute zero; you always have the freedom to choose to value something more than you value God.

Return to your place in the main text (Rooftop)

Improving inner insight

Inner insight limited by your ego

On the ground floor, you are virtually blind to much of your interior townhouse; you have barely any insight into the ways of your heart and mind.  You likely don’t recognize: how your anxiety paralyzes you; what triggers your anger; how your views can distort your understanding of others; how you act robotically at times when you could instead reprogram your responses to life; how you discount or don’t appreciate God’s contributions to your life; how your worldview includes both truth and error.

The ground floor is your ego’s home turf where its most devious lie prevails: “you are so very special that you deserve to have as much of life’s pleasures as possible.”  Buried within this lie is the belief that you are so great that you shouldn’t humble yourself before anyone, including your Divine Companion.  The ego believes that bowing to another diminishes the great importance and specialness of you.  The ego’s lie contains a seed of truth: you are certainly quite precious to God; your role in the divine family matters very much to God, your divine parent.  But the lie focuses exclusively on that narrow insight (your importance) and completely ignores the larger view of God’s great goodness and the great value of other people.  This lie can grow to the point of suggesting that God’s own greatness is exaggerated in order to manipulate people into worshipping God; that God pretends to love you but really only wants supremacy over you.  The lie whispers seductively to you, saying: “Go ahead and indulge in the world’s pleasures; you deserve it all.  God is highly overrated!  You don’t really need your Divine Companion to have a meaningful life.”

This lie of exaggerated self-importance can be so persuasive that you might never look for something more, something larger than you and your self-interest.  You might never feel a need to search for the inner stairway; if you do climb a few steps, you might think that there’s nothing very worthwhile above the ground floor, nothing better than your ego’s values.  Self-importance can thoroughly end your spiritual growth because it leaves no room for anything other than your ego’s ways: indulging in pleasure and avoiding pain; pursuing excessive security; avoiding any pursuit that requires too much effort.

Vanity ruins everyone it afflicts.  Just as cataracts impair your vision, vanity can so thoroughly impair your spiritual insight that you can barely perceive God’s magnificent character; nearly-blind, you are vulnerable to greatly esteeming your own pedestrian character over God’s sublimely beautiful character.  Then vanity and hubris can grow rampant, choking out your humility and reverence which are needed to cultivate your relationship with your Divine Companion.

The ego’s philosophy of life may work for a while but eventually fickle fortune stops smiling on you and your circumstances diminish: you experience the insecurity of losing a good job; or you taste the bitterness of losing someone who seemed like a good friend or a true love.  Over time, every egotistical pursuit gradually yields diminishing returns and, when you die, the ego has nothing for you.  And you don’t have deeper values or a worthy character to sustain you after the fall.

If you are fortunate, these “tragedies” of losing as you follow the ego’s chosen paths motivate you to seek your inner stairway and find the higher satisfaction of cultivating your relationship with your Beloved who waits for you.  In contrast to worldly paths that gradually fade, the spiritual path (your inner stairway) leads to enduring goodness and beauty; to a loving and trustworthy partner whose affection never fades.  Your Divine Companion’s affection is never deficient although, at times, you may barely appreciate the miracle of being the recipient of such personal and perfect love.  Your Divine Companion wants to enjoy full intimacy with you; to share every aspect of your life with you; to be with you in every moment, in moments of utter discouragement as well as in moments of great happiness.

Compared to the supreme love of your Divine Companion, even the best love humans can muster on their own is merely a flicker compared to the brilliant light of God’s love.  You may think that God’s love is akin to a person’s affection because that is the nearest worldly equivalent.  But your Divine Companion’s love is so much more than even the wonderful love of a good human partner.  You can only experience the blessing of such amazing affection when you escape the pull of worldly attractions and place yourself under the pull of higher spiritual values.

As you climb the inner stairway, you begin to see the larger scope of your inner world and become aware of its previously unrecognized inner operations.  As you experience the distinct difference between the bottom and top sections, you begin to appreciate the great battle raging within you between your baser instincts and your higher desires.  Sensing the immense significance of this conflict between your lesser angels and your better angels may motivate you to move your center of gravity away from your bottom section and towards your top section.  Sensing your finite time on Earth may motivate you to not fritter away the precious gift of your allotted remaining time; to not disappoint you better angels; to not disappoint your Beloved who waits patiently for you to come to the very top of the inner stairway.

Inner insight limited by addiction

You may be smitten with a particular worldly goodie and “love” what you are addicted to above all else.  If so, you will lose your insight and fail to appreciate how, in the long run, worldly attachments and egotistical self-preoccupation will eventually let you down; often, they will let you down very hard.  But, in the dimness of a worldly mindset, you don’t have the long-distance vision to see where this path certainly is taking you.  What a shame to become so preoccupied with pursuing the treasures of your own bottom section when the top section of your own townhouse holds such superior treasures.

Abandoning yourself to pleasure seeking eventually squanders all of your rich endowment leaving you with a greatly diminished character, with a decrepit and run-down interior townhouse.  Your life is far less than it could have been if you had wholeheartedly pursued higher values.  Dedicating yourself to pursuing worldly allures is like being bitten by a snake: the venom of your misguided desires gradually infects all of your body, destroying you cell by cell until your higher capabilities barely function at all.  As your character is degraded by again and again choosing the lesser over the better, you lose your precious capacity to grow closer to the God who dwells within you.  Even then, all is not lost.  But redeeming yourself usually requires much effort by others to rescue you and heal the great damage you’ve done to yourself.  Even then, a Divine Companion’s great and tender love can rescue a gravely ill soul—but why would you ever treat so poorly the One who loves you so truly?

Inner insight into human ambivalence

Inner insight is being aware of what happens in your inner world, especially the impact of unresolved ambivalence on the human mind.  An intense battle rages in your interior townhouse between your ego’s distortions (“I am the greatest!”) and appreciating God who loves you so much (”God is the greatest!”); that battle gets less and less intense as you spend more and more time on your upper floors, as you spend more and more time in the more spiritual parts of your mind.

The quality of your character rests largely on how you resolve your ambivalence, your waffling between the two core options available to you.  Day by day, you are shaping your character by the choices you make, by what you opt to pursue in each moment of your precious time: will you, moment by moment, devote time and energy to pursuing that which glitters and then fades?  Or will you, moment by moment, pursue the much more wonderful but subtler beauties and truths that endure eternally?  Many people seem to have no idea, or only the vaguest idea, of this core choice which life is pressing upon them in each moment of every day, in each train of thought and in each situation that demands a response from them.  Being oblivious of this very important choice may seem like bliss because it saves you the mental effort of engaging with this ever-present decision.  But being oblivious of this very important choice also prevents you from making a full and consecrated decision to seek the most wonderful partnership that you could ever experience.  How much better to recognize and face the ongoing challenge of this ever-present choice and reap that precious reward of human-divine intimacy!

Inner insight limited by half-heartedness

Spiritual growth requires both your wholehearted desire for God and the assistance of your Divine Companion; spiritual growth is a joint effort that will sputter out without your participation.  God’s participation in this joint venture is always assured; God’s concern and care for you never diminishes or vacillates.  But your participation may likely fluctuate, especially on the lower steps of your interior stairway: you may doubt your Divine Companion’s goodness.  How could you really grasp it until you have experienced it first-hand?  Even with your doubts and half-hearted participation, your Divine Companion offers you the most finely attuned assistance when you are sincerely receptive.  God greatly simplifies making choices by illuminating your mind so you can recognize what is true and accurate versus what is not.  Without God’s clarifying light, in the mental darkness, you might get mired in quicksand-like confusion.  Without the divine light that enables inner insight, you might think that you are actually seeing clearly when you are nearly blind; you might think that you are following the holy path when you are far off the trail.

God’s light also helps you discern a person who truly loves God from a person who proclaims their sanctity but doesn’t really love God above all else.  Discerning a person’s motives and values enables you to engage with fellow seekers of divine intimacy while also setting clear boundaries for posers who might pull you off of the spiritual path.  Always set such boundaries with kindness and tenderness for would-be trespassers who might otherwise slip into your interior townhouse and pollute your inner atmosphere.  Perhaps some church attenders may try to convert you to their chosen religion.  In your initial conversations, their religion may look at first glance like a path to God; boundaries enable you to more fully explore it and see if it really a path to intimacy and cooperation with God.  Or perhaps well-intentioned secularists may try to persuade you that trusting God is quite foolish; they may urge you to abandon your spirituality and join them in their religious-like trust that science provides a complete explanation of everything.  In your initial conversations, their arguments and reasoning may seem convincing; setting boundaries gives you time to recognize that science only explains material facts and offers little or nothing regarding the purpose of life.  Boundaries help you recognize whether a friend or community will help or hinder you in your spiritual growth; boundaries allow you to intentionally select and invest yourself in healthy friends and company.

Making peace with your human limitations

Even after deep spiritual communion, you can still make spiritual errors and regress back to the ways of the lower levels of your interior townhouse.  Even after you have ascended the interior stairway, nonspiritual thoughts and concerns may dominate your time and attention for a while.  Expect to have such lapses; they are simply a part of being human.  These lapses shorten if you don’t despair and get excessively discouraged by them.  They are simply a part of human nature.  They are like false trails leading nowhere that a hiker might mistakenly take when the true trail grows faint; once they recognize their error, robust hikers always return back to the true trail.

Better to continue walking on with hope and integrity than to sit and cry when you realize that you’ve been following a trail that doesn’t lead you closer to God.  Upon realizing that you have slipped spiritually, resume the spiritual practices and habits that previously lifted you up.  Every day and every thought spent obsessing over your lapse simply become a wasted day and an unproductive thought.  What a shame that you might unnecessarily waste even one day in unnecessary despondence that could have been spent drawing closer to your Divine Companion.

Your Divine Companion is an excellent teacher who can use even your lapses and mistakes to help you understand yourself and life even better.

QUOTE [page 62; Starr translation]

“What could be worse than not feeling at home in our own house?  What hope do we have of finding rest outside of ourselves if we cannot be at ease within? “

PARAPHRASE

“What could be worse than not feeling at home in your own interior townhouse?  How could you possibly find peace and assurance in the often-harsh world if you cannot find and be nurtured by your wonderful inner resources?  What could be worse than seeing yourself—your God-given interior townhouse—in an overly critical light?  What good is the best external religion if you don’t also experience the warmth of God’s love in your own interior world?  What good are theological insights about heaven if you don’t also have the inner insight to see your own interior townhouse illuminated in the light shed by your Divine Companion?”

Intimacy with your Divine Companion begins with and then rests on your human nature.  Though imperfect, be grateful for your human mind, your best ally in drawing close to God, even with its limitations and glitches.  How foolish to wage war against yourself, your essential but imperfect mind!  How great a mistake to be at war with the very gift God gave you which enables you to eventually enjoy that most wonderful partnership into which your Divine Companion invites you.

Jesus always responded graciously and kindly whenever he was treated harshly and even in the face of great evil.  He seemed to accept and love a person no matter how imperfect they were.  He was considerate of even the Pharisees who disrespected him and condemned him as evil.  Jesus said “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do” to the soldiers who tortured and killed him.  The sublime graciousness exhibited by Jesus begins at home; it begins within your interior townhouse.  You cultivate that graciousness by being kind and forgiving to those who aren’t kind and considerate to you; you cultivate that graciousness by being kind to your own less-than-perfect parts.  Only when you cultivate such spirit-based graciousness in your inner world can you hope to be gracious when you are mistreated in the outer world.

Please be firm but gentle when you encounter imperfect parts of your interior townhouse or when you feel the tug of your baser urges.  Trust the rightness of the kindness with which God sees you; trust that God’s loving and warm gaze sees you far more clearly than your ego’s judging and critical glare which sees you with a cold eye and a critic’s vindictive heart that enjoys attacking you for even the slightest mistake.  Kindness for both your less-than-perfect parts and for people who ignore you or disrespect you are like an elevator that accelerates your ascent to the higher floors of your interior townhouse.  Reaching your higher floors helps you be more compassionate to your weaker aspects.  An accepting and forgiving attitude towards your human imperfections gives you power over them and neutralizes their power to control you.  Forgiveness and kindness enable you to experience great spiritual joy in this life, on this planet, in this moment.  Rather than being tormented by your imperfections and their impact, you might even come to laugh at the parts of you which you once despised so much that you avoided them at all costs.

Using force may be appealing when you want to correct problems that you see in your interior townhouse.  Despite its superficial appeal, force seldom makes lasting improvements and often creates collateral damage.  Gentleness is a far better approach for making enduring improvements.  Your inner world—being a lovely, if unfinished, creation of God—deserves to be treated with great tenderness and care.

The need for slow and steady growth

Likewise, a huge dramatic interior makeover done in one sweeping project is likely to be a dramatic flop in the long term.  Never underestimate how much you can upstep your character by consistently taking small steps in the right direction: adding a few more minutes of prayer every day rather than attempting a huge increase in your devotions all at once; such a huge change seems wonderful but is likely unsustainable.

Your upper floors hold great spiritual beauty but you can’t experience it without going through the intermediate floors and experiencing all of your human nature in the process.  What a terrible insult to your Beloved if you ascend a few steps up the stairs and glimpse some of the divine beauty only to return to the lower floors because you lacked the stamina to climb further, because you were no longer willing to carve out time in your life for your Divine Companion.  God will always help whenever you make some effort to climb your interior stairway but even God cannot assist you if you have no desire for the upper floors or who have no stamina for climbing heavenward.

Prayers are like the treads on the inner stairway: each one brings you closer to your Divine Companion.  Make good use of those holy treads!

Seeking wisdom from another

If you are fortunate to know a spiritually wise person, seek out their perspective on your inner experiences.  Thoughtfully combining both of your experiences and perspectives can minimize what is trivial and highlight what is central to the inner experience of God.

If you can’t find such a person, you can always seek guidance from your Divine Companion.  You are never spiritually alone even when you don’t have a human spiritual guide or director.  Your Beloved would never leave you totally deserted; don’t believe the illusion that you are alone and abandoned when you have no human kindred spirits in your life at a particular moment.  In such circumstances, allow yourself to be led and directed by the God dwelling within you.

Missing your subtle lack of humility

Complaining about spiritual aridity

If you feel that your spiritual life is arid (that is, you feel that you should be experiencing more bliss based on how good you have been), you may benefit from more humility, from more trust in the wisdom of your Divine Companion who will wisely pull you into the divine embrace at the right time which is optimal for your spiritual growth.  A humble soul patiently awaits that time without a complaining heart.

A person’s good works may erode their humility; it’s impossible to enter your Divine Companion’s sanctuary without complete humility, without completely throwing yourself on the mercy and goodness of God.  Perhaps your impatience is a sign of a subtle arrogance: “Hey God!  I think I’ve done enough and then some.  I’m overdue to have more spiritual bliss.”  Perhaps you harbor a stealthy sense of entitlement which will teether to your lower floors and keep you from ascending any further up your inner stairway.

Your life is certainly quite precious: its great value is rooted in your capability to bond with your Divine Companion.  That bit of truth can metastasize into arrogance when you greatly exaggerate your own value and think that you are extremely precious all on you own.  Lacking humility, you may come to believe that you don’t need God to be a good, even great, person; that you are wonderful simply on your own resources and that you require nothing or no one else to be great.  Such an arrogant heart removes itself from so much divine nourishment!

Being in thrall to the smaller spiritual experiences

The most wonderful spiritual delight is being fully aligned with God’s will and living in God’s ways.  Smaller spiritual delights come from isolated experiences in the top section, perhaps feeling a sense of unity with all of creation but without any personal connection with God.  Many people are so fully sated by these smaller delights that they stop climbing their inner stairway any further.  They can’t experience God’s wonderful embrace because they are so mesmerized by their overly treasured smaller spiritual experiences.

The deepest spiritual delights are experienced not in the top section of your interior townhouse (your own spiritual mind), but on the rooftop (your soul: the space you share with your Divine Companion, not a space for you alone).  There, in the arms of your Divine Companion, you see and feel the kindness in the soft loving gaze of God’s eyes.  If you don’t become too obsessed with the pleasant but smaller spiritual delights, if you abandon all self-absorption, you will, sooner or later, be lifted up by additional divine infusions which help you reach the rooftop where you will have your own first-hand experience of the God who dwells so close to you, who actually dwells within you.

Seeing only the bottom section of your interior townhouse

What a terrible thing to be so immersed in your psychological self that you have no sense of your fuller beauty!  Being thoroughly anchored to your ground floor, you may feel ashamed of who you are because of a laser-like focus on some flaws which you perceive in yourself.  Such tunnel vision obscures the great beauty which God endowed you with when God created you with divine-like powers to choose your values, to love another and to cultivate a more beautiful character.  You might think poorly of yourself if you only consider your human nature which has powerful but base drives that can easily overwhelm everything else within you; you might think yourself wholly sinful and debased if you had no sense of the divine nature you possess in addition to your human nature.  Then you might think (erroneously) of yourself as being too flawed to be worthy of God’s great love for you.

What a terrible waste to think of yourself as living in a hovel because you only know a small part of your interior townhouse.  If you think that the lower rooms of your inner world are all you have, then you would never explore and seek your highest parts.  You might even live your whole life like a pauper living in a spiritually bereft hovel when, in reality, all along you were living in a richly endowed townhouse befitting a spiritual prince or princess.  You might consider yourself completely homeless although you are actually the proprietor of a magnificent home.  Such poor thoughts betray the truth of how richly endowed you really are.

Perhaps you have no sense of your precious inner world; or you have no hint that you can enjoy the warm embrace of your Divine Companion.  If so, you might consider trusting the experiences of others who found rich spiritual companionship in their inner world; perhaps their experiences might make a spark of hope glow a bit brighter within you so that you have enough light for the next few steps of your spiritual journey.  Gradually, that inner light of hope will burn brighter as you draw closer to your Divine Companion.

As you climb higher into the top section, God is now able to bless you much more than was possible in the bottom section; higher spiritual gifts are virtually invisible to an unprepared psychological mind; they can do nothing for a person who lacks spiritual desire.  God is an extravagant gift-giver to those who sincerely seek God’s company.  God’s gifts to you far exceed whatever you sacrifice or spend as you climb the inner stairway.

When you are in the bottom section, you can only experience or imagine happiness: a positive human emotion based mainly in your ego, connected to your material security and social status.  Only in the top section can you begin to experience joy: a positive spiritual emotion based on glimpsing the goodness of God.

Seeing only your walls

Inner insight involves seeing as much of yourself as possible, not just the readily apparent parts of your personality.  But the scope of your inner insight can be quite limited.  Perhaps you became fixated on the walls of your interior townhouse, your human personality, rather than what you can make of your human life.  Your walls (your human strengths and weaknesses, your likes and dislikes) are certainly quite real; at first glance, they might seem to be all of who you are.  You might be consumed with your specific personality type: “I am a thrill-seeking extrovert” or “I am a conscientious introvert.”  With such a narrow focus, you might fail to see what your personality can accomplish, especially when you partner with your Divine Companion.

A superficial view of your human personality misses the truth that you also contain a soul: a special place built into your interior townhouse for enjoying intimate companionship with the God who dwells within you.  Seeing yourself as a human being who has a divine meeting place releases you from a superficial view of yourself.  You become a focal point where the human and the divine can mingle; your life is a precious opportunity for the divine to cross-fertilize a human being.  Seen with this deeper insight, surely you matter very much!  You matter very much in your Divine Companion’s eyes even if you don’t yet feel that you matter very much in your own eyes.

The distortions of the lower floors

Distorted inner insight

The fuller inner insight of the upper floors enables you to see yourself clearly and to see more of yourself: your Shadow as well as your divine endowments.  But when you live mainly on the lower floors, your inner insight is often near-sighted and distorted; not being able to see all the rooms of your interior townhouse, it feels smaller than it actually is.  When you see yourself with distorted insight it’s as if the walls of your interior townhouse are covered with funhouse mirrors; as a result, you only see yourself in twisted ways.  With cultivation, your inner insight improves providing you with a clearer and fuller view of yourself.

Distortions about you and the meaning of your life also arise from the outer world as well as from your inner world: the foolish and shallow views prevailing in your time and place can be like voices penetrating into you through your townhouse’s doors and windows; when those voices become loud and insistent, they make it virtually impossible to hear the song which your Divine Companion is singing to you from the rooftop.

Clear and wise voices can also infiltrate into your mind from the outside world, such as the words of good-hearted people, spiritual wisdom and sacred texts.  These voices bring clarity and dispel distortions; they are a wonderful help for understanding yourself, God and the spiritual journey; but even the clearest outer voice isn’t nearly as wise and enlightening as the actual voice of your Divine Companion.

Outer experiences can also clarify (or distort) your insight; often the more challenging and difficult experiences can clarify your insight the most.  Illness and suffering may help you see yourself more clearly and sharpen your spiritual receptivity so you can see God dwelling within you.  Be absolutely clear: your Divine Companion would never afflict you with cruel circumstances; your Beloved is far too kind to do any such thing.  But your Divine Companion can use the world’s unavoidable harshness to deepen the bond you share, a partnership that makes the hard times to come much more bearable.

Hard times are not simply a hellish time through which you must grit your teeth and stoically endure.  They are often rich soil for growing a robust and trustworthy character.  Hard times may seem to pass agonizingly slowly; please trust that slowly-made changes are solid and enduring.  A tree in poor soil with limited sunlight or too little water grows slowly but produces a superior and stronger wood than a well-situated tree with no challenges which grows quickly but produces an inferior and weaker wood.  In the same way, hard times can create a strong and beautiful character that thrives even when challenged.  I hope knowing this cause-and-effect relationship helps you navigate hard times with grace and reverence.

Weak inner hearing

The limitations and glitches of the human brain are quite real and impossible to completely escape.  Despite your limitations (for example, you may not always be a hospitable host to your Divine Companion), your Beloved is always a wonderful housemate who keeps calling out to you in a sweet voice, far sweeter than any of the other voices inside or outside your interior townhouse.  The divine voice may be far off when you start your spiritual journey, but if you listen carefully, its rich and warm tone will assure you of how much you are loved and desired.

You grasp a sense of your inner world before you are able to articulate it, much like a child can understand what a parent says before the child can respond using their own words.  You begin to appreciate the lovely character of your Divine Companion after first hearing the lovely song your Beloved sings to you.  But your initial attempts to sing back in response are likely to be very garbled and off-key.  Being unable to adequately express what you feel can be very frustrating, especially for something that matters so much to you! Fortunately, God appreciates your sung response based on your desire (not on how well you hit the high notes); as if God is like a loving parent who proudly hangs a child’s first and imperfect artwork in a place of honor on the refrigerator of heaven.

Return to Inner Insight main text

Harmonizing your bottom and top sections

Describing the great difference between your bottom section and your top section may create the (erroneous) impression that they are so different that they are incompatible with each other.  Your bottom section is where you take your first steps on the inner stairway that leads to your top section and eventually to your rooftop.  Your top section contains spiritual capabilities that enhance your bottom section.  Harmonizing your human nature and your spiritual nature enables each section to complement and support the other.  Integrating your human nature and your spiritual nature is what makes your townhouse all that it can be.

It’s a terrible waste to not make the most of your richly endowed home by not using all its parts.  What a shame to be shackled by the bottom section’s limitations when it can be uplifted by your top section which is so richly endowed with wonderful spiritual capabilities!  What a shame to live in spiritual poverty when your bottom section leads to the upper storehouse of spiritual riches!  Your townhouse becomes a much finer home when the capabilities of your top section are brought into the rooms of your bottom section: the glitches of your bottom section are easily resolved by the graces of your top section.

When you are only aware of your human aspects, the bottom section of the interior townhouse, you might think you aren’t particularly special or that you don’t matter very much; by extension, you might also think that other people aren’t particularly special either.  But even an unspectacular person (to human eyes) is quite beautiful in God’s eyes, to the God who sees their full interior townhouse, the top section as well as the bottom section.  God sees you (and each person) as being able to become a wonderful partner, as if God knows that each person’s townhouse can potentially become home to both a person and God; that each person is like a house that can become a home in which the human-divine relationship can develop and flourish; and then your interactions with others (the fruit you bear) will become more gracious and caring.

Return to main text

Along the climb

Starting the inner climb

Your initial steps climbing the inner stairway will require more effort compared to moving down the hallway from a room to another room on the same level, on the same floor; it takes additional mental effort to overcome your psychological inertia and cultivate new aspects of yourself.  Just as climbing a mountain uses muscles that aren’t used when walking on a flat path, climbing your inner stairway requires different mental muscles beyond those used when walking the hallways of a given floor; a new mindset needs to be exercised and strengthened in order to leave the comfort zone of your familiar default mindset.

Good mental muscle tone isn’t enough to climb the stairway; you also need a reason to motivate you to put out the extra effort: a sense that your upper floors contain something worthwhile that will enable you to live a fuller and more meaningful life.  Why would anyone exert the extra effort needed to climb the inner stairway if the upper floors were just like the lower floors?  If all the floors of your interior townhouse were identical, then climbing the inner stairway would just be a foolish expenditure of energy that doesn’t help you grow.

Stagnation or continual climbing

Precisely practicing the exact same spiritual ritual year after year has the potential to become cold and rote, hardly the foundation for a vibrant relationship with your Divine Companion.  Imagine a spouse repeating the exact same affectionate words every single day of their marriage; even the most wonderful and eloquent words will eventually lose their loving feeling when repeated verbatim endlessly.  But fresh and heartfelt words of affection stave off crystallization and keep your relationship vibrant and alive.

The stairway never ends

No matter how much you have grown spiritually, you can always align yourself more closely with God.  No matter how far you have climbed your inner stairway, it always has higher steps for you to take.  Fortunately for us, the stairway has no limit or end in this life.  Unlike a completed building that never changes, your interior townhouse can always grow and become more spiritual; you can always acquire a bit of the character of your Beloved. Unlike a physical building, God made your interior townhouse capable of growing continually; like a tree which can always grow a bit more, you can always grow a bit more spiritually; you can always acquire a bit of the character of God.

You will become quite vibrant and active when you have been embraced by your Divine Companion: you will no longer rest like a couch potato, content with your human accomplishments.  You will no longer be abused by the voice of an unrelenting Inner Critic (or another such persona) who was a virtually permanent squatter and dominant voice on your lower floors.  You will be delighted to continual climbing the never-ending stairway that brings you closer to your Beloved.

The ground floor as seen from above

You might think that your ground floor is evil because so much of its ways are at odds with God’s ways.  Thinking that some of your parts are evil is a distortion based in a ground floor mentality.  Before glimpsing your Divine Companion in your top section or experiencing the warm embrace of your Beloved on the rooftop, your ground floor seems so infinitely separated from God that it imprisons you and keeps you from spiritual growth.  But after such a life-changing glimpse or embrace, you now see that the same ground floor, although primitive, is a launching pad for beginning your journey towards God, the trailhead to the path for pursuing a relationship with your Divine Companion.

Seeing yourself through a top-section mentality helps neutralize the self-absorbed tendencies that are so strong on the ground floor.  Your top-section mentality grows stronger when you frequently turn your attention to God or study people who dedicate their lives to loving God.  Turning towards God corrects the baked-in human tendency to excessively elevate yourself, as if God continually corrects your ground-floor distortions about yourself the further you ascend the inner stairway.  God provides you with a new sense of yourself, a perspective which you could never cultivate on your own no matter how hard you try.  You see that even your primitive lower floors can be transformed into a sweet place that exudes a tender and caring fragrance which seeps through your open windows and reaches the people who visit your front porch or rear patio.

Simple beginnings, amazing potential

Early on the spiritual path when you are living mainly on the lower floors, your inner world may feel like a newly-begun garden where the newly germinated spiritual seedlings are overrun by much larger and well-established weeds.  Those pervasive human weaknesses may seem impossible to remove because they seem so deeply rooted.  But don’t let despair over your human nature obscure the wonderful seeds which God has planted within you; be assured that cultivating your spiritual endowments will uplift your character so you become a worthy partner for your personal Divine Companion.  Yes, your just-emerging spiritual seedlings may at first seem too weak and small to be of much value but they can grow strong enough to lift you up from the loneliness and meaninglessness of a material-only existence.

Vacillation is a natural part of the spiritual path

Perhaps you reached the top section and escaped the clutches of the bottom section only to be recaptured by the lower floors in moments (or months) of weakness: those times when you cave in to your craving for the pleasant feelings which the ground floor pursuits can provide (although such “pleasures” are just a mirage that conceals the pain and loss which will certainly follow when you pursue them).  If you indulge yourself in the lower pleasures, you are apt to forget the far greater beauty you have glimpsed on your upper floors.  Remember you are always free to choose where you go in your interior townhouse; exercise that precious freedom!  You have this inner freedom even when you have extremely little freedom in your outer circumstances; you can make important inner choices even when you have no options in the outer world.  Some brilliant souls ascended to their highest inner floors and enjoyed the divine embrace even when they were cruelly mistreated and had virtually no freedom at all in their outer circumstances.

Fewer and fewer reach the higher floors

Not everyone who has affiliated themselves with a religious organization or who has rigorously pursued a spiritual discipline reaches the top section of their interior townhouse.  Some people, religious and non-religious, reach the first floor of the top section and catch a glimpse of this inner world from the doorway only to retreat back to the bottom section; they may then spend the rest of their lives extolling their limited experience.  Many fewer people, even among religious nuns and priests, seem to go much further into the top section, as if the saying “many are called but few are chosen” applies to the inner world.  That saying might be paraphrased as “everyone’s townhouse contains an inner stairway, many have the curiosity to climb the stairway and peek into the beautiful first floor of the top section but few have the requisite attitudes—humility, reverence, courage, holy desire—to climb the inner stairway much higher into their top section.”

Most people, if they even reach the first floor of their top section, seem to stop climbing there and not venture any further.  In the first floor of the top section, your mind is on the bubble between a mainly human mindset and a human+spiritual mindset.  You are vulnerable to falling back down the stairway because you don’t yet have your spiritual legs which, like sea legs, stabilize you so you don’t fall down when your mind vacillates between these two mindsets.  The rocking ship represents your vacillating mind; sea legs represent your ability to stand firm and upright in the face of vacillation.

Rouse yourself from the ground floor’s sleepiness!  Firmly grasp that sublime spiritual gems really are contained in the innermost depths of your heart.  Keep exploring your inner world until you find that high divine treasure which God placed within you.  Such exploring requires a strength of soul (that is, a highly purified desire for God) more than a strength of the human constitution (such as great physical health and power) or strength of the human mind (such as much education or great erudition).  Trust you are equipped with a sufficiently strong soul, which when activated by your pure desire, brings you close to God’s heart.  You have strength enough to climb the inner stairway where you can intimately know your Divine Companion in your own first-hand experience.  God is all powerful and very generous in imparting some measure of that divine strength to you; every time you use your allotted God-supplied strength, God imparts another helping of strength to you.  God is the dependable upholder of your soul; God always rewards the pure and sincere affections of every God-hungry soul with even richer love and greater endowments.

Reaching the first floor of the top section doesn’t guarantee that you will continue climbing the inner stairway.  For various reasons, only some who reach that first spiritual floor continue climbing to the floor above it.  Even fewer people continue all the way to the highest floor of the top section.  In practical terms, this means that very few people will understand your upper floor experiences if you try to talk about them.

An exception to climbing the interior stairway

It seems that most people must climb the entire stairway to reach their Divine Companion; their spiritual comprehension grows as they climb upward; their efforts in climbing seems to enhance their delight in being held in their Beloved arms.  But that isn’t the only way the inner relationship with God can develop.  A few people have almost no comprehension of that inward journey yet they love God intensely and seem to feel their Divine Companion’s love very profoundly.  Such a devout person with minimal comprehension seems to have a spiritual fiber optic cable which brings the beauty of God directly from their rooftop to their lower floors enabling them to personally experience God’s closeness without the arduous climb up the inner stairway.  Because they deeply appreciate that divine beauty which graces their inner world, they are trustworthy companions to their Beloved.

I’ve only met one person who reached the divine embrace this way.  Certainly, there must be others, perhaps a few or many.  God is so vast that God cannot be constrained by my limited ideas of how you develop a relationship with your Divine Companion.

Return to previous place in main text (Climbing the Inner Stairway)

Your Divine Companion and the Climb

QUOTE [Dwelling 4; chapter 3; paragraph 2]

“Let us imagine that the senses and powers of the soul (which I compared in my allegory to the inhabitants of the castle) have fled and joined the enemy outside. After long days and years of absence, perceiving how great has been their loss, they return to the neighborhood of the castle, but cannot manage to re-enter it, for their evil habits are hard to break off; still, they are no longer traitors, and they wander about outside.”

“The King, Who holds His court within it, sees their good will, and out of His great mercy desires them to return to Him. Like a good Shepherd, He plays so sweetly on His pipe, that although scarcely hearing it they recognize His call and no longer wander, but return, like lost sheep, to the mansions. So strong is this Pastor’s power over His flock, that they abandon the worldly cares which misled them and re-enter the castle.”

PARAPHRASE

Even if you abandon climbing your inner stairway

and live wantonly for a long time,

Your Divine Companion, still remains alert and perched within you,

more attentive of your intentions and desires than your actions,

always attuned to the slightest turning towards God,

even if you were enthralled by baser desires for a long time.

Your Beloved wants intimacy with you so much

that your slightest uptick in desiring God can erase years of being ignored.

Then your Divine Companion pipes sweet music into

whatever townhouse room you are in.

The slightest strains of the divine music are sweet enough and powerful enough

to guide a lapsed, but now God-desiring, soul back to their inner stairway.

Your soul’s magnetic attraction to the divine music

will surely guide you back up your inner stairway.

But the same divine music has no pull on you

if your hunger to know God has died off.

Return to the Main Text (end of the Climbing Skills section)

Willing to suffer like Jesus did

The suffering along with the ecstasy

A person embraced by their Divine Companion often feels a deep emotional pain when they can’t assist another person to climb their inner stairs and meet their own Divine Companion.  An embraced person may be especially disheartened to see churched people so immersed in sacred texts yet so far from their Beloved and the spirit of God.  An embraced person’s most cherished goal of assisting others spiritually may seem so hopeless that they long for their own death so that their suffering ends; so that they can move to where virtually everyone reveres God and cooperates in lifting each other up.  But, as long as you walk this Earth and want to walk it as Jesus did, you must accept such suffering; you must keep picking up your cross just as Jesus so willingly picked up a far more grievous cross and bore it so nobly that untold numbers of people are so inspired by his holy example that they willingly accept whatever challenges and suffering they must bear along the spiritual path of their earthly life.

An embraced person may experience two paradoxical feelings: 1) how extremely disappointing an unredeemed person can be to God; and 2) how tenderly God loves even the least spiritually developed person who still retains a chance of accepting and revering God.  An embraced person may feel very sad that, although human-divine intimacy is possible, so very few accept the wonderful invitation to partnership that God extends to them.  Perhaps you might consider yourself blessed to contend with such conflicting emotions because God must also experience the same combination of “feelings:” a hopeful desire that each person draws near to God paired with a keen disappointment when so very few actually do.  Paraphrasing the Canticle: “The bridegroom brings his intimate partner into the innermost sanctuary so that the bridegroom can feel all that his partner feels and so that the partner can in turn feel all that he feels.” How lonely the Perfect Lover, who faithfully waits for this intimate sharing, must feel when you don’t climb the stairway and your Beloved waits alone on the rooftop.

An embraced person is pained to see people living lives not even slightly aligned with God; an embraced person is also sympathetic to such people by remembering their own spiritual misalignment earlier in their life prior to knowing God through the divine embrace.  This human pain must be borne because it can’t be separated from knowing God’s wish to intimately participate in each person’s life, in the full mix of their human weaknesses and strengths.  Knowing how hope is mixed with sorrow, you might more readily endure the piercing pain when people aren’t able to engage in I-Thou connections; when people care so little about the wonderful I-Eternal Thou connection which would enable them to be genuinely loving to others, to be gracious and wise servants of one another.  Your Beloved companionship helps you remain hopeful even when so few attend the great banquet to which God invites them.

Willingness to bear pain for God

While living in the flesh on Earth, Jesus knew God the Father (the God of Highest Heaven) quite well.  Having communed with God in his soul and keenly knowing the great love God holds for each person, Jesus held that same divine love for each person, no matter what their stage of spiritual development.  Jesus must have sensed how the Father might “feel” being callously disregarded by so many people.  Jesus didn’t seek to escape experiencing such feelings of deep divine disappointment; quite the opposite: he wanted to remain here on Earth and endure that sadness so he could minister to any sincere God-hungry soul.  Jesus was pained by the spiritual poverty that so many people live in; he unhesitatingly endured any amount of his own pain (the emotional pain of being shunned and dismissed; the physical pain of his cruel death) because he was so concerned with relieving the pain of each person who felt—erroneously—abandoned by God.  Jesus lived as if relieving the pain of others mattered much more to him than relieving his own pain or escaping the burden of his mission.

You can extrapolate from God’s love for you to knowing that God loves every other person just as deeply.  Being familiar with many people, you know that God’s love is very often unrequited, that God’s precious offer of love often evokes only a feeble response from a person.  You know that few will respond when you reach out spiritually.  Knowing that Jesus was also rejected and unappreciated by many, you are braced to face the indifference of the many so that one person might find their Divine Companion and relieve the terrible pain of feeling like a spiritual orphan.

The anguish of seeing God so broadly disrespected can feel overwhelmingly unbearable when you know what a precious grace so many decline.  Your deepest anguish is not even close to the incredible anguish Jesus must have felt during his torture and painful execution.  Jesus must have been deeply pained by people’s spiritual indifference and near-total lack of reverence for God the Father, the God of Highest Heaven.  Perhaps his terrible physical sufferings were slightly alleviated by the hope that some people would grasp that his final hours were a clear demonstration that God is willing to suffer the most severe indignity in order to help even one person draw closer to God.

Oh, that you might willingly bear and endure your own shunning as nobly as Jesus did! That you might bear the severe contempt of others if that might help even one person draw closer to their Divine Companion; to trust that, when following God’s will, human suffering can be transformed into spiritual fruit.  Without a sense of the larger spiritual purpose of suffering, the pain of seeing God so unappreciated would be utterly unbearable.  But Jesus’ example of using his own suffering to minister to others can deepen your understanding so that your suffering is transformed into glad ministering; so that you are willing to suffer again and again for another person’s benefit.  Be clear that this suffering is not some kind of spiritual masochism (a pain that serves no higher purpose); bearing these sufferings is not gratuitous suffering that accomplishes nothing; rather, this suffering has the clear spiritual purpose of assisting another person to glimpse God and feel God’s warm love.

You are still human; no matter how close you draw to your Divine Companion, you will still sorrow when a dearly loved one is sick or dies.  But you are never alone in those human sorrows: your Divine Companion remains with you at all times.  A suffering shared is halved just as a joy shared is doubled.

Meditating on the suffering of Jesus

Meditating on Jesus’ death illuminates very concretely how he was willing to do anything, absolutely anything, to penetrate the dense human mind so that you might appreciate the great lengths to which God goes to reach out to you.  Jesus’ torture and death were intensely painful in the physical sense; his emotional pain perhaps was even more intense.  One of his apostles had betrayed him; his remaining apostles didn’t really understand him as evidenced their desire for the higher places in a material kingdom at the Last Supper and their use of force to repel those who came to capture Jesus; few followers really grasped who he was and what he offered as evidenced by the many people wanted to make him King after he fed the five thousand but then had only contempt for him when the food stopped coming.  Hanging on the cross, those human emotions from people’s responses might have overwhelmed him if not for his spirituality which assured him that he had faithfully done what God the Father desired him to do in his earthly life.

For many reasons, you might not want to dwell on the suffering of Jesus.  Perhaps it is traumatizing to vividly imagine the tremendously cruel treatment of such a blameless person; perhaps the crucifixion has been presented as a gory sacrifice required by God to make God once again welcome people into his loving arms; perhaps meditating on human cruelty diminishes your grasp of God’s loving character.  Without meditating on the crucifixion, it’s harder to fully appreciate that God can use even such terrible events to reveal God’s loving nature.  Please meditate on Jesus’ sufferings and be nourished by them so his painful experiences won’t be in vain in your own life; let his pain become a magnet that makes you loyal to God and a trustworthy partner to your Divine Companion.

Even after hearing about Jesus enduring great sufferings, many people still don’t appreciate how great his love for each person is.  Jesus suffered greatly in the Garden and on the Cross.  How terrible if, by not appreciating that, you might inflict even more suffering on the Son of God by dismissing this highest example of his love for each of us.  A deeper awareness of Jesus’ sufferings may make you want to tenderly relieve them by appreciating their great significance.  You might be more willing to endure your own suffering and not allow it to interfere with following in his footsteps and trying to help people see, one by one, how much God loves them just as they are because of all that they can grow to be.

Jesus did many “smaller” things, such as encouraging an anxious person or assuring a lonely person; he did very impressive things, such as miraculously healing people, to illuminate God’s tremendous love for you. Even then, many people doubted that Jesus and God the Father really love them very much.  For those unmoved people, the Crucifixion may show how much Jesus loves them; perhaps it may penetrate the doubts of their mind and the walls they’ve built around their hearts.  Seeing Jesus prostrated and suffering in the Garden of Gethsemane might help both a devout soul as well as a cold soul appreciate how very much God loves them.

The desire to die to go to heaven to be with God NOW

The divine embrace feels so good that you may feel the desire to die right now so you can continually experience the higher emotions of heaven.  The jubilation of embracing your Divine Companion and the exalted insights from the flight of the soul are so exquisite that you might want to end your life on Earth so that you can permanently live in a heavenly place of such intense spiritual beauty.  It’s much like, how on a very cold morning, you want to stay under the warm and cozy blankets rather than get up and go out into the cold house.  Communing with your Divine Companion feels so much warmer and richer than your earthly experiences that you never want to leave the divine arms and return to the indifference and meanness so often found in human relationships.  Having purged yourself of worldly desires, no material things tether you here to the Earth; you would gladly end your life because nothing material is even a fraction as wonderful as your spiritual experiences.

Your life on Earth now feels as if you are living in exile, exiled from the place where you really belong, exiled from the spiritual country of which you are a true citizen.  But you have, in fact, dual citizenship: you are a citizen of the spiritual realm as well as a citizen of Earth.  Allow the sovereign of your interior townhouse, your Divine Companion, to direct which realm you will be domiciled in.  Just as the butterfly is a creature of both the air and the land, you are a creature of both the material world and the spiritual world.  You must, for this lifetime, go back and forth from one realm to the other.

A powerful desire to escape this world in order to have more spiritual experiences may reflect immaturity.  Spiritual maturity involves diminishing your own personal desires about where you are and being content to be wherever God wants you to be.  Many saintly people welcomed remaining in tough worldly circumstances so that they might continue to serve rather than wishing to die, to leave their challenges behind for a more perfect spiritual existence.  Don’t deceive yourself that a wish to leave this world (in plain words, to die) necessarily reflects a great love for God.  A greater love is wishing to do whatever God asks of you, even remaining here in challenging times for as long as God should desire that.

A powerful desire to escape this world can feel painful because you have such an intense desire for deeper intimacy with God.  In a person redeemed by God, that pain is thoroughly mixed with a peace and calm; that mixture is quite different from the unease of a person who feels overwhelmed by their circumstances but hasn’t been redeemed by God.  If your longing for heaven feels painful and is colored by much frustration with life, such longing isn’t likely to serve either you or God very well.

Return to place in the main text (Jesus as your Ultimate Guide)

Hard times: your assayer and teacher

The purity of your desire for God is often assayed during hard times.  Before hard times, you may think that your heart is free from all self-centeredness; you might consider yourself to be quite spiritually advanced and to have fully mastered the art of life.  You may have become a big fan of your own piety and think that you are now totally immune to human downturns; that you are beyond being perturbed by life’s happenings.  But when you have an intense negative emotional reaction to hard times, the impurity of your desires comes clearly into focus.

Perhaps as a long-time spiritual practitioner, you may think of yourself as an advanced teacher, far beyond the mere student phase.  In that fantasy, you may come to feel that you should be respected as a sage-like teacher; admitting your limitations and failings robs you of this self-image which you are so in love with.  You quite admire yourself and expect others to admire you just as much.  Without being too aware of it, you have come to live in a fantasy world which greatly exaggerates your goodness and leads you to think that you are free of any imperfections.  Hard times can help open your eyes to how such ideas about yourself are actually a fantasy of your ego which isn’t very realistic.  If you allow disappointments and hard times to be your teacher, they will reveal the impurities that still contaminate your holy desire.  Only then can you further purify your desire so that you are a more trustworthy partner for your wonderful Beloved.

Big reaction to a small issue as if it were REALLY terrible issue

Perhaps you may have a very large negative reaction to a relatively small difficulty, a very strong and long-lasting negative emotion as if you are thinking: How could this happen to me?  How can I continue on having to bear such a terrible disappointment?  Your response, if you are honest with yourself, might reveal your hidden desire (hidden, at least, to your own awareness) which was laid bare by the intensity of your reaction.  Such reactions show that you hold the belief that you, your human self, is quite great and should not be poorly treated.  The intensity of your reaction is likely proportional to the impurities remaining alongside your desire for God.

Sometimes you might suffer because you are doing God’s will, which is often unpopular, especially among church people.  At other times, you might suffer because of your shortcomings or because of the trivial beliefs that you cling to as if they were critically important.  If you are a self-satisfied person, you may be very loath to think that any weakness of yours caused your suffering; instead, you might think you are quite perfect and you must be suffering for God’s sake.  [Note to self: no such person ever appreciates it or benefits if you try to help them see how they actually contributed to the magnitude of their suffering.  They will detest you if you try to help them see their situation more clearly!  Be kind and considerate to them; allow the consequences of their views to help them gradually see themselves more clearly.]

In contrast, a more spiritually sincere person (a less self-satisfied person) will likely recognize their suffering as a sign of how they still need to grow more attuned to God.  Often, your suffering may show you more clearly how you are still personally attached to some worldly thing which interferes with giving your whole heart to your Divine Companion.  If your distress opens your eyes to how you have lost your spiritual way or how you have neglected your relationship with your Beloved, then you can really benefit from the lesson of your suffering rather than complain about it.  With heightened clarity, you are better able to make the necessary corrections to your worldview so it aligns more closely with God’s ways of seeing.  Knowing yourself, being able to reflect on what happens in your inner world, is essential to learning from hard times so that they help you ascend the interior stairway.

A less spiritual person may not recognize the lesson contained in their suffering at all and might continue to mope for much longer than is helpful.  They might even flaunt their suffering in an attempt to get pity from others; they might offer it as proof of their advanced “holiness” in an attempt to be admired by others.  They might (erroneously) attribute their hard times to the flaws of others and miss how their own poorly ordered values and attachments play such a large role in their suffering.

At any point when you struggle with learning from your suffering, humility will always be your friend.  Humility is the ointment for your wounds, a salve for your slighted ego.  Your humility allows God, the great physician and therapist, to heal your wounds and make you stronger in your wounded and hurting places.

If you are aware of the life experiences of many people, it becomes clear that you can experience both God’s intimate love and also experience bouts of depression or other suffering.  Although spirituality buffers you from hard times, spirituality is certainly not a get-out-of-hardships-scot-free card.

Perhaps life has laid you low: perhaps you lost a job and must live with less security or fewer luxuries; perhaps you are estranged from family; perhaps your marriage has become a hateful relationship.  You might rationalize such circumstances as being unproductive by saying to yourself: how can I continue my spiritual journey when I am so materially thwarted or so deprived of healthy connections?  God would prefer that you be less perturbed by the downturn in your worldly circumstances and instead content yourself with following God’s will as best as you can in your lessened circumstances rather than pining away for better circumstances using the thin rationalization that you could do more for God with better material circumstances (a flimsy self-deceit that masks a self-centered desire for a cushier life).

Hard times give you the opportunity to let go of those attachments which prevent you from giving yourself completely to God.  Overmuch psychological distress is a blaring sign that you still cling to “precious” attachments to something worldly or some social status, attachments which limit your intimacy with God and your full cooperation with your Divine Companion.  Imagine someone who is dating a wonderful suitor but she obsessively talks about the previous slights she has suffered when they go out to dinner; she misses a great opportunity to experience a wonderful love right now because she is overly preoccupied by long-ago unloving relationships.  Such is the inner life of a person so trapped by their hurts and traumas that they can’t experience the wonderful divine love waiting for them in their inner rooms.

Each time you suffer emotionally because one of your lesser desires has not been sated to your satisfaction, you have an opportunity to see how shackled you still are, self-shackled through your own choosing of unwise values.  If you humbly ask for help, your Divine Companion will help you loosen those shackles, the grip that your fondest attachments have on you.  Of course, you must keep doing your part and keep working to release yourself from your lesser desires that you once adopted of your own free will.  You and your Divine Companion can work together on freeing yourself; you can’t wholly delegate such personal responsibilities to someone else, not even to a divine someone else.

The losses that excessively trouble you will open your eyes to what still controls your desires (your passions).  The health of your relationship with your Divine Companion improves as you stop feeding your lower desires and only feed your higher desire for God.  Your Divine Companion is the far more accomplished partner in the human-divine relationship; you are always the bottleneck which limits that relationship.

Perhaps you are tempted to shape your relationship with your Divine Companion to your preferences (as you might try to tailor a relationship with another person to your wishes).  How foolish it feels to actually write that sentence!  What absurd arrogance to not humble yourself to your Beloved’s much wiser mind and allow that more loving divine heart to shape your relationship!  Your relationship blossoms so much more when you happily and eagerly follow your Divine Companion’s lead rather than attempting to be the leader in the human-divine dance.

You can be overly attached to many seemingly innocuous things because they aren’t overtly materialistic: perhaps you love your position in the hierarchy of a convent or your reputation for having a sunny disposition.  Any of these attachments are just as serious an impediment to the human-divine intimacy as the more obvious material attachments.  The attachments of monks in monasteries and nuns in convents are simply different flavors of the worldly attachments of secular people who have not devoted their lives to God.  Any attractive-to-you thing which you do not release and surrender to God will limit your intimacy with your Divine Companion.  The surrender of your treasured wishes is not a glum sackcloth-and-ashes kind of sacrifice but a delighted shedding of things that impede the vibrant love you can share with your Beloved.

Spiritual growth—ascending the stairway to ultimately rest in your Beloved’s arms—has very little to do with excess material comforts or elevated social standing; neither of those are required for spiritual growth.  Wealth and status are completely disconnected from your ability to make spiritual progress in your inner world.

Perhaps you had a good reputation but you were then unjustly smeared by the gossipers in your church group or by trolls on social media.  Of course, being mistreated by people who you considered to be friends stings quite badly.  But if your reputation was honestly deserved and you aren’t overly attached to it, then you are more likely to respond graciously and skillfully when you are treated poorly by such false friends.  If your heart is pure and loves God above all, your Divine Companion will soothe you when you are unjustly slandered.  You might take heart when mistreated by considering how Jesus, who was far more spiritually perfected than any of us, experienced extreme rejection and yet never faltered in doing God’s will.  Perhaps you might even consider yourself blessed to walk the same path that Jesus walked which includes intense mistreatment.

Return to the main section where you were reading (Purified Desire)

More About Relapse Prevention

QUOTE

[Dwelling 4; chapter 2; paragraph 8]

“Practice what I advised in the preceding mansions, then—humility, humility! for God lets Himself be vanquished by this and grants us all we ask.”

PARAPHRASE

“In the top section, just as in the bottom section, you ascend stairway by humility, more humility and then total humility; which is another way of saying that you grow spiritually with reverence, more reverence and then utmost reverence and submission to God whenever an important choice arises.  Deepening humility and reverence are essential to eventually climb high enough on the stairway to where God will give you whatever you ask for because what you ask for is exactly the same as what God has in mind for you.”

Beware of spiritual overconfidence

Unlike a mountain climb that ends once you have reached the summit and have “bagged a peak,” the spiritual journey never reaches an ultimate summit.  Instead, no matter how high you may have climbed, the spiritual stairway keeps ascending ever higher.  Sustaining spiritual intimacy requires that you continually climb further up the inner stairway.  Even after reaching the rooftop, your relationship with your Divine Companion requires your sustained spiritual growth to keep it fresh and alive, just as a marriage requires continual cultivation and nourishment long after the wedding ceremony.  Spiritual overconfidence is believing that you have reached the ultimate summit and need to climb no more; spiritual overconfidence can easily give rise to the false notion that you no longer need to keep trying to draw ever closer to God.

Be very clear: it is imperative to keep seeking spiritual nourishment, even after you first experience the divine embrace on the rooftop.  You are still a spiritual babe who requires continual nourishment from your spiritual mother, your Divine Companion.  Some, even those who have achieved a high spiritual state, thought that they no longer needed divine infusions; in their self-satisfaction, they suffered from spiritual malnutrition and reverted back to a self-centered mindset; they considered themselves to be quite magnificent, even as being not very much less than the God who created them.  Their self-satisfaction (and their sense that they were so mature that they no longer needed God’s nourishment) grew so slowly that they didn’t notice it even when it became quite large over the years.  Because their spiritual growth stalled, they are often more of a hindrance than a help to hungry souls, hindering others by emphasizing tangential matters inherent in their limited understanding.  Just as even a gifted musician can always improve, God desires that even an advanced soul continue to improve and develop their spirituality; because they aren’t spiritually stagnant, such a vibrant person can really help others make progress on their spiritual journeys.

Once you embrace that terrible error of considering yourself quite magnificent, your spirituality begins to crumble because you forget how much it relies on your Beloved’s nourishment.  Throughout your life, you remain a spiritual babe who still desperately needs your mother’s milk, your Divine Companion’s continued infusions.  You can immunize yourself against such arrogant overconfidence to a certain extent by staying quite aware and very appreciative of how much your growth has depended on the wonderful lover who has so abundantly nourished you.  Remain alert of this error because each person still contains some of the hard-to-extinguish human propensity for egotism, for excessive pride, for seeing your growth as solely your human accomplishment despite the fact that your contributions are almost insignificant compared to what God has done and continues to contribute in your life.

Rather than feeling overly confident about your own spiritual accomplishments, it’s far better to be keenly aware of your potential to sabotage your budding human-divine partnership by regressing to self-centeredness which distances your Beloved because self-centeredness is so inconsistent with the other-centeredness of the divine mindset.

Beware of misinterpretations of spiritual experiences

The human mind can be quite gullible and convince itself that an experience of purely human emotions is actually a divinely gifted experience.  You might misinterpret a wonderful human experience as being the divine embrace.  Please don’t be so deceived and become very attached to such mainly emotional experiences; it will become a great obstacle from experiencing the real divine caress.

Perhaps you’ve had an emotionally intoxicating inner experience such as an unusual bodily sensation or a trance-like state after much fasting or sleep-deprivation.  Such mislabeled mainly human experiences lack the spiritual fruit of a genuine human-divine connection; they have no sense that a Divine Companion lives within you; they lack the enduring joy and delight of experiencing your Beloved’s exquisite personality more clearly.

Genuine spiritual experiences invigorate you mentally and physically rather than exhaust you; for this reason, be wary of practices that drain you mentally or physically.  Genuine spiritual experiences more often relieve emotional pain and anguish rather than intensifying them.  A spiritually immature person may try to appear superior by exaggerating their inner turmoil.  They may be prone to preening: presenting themselves in a very favorable light as a spiritually advanced person.  Imagining themselves to be great role models, they are quite glad to opine about their insights at length and describe their “spiritual” experiences in great detail to anyone who will listen.  Beware of a person (including yourself) who is more concerned with promoting themselves and their “amazing” experiences than being concerned with helping another person experience the God who dwells in their own heart.

Religious organizations that lost their savor

The people who started our order gave up every earthly pleasure and mortal longing to seek the ultimate spiritual pearl: experiencing the embrace of their Divine Companion.  Our religious forerunners bore such wonderful spiritual fruit that others were spontaneously drawn to them; eventually enough people coalesced that our order was formally formed as a small organization within the much larger church organization.  But as the years passed, the wisdom of preparing oneself for divine intimacy has been virtually lost even for most people within our order.  Oh, all nuns are well acquainted with our established techniques of prayer and contemplation; these techniques are wonderful first steps on the inner stairway.  But so few, even in our order let alone in the wider society or the larger church, make any real effort to climb the inner stairway any higher.  Don’t permit yourself to be discouraged by religious people who have lost their spiritual savor.

The possibility of regression always remains

A spouse in a married couple can stray from their marriage vows even though that might seem impossible on their wedding day.  You, too, can fall out of love with your Beloved even though that might seem impossible after experiencing your Divine Companion’s lovely personality in the rooftop embrace.  Yet that seeming impossibility can happen if you are seduced away (again) by the lesser pleasures of life; or if you are unwilling to relinquish all of your lower attachments; or if you get lazy and neglectful to the point of taking your Divine Companion’s affections for granted and not cultivate your human-divine bond.  All bonds need cultivation so that they don’t deteriorate.

What a terrible loss to come so close to the most wonderful marriage bond imaginable and then to lose it all by bungling your choices at crucial decision points.  What a terrible loss to climb so many inner steps only to retreat downward when you are quite close to the rooftop.  No matter how far you ascend the inner stairway (no matter how strong your affection for God has grown), you still must be vigilant about the weaknesses of the human mind.  Thankfully, your Divine Companion’s presence strengthens your mind which helps you to remain faithful and devoted to this precious relationship.

In your elation as you ascend the inner stairway, you might lapse into a false sense of spiritual security and think that you are safe from ever regressing.  How I wish that were so!  But I’m not sure if any human being can ever be so spiritually advanced that they become invulnerable to the glitches of the human brain: succumbing to the allure of worldly pleasures; wanting to avoid pain at all costs; wanting to hold a position of power and acclaim.  You might imagine your ego as a separate persona within you who hates relinquishing control and who would love to sabotage your divine engagement which clearly involves demoting your ego and elevating your Divine Companion.  You might imagine your ego as a mischievous imp of a lesser angel running amok in your inner world who tries to delay and derail your climb up the stairway toward your wonderful lover.  The ego is that mindset which values yourself too much and thinks it imprudent to bow to anyone, including God, or to cede too much of your townhouse autonomy to your Divine Companion.  Even Judas who spent years in the close company of Jesus was able to horribly betray him; the ego lurks in your townhouse who, like your own inner Judas, remains ever capable of betraying your wonderful Divine Companion even after you have enjoyed that sublime embrace.

[Teresa wrote that the Devil, not the ego, is who assails a person who becomes careless and overly confident in their own greatness.]  The exact personification—either the Devil outside you or the ego within you—may not matter as much as grasping the fact that something which feels like a person can sabotage your spiritual growth.  The Devil (or ego) can undermine someone in the convent just as easily as it can assail someone who lives in the secular world; the Devil (or ego) can undermine a dedicated and ascetic monk in the most remote cave just as easily as it can derail a person dedicated to seeking material pleasures.  Be aware of weak links within the human brain but never think that your human-divine relationship is hopelessly impossible: the pull of your ego is not the only force that tugs on you (be ever so grateful for that!); your Divine Companion is always offering to pull you closer.  If you cooperate with God, the pull of your Divine Companion is always strong enough to overcome even the most powerful pull of the Devil (or your ego) which is competing for your heart’s full affection.

Regression, like growth, happens in baby steps: by making small concessions to your selfish desires (as in, “Oh, indulging in a little of that vice won’t do any serious harm.”).  But such seemingly innocuous concessions to excessive self-love are like strewing bad seeds in a garden which will grow vigorously like a weed until they can strangle even your best intentions.

The thinking of a person on the path of regression goes something like this: “I am doing pretty well; I’ve got this game of life figured out; perhaps I don’t need my divine partner very much anymore.”  Such thinking is extremely distorted and neglects all the ways that your growth has depended on your Divine Companion’s contributions.  In contrast, the thinking of a person on the path of spiritual progression goes something like this: “I am doing pretty good largely because of God’s abundant graces to me; I could never have done any of this progress or borne this spiritual fruit on my own; I need God’s help now more than ever or I’ll fail and make an epic spiritual crash.”

Becoming too entranced by spiritual goodies

You gradually see more and more of God’s personality as you climb to the higher floors of the top section.  These experiences delight your soul.  The spiritual delights can do one of two things: 1) inspire you to climb even higher and draw closer to God or 2) imagine that you can preserve these spiritual delights so that you can enjoy them whenever you want without the effort of continued climbing.  The second option can be very tantalizing but no spiritual delight can be captured in a virtual memento book; they will wither and cease to delight you if they are stuck in some preservative.  Of course, it’s important to remember your experiences and how greatly God has blessed you but not if that remembering means losing your enthusiasm for continuing your spiritual journey.

If you take the second option of being satisfied with capturing spiritual goodies, then you will foolishly waste valuable time that could be spent climbing higher on the stairway to the rooftop.  It’s wise to only occasionally partake of rich treats in both our food intake and our spiritual intake.  Imagine the great loss if, trying to gorge on spiritual goodies of the lower floors, you lost your appetite for other spiritual food (such as service; wisely using the capabilities of your bottom section) which is essential for a balanced spiritual diet.

Some people can be spiritually snobbish claiming that they are continually in a very lofty place which they never leave; they claim that they have no need of “lower” prayers or “lesser” spiritual practices.  They think—quite erroneously—that they lose nothing by abandoning “lower” praying.  “Yeah, right!” I think.  Please guard yourself from such snobbery because it will end your spiritual growth to the point that you will bear less and less spiritual fruit.  Please don’t drink this Kool-Aid of the ego which poisons you so that you lose the will to seek God and do whatever God asks of you.  Immersing yourself in “lower” levels of prayers is much more nourishing than wistfully hanging around the lower spiritual floors hoping to have another helping of a tantalizing spiritual goodie.

If you are in thrall to the lower spiritual delights, you might neglect undertaking challenging work for God to help establish the Beloved Community on Earth, work that will certainly require that you bear a cross because you will experience rejection, dismissal and attacks just as Jesus did.  God wants you to be well-nourished and delighted; but if consuming a rich spiritual diet is your main concern, you will become spoiled and weak.  Your Divine Companion wants a robust person as lover and partner; hard and challenging work for God is a blessing because it makes you such a partner.  Please desire to undertake the difficult tasks and challenges that will help you grow into a lover worthy of your Divine Companion rather than wanting an endless experience of the lower spiritual goodies.

Anyone can relapse

The higher steps on the inner stairway represent drawing closer to God:

deepening your reverence for God;

appreciating God’s character of truth, beauty and goodness;

becoming more devoted to serving God;

becoming a more loyal partner to your Divine Companion.

The lower steps on the inner stairway represent being more shaped by your ego:

having an exaggerated sense of how good and important you are;

being quite self-centeredness;

clinging to your dreams of grandeur and your petty resentments.

Just as the inner stairway leads upward, it also leads downward.

You develop a lovely and healthy sense that you are securely attached to your Divine Companion as you ascend the stairs and get closer to fully mingling yourself with your Divine Companion in the soul (on the rooftop) where your human-divine bond becomes much more secure.  But that bond isn’t bombproof just yet.  Even when you have reached the highest step on the inner stairway, you can still fall from this exalted place by failing to be as loyal as your Divine Companion is.  You are more likely to fall if you become overly cocky and think that you are such an amazing person that you couldn’t possibly fail as a partner to your Divine Companion

All of the apostles spent years in the close company of Jesus: many of them become so devoted to Jesus that they continued to work for Jesus even though that work meant being ostracized by the high priests and, for some, being cruelly put to death.  One apostle also shared the same amount of time with Jesus but wasn’t faithful to him at all; Judas thought that Jesus didn’t really understand life or God.  Like the apostles, both possibilities exist for you: to become increasingly loyal and dependable or to become fatally disloyal.  You are much better served to strive to be like the devoted apostles than to worry that you will become like the traitorous one.

Your position high on the inner stairway is a blessed place where you have drawn very close to God, a holy place you have reached by your choices of what you value and who you love.  But even high angels can fall from the precious closeness they enjoy with God.  Don’t worry: most angels are loyal to God who holds them securely; most people who reach the rooftop are loyal to God who holds them securely and keeps them from falling.  But God isn’t a prison keeper who holds you in chains: you are always free to leap from the rooftop if you so choose.  Such a choice seems incredibly absurd but the choice still remains open to a person.

This warning isn’t meant to frighten you; whatever you do, please don’t obsess over the possibility of relapse; that would only pollute the loving bond with your Beloved.  Your side of the human-bond is becoming more robust as you draw close to your Divine Companion; you are becoming a much more reliable partner; the chances of losing this bond decrease step by step but they never become absolutely zero.  It’s good to be mindful of the possibility of falling but it’s not good to obsess about that too much.

People only seem to fall when they can’t see how their egoic self-importance drains their love for God; they may even come to resent that God has a higher place in their interior townhouse than they do.  They imagine that they, not God, deserve the townhouse’s penthouse as their dwelling place.  The ego (being very self-centered and thinking that everything should revolve around you) seems to be the main reason why a person would ever fall from the upper steps.

Humility--knowing that, even high on the stairway, you are still quite spiritually young and have so much to grow and know—is a handrail on the stairway which safeguards you from taking a spiritually fatal self-absorbed misstep.  Self-respect—knowing how precious you are to God and your Divine Companion—is a powerful antidote to self-loathing, a perversion of humility so great that it dishonors true humility.  Reverence—perceiving and appreciating the great spiritual beauty of God and all that God has created—keeps your eyes looking up towards your goal so you have a better sense of balance as you climb the stairway making a fall less likely.

Self-deception

Seemingly good works may be camouflaged as spiritually motivated when their true motive, could it be accurately discerned, is really to elevate your own reputation.  Your ego is quite good at wearing disorienting disguises which enable it to appear as just the opposite of what it really is.  You can avoid being taken in by the ego’s con by remembering a motto for the spiritual path: “May I become smaller so that God may become larger within me.”  In contrast to a devout soul, spiritual posers love to preen and call attention to their facade of being virtuous; they can deceive some people into believing that they are much better than others.  Beware of deceiving yourself (of posing and preening) because such distortions and self-deceptions will poison your intimacy with your Divine Companion who is the source of all true spiritual fruit (vs. the sham spiritual fruit displayed by the posers).

You may be convinced that you are ready to bear being publicly despised and insulted; perhaps you actually are ready or perhaps you only think you are ready.  You can discern whether you are really ready to bear being shunned by noticing whether you freely admit your personal weaknesses to others or whether you try to hide your personal weaknesses from their view.   For example, you may greatly protest and defend yourself if anyone should mention one of your weaknesses.  How spiritually foolish to be concerned when others notice that you are less than perfect!  God save us from the melodrama of such spiritual posers who so long to be admired by others that they bristle at the smallest slights!  If you can’t own your human foibles, please don’t try to claim being highly spiritual.  If you are a spiritual director and your ego deceives you by exaggerating your strengths and minimizing your weaknesses, you are quite likely to harm those who you imagine yourself to be helping.  Some naïve directees might see you as being exalted as you see yourself, but a genuinely spiritual person can readily distinguish the sincere love of a God-devoted soul from the faux affection of a spiritual poser.

Gracious service

Anyone who feels that they have attained union with God but has no compassion for others is gravely deceiving themselves. But if you honestly tell God that you are willing to serve others, especially to do service that you have previously considered beneath you, God will elevate your spirituality more than countless hours of a spiritual practice ever could.  Your ego may likely resist that you are becoming so servant-minded but remember that your ego is a sly con-artist who never delivers on the mirage-like promises it presents to you.  Unlike your ego who never delivers even for your biggest buy-in, your Divine Companion delivers great inner blessings when you make even a modest dedication to serving as God wishes you to.  Your efforts in serving are essential to the divine plan; even God who is all powerful can’t do the work designated for you.  Fully expend yourself in serving others just as Jesus gave his all in serving us and ministering to us.

Avoiding service

Perhaps you have caught a snippet of your Divine Companion’s song and, anxious that you might lose that seemingly fragile divine melody, you seal yourself off from serving others in a futile attempt to avoid distractions and hold onto that lovely melody.  That strategy seems to make practical sense to the human-only mind but it simply doesn’t work.  You are more likely to continue hearing your Divine Companion’s song if you integrate prayer (intimate sharing with your Divine Companion) with compassionate service for another person; with serving others because you know that Jesus would serve them if he were here.  Because Jesus isn’t physically here, you desire to serve each person as Jesus would because it pleases God to see Jesus’ work continued after he has physically left this Earth.  Doing what Jesus would do in a situation is the living definition of aligning your will with God’s will.

Pompous spirituality

Some people can talk about spirituality in a lofty way at great length but they might struggle to walk the spiritual walk for even a few short steps; hard times may open their eyes to their limited ability to walk the spiritual path.  They might talk at length about how their soul is noble because it suffers just as Jesus did; they may claim that they desire to suffer for God.  They may consider themselves a paragon of virtue and see others as “poor things” who aren’t as spiritual as they are.  But their condescending words show how they are quite taken with themselves rather than being deeply moved by their Divine Companion’s lovely personality.

In contrast, people who quietly and privately practice submitting everything to God, to fully surrendering themselves to God, are less concerned with how they appear to others; they feel little need to talk much about themselves.  Their self-renunciation is a means of making more room for God, not as a sadistic way of crushing their human nature; they aren’t interested in appear like a holy martyr to others.  Their desire to become small is balanced by clear and balanced thinking so they don’t endanger their physical or psychological health by adopting overly severe practices which would actually impede, not help, their spiritual progress.

Human peak moments vs. human+divine peak moments

Solely human peak moments are quite wonderful but they seem superficial, like a sensation that is only felt on the skin, compared to peak moments of human-divine blending which penetrate deep into your marrow, into the very foundations of your inner life and personality.  Many spiritually ignorant people seem quite comfortable passing judgement on what is, and what isn’t, a genuine spiritual experience.  Beware because spiritual ignoramuses will speak with as much (or even more) confidence than actual spiritual sages who really know the upper territory of the interior townhouse from their own personal experience.

Fruitless sharing of your experiences

Your spiritual experiences may be best kept private when few people in your circles have spent much time in their top section; having no spiritual perspective, they will likely mock you if you share your experiences with a wider audience.  Many people will imagine that you think too highly of yourself and people love to topple anyone with such lofty ideas about themselves.  In the process of toppling you, they will besmirch the idea of how God can be immediately present to a person; in doing so, they will discourage other sincere souls from seeking this sublime blessing from God.

The faux rooftop

More than a few people consider their mental imaginations to be exotic visions of God; but their self-manufactured visions don’t reveal God’s divine character of gracious goodness, surpassing beauty and sublime wisdom.  Based in the human mind, their imaginative descriptions are no more intriguing than looking at sacred art; neither one can move you even a small fraction of how much the direct experience of your Divine Companion can move you.  The human tendency to elevate personal thoughts as divine thoughts is a good reason to consult a wise director who can recognize a genuine spiritual experience even if it isn’t exactly what the director has experienced themselves.  To benefit from such a director, you must fully disclose what you experienced; how else could they say anything meaningful in response?

God always seeks to separate the spiritual wheat from the psychological chaff so that you may be spiritually nourished by the wheat without choking on the chaff that so often comes from distorted notions about God.  Ideally, a spiritual director or a spiritual friend assists in that process of discerning.

Expect blowback from those who are content with their religious status

If you make a big spiritual shift in your inner life to desire God above all else and to serve others as Jesus directed us, expect to get intense blowback.  Many people will say that you are a spiritual phony; you will be despised by such people for valuing God so much.  Expect to be as poorly treated as virtually every God-dedicated person has been treated before you.  Many secular people feel that they know everything there is to be known; they are prone to get angry and vindictive when another person’s life shows that they know something more deeply than they do.  Church-affiliated people may be especially angry if they think that you have experienced God more intimately than they have.  Although you may not care about being disrespected by such people, you may be sickened by how people treat God and their Divine Companion with such terrible disrespect.  The companionship you share with your Beloved in your soul will provide you with the spiritual and psychological stamina necessary to bear being treated quite harshly in religious organizations.

Mixed feelings

As you climb higher up the inner stairway, you may have mixed feelings: a lovely feeling and a sickening feeling.  The lovely feeling is experiencing how much God loves you and is personally devoted to you; the sickening feeling is how poorly you have treated God before realizing just how wonderful your Divine Companion is.  That sickening feeling can guide you to see how you can treat your Divine Companion better, to where you can remodel your interior townhouse to be a fit and appropriate place for your Divine Companion to spend time in.

Interior redecorating

Imagine if you had a friend who was so allergic to perfume that they struggled to breathe as soon as they entered a room with a strong scent of perfume in the air.  Of course, you would put away any offending scents and air out your rooms so that your friend could have a good visit with you.  In the same way, from your perspective higher up on the stairway, you now better understand what your Divine Companion cannot tolerate.  How rude it would be to keep any vestiges in your lower rooms which are so offensive that your Divine Companion won’t enter those rooms.  Profound gratitude for being embraced can propel you to re-make your interior townhouse to be as hospitable to your Divine Companion as possible.  Spiritual experiences motivate you positively (make you want to be hospitable) rather than motivate you negatively (a fear of punishment for an offensive inner atmosphere; a fear of the divine affection being withdrawn).  When you get to the heart of them, positive motivations are very God-centered and focused on the benefits to your Divine Companion; but negative motivations are quite self-centered and focused on what you might lose.

You might be overwhelmed by how terrible your behaviors were earlier in your life when you were dismissive of, or even quite offensive to, your Divine Companion.  Awareness of your past deficiencies helps you to live in a different way now; but dwelling excessively on your past errors may diminish your awareness of the precious opportunity for partnership you currently have.  What a terrible disappointment to your Divine Companion if that opportunity was to languish because, obsessing over your past errors, you were too afraid to seize the chance for collaborating which God has extended to you.

It’s best for your spiritual growth to balance regret over past sins with much gratitude that your Divine Companion still sought you out in your far-from-perfect state, still wooed you and so completely embraced you.  All of your Beloved’s behavior towards you shows that your Divine Companion has no regrets or reservations about choosing you as a partner knowing your weaknesses and strengths quite well.  Allow any regrets over your past errors to clearly illuminate how very much God loves you: that no amount of human errors or personality flaws would ever stop God from pursuing and wooing you or anyone else, not even a person who, to our inferior human insight, seems quite unspiritual in our judgement.  Neither you or anyone else has loved God as perfectly as God loves a person; allow God’s all-encompassing love to erase any self-loathing and self-torment over what you did long ago.

Some regret over sin is healthy and helps guide your steps on the spiritual path but excessive obsession over your sins obscures the graces and graciousness of God.  Don’t allow your tunnel-vision focus on your errors to so overmagnify them that the great goodness of God is pushed to the periphery of your awareness; tunnel vision always restricts your field of vision and, in this case, may edge God completely out of the picture (out of your awareness) when you focus excessively on your limitations and mistakes to the detriment of other more positive aspects of life.

An interesting side effect of being keenly aware of your sins is that this insight seems to defang any fear of hell.  Perhaps having experienced how God dearly loves even a greatly flawed person, the idea that God would create a hell of intense suffering for any one of God’s creatures now seems totally implausible.  Besides, God desires that your love be motivated by a longing to be closer and share everything in common; God has no desire for a love motivated by fear of avoiding hell.

The slow pace of growth

Growth takes time; the pace of growth may seem maddeningly slow during dormant times that feel as if they will last forever: don’t worry; they won’t!  You may grow impatient as you wait with an intense longing to take your relationship with your Divine Companion to the next level.  You may feel an overpowering desire for deeper intimacy right now, but you can’t quite achieve that in this moment.  Be patient with the time required for deepening human-divine intimacy: God will surely return all the love and longing which you offer up.  Be cheered: God returns all the investments of your heart with greatly compounded interest, with graces and blessings that exceed whatever you have offered to God.

Perhaps, at times, you feel very impatient and want to reach the rooftop sanctuary quickly without requiring so much time and effort.  Consider that, even if you were rapidly and magically escorted to the rooftop, you would be quite disappointed because, lacking the spiritual capabilities that only develop from your own efforts in climbing the inner stairway, you would be incapable of appreciating the rooftop’s exquisite beauty and your mind couldn’t digest the intense spiritual nourishment supplied there.  Human nature can be very impatient and want the ultimate banquet immediately when your spiritual metabolism is immature; reaching the rooftop feast without your own efforts would only lead you to foods which you can’t yet digest, insights which you can’t yet appreciate or benefit from, and love which you can’t yet reciprocate.

Oddly enough, impatience can slow—not accelerate—your climb because you are so focused on getting a reward that you are less concerned with becoming a more spiritually fit climber.  Impatience, like pride, seems to be a first step in descending, rather than ascending, the inner stairway.

Return to section in main text (Relapse Prevention)

Spiritual advisors

Helpful vs. unhelpful spiritual direction

The worst error a person who considers themselves a spiritual director can make is to prevent a person from freely and fully exploring all of their inner world, that precious gift which God gives each person when they are created.  The most helpful thing a spiritual director can do is to encourage a person to explore their inner world as fully as possible and to really notice all that happens within themselves, in both their human aspects and their spiritual aspects; to encourage a person to become a skilled navigator who understands their inner world as their home rather than staying a person who, unfamiliar with the language and layout of their inner world, feels like a foreigner even when they are on their home soil.

Obsessively consulting a spiritual director, even a wonderful one, serves little purpose; obsessive analysis may shorten how long even a precious spiritual experience lingers and nourishes you.

The spectrum of spiritual advisors

A personally experienced spiritual advisor or spiritual friend (someone who has been embraced by their own Divine Companion and understands the top section of the interior townhouse) can really help you make sense of your inner experiences.  In contrast, a spiritual-advisor-in-name-only is a great hindrance to accurately comprehending your inner experiences.  Someone who is only a spiritual sage in their own mind will likely be offended if you’ve had higher spiritual experiences beyond what they’ve had; your higher experiences threaten their treasured position of being a spiritual authority, of being the holiest one in the room.  In discerning who is a good spiritual advisor or friend, you can always rely on the rule of thumb which Jesus taught: a good tree bears good fruit; a spiritual person always will be kind and caring.

Another useful rule of thumb for assessing another’s opinion is that the more intensely someone attacks you and the more they are absolutely sure that they alone are correct, the more you should doubt what they say about you.  Anyone who has been caressed by their Divine Companion will certainly be more gracious than that; if you are in error, they will gently guide you to see the true parts of your experience and tenderly remove any errors in how you see your experience.

If you have long held a low opinion of yourself, another person or director-wannabe might sense your weakness and pile on; they might suggest that you are foolishly deceiving yourself by thinking that you have experienced Jesus walking by your side or another spiritual experience.  If you notice carefully, you will recognize that they are echoing your own Inner Critic; they are not at all reflecting the indwelling God’s wonderful tone and perspective.  Dismiss their prattling just as you would do well to dismiss your Inner Critic’s constant berating.  Neither your own Inner Critic nor the world’s critics, speak for God; what they say is diametrically opposed to what you Divine Companion wishes to whisper into your soul.

Treasury of Metaphors

[Teresa used many metaphors in The Interior Castle to communicate the personality of your Divine Companion and the atmosphere of various parts of your inner world.  Her metaphors add flavor to her map of your inner world that would otherwise be colorless without them.  She developed some metaphors extensively; others were simply a phrase or a few sentences.]

Intimate Partners

your relationship with your Divine Companion is like that of a bride and groom

The gradually developing relationship between two people who eventually become intimate partners is a rich metaphor for wrapping your mind around the arc of the virtually invisible relationship that you can forge with your Divine Companion.  [Teresa develops this metaphor in several chapters in Dwelling 5.]

Paraphrasing a line from the Canticles: “The groom brings his beloved bride into the wine cellar.”  The groom is your Divine Companion; you are the bride; the wine cellar is your rooftop, the sacred room which holds the most precious nourishment in the entire interior townhouse.  With her own efforts, the bride can reach the vicinity of this sacred room but she can’t enter into the room itself; only the bridegroom can carry her across the final threshold and into the innermost sanctuary.  Just as the bride brings herself close to the sacred room, you must do your human part of reaching for God, of climbing close to the rooftop, before your Beloved can do the divine part of drawing you into the richer sharing and intimacy of the innermost sanctuary.  Both the bride and the bridegroom have essential roles in entering the sacred room and joining together there in deep intimacy.

Entering the vicinity of that sacred room means completely aligning your will with God’s will and being happy to sacrifice anything that doesn’t resonate with God’s ways.  This doesn’t require having an especially erudite mind or achieving great accomplishments in the world’s eyes; the main requirement is distilling your many scattered human desires into a single consecrated holy desire for God above all else.  Then, when you are in close proximity to the sacred room, God can pull you the last remaining steps into the sanctuary itself.  God is quite wise and usually only pulls you onto the rooftop when you are capable of benefitting from the divine embrace.  God usually won’t pull you onto the rooftop if the embrace would only confuse and disorient you. Being in the vicinity of the sacred room is another way of saying that you are now ready to spiritually benefit from the rooftop embrace; being far from the sacred room is another way of saying that you wouldn’t benefit spiritually from such an experience.

[Quite rarely, God may pull someone who isn’t fully prepared onto the rooftop.  Afterwards, to make up for their lack of preparation, they must spend much time and exert great effort to understand and assimilate their experience; without insight and effort, their understanding of the Divine Companion may be greatly distorted.  Wise guides can help them understand their experience more accurately; self-deceived guides can amplify distortions so that even such a precious experience doesn’t bear much spiritual fruit.]

Taming your ego prepares you to enter the most precious sanctuary; with an untamed ego, you might arrogantly consider yourself so amazing that you are entitled to be next to God in that holiest inner room.  Such a laughably inflated sense of yourself can’t see God’s much more beautiful character and keeps you far from the inner sanctuary.  How ironic that an arrogant person who deludes themselves into thinking that they stand on the inner stairway’s top steps is actually quite far from the rooftop; they have no comprehension of the great distance separating them from God (what a terrible disappointment awaits them!).  But a humble person who considers themselves quite far from God may actually be drawing near to the rooftop; they have yet to comprehend how close God is (what a wonderful discovery awaits them!).

The progression from dating to marriage

A relationship may progress from a casual acquaintance to more serious dating; and then to being engaged; and finally to being married.  Or a relationship can fizzle out and end at any of these stages.  This human progression mirrors, in a limited sense, the progression of your relationship with your Divine Companion.  In a relationship between two people, each person must wrestle with their doubts and ambivalence if they are to form a relationship solid enough for a worthy marriage.  In your relationship with God, your divine partner has no doubts or limitations: your Divine Companion wholeheartedly wants to bond with you; your doubts and partial trust are the only bottlenecks to a secure and beautiful marriage with your Beloved.

Dating is the first step in a relationship which may—or may not—eventually lead to marriage.  On the top section’s lower floors, you may be like a suspicious dater who is reluctant to trust your indwelling housemate very much when you first meet.  Yet even before your very first encounter, God is already completely devoted to you and has abundant affection for you.  What an upside-down state of affairs: that such a divine lover is so perfectly loyal to such an immature creature who barely cares for this wonderful one.  Can you imagine such a situation in human dating?  Can you imagine the most wonderful man in all the land being totally devoted to a rather coarse woman; and the woman, oblivious of being so fortunate to have the affection of such a wonderful person, doesn’t appreciate how greatly and undeservedly she is blessed? In her great ignorance, she doesn’t even try to reciprocate her suitor’s feelings or attempt to love him to the best of her abilities.  No one would ever believe such a story because it is too farfetched.  Yet this same story plays out every day in the inner worlds of many people all around you.

Notice how the groom in this story (your Divine Companion) so thoroughly humbles himself and betroths himself to a lesser partner; notice how persistently he woos the one he wants to marry even when she barely has any interest in him.  This situation illustrates the great humility of God who, in the form of your Divine Companion, is fully devoted to you no matter how indifferent you may be.  Very few people seem to realize what warm companionship and wonderful collaboration is possible in their inner world.

Floors of the interior townhouse and stages of relationship

The ground floor of your bottom section represents having no clue that God exists or might possibly dwell within you.  The highest floor of your bottom section represents a second-hand sense that God might live within you.  Moving upward, the lower floor of your top section represents your own dawning, but minimal, first-hand awareness of your Beloved; the middle floors of the top section represent a casual dating relationship in which you come to know your Divine Companion better but your affections may still be given to other suitors.  The higher floors of your top section represent a betrothal, an initial but not yet finalized engagement, with your Beloved.  On the rooftop, your loyalty and fidelity become fully assured; you enter an irrevocable marriage with your Divine Companion.

A quick orientation

Bottom section

ground floor: totally unaware of your Divine Companion’s existence; there is no relationship

middle floors: you’ve heard stories about a Divine Companion but pay scant attention

highest floor: your interest may be piqued but you’re not moved to know more

Top section

lowest floor (acquaintance): slight awareness of and fledging desire for your Divine Companion

lower floors (casual dating): more appreciative of your beloved; you still are open to another suitor

higher floors (engagement): you know your Beloved much better and are willing to forgo all other suitors

rooftop (marriage): you give yourself fully to your Divine Companion as a loyal and trustworthy partner.

No one can love another person in any meaningful way without first getting to know them; in the same way, you can never fully love your Divine Companion until you really know your Beloved which is much like what happens when a couple moves through the stages of acquaintance, dating and ultimately engagement.  The more you know and appreciate your Beloved’s wonderful personality, the more you will love the God who is so very close to you.  Once you grasp the great character of your Divine Companion, you will readily and completely give your heart to this human-divine relationship.  You would enthusiastically remedy any trait within you that hinders this precious union; you would so gladly give up your most treasured earthly desire that letting go of it would feel like no sacrifice at all.

A spiritual marriage is an apt metaphor for only a few rare souls who, having met and fully appreciated their Divine Companion, are delighted to remake their interior townhouse so it can be a dwelling worthy of their divine partner.  Early stages of dating are a more apt metaphor for many people’s relationship with their Divine Companion.

No awareness or shallow awareness

Many people seem to have no sense at all that God dwells so closely within them.  Being completely unaware, the word relationship doesn’t even apply to them.  Living only on your ground floor, you’d have no sense that your interior townhouse is home to a wonderful housemate.  Without being aware of another person, a relationship can’t even begin.  Being so unaware, you would live your life with the mistaken idea that God is very distant from you and that God is indifferent to you and unconcerned with your needs.  It’s comparable to being totally oblivious of another person’s existence although that person is very aware of you.

If you spend some time above the ground floor, you might have heard suggestions that God indwells people but this idea seems so vague that you give it little weight.  Or perhaps you dismissed that idea as a bunch of gibberish.  You haven’t the slightest clue how wonderful your inner housemate is.  It’s as if you heard about an interesting person on the periphery of your social circles but, without ever spending time with them, you discount them as not worth your time.  Your Divine Companion is like a person you see as you go around town but who doesn’t merit even a simple hello.  When you are barely aware of another person or very dismissive of them, no relationship can develop between you.  Unaware of how wonderful that person is, you ignore them and they remain a distant someone you only know from others’ accounts.

Initial interest (still not very interested)

As you leave your bottom section and enter the first floor of your top section, you’ll catch brief glimpses of your Beloved, fleeting encounters which give you a hint of your Divine Companion’s lovely personality.  Like being intrigued by someone after a short conversation, yet not knowing them very well, you might only have a lukewarm interest in getting to know them better; not fully appreciating them, you might not make a focused effort to see them again.

During the acquaintance stage, some people may play hard-to-get, like a coquettish lover who imagines that makes them more attractive and intriguing.  But God never hides from you or plays hard-to-get while God is courting you.  Quite the opposite: God is always trying to make it as easy as possible for you to either begin dating or to take your relationship to the next level.  God is always reaching out to you at the most intimate level which you can sustain at that moment.

Casual dating

Spending more time in your top section and occasionally encountering your Divine Companion, a desire may grow to see your Beloved more regularly.  Your relationship at this point is like casual dating: you really like your partner but you don’t yet fully appreciate how wonderful your Divine Companion is.  So you only make small efforts to spend more time together.  You don’t yet grasp the miracle that a perfect lover is so close to you and desires you so much.  Like many casual daters, you may still keep your options open in case an even better lover might appear (how absurd!).  At this point in your dating relationship, without spiritual insight, you might greatly underestimate your Divine Companion.  I beg you to devote yourself to getting to know your inner housemate well enough to realize that a sublime lover awaits you right now, to be your full partner if you desire God with all your heart; yours if you fully trust God like a child fully trusts a loving parent.

Steady dating

Climbing to a higher floor, your desire to see your Divine Companion intensifies but you have not fully closed the door to other suitors.  You enjoy your Divine Companion’s more frequent company but you still won’t relinquish your option to take up with someone or something more appealing.  You may be tempted to give your affections to another suitor, much like pursuing a crush on another while you are dating someone.  At this stage, you behave as if you don’t have an exclusive relationship with your Beloved.  Your desire for your Divine Companion may be diluted by a worldly attraction, perhaps masquerading as a holy desire, such as wanting recognition in your religious organization (as opposed to wanting to serve as needed with no consideration of being acclaimed in the eyes of others).

Betrothal

Betrothal (engagement) is a more apt metaphor when you have climbed up to the upper floors of your top section; you are like a fiancé engaged to your Divine Companion and you experience deeply moving spiritual caresses in your time together.  When you make a full and final commitment (marriage), you will experience even richer moments of intimacy when, once fully dedicated, your Beloved pulls you into the precious rooftop embrace.

As your engagement progresses, your relationship with your Divine Companion becomes less and less vulnerable to deteriorating.  But your relationship isn’t yet absolutely certain; you can still withdraw from your human-divine engagement and take up another worldly passion.  Even during engagement, you can be tempted away from your perfect suitor by a far less worthy suitor.  That seems bizarre and impossible, but you certainly know some people who cling to an abusive partner and rebuff the affections of a genuinely loving suitor.  What a terrible wasted opportunity to vacillate when you are on the cusp of fully betrothing your human self to the divine.  What a terrible hurt you inflict if you leave your Beloved stranded at the altar where a human can wed God while still here on Earth. What a deep sadness for a Divine Companion when they are left by a person who they considered so precious, whose partnership they so desired.  What a dismal moment when the divine love isn’t reciprocated.

Marriage

The highest floor of your top section represents a fully committed and irrevocable bond between you and your Divine Companion.  You have moved from engagement to marriage; you have moved from an unfinalized commitment to a full and firm commitment with nothing held back.  You have given all your heart to your Divine Companion; you value this precious connection above everything else.  Now fully wedded, you are ready for the very intimate embrace between you and your Divine Companion, the fullest and most spiritually profound experience of two fully devoted partners.

You may feel that God has claimed a portion of your heart for God.  You may feel that a part of you is no longer yours but now belongs to God.  You might feel that some of you is gone when you are not in the intimate embrace of your Beloved.

No one stays on the rooftop all the time; even honeymooners leave the bedroom.  When the rooftop embrace inevitably ends, after feeling so close to your Beloved, you might keenly feel the absence as an intense “pain.” You might lovingly “complain” that you want to be held in your Beloved’s arms or you want to hear your Divine Companion’s voice again (right now, please!).  This longing is tinged with something akin to pain, but the sublime longing is so sweet that you would gladly bear any pain involved.

marriage is a metaphor; the divine embrace is not a sexual thing

In case your mind is in the gutter and you are thinking that the divine embrace or being slain in the spirit is merely the sublimation of carnal desires or simply a derivative of the physical pleasures of sex … Please understand this very clearly: I use the love and intimacy shared by two people simply as a metaphor for the love and intimacy shared by a person and the indwelling God.  Both relationships involve joy but the human-divine relationship involves spiritual joys beyond material happiness and pleasure.  Some people may read something orgasmic into my experiences of swooning for my Beloved—they completely confuse the literal parts of a metaphor with the figurative parts: the deeper concept to which the literal parts of the metaphor point.  Such a literal understanding of the metaphor of the lovers is as foolish as attempting to find the Good Shepherd by mingling with a flock of sheep in a pasture.  Good luck with that!  You will lose your way on the spiritual path if you confuse the joy of spiritual intimacy with the pleasures of sexual union; or if you confuse a holy desire to be completely aligned with your Divine Companion with sexually-tinged emotions of infatuation with an attractive person.

For many, sex is the epitome of physical pleasure; for loving partners, sex (in addition to its physical pleasure) may also be a peak experience of loving someone and being loved in return.  The divine embrace is the epitome of spiritual pleasure: as if God bares all to you and you bare all to God; knowing that even when all of your wonderful but imperfect self is bared, God still treasures you.  You will feel a joy and peace far richer than you have ever experienced before; consumed in that joy, all else (both worries and other lusts) will fade far, far into the background.  You will feel your human love being submerged into and merged with divine love.  You will experience love flowing in both directions: from you to God and from God to you; from creature to Creator and from Creator to creature.  What an exquisite and sublime harmony of human and divine hearts!  Just as sexual intimacy can create a new person that neither partner could make alone, the spiritual intimacy of intermingling your human nature with your Beloved’s divine nature can make new co-creations that neither partner could make alone.

However delighted you may be by the physical pleasures shared with your lover, those pleasures (as very wonderful as they are) will be dwarfed by the spiritual pleasure of being held in the arms of your Divine Companion.

Get Engaged!

I could never adequately and accurately describe the God who dwells in your interior townhouse.  Yet I still try because I am absolutely sure that you can become engaged to your Divine Companion this life, even on this often-harsh Earth, even in this imperfect moment, even with all of our human limitations.  I am sure that, if you treat your life as an engagement period in which you decide to accept your Divine Beloved’s offer of eternal marriage, that you can become fully betrothed to your Divine Companion.  Imagine how precious your love is to your Beloved when you give it now on Earth while still encumbered from fully grasping the grandeur of your Divine Companion.  Imagine how wonderful this earth-bound life becomes when you render your human limitations moot by becoming a fully reliable partner to your Beloved right now, by being a loyal and dependable collaborator on the spiritual tasks of this life.

courage is needed for intimacy

You need much courage to accept your Divine Companion’s marriage proposal to blend your two lives into one fully shared life.  But often human nature is much too timid to even imagine, let alone actually accept, the possibility of being in such a truly loving relationship.  The human imagination often seems limited to being in the less loving relationships with which they are more familiar.  How timid the human heart can be when it’s not uplifted by spiritual longing; yet how courageous the human heart can be after being touched, even briefly, by the Divine Companion’s caress.

QUOTE [from Dwelling 5; chapter 4; paragraph 10 in The Interior Castle]

“Love is never idle.”

“A reliable love-partner never sleeps.”

PARAPHRASE

Love never stalls out; it is always desiring to take the relationship to the next level.

A trustworthy intimate partner is never complacent about their relationship.

Keep your relationship with your Divine Companion vibrant!

half-hearted mindset of betrothal (engagement)

A person who thinks lightly of their betrothed won’t give their heart fully and give up all other possibilities.  They are only half-hearted and still might be entranced by a flashy suitor.  How foolish to not see the far greater worthiness of your divine suitor compared to any earthly treasure!  What a terrible waste of your time on Earth to waffle as you face the core spiritual choice laid before you.  What does it say about your character if you were to only give your whole heart when, after this life, you see your companion’s magnificence much more clearly.  Then you will have squandered the opportunity to give the greatest possible gift to your Beloved: to trust and love your Divine Companion before that divinity is fully revealed to your eyes.  I doubt that even your finest heavenly accomplishments could bring more joy to God than your full commitment to your Divine Companion right here on Earth when you must trust the goodness of the indwelling God without seeing God as clearly as you will in heaven.

Imagine how you will feel like such a simpleton if, when with a far clearer perspective in heaven, you see that you mindlessly waffled on responding to your Beloved on Earth when you had an opportunity to give yourself fully to your Divine Companion.  Giving yourself to a lover whose great beauty and majesty is clearly revealed seems like a smaller gift than giving yourself to a lover when you only grasp their character but have not yet seen their abundant riches of truth, beauty and goodness.  In some fairy tales, a person loves a prince or princess when they are disguised as an ordinary person of the realm; then the royal one knows that they are loved for who they are, not for the riches which their position can offer a person.

How great a gift you give to God when you remove any motes from your spiritual eyes while you live your life on Earth (when you resolve your human doubts and fully trust that God dwells atop your interior townhouse).  Noticing the motes in your eyes is the first step to removing them; your Divine Companion stands ready to help you and everyone who is ready to let go of their stubborn human doubts that interfere with seeing and experiencing God.  God can use even the baser parts of your human nature (the motes in your eyes, the flaws in your thinking, the wounds in your heart) to restore you just as Jesus used a lowly earthly substance (mud) to restore the sight of the blind man.

Perhaps the most grievous flaw of the human mind is that we don’t desire our Divine Companion with our whole heart; our desire is so often half-hearted; our allegiances are divided because we are unwilling to relinquish all of our ego’s wishes and dreams.  The indwelling God wishes to feed you from the finest spiritual banquet but, if you are half-hearted with little spiritual hunger, you won’t have the hunger-urge to taste even a morsel of such fine spiritual food.  God’s supply of spiritual food is infinite: you will never come to the end of the banquet table no matter how much you consume.

the special quality of a love consumed with a desire to be pleasing to one’s partner

a lover who is consumed with a desire to be in harmony with one’s partner

Teresa powerfully desired to cultivate a personality that was pleasing to God.  She often expressed its flip side: powerfully desiring to eliminate any trait or habit that would displease God.  Her twin desires seem to flow from grasping and appreciating her Beloved’s preferences.  Knowing clearly that her partner was far more wonderful than herself, her heart—her devotion—became centered on pleasing her Divine Companion; her desire to please her partner was far greater than any wishes she held for herself.  With all of her heart, she wanted her interior townhouse to be as hospitable as possible for her Divine Companion; she wanted to engage in ways that would please her Beloved.  Without giving all of your heart to your Divine Companion, your desire might be motivated by a personal pride of being paired with such a wonderful partner who raises your status; or your desire might be motivated by the blessings that flow from having such a wonderful partner.  A half-hearted partner remains more or less self-centered which lessens their desire to please one’s partner.

There’s a world of difference between loving your Divine Companion because you really appreciate their great beauty and want to bring your heart, mind and soul into complete harmony with your Beloved versus loving your Divine Companion because of how that relationship improves your own life (of course, that human-divine relationship will enhance your life but that is a side benefit rather than your deepest attraction which most powerfully motivates your love).  There’s a world of difference between being drawn to your partner because you delight in their character versus being drawn to your partner because they enhance your life.  The first motive for loving leads to a powerful desire to please your partner; the second motive for loving feeds a desire to be pleased by your partner.

If your love is based on how much your partner enhances your life, your love is likely to falter when you inevitably hit hard times.  But if your love is based on appreciating how wonderful your partner is, then your love won’t be affected when circumstances are inconveniencing or very challenging, or when you need to sacrifice a treasured attachment to be in fuller harmony with your partner.  In both flush times and hard times, you will still desire to be more pleasing to your partner, to be more fully harmonized to your partner’s values and ways.

Evocative bridal phrases

Teresa uses suggestive phrases to evoke the feeling of the divine embrace:

--“the kiss of the mouth” to distinguish it from casual more chaste kisses

--drinking the finest wines kept in the deepest wine cellar (from the Song of Solomon)

--delighting in reaching the innermost and most sacred tabernacle, the closest abode of God on Earth where God indwells a person

--a signal to a person who, like a ship floundering at seas, has lost all their hope that they could ever reach a spiritual harbor; the presence of a Divine Companion is a sign like the dove who returned to Noah’s ark with an olive branch to assure Noah that land is nearby even though Noah can’t see that land just yet.

Oasis metaphor

[Dwelling 4; chapter 2 of The Interior Castle]

Your mind is like soil watered by two different springs: the first spring brings human water; the second spring brings divine water.  The first spring requires great effort on your part: the mind equivalent of building aqueducts, operating pumps, etc. Imagine how noisy and exhausting such a mental contraption is!  This spring represents your mental labors and energy-intensive self-discipline.  The happiness that flows from this first spring is mainly the fruit of your human mind; this happiness quickly dissipates without your continual efforts.

The second spring of water requires much less effort on your part; it is like an artesian spring that flows directly into a basin where you can easily get the water.  Imagine how peaceful such a restorative pool of water is!  This second spring represents your Divine Companion’s infusions into your mind, heart and soul.  In one sense, these spiritual waters seem solely controlled by your Divine Companion; in another sense, these waters seem controlled by how spiritually receptive and cooperative you are; they seem controlled by how thoroughly you have removed any psychological blockages to trusting God.  The joy that flows from this second spring is mainly the fruit of divine infusions into your human mind; this joy endures much longer than the good mood that comes from the first spring.  The water from the second spring flows generously into every nook and cranny of your interior world and enhances each room on every floor.

This divine spring dilates your heart making you more caring, more compassionate, more tenderly loving, more gladly servant-minded.  The water of the divine spring is like fertilizer that nourishes your personality and increases your spiritual fruiting.

Discerning one spring from the other

Two sure ways can help you discern whether a human-origin spring or a divine-origin spring has flowed into your mind:

1) whether you readily bear good spiritual fruit afterwards; and

2) whether you have become more humble: less preoccupied with yourself and more concerned about others and God.

The surest assay of whether you are humble is that “you neither think you now deserve these graces and consolations from God, nor that you could ever be deserving of them as long as you live.”  Humility means loving “God without [any] self-interest [at all].”  Arrogance, the opposite of humility, exaggerates your merit and considers yourself as worthy of or overdue for the glorious divine graces.  The most sincere souls have no thought of gaining any special dispensation or consolations in this lifetime.  Instead, they only seek service, more service and then even more challenging opportunities to serve.  Human confusion (so common on the lower floors) may sneakily suggest that you should seek out suffering because that will somehow entitle you to receive more divine consolations; what a disgrace to God’s tenderness to think that God requires, or even desires to see, your suffering before God will pour forth divine water and love on you.

The divine waters won’t flow as fully when you are wanting more of the benefits of the divine waters.  Your most diligent efforts to force a larger flow of water will yield very little when you are motivated by selfish wishes, even selfish wishes for spiritual goodies.  But, when you are quite forgetful of getting more blessings because you are so fully dedicated to doing God’s will, the divine waters seem to flow spontaneously without your specifically asking for such blessings.  The divine waters seem to flow more continually when their sweet goodness doesn’t pull your gaze away from the great beauty of God’s face, God’s wonderful personality.

When you leave behind the more primitive wishes and motives of your bottom section (when you let go of your worldly attachments; when your ego gives up its claim for complete control), the divine spring flows more abundantly.  The top section of your interior townhouse seems to operate as if clinging to your primitive attachments creates a dam in the divine waterway which even God’s power cannot penetrate.

Tree Metaphor

You aren’t like an inert rock that only changes when external forces act on it over long geological ages.  Rather, you are like a plant seed with the potential to grow into a tree, even in your lifetime.  But the seed’s fullest potential is only realized when it is planted in rich soil, is watered by a bountiful spring and receives much sunlight.  Such a well-situated and well-nourished seed becomes a very magnificent specimen tree that demonstrates everything a seed can become.  But a seed languishing in poor soil, lacking enough water and sunlight to thrive, becomes a stunted tree that bears little resemblance to the specimen tree; the stunted tree doesn’t show the full potential of what a seed might become.

You—the character which you cultivate and develop—are like such a seed.  You can grow into a wonderful person or you can be a shadow of your full potential depending on the quality of your mind (the soil), your values (the water of the spring), and your spiritual desires (your receptivity of the sun’s light).

Your mind is the soil in which you (the seed) grow: is your soil well-tilled because you frequently exercise your capability for thinking clearly and deeply?  Or is your soil hardened because you only occupy your mind with material concerns and shallow pursuits?  Your mind’s capabilities for wise thinking and clear insight develop and increase when you use them well.  But your mind barely rises above foolish thinking and minimal self-reflection when its capabilities are barely exercised.

Your desires (your values) are the springs that shape how you (the seed) grow: does your spring bring good clear water because you have tapped into deeper values?  Or is your spring barely a trickle of polluted water because you have been beguiled by shallower values?  Your values determine what you pursue: if you value pleasure, you will pursue life’s goodies as much as possible; if you value competency, you will pursue every opportunity for developing your skills.  Valuing what really matters opens a strong flow of nourishment to help you grow into all that you can be.

The thoughts you entertain are the sunlight that enables a tree’s leaves to make energy: are you exposing yourself to high spiritual ideals that inspire you to seek purpose and meaningful tasks in life? Or are you entranced by trivial theories and theologies that don’t inspire you or energize you to take on worthwhile but demanding spiritual endeavors?  Attuning your receptivity to higher spiritual ideals (more accurate presentations of God’s lovely personality) uplifts your thoughts and forms you into a specimen of all that a person can be.

The endowments of your inner world (the capabilities of your mind) aren’t limited to their initial levels; they increase when you use them wisely.  When you strengthen them, they can better nourish you and support a flourishing character.  When you fritter away your capabilities, you starve yourself of the nutrients your character needs to develop.  You can either strengthen or atrophy your mind’s initial capabilities by the depth of your thoughts and the wisdom of your values.

Thriving or withering

Your spirituality is in danger of shriveling and dying when you aren’t nourished by God’s succor (the sunlight in this metaphor).  How terrible when a person spurns their Divine Companion’s offer to become fully betrothed to each other.  Squandering such a precious opportunity to co-create a brilliantly beautiful life is a tragedy of the greatest proportion. Wasting your one precious life is like not cultivating a seed that could become a wonderful specimen tree.  Please don’t allow yourself to wither when all you need is available to you.  Please don’t live in spiritual starvation when God is so close to you.  Such would be the deepest sadness in all the universe!

A tree rooted in good conditions grows into a thing of beauty.  A person rooted in rich spiritual values who makes wise choices grows into an exceptionally beautiful person; they blossom and develop capabilities that would have otherwise lay dormant; they bear much good fruit.  Nurtured by your Divine Companion, you can grow in spiritual beauty and stature (which has absolutely nothing to do with your social status, even in religious circles).

A person who keeps God at arm’s length deprives themselves of the essential nutrient needed to become a really warm and kind person.  A person who keeps God at arm’s length imprisons themselves in a much darker place in life than they could have otherwise enjoyed.

A person who forsakes God (who has no reverence or respect for God’s sublime character) will likely fill that vacuum by glorifying their own ego; they are likely to consider themselves as the most wonderful being in all the world, in all the universe.  Such a bleak mindset contains none of the divine beauty that comes when you allow God to enter your inner life and then spiritize your mortal character.  Perhaps you have fallen into self-centered darkness and then miraculously caught a glimpse of your fallen state in a moment of clear self-reflection.  If you are fortunate enough to sense how bleak your life has become (how far you are from who you could have been), you might be motivated to ensure that you reverse course, reorient your life and never again lapse into that dark condition of insufficiently revering God.

The quality of spiritual fruit

It’s impossible for a starved tree to bear much fruit when its roots are buried in thin soil with little nourishing water or minerals.  It’s impossible for a spiritually starved person to bear much fruit when their mental roots are anchored in foolish desires and endless ruminations on distorted ideas.  A person living on a spiritual subsistent diet might accomplish some wonderful material deeds but not the more compassionate acts that only a God-nourished soul can.  Material accomplishments may earn the admiration of other secularists but they are not the epitome of who you can become and of what you can do; amazing but spiritually vacuous worldly deeds don’t please God nearly as much as humbler but spiritually vibrant smaller deeds.

Water flowing through a contaminated watershed becomes a polluted stream.  Fruit growing on a tree in contaminated ground accumulates the soil’s pollutants.  The fruit you bear reflects the purity of your values and the clarity of your thoughts.  Consuming polluted fruit may seem fine at first but eventually it will poison the person who consumes it.  If the poison is fast acting, its ill effects will be immediately obvious.  This situation is like choosing something opposed to God’s ways and the consequences of your choice are immediately quite obvious so you can clearly see the foolishness and harm of that choice and never repeat it again.

If the poison in the fruit is slow acting, its insidious effects are only felt much later; if the gap between eating the fruit and its harmful effects is long enough, you might not even connect the fruit you enjoyed long ago as causing your current misery.  Adopting some reasonable sounding but inaccurate worldview may inflict its harm much later; you may never connect the dots and see which choices flowing from which erroneous and incomplete beliefs are causing your current misery.  Without connecting your circumstances with your preceding values and choices that caused it, you remain vulnerable to continue consuming the very ideas and thoughts that cause you so much grief and suffering.

Where the tree metaphor falls apart

Unlike a tree which must remain where it first germinated, you can move yourself from an unhealthy setting of your earlier life to a healthier setting as an adult.  If the people and religion that first formed you aren’t healthy, you can move to new friendships and teachings that better nourish you and your soul.  You can send your roots down into new soils so your relationship with your Divine Companion thrives, enabling you to more graciously serve others and care for them in more attuned ways.

Some people may remain rooted in inferior soil because they aren’t willing to invest the significant mental effort to move to better soil.  Some people may uproot themselves from good soil because of some minor inconvenience or perceived slight and, in their anger, be unaware that they have transplanted themselves from good soil to poorer soil.  Your choice of soil affects the course of your life a great deal; choose wisely so that you transplant yourself into soil that is better, not worse, for the development of your soul.

Everyone is free to choose where they will put down their roots; you are free to choose the views you consider to be true, the communities you consider worth joining, the goals you consider worth pursuing in your life.  A person may choose grossly distorted views over more accurate views; or they may choose to join toxic communities over healthy groups; or they may choose to pursue inferior goals over more uplifting goals.  Be aware that each choice you make usually involves moving towards one thing and away from another.

A wisely cultivated inner garden gets better

A garden metaphor for your inner life emphasizes how your mind is like an ecosystem which can change for better or worse.  Just as an ecosystem can thrive or collapse depending on how it is treated, you can grow or wither depending on how you cultivate your inner life.  Like a garden, your inner life blossoms when it is well tended; it deteriorates when it is neglected.  You bear more spiritual fruit when you cooperate with your Divine Companion who assists you like a master gardener than you do when you rely only on your own resources and dismiss wise guidance.  The state of a person’s inner garden may be hard to assess but a well-cultivated inner garden always seems to enhance a person’s ability to graciously serve others.

Your inner world is like an extensive garden with different parts for flowers, trees, vegetables, fruits and meditation or prayer.  Some parts of your inner garden are well-suited to dealing with the practical demands of day-to-day life; some parts are well-suited to navigating relationships with others.  These garden parts correspond to the bottom section of the interior townhouse. Some garden parts are well-suited to spiritual understanding.  These garden parts correspond to the top section of the interior townhouse. Your inner garden also contains a sacred place where your amazing co-gardener, your Divine Companion, waits and hopes you will share full access to all of your garden.  This sacred part corresponds to the townhouse’s rooftop. Your garden becomes more lush and fruitful, your interior townhouse becomes even more wonderful, your life becomes as precious as possible, when you share it more fully with your Divine Companion.

Cultivating your inner garden is an art that requires a lifetime to develop. The goal of inner cultivation is to create a garden (an environment) that is hospitable to your Divine Companion not a garden with weeds that are noxious to your Beloved.  [An earlier section, “Climbing Skills,” describes attitudes and practices for ascending the interior stairway; they could also be called cultivation skills for your inner garden.]

Caterpillar Metamorphosis

[Dwelling 5; chapter 2]

Metaphor: caterpillar to moth metamorphosis

A silk worm’s life has several seasons; during each one, it assumes a unique form and pursues a specific purpose. It begins as a very small but tough egg that can survive harsh conditions; throughout the winter cold, it lies dormant on a mulberry tree.  The caterpillar emerges from the egg when its preferred food, mulberry leaves, appears in spring.  Then the very hungry caterpillar voraciously consumes leaves to fuel impressive and rapid growth.  In this season, the caterpillar’s form is very obvious: a fat body with a tiny mouth devoted to consuming an amazing amount of food.  It seems to have only one purpose: to eat as much as possible in order to grow as fast as possible.

Once it has grown enough, a previously unseen capability of the caterpillar’s tiny mouth develops: it can produce silk as well as consume leaves.  The caterpillar spins an astonishing amount of silk and weaves it into a cocoon.  In this season, the caterpillar’s form is also obvious: it is a spinning machine.  It now adds a new purpose: to create its silk cocoon.

When the season of silk-spinning ends, the caterpillar withdraws into its cocoon and seems to completely dissolve into a thick liquid.  But actually it is incubating: digesting some, not all, of its original caterpillar parts and constructing new moth parts.  Even during the seasons of eating and spinning, the caterpillar always possessed the blueprints for becoming a moth: imaginal discs present all along within the caterpillar body but only visible to well-trained eyes.  In this season, the caterpillar’s form is obvious: a liquid goo.  Although it can be hard to see, it has only one purpose: to transform itself.

When the incubation season is completed, the “caterpillar” emerges in a new form, unrecognizable and completely remade, as a moth. This new season brings a single purpose: mating.  In earlier stages, the creature’s purposes could be accomplished alone: eating and spinning; but the moth’s new purpose can only be done with another creature.  The moth is consumed with finding a mate (and the mate is equally consumed with finding this moth) so that together they can co-create something which neither could create alone.

In any one season, there’s no indication that this creature will have other seasons, other forms and other purposes.  A caterpillar shows no indication of ever being a winged moth; a moth shows little indication that it was ever a caterpillar.  At each stage in its life cycle, you might think that you know exactly who this creature is; but you would be mistaken unless you understand the creature’s entire life cycle.  To think that all of these seasons happen in two months: such a rich and fulfilling life for such a small but industrious creature!

As a side-effect of doing the tasks of each season of its life, the industrious caterpillar creates silk, an amazing fiber that others can use to make beautiful things.

Human counterpart in this metaphor

Your life has its own unique seasons, each with its own form and purpose.  Your infant brain is pre-programmed to be strong and resilient (like the caterpillar’s egg) to cope with circumstances that could be very harsh: a survival instinct that includes good measures of anxiety, aggression and self-centeredness; and a powerful drive to bond with your family and clan.  With a loving parent and a stimulating environment (good human nutrients equivalent to the caterpillar’s mulberry leaves), your mind grows by leaps and bounds.  Your form (your personality) is quite obvious to you and your friends; you might think that your human nature is all of you just as a naïve person might see a caterpillar and think that is the whole story, never imagining that it has the potential to be a moth.

As you continue growing, your mind develops additional capabilities: connecting with people as well as learning established ideas and creating new things (new capabilities analogous to the caterpillar’s mouth developing the capability of spinning as well as eating).  Your mind can also develop capabilities for grasping spiritual matters as well as material and psychological matters.  You become more independent and can be a contributor as well as a consumer.

If you love spiritual beauty more than material pleasures, you may enter a season of incubation and enter a spiritual cocoon where you reduce your ego-driven ways to make room in your inner life for your spiritual nature which was within you all along (like the moth blueprint was always within the caterpillar).  But early on your dormant spiritual nature was only visible to someone with keen spiritual insight; you can sense your spiritual nature if you look deeply within yourself and grasp all that your inner world contains.

If, like the caterpillar is reborn as a moth with an entirely new purpose, you are reborn as a new person, you will have new purposes which are quite different from your prior purposes in life.  Some of your earlier purposes will remain (perhaps loyalty to your family and partner) and some will be dissolved (perhaps your preoccupation with excessive security or acclaim).  Two additional purposes will surely emerge when you are reborn.  Like the moth’s purpose of mating requires a partner, your new purposes involve relationships with others; they aren’t something that can be done by yourself alone.  The first purpose is an inner one: to love and trust your Divine Companion as fully as possible; the second purpose is an outer one: to love and graciously serve the people you encounter in life.

Like the action-packed life of a caterpillar, much growth can happen in your relatively short life, but only if you are aware of your inner world and make wise choices in cultivating it. The great gift of divine intimacy awaits you if you diligently apply yourself to the tasks of each season of your life.  And, like the beautiful silk produced by the caterpillar contributes to others, your kindness can contribute to the goodness of the world.

The limits of this metaphor

A caterpillar/moth is basically programmed to automatically assume the form and purpose of each season of its life cycle; it really doesn’t have any choice in what it does or what it becomes.  But a human being isn’t robotically programmed like a moth: after the first few stages of childhood development, you must choose to undertake the additional stages of growth.  No one can make you learn new things or be kind to others; you must choose to do so or those capabilities won’t be developed.

Although you aren’t robotically programmed to grow spiritually, you contain all the programs needed for your spiritual development.  They are baked into you.  Just like the imaginal discs are contained within the caterpillar, you contain all the capabilities that you need for bonding with your Divine Companion.  They lie dormant within you, waiting for you to awaken them with your holy desire to know God.  As this desire deepens (another way of saying as your values deepen), the necessary spiritual capabilities will appear; they will be sufficient to bring you closer to your Beloved and enjoy intimacy with your Divine Companion.

Every tiny creature plays a role in God’s world

This tiny aspect of creation, the caterpillar, bears the imprint of the Creator and illuminates God’s nature: how God loves to gift great possibilities to a seemingly lowly creature; how each creature must diligently apply themselves to the tasks of each season of their life in order to realize their amazing potential which lies dormant, nearly invisible, within them. Along the way in the course of your life, God asks you to contribute to the world by creating something beautiful and by serving others.  The caterpillar and you, both tiny aspects of God’s vast creation, bear the divine imprint of God’s great generosity and your life’s great possibilities for growing and contributing.

Like the caterpillar, although you aren’t particularly lofty, you can play a role in God’s plans when you allow the divine pattern which God imbedded within you to guide your many small actions which move you along the larger trajectory of your life.  How inspiring that, if you are a devoted spiritual caterpillar diligently doing the tasks of the current season of your life, that you can eventually develop into a wholly new creature who is so very different from who you were as you began your life.  This aspect of the metaphor emphasizes appreciating the value of the lower stages of spiritual development; being too absorbed in loftier stages yet to come can detract your focus from your current tasks and slow your ascent up the inner stairway.

This metaphor of metamorphosis resonates with Jesus’ teaching that spiritual growth is like being born again into a whole new person.  The caterpillar only becomes a moth when it fully lays down its caterpillar identity.  Without allowing itself to be dissolved in the cocoon, it will always remain a caterpillar.  In the same way, you can only be reborn when you fully lay down your human identity—all your personal attachments and all desires for worldly treasures.  Until you lay them down, you will be confined to a human-only life; you won’t be able to live the larger human+divine life which is built into you.  You might understandably be afraid to lay down what you believe sustains you and enables you to negotiate all that life requires of you.  But you are only afraid because you don’t yet know the wonderful transformation awaiting you on the rooftop, awaiting you in your Divine Companion’s arms during that sublime embrace.

Contemplating the miracle of the caterpillar assures me that no part of your life need be feared or looked down on.  Every season of life—every phase of human development—is sacred and can play a role in becoming the full person God desires you to be.  Every person you meet, at any stage in their growth, merits your awe and deep reverence when you know the great potential that lies within them.

Two kinds of spiritual nourishment

First spiritual foods

Like the leaves that feed the caterpillar’s initial growth, the accumulated religious treasures of the millennia nourish you spiritually on the lower floors: sacred texts holding the highest human insights into God; sacred rituals for cultivating your devotion; prayer practices; the writings of spiritual sages describing their inner experiences.  These first spiritual foods strengthen you and compensate for the gaps in your understanding; the great possibilities they reveal can act as an antidote to counteract the inertia of human laziness; they enlarge your spiritual awareness.  An early diet of the spiritual treasures of the ages, along with a devout prayer life, enable you to cultivate a vigorous human character along the lines of the divine template and become ever so slightly more like God, more like the person God intended you to become.

Without the proper spiritual food (like the mulberry leaf for the caterpillar), you will be starved of essential nutrients and your spiritual growth will be stunted.  Subsisting only on your own thinking, you can only slightly enhance your interior abode to be hospitable to your Divine Companion; but when you consume good external spiritual nourishment, you can much better transform your interior townhouse into a dwelling fit for sharing your life with the divine.  As the caterpillar readily gives up its caterpillar existence to become a moth, a humble and devout person readily gives up their human-only existence to become an intimate partner of God.

Be very clear that you are changing your lower floors to be appropriate for God’s company and purposes; these changes don’t heighten God’s desire for you.  It’s simply impossible for human actions to improve on God’s already infinite affection.  God’s desire to be close to you is already so great that it can’t be increased.  How ridiculous to imagine that human actions are required to deepen God’s already unfathomable love; God loves you greatly even before you take the first step on the inner stairway.

Taking in external spiritual nourishment (immersing yourself in the accumulated wisdom of the human race) leads you to take the first steps on the spiritual path.  As wonderful and essential as your initial spiritual growth is, it will later be dwarfed by the spiritual growth spurts that come when you feed on the internal nourishment provided by your Divine Companion.

Second spiritual foods

The second kind of spiritual nourishment is found within your interior townhouse: in an inner dialogue with your Divine Companion; in glimpses of your Beloved’s beauty; in fragments of the sweet divine melody; in your Divine Companion’s caresses and embrace.  Such spiritual nourishment is like the caterpillar feeding on internal foods in the cocoon.

The second and inner spiritual foods are discussed at length throughout this book; that emphasis may give the erroneous impression that the first and external foods are somehow inferior.  That isn’t true at all: it’s hard to find a person who enjoys inner spiritual nourishment who wasn’t first nourished by outer spiritual food.  Both kinds of foods nourish you: a balanced spiritual diet is far better than a diet of mainly one kind of food.

QUOTE

[Dwelling 5, chapter 2, paragraph 5 from The Interior Castle]

“Forward then, my daughters!

hasten over your work and build the little cocoon.

Let us

renounce self-love and self-will,

care for nothing earthly,

do penance,

pray,

mortify ourselves,

be obedient, and

perform all the other good works of which you know.

Act up to your light;

you have been taught your duties.

Die! die as the silkworm does when it has fulfilled the office of its creation,

and you will see God and be immersed in His greatness,

as the little silkworm is enveloped in its cocoon.

Understand that when I say ‘you will see God,’

I mean in the manner described, in which He manifests Himself in this kind of union.”

PARAPHRASE

My fellow spiritual sibs, let’s press forward with vigor!

let’s ascend up the inner stairway with joy and delight.

Enthusiastically undertake the tasks inherent in living on each of the lower floors.

Do life’s early tasks well, knowing that you are building the cocoon in which you will be transformed.

The early tasks are:

renouncing self-love and self-will,

caring little for earthly things,

being deeply sorry for how you’ve deviated from God’s ways,

praying: seeking to turn your inner monologue into a human-divine dialogue,

being obedient to your spiritual leadings,

washing feet and serving others as graciously as you can.

Be worthy of the beautiful spiritual housemate you are hosting;

Embody the best of what you have learned through your spiritual studies.

Die! as the silkworm dies in the cocoon when it has fulfilled the purpose of its earlier seasons,

Gently let go of the person your ego has created:

it has fulfilled its purpose and is much less essential now.

Having relinquished your small identity, you will sense God stirring within you;

you will be immersed in God’s great and wonderful personality.

As the little silkworm is enveloped in its cocoon,

allow yourself to be fully enveloped in your Divine Companion’s sure and trustworthy affection and devotion.

Understand that when I say ‘you will see God,’

I mean that you will experience God’s personality in the inner divine embrace

which is a far better way of knowing God than through intellect alone.

You will much better grasp the loveliness of God’s personality.

The cocoon is like the divine embrace

The divine embrace seems to last only minutes yet can leave you transformed for your remaining time on Earth.  You will remain a beautiful spiritual butterfly for many, many years if you maintain a vibrant relationship with your Beloved.  The transformation may be so drastic that you may barely recognize yourself afterwards; you may barely recognize your interior townhouse as the same place you lived in prior to the divine embrace.  The limited human mind of the bottom section can’t wrap itself around such a huge transformation yet your own experience assures you that it is quite real.

Understanding what you experience in the divine embrace is beyond the grasp of the human mind: How could such a powerful God be so kind and tender?  How could such a perfect lover so ardently seek your much more meager loving?  How could such a refined person be content to live in and share such a humble townhouse?  How could such a spiritually lofty mindset rest on the foundation of a much humbler human mindset?  Without being able to adequately answer these profound questions, only praise remains.  Your soul will be swept up in spontaneous praise for the great glory and beauty of God’s character; your heart will overflow with gratitude for being able to experience God this way; you would be willing to endure another thousand caterpillar-like existences simply to experience again the brief but utterly transforming moments in your Divine Companion’s arms; you become willing to undertake the most difficult spiritual tasks that will surely present themselves to you after the embrace.

The caterpillar’s diligent crawling and single-minded spinning are what eventually enable the moth to fly.  Look back on your own life and see that faithfully using your human mind and embryonic spiritual capabilities is what enabled your more enhanced spiritual capabilities to unfold.  How foolish to despise the early stages of life when they are the prerequisites which form the foundation for the next wonderful stage.  Far better to steadily and surely grow by conscientiously doing the work of each stage than to stall your growth by daydreaming about the wonders of future stages.

The divine embrace whets your appetite for even closer intimacy with God; you become eager to do whatever is required for closer sharing and cooperation.  You experience a sweet spot of feeling both a) the deep peace of secure attachment (deep satisfaction with your current relationship with your Divine Companion) as well as b) an intense desire for even deeper spiritual intimacy.  The baser pleasures of the world that were once so alluring now seem quite bland and barely appealing.

Being held in the divine embrace is like taking a sip of the finest wine which leaves behind a long-lasting sense of its flavor: your Divine Companion leaves behind sweet graces within your townhouse after each encounter.  Having tasted the divine ambrosia, those worldly pleasures that you previously enjoyed so much no longer satisfy you even slightly, let alone sate the desires of your heart.  After the divine embrace, worldly pleasures might even feel unpleasant and unsatisfying because you now know how they can inhibit the precious human-divine intimacy.

The new pleasure of flying

The caterpillar delights in being able to fly after only being able to crawl for all its life. [Fact check: silk worms can barely fly; different species of other caterpillars grow into moths and butterflies that can fly.] How amazing to be able to fly: a whole new way of being in the world.  In the same way, after the divine embrace (after emerging from the cocoon-like arms of God), you will certainly have new ways of being in your world.  Likely, you will feel much more joy even though your worldly circumstances haven’t changed; you will be much less self-centered; you will be more courageous and undertake tasks that felt far beyond you before.

At any point on the inner stairway, your soul desires to do more than what you can actually do at your current stage.  Even at the human equivalent of the butterfly stage, when you can do more than you could at earlier stages, your soul desires to do even more than what you are actually able to do.  Your desires will likely always exceed what you can do at any point in your life.  Don’t be frustrated with your current limitations because your Divine Companion is moved by what you desire to do (your highest ideals) much more than what you can actually do at your current stage.

one foot in each world

Where does a person go after they have tasted the holy pleasures of the divine embrace?  You must still live with one foot in the material world (there is no escaping life’s incessant demands) and with one foot in the spiritual world.  You must continue to live with the friction between these two worlds; fortunately, that friction can’t disturb your secure attachment to your Divine Companion.  You must continue meeting life’s obligations but now, with all the graces you have received, you can meet those obligations with a vibrant step that reflects the imprint of your Divine Companion.  After the divine embrace, you can graciously bear heavier crosses that would have crushed your spirit before you received the divine infusions.  Doing God’s work without any worldly recognition or acclaim will no longer deflate you as it may have before.  You will now be content to do good so unselfishly that you will barely be aware of what you did; as if your right hand is unaware of the good that your left hand has done; as if you are so focused on God and others that you are barely focused on yourself.

In moments of deepest prayer, indulge your hope that everyone might want to please and welcome God.  Keep this hope alive even though many people are so cavalier (indifferent to God) and dismiss the possibility that God could do anything meaningful in their life.

Butterfly Poem

QUOTE (Dwelling 6; chapter 6; paragraph 3 in The Interior Castle)

“O poor little butterfly!

chained by so many fetters that stop thee from flying where thou wouldst!

Have pity on her, O my God, and

so dispose her ways that she may be able to accomplish some of her desires for Thy honor and glory!

Take no account of the poverty of her merits, nor of the vileness of her nature, Lord,

Thou Who hast the power to compel the vast ocean to retire,

and didst force the wide river Jordan to draw back so that the Children of Israel might pass through!

Yet spare her not, for aided by Thy strength she can endure many trials.

She is resolved to do so—she desires to suffer them.

Stretch forth Thine arm, O Lord, to help her lest she waste her life on trifles!

Let Thy greatness appears in this Thy creature, womanish and weak as she is,

so that men, seeing the good in her is not her own, may praise Thee for it!

Let it cost her what it may and as dear as she desires,

for she longs to lose a thousand lives to lead one soul to praise Thee but a little better.

If as many lives were hers to give, she would count them well spent in such a cause,

knowing as a truth most certain that she is unworthy to bear the lightest cross, much less to die for Thee.”

PARAPHRASE (paraphrased as a dialogue between you and your Divine Companion)

You: I am worried that my interior townhouse is terribly inadequate for you,

that it isn’t good enough for you to come and be here with me.

Beloved: Please don’t be so judge-y about your interior townhouse.

Like the Heavenly Father, I see you—your interior townhouse—as wonderful.

I see you with mercy and kindness; I have no microscope that searches out your human flaws.

You: My Beloved, after the warmth of your sweet and vibrant embrace,

my interior townhouse now feels cold as if I am too far from you;

this abode now feels like ballast,

a hindrance that prevents me from soaring to the heights where you live.

Beloved: Please trust me: you are never far from me anywhere in your townhouse.

Together, we will remodel your townhouse into a place of great beauty;

together, we will enhance your heart and mind.

I want to work miracles with you!

We will transform what feels like ballast

so that it now becomes the fulcrum for doing God’s work in the world.

You: I am ready to remove anything in my townhouse that hinders your plans.

Please take away anything in me that displeases you or offends your sublime senses.

I clearly see that my earlier treasures are trifles compared to your great beauty and goodness.

I would love if your light would shine brightly from the windows of my townhouse,

not so that anyone is attracted to me, to the townhouse,

but so that lost souls stumbling in the darkness are helped by the light that is yours alone.

Beloved: I would love that, too!

You: I am totally overcome with love because you, such a wonderful lover, want me as your partner.

I want to share your goodness with others so that another person feels you as I do.

Just as you are willing to do anything to reach me,

I am willing to do anything, no matter how hard, so that one person can feel the warmth of your love.

Beloved: I have the same traits as the Heavenly Father who is so powerful,

who moves the huge oceans and spins the vast galaxies.

Yet I lay down all my power when I come to your rooftop.

I am only tender until you welcome me into your inner world.

And then, once welcomed, my power can accomplish so much with who you are;

together, we can do things far beyond your wildest imagining.

You: I give you my wholehearted welcome!

All that I have is yours to do with as you will.

[I get the irony: all that I have to give you, I have first received from you.]

Beloved: I placed the spark of your essence into you.

No limitations of your mind nor the harshness of this world can stop that spark from shining.

God can perform many miraculous feats.

When you cooperate with me, together we can perform the most wonderous miracle of all:

transforming a self-centered person into a God-cooperating person.

You are no bystander to this magnificent spiritual miracle:

your participation is essential, especially your willingness to climb your inner stairways and

leave the comforting familiarity of your bottom section behind.

You: Before I entered the top section, leaving the bottom section felt like a torment too great to bear.

But after you embraced me, I gladly leave those floors behind.

Leaving them is a trivial price to pay for spending even one moment in your arms.

Beloved:  Thank you!  You have entrusted all of you to me even though it seemed costly.

Now I can give all of me to you, as much of me as you can assimilate.

All my spiritual riches are now available to you.

You: A great hope springs up in my heart that even a humble person such as me

might bear the spiritual fruit that inspires just one other person to really trust God’s goodness and

encourage them to cultivate a reverent mindset which praises God with all their heart and might.

I would live a thousand lives on this harsh orb

if that might assist just one person to betroth themself to their Divine Companion.

What a thrill to be the earthly partner with an audible voice

that helps just one person attune to the voice of the God who dwells within them,

whose subtle divine voice whispers to them within their interior townhouse

but they won’t listen for that beautiful divine voice without a nudge from another person.

The Divine Fingerprint

[Dwelling 4; chapter 1]

A person’s unique fingerprint is a set of physical characteristics which identifies each person.  A person’s personality is a set of unique psychological characteristics which identifies each person.  These signature qualities enable you to distinguish one person from another, one friend from another.  Teresa describes the signature qualities of your Divine Companion that can help you discern your human self from your divine housemate.

recognizing your Divine Companion by the signature of divine fragrance

Each of your friends has a distinct personality that distinguishes them from other friends.  Each friend’s personality identifies them: one is bubbly, another is reserved; one is critical, another is sympathetic; one is optimistic, another is pessimistic.  Your Divine Companion has a very distinctive personality which is quite different from any person in the outer world or any persona in your inner world.  Your Beloved’s personality is identified by a fragrance or signature melody which clearly identifies your Divine Companion.

The sweet fragrance of your Divine Companion can be more clearly felt in your top section; your ground floor is too far from the rooftop for that precious fragrance to penetrate at first.  The divine fragrance is akin to the wonderful feeling you have when someone is attuned to you and really appreciates you.  Sensing the divine fragrance assures you of God’s exquisite tenderness for you.

The sweet song of your Divine Companion can be more clearly felt in your top section; your ground floor is far too noisy for you to hear the softer notes of your Divine Companion’s song.  The divine melody is akin to feeling the warmth of a kind person who loves you very much and cares for you very deeply.  The divine melody assures you of God’s unfailing devotion to you.  Sensing God’s amazing personality may motivate you to give your all (all your efforts, all your time, all your heart, your everything) to continue climbing the inner stairway.

The divine tenderness

As you climb higher on the inner stairway, your Beloved can show you more of the lovely divine personality.  Just as you get to know someone by being with them, you get to know your Divine Companion’s amazing character by drawing closer.  Or, just as you don’t know someone if you don’t spend time with them, you don’t know your Divine Companion if you never draw close.  The divine personality is very tender, always and delicately reaching out to you in a way that reflects your Beloved’s sublime longing for more intimacy and collaboration with you.  Intimacy and collaboration seem be the very core of God’s personality.  Experiencing God’s exquisite desire for you may ignite your own robust desire to reach out to God with all the reverence and loyalty you can muster.

The thunderclap call

Much of the time, your Divine Companion is quite tender and gentle with you.  But sometimes your Divine Companion might grab your attention so powerfully that it feels like a loud thunderclap which instantaneously captures your attention no matter what you are doing.  Such experiences feel as if your Divine Companion is saying to you: “I need your full focus right now.  I need you to allow me to flow more fully into your interior world.  We have work that we must do immediately.”  Such a powerful bid for your attention is not like the sharp rebuke of a harsh schoolmaster; your Beloved’s penetrating bid feels so delicious that you will hope that it never ends.

Your Divine Companion’s distinctive tone

[Dwelling 6; chapter 2]

Your Beloved’s calling, whether delicate or penetrating, clearly comes from God and not from your human imagination or ruminations.  The tone of the divine calling is quite different from the musings of your mind or the intense stirrings of human emotions; God’s ways are starkly different from the human mind’s ways.  Your Divine Companion’s “voice” is unmistakable; it can communicate volumes and open your eyes without uttering a word.

The Soft Wax

Teresa describes the soul using a metaphor of the wax used to seal a letter which is warmed to become soft enough to receive the imprint of God’s signet ring.

QUOTE

[Dwelling 5, chapter 2, paragraph 11 from The Interior Castle]

“The soul has so entirely yielded itself into His hands and

is so subdued by love for Him that it knows or cares for nothing but

that God should dispose of it according to His will.

I believe that He only bestows this grace on those He takes entirely for His own.

He desires that, without knowing how, the spirit should come forth stamped with His seal for indeed it does no more than does the wax when impressed with the signet. It does not mold itself but need only be in a fit condition—soft and pliable; even then it does not soften itself but must merely remain still and submit to the impression.”

“How good Thou art, O God!

All is done for us by Thee, Who dost but ask us to give our wills to Thee

that we may be plastic as wax in Thy hands.

PARAPHRASE

“When you completely cede inner leadership of your townhouse to God,

when you love God with your whole heart,

when you hold nothing back, your human nature is both subdued and graced…

subdued: your coarser instincts and yearnings are tamed and muted;

graced: your mind is now much more than it could ever be on its own resources.

This simultaneous subduing and gracing can only happen

when you give yourself entirely over to God’s aims.

God can only transform you so thoroughly

when you totally place yourself into God’s hands.

Making yourself completely receptive to God’s wishes is like becoming

warm and soft wax that accepts the imprint of God’s signet ring:

wax (a heart) that is hard and brittle is impervious to God’s imprint;

wax (an ego) that is too mushy cannot retain God’s imprint.

To receive God, your personality must be

receptive enough to allow God to put a clear and accurate imprint on you;

substantial enough to hold a lasting imprint of God.

Be quite clear: you don’t put God’s imprint onto yourself;

God is the only source of that divine imprint;

even the most elevated human being can’t imprint themselves or another person.

Be quite clear: you may bear the imprint of God but you are the recipient of holy graces;

you are not the source of such exalted holy graces (not by a long shot).

You must remain still when God imprints onto your soul

so that God’s imprint isn’t smudged or distorted by your squirming.”

Gravity

[Dwelling 4; chapter 3]

The gravitational pull between two planets becomes stronger as the mass of one planet grows; the attraction between them becomes weaker when one planet shrinks.  Your desires are like one of the planets in this metaphor; the object of your desire is like the other planet.  The attractive power of material goodies increases when you value them and desire them highly; their pull on you decreases when you value them and desire them less.  The more strongly you are attracted by worldly security, ease and pleasure, the harder it becomes to escape their hold on you; and the harder it becomes to respond to the gravitational pull of spirituality.  When you care less about the self-centeredness of the bottom section and when you place less value in worldly goodies, you can more easily escape the surly bonds of the ground floor and be attracted more strongly by the deep intimacy found in the upper section of your interior townhouse.

You can weaken the world’s gravitational pull on you by decreasing your materialistic mass (by decreasing your desire for worldly goodies) and transforming it into spiritual mass (by increasing your holy desire to be with God).  Your Beloved’s spiritual gravitational pull is only as strong as your spiritual mass, as strong as your desire to align your life with God’s wishes.  You can tilt the scales in the gravitational tug-of-war between the world and God by decreasing your worldly mass, by willingly releasing your selfish desires and not pursuing gratification of your baser instinctual drives.  Strengthening your spiritual desires helps you to escape the world’s gravitational pull and place you under the gravitational influence of God.

[Dwelling 5; chapter 4]

Your instincts that ensured the survival of the human race (selfishness, aggression) are so thoroughly baked into the human brain that only the grace of your Divine Companion’s infusions allows you to achieve escape velocity from their pull on your human mind and begin to act somewhat as God intends: to be love and forgive and serve others (which are quite counter to the more selfish animal-like urges of the unredeemed human mind).

Stagnation is very detrimental to your spiritual life; for example, if your faith practices remain exactly the same as they were years ago; or if your spiritual growth slows to a standstill.  A planet that stops moving will lose its momentum and fall into the gravitational clutches of whatever other planet happens to be closest.  In the same way, standing still spiritually makes you vulnerable to being pulled down by the powerful attractions of the material world and the allure of ground floor thinking because you have lost the forward momentum that come from actively growing.

Inner Sovereignty

ceding inner sovereignty to your Divine Companion

Using only your human strengths and psychological capabilities, letting go of your pet treasures (decreasing your materialistic mass) is a Herculean task; repudiating your coarser human aspects all on your own usually requires force to suppress them.  Such a negatively based approach is so incredibly laborious that you likely won’t be able to keep up the work.  A more positively inflected approach—cultivating a sincere desire to become hospitable to your Divine Companion—feels much less draining; you may even feel as if God is doing much of the work to help you escape the incessant pull of material goodies.  It’s amazing how God only asks for your whole-hearted desire not that you accomplish a complete domination of your baser human nature.  Having a wholehearted desire seems far more doable than a total psychological cleansing of your inner world.

Some people describe spiritual intimacy as “the soul entering into itself” or “the soul rising above itself.”  To me, spiritual intimacy feels more like your personas (your human parts who inhabit the rooms on the lower floors) all quieting their clamor and laying down their concerns and agendas.  In the ensuing inner hush, you hear your Divine Companion’s sweet voice more clearly and feel the warmth of your Beloved’s embrace more palpably.

Your Divine Companion is no dictator who wants to banish your personas or to control your inner world like a tyrant.  Rather than force entry into your interior townhouse, God wants you to voluntarily open the door so your Beloved can enter and uplift every part of you that resonates with God’s ways, including any wayward personas.  Parts that don’t resonate with God’s ways will simply fade away; God doesn’t need to overpower them or conquer them; God would take no joy at all in forcibly changing you.  Your glad and voluntary ceding inner sovereignty is your only possible contribution to your relationship with your Divine Companion (a contribution that God, even with so much divine power, can’t make).

Your contribution to the human-divine relationship involves fully and finally resolving your ambivalence about what you want most: the earthly pleasures which are so esteemed in your bottom section or the spiritual joys which are best appreciated in your top section?  When you make a final and wholehearted choice that spiritual values will guide your life, then you will find yourself almost effortlessly ascending the inner stairway.  When your ego fully releases its foolish desire for complete inner control, in due time, you will surely enjoy the sweet intimacy shared between just you and your Beloved.  Upon experiencing the overwhelming beauty of the divine personality who has come so close to you, your ego will gladly relinquish the inner throne and install your Divine Companion as the full sovereign of your inner world, the position which your Divine Companion has always deserved but the human ego often seems to take forever to recognize that blatant truth.

QUOTE

[Dwelling 4; chapter 3; paragraph 4 from The Interior Castle]

“God especially calls those who have eschewed worldly pleasures and now devote themselves to spiritual things; if they allow Him power to act freely, He will bestow still greater graces on those whom He thus begins calling to a higher life. Those who enjoy this recollection should thank God fervently: it is of the highest importance for them to realize the value of this favor, gratitude for which would prepare them to receive still more signal graces.”

Dilation

[Dwelling 4; chapter 3]

Teresa describes how drawing close to your Divine Companion dilates you like a balloon when water is pumped into it.  The human-divine partnership dilates your heart and mind and uplifts all of you.

The influx of your Divine Companion’s love dilates your heart, enlarging you and your capacity to be a compassionate servant, sweetening you and your interactions with graciousness.  Like the fragrance which spreads over a room when a stove is splashed with perfume, a heightened kindness flows from you; you spread the sweet fragrance of God in the warmth of your love for God and others.

The influx of your Divine Companion’s insights dilates your mind, enlarging you and your capacity to recognize spiritual gems even when they are buried under much tradition and accompanied by many distortions.  Like Jesus, you are much more concerned with recognizing these gems than pointing out the errors that cover them.

Most likely, you won’t be terribly aware of being dilated by the divine influx because it’s often outside the awareness of even the highest soul who is barely aware of how they have changed.

Dilating your heart (becoming more trusting)

The blessing of being in your Divine Companion’s arms dilates your heart so that you are even more securely attached to your Beloved.  Fear of hell and any earthly calamity fade away as you absorb the peaceful assurance of God’s presence.  Earlier fears, even your scariest ones, are replaced by a confidence that you and your Divine Companion will certainly continue your relationship after this life on Earth, no matter how harsh your life may be.  Worries about whether you can face tough circumstances fade because you know that your Divine Companion will remain with you no matter what.  You may start to see that graciously bearing difficult times is how you build a trustworthy character that is worthy of your divine partner; challenges ensure that your hospitable inner atmosphere remains steadfast no matter what difficulties you might encounter.

Dilating your mind (more insight)

In those precious rooftop moments, God’s sweet nature seems to seep into and color every corner of your interior townhouse giving you a first-hand experience of God’s personality.  Based on that deeper spiritual insight, you develop a quiet confidence to do what God wants which you now know more clearly because your Divine Companion is infusing God’s ways into your mind.  Following your Divine Companion’s leading replaces previous rule-bound obedience to human-made religious laws which are so often presented as divinely ordained laws.

Time on the rooftop clearly illuminates how the divine ways are much finer than human ways; how your divine partner’s personality is much more wonderful than yours.  When you really grasp how much better the spiritual worldview is than the human worldview, it’s much easier to move on from your smaller self.  Appreciating God’s far greater beauty dilates your heart to be more loving and dilates your mind to better recognize spiritual truth.

Inner Martha and Inner Mary:

[Dwelling 7; chapter 4]

tension between your bottom section and top section

You are clearly one person, one indivisible individual.  But your spiritual nature (your top section) is so different from your human nature (your bottom section) that you may feel like you embody two people, as if an Inner Martha and an Inner Mary live in your inner world. Your human nature (your Inner Martha) may be preoccupied and burdened with the daily tasks of life.  Your spiritual nature (your Inner Mary) may be consumed with blissfully enjoying divine intimacy.  They are so different that they are often at odds with each other.  Just as Jesus thoroughly blended his human and divine nature, you can thoroughly harmonize your human nature and your spiritual nature.  You can allow the finer aspects of your top section to fully penetrate your bottom section so that every part of you is redeemed and made more hospitable to your Divine Companion.  Helping your Inner Martha collaborate with your Inner Mary is the finest gift you can offer God who created you with twin natures and delights to see both developed and working together.

Full spiritual development requires cultivating the part of you who loves being caught up in the company of God as well as the part who is concerned with taking care of Jesus’ earthly needs and fulfilling God’s worldly wishes.  Each persona, Inner Mary and Inner Martha, is quite good on their own but they are far richer when they work together.  Imagine only feeding Jesus but not listening to him; or only listening to Jesus but not feeding him.  Doing only one or the other isn’t a well-rounded response to Jesus or a well-balanced way of living.  Harmonizing your Inner Mary and Inner Martha makes your interior townhouse more hospitable to your Divine Companion.  Their cooperation involves sometimes withdrawing from the world for moments of spiritual intimacy and at other times engaging quite intensely with the world for periods of service.

Harmonizing your Inner Sisters becomes easier when you meditate on Jesus who exemplified the perfect harmony in his earthly life: he spent much time in private personal communion with God the Father and he also devoted himself to compassionately caring for a hurting soul, to spiritually tutoring in one-on-one conversations and to teaching in large groups despite the presence of those who wanted to destroy him and his credibility.  Seeing Jesus engage so fully with people serves as an antidote to excessively longing for uninterrupted spiritual bliss to the point of being oblivious of the needs of those around you; seeing Jesus so frequently go off in private to pray and take in spiritual nourishment serves as an antidote to doing good works so obsessively that you exhaust yourself because you neglect being spiritually replenished.

Muscles of your mind

Without exercise muscles won’t do much for you

A person who never exercises won’t be able to do the many things which their physical body is capable of.  Having little strength and coordination, they will only be able to do small tasks; they will have little endurance and be exhausted by small exertions.  They can easily get sucked into the inertia of the sofa and become couch potatoes watching others excel in sports on TV.  They could easily content themselves with this spectator lifestyle and think that their life holds no other possibilities.

A person who never prays (who never exercises spiritually) won’t be able to do the many things which their spirituality is capable of.  Having little spiritual development and strength, they won’t be able to pursue spiritual adventures which they could otherwise do if they had only developed their current spiritual endowments.  Having little spiritual strength, they will only be able to do small spiritual tasks; they will have little endurance and will be exhausted by small spiritual exertions and excursions.  They can easily get sucked into the spiritual inertia of a church pew and simply be a spectator, watching others preach about God.  They could easily content themselves with a second-hand religion and think that life holds no other possible avenues for knowing God.

You always have the opportunity to turn away from your petty interests and turn towards God; realigning your values and desires strengthens your spiritual muscles and develops your wonderful spiritual endowment.  That opportunity for spiritual growth always exists unless you have so neglected your spiritual muscles that they have completely atrophied and they can no longer reorient you towards God.

You need both psychological and spiritual muscles for the climb

As you climb the inner stairway, more spiritual capabilities come online, as if they are activated when you need additional abilities to climb into the top section and draw closer to your Divine Companion.  They are so wonderful that you make think you no longer need the bottom section’s psychological capabilities and that perhaps you should permanently retire them.  But, as lovely as your upper capabilities are, you still need your lower capabilities.  So don’t toss them away!  Don’t toss away any of the wonderful mental capabilities that God endowed you with.  They can help you climb the inner stairway and cope with life on Earth.

You need both kindling and sticks for a large and lasting fire

Spiritual growth is like building a fire that needs different fuel at different stages.  Initially, kindling is needed to start the fire.  Once the kindling has caught fire, it is no longer needed; instead, sticks of various sizes are needed to build a sizable fire.  The kindling represents your psychological capabilities needed to climb the first steps of the inner stairway; the larger sticks represent your spiritual capabilities to climb the higher steps of the inner stairway.  Both kindling and logs needed to build and sustain a larger and longer-lasting fire (to sustain a consecrated heart).  When the fire eventually dies down, you will need kindling again to restart the fire.  This represents the need to retain all of your capabilities, both psychological and human, to climb high up the inner stairway.

Only a blockhead would simply sit by a fire ring and pray for a miracle, like lightening, to strike and start a fire rather than working with the kindling at their disposal.  Only a simple-minded soul would expect that God can kindle your spiritual flame alone, with no participation from you; or would think that God can make you grow when you aren’t even using the human strengths and spiritual abilities which God gave you.  How foolish such thinking is!  The reward of knowing God seems possible only for an industrious soul who uses all the mental capabilities they have developed at each point in life.  They must diligently apply themselves for their remaining time allotted.  Often many years—your whole life—are needed to reach (or return to) the embrace of your Divine Companion.

Meditation: using your psychological mind to jumpstart your spiritual journey

One example of the spiritual use of your lower capabilities is meditating on the nature of your relationship with God: God is the One who created you; you are the creature whose very existence depends on God.  As you consider this spiritual gem, you will more deeply appreciate your great debt to God; and appreciate that you owe everything you are, absolutely everything, to God’s generous graces.  Such a meditation is most helpful when you become immersed in it rather than practicing it in the aloof manner of the intellect divorced from the heart.

Another example of using your lower capabilities is meditating on the unfathomable love that would cause the Son of God to leave the splendors and devoted support of his heavenly abode so that he could come to a much, much cruder Earth where almost no one had any respect for him, let alone any devotion to him.  Immerse yourself in imagining the great love that must motivate God to so willingly come and suffer at the hands of many very callous people so that a few sincere people might be lifted up.

Another example of using your lower capabilities is meditating on the various episodes of Jesus’ life and how he faced many of the same circumstances as you: growing from a baby to a toddler to a young boy, etc.  Jesus started his spiritual journey from a child to a man with total devotion to God the Father by using the capabilities of his psychological mind.  I doubt that he sprung from the womb with a fully consecrated heart.  Jesus, like each of us, needed to use the capabilities inherent in our human nature (the capabilities of the bottom section).  Seeing how much Jesus wanted to partake of all aspects of human life by coming to dwell on Earth illuminates how much God wants to fully share your life by coming to dwell with you in your interior townhouse.

Crystal Walls and Crystal Globe Metaphor

[Dwelling 2; chapter 1]

You can imagine the walls of your interior townhouse as being made of crystal allowing light in one part to shine into other parts.  But when you neglect your townhouse, inner pollution covers the crystal walls like a layer of soot making them opaque so God’s inner light can no longer shine into every room.  Even then, your Beloved still dwells within you but the soot-covered walls don’t allow the warm love and clear light of God to penetrate into the interior rooms where you spend most of your time.  Although your Divine Companion is very close, you likely feel alone and abandoned because you can barely feel the divine inner presence.

A crystal globe refracts the sun’s light revealing beautiful beams of many colors.  But when it is covered with a dark cloth, the same globe reveals nothing although the sun still shines.  The rooftop is like a crystal globe where your Divine Companion dwells and awaits to display God’s lovely colors (traits) by refracting them through your personality.  When you remove your self-centeredness and worldly addictions which lie like a cloak over that precious globe, then it can reveal the previously obscured personality of your Divine Companion so you more clearly sense the beautiful traits of your Beloved.

Your life’s purpose is to remove any grime that covers your crystal walls and to remove all desires that cloak that precious crystal globe.  This metaphor means that your life purpose is making your highest desire to know God and to follow God’s ways.  Then the light from the cleansed crystal can shine into your heart and correct any distorted thoughts that God has abandoned you or that the Creator has withdrawn from you.  A correct understanding will emerge to replace any such errors: the truth is that God made you and loves you; that God longs so very much to be with you in a very personal way, right now, right here on this difficult and challenging orb.

A person becomes exceptionally beautiful when God’s character can penetrate throughout them because the crystal walls around their Divine Companion have been thoroughly cleaned.  The same person would be far less beautiful if their baser views and values cover those crystal walls which keep God’s character from streaming through them.  Hearing of God but not wanting to weave God into the fabric of your life is one way of covering those crystal walls.  God still remains present in such a person but, out of respect for their choices and values, their Divine Companion doesn’t penetrate throughout them.

Life is so completely different after you remove the grime on the crystal and allow spiritual light to shine into your inner world which then uplifts your character and enriches your relationships with other people.  Arrogance or self-absorption will clog the conduit through which God flows into you.  What a terrible tragedy to live in darkness when a wonderful light is so close to you!  What a terrible waste to be spiritually starving when a bountiful spiritual feast lies right at your fingertips!

The lens in a lighthouse concentrates the light of a lamp sending bright light far out to sea.  A crystal globe refracts the light of the sun streaming beautiful colors all over a room.  Your soul is the portal through which your Divine Companion’s spiritual light can enter every room of your interior townhouse.  That precious divine light, that uplifting spiritual worldview, can turn a dark and dreary inner world into a bright and hopeful one.  The spiritual light flowing through your soul will warm you and enable you to see more clearly; then you can warm other hearts that might be freezing in interior harshness or loneliness.

The central crystal globe is also like a powerplant that energizes your interior townhouse.  Your soul is like a spiritual energy source that powers your highest aspirations and your best efforts.

A mash-up of metaphors

interior townhouse, garden, spring, tree, crystal walls/crystal globe

A tree needs good soil

Your soul is the apex of your interior house, a high penthouse where your Divine Companion awaits you.  Your soul rests atop both sections of your interior townhouse.  The health of your soul depends on the health of these two sections just as the health of a tree is determined by the health of the soil in which it rests.  Healthy townhouse sections nourish your soul like good soil supports a strong tree.  But a townhouse contaminated with baser desires can’t support your soul’s flourishing any more than poisoned soil can support a robust tree.  An inner world polluted with baser desires will stunt, or even kill, your soul.

Pure water only flows from good soil

Pure water flows from a spring that draws from good soil; poisoned water flows from a spring that draws from polluted soil.  Your soul, your spiritual center, is like a spring that flows from the soil of your human nature.  When you (your human soil) are devoted to pursuing material satisfactions, your mind is pulled down by secular obsessions and contaminates the spiritual water that wants to flow into your soul.  When you remove erroneous thinking from the soil of your mind and baser desires form the soil of your heart, purer spiritual waters can flow into you.

Early in your spiritual growth, your human mind is ambivalent: it is torn between earth and heaven, between worldly attractions and the divine pull.  Ambivalent feelings are like being suspended between valuing two different sets of values (earthly and godly) without choosing one or the other.  Growing spiritually involves resolving your ambivalence and consecrating yourself to one highest value: God.  An ambivalent mind is like polluted soil that can’t support a good spring; a consecrated mind is like pure soil which allows the pure water of your Divine Companion to pour into you.

Your interior townhouse is the human streambed through which spiritual waters flow into you.  If your streambed has good soil, then the upstream water (the spirituality flowing from your Divine Companion into your personality) will be clear and delicious.  Nourished by God’s water, you will be gracious and kind to another person.  But if your streambed is polluted or undeveloped, then the upstream water flow will be weak and contaminated.  Without spiritual nourishment, driven and motivated mainly by your human-only and material-only desires, you will only be able to offer tepid companionship to another person.

Rooftop metaphors

Rooftop as soul

God imbued you with seeds of the divine nature.  You clearly aren’t God but your interior townhouse contains everything that you need to become more like God.  Some people use the word soul to designate your potential to become like God.  In that sense, your soul is the crowning jewel of a human being, the capability to cultivate a character aligned with the divine design.  But many people, perhaps the great majority, think their bottom section is the entirety of their interior townhouse; they have no sense of having a soul; they don’t value the great treasure—their amazing spiritual potential—which implanted into them when God created them.

The light of God is quite bright on your rooftop; God’s light has always been shining there although you never see it so clearly below the rooftop.  God’s love for you has always been warm although you never feel it so fully below the rooftop.  The rooftop is that shared place where you can experience your Divine Companion most fully.  Without that meeting place midway between human and God, without that intimate marriage bed for you and your Divine Companion, where could you and God meet and embrace?

Rooftop as marriage and bed of intimacy

Your soul is like the bed of intimacy where you consummate your full marriage with your Beloved.  Long before that, your Divine Companion loved you completely; now, with your consent and cooperation, your devotion also becomes fully consecrated.  The rooftop wedding assures your connection for all of eternity.  To be worthy of such a magnificent marriage, you must be devoted and faithful to your Divine Companion on the lower floors before the rooftop marriage.  Spending time in the human-divine marriage bed gives you a fuller sense of your Divine Companion which will motivate you to make yourself pleasing to and appropriate for such an amazing partner.  Having so intimately experienced that wonderful divine nature, the deepest appreciation and richest praise seem to emerge spontaneously from your heart.  Knowing how loyal your Divine Companion is to you, your supreme desire is to be equally loyal to your wonderful partner.

The rooftop marriage begins a phase of deeper intimacy between you and your Divine Companion, represented as the marriage bed.  You take your relationship to the next level and give complete leadership of your inner life over to God.  Amazingly, God doesn’t want to be one-up in your relationship.  After the wedding, your Beloved elevates you to the position of co-leader; you now more actively participate in directing your inner life alongside your Divine Companion.

Reaching the rooftop is like entering a wedding chapel where you and your Divine Companion are united in a partnership that will continue to grow and can never be severed.  Although you will leave the wedding chapel and return to the floors beneath, you remain a fully wedded partner to your Divine Companion.

The whole divine family (the three persons of God who live in the Highest Heaven) seems to come to your rooftop to celebrate this wonderful human-divine marriage.  Each member of the divine family bestows on you a wedding gift of their unique spiritual qualities corresponding to an aspect of divine love which they personify.  The synergy among their gifts deepens your spiritual understanding far beyond any theological teachings.  The presence of each person of God and their generous gifts assures you even more of God’s great goodness and how tightly you are woven into the divine web of relationships.  Being so sure that God will never abandon you, you now devote yourself to becoming a trustworthy partner who would never desert God in any circumstances.  You are sure that God will always nourish you as you attempt to complete any spiritual work, no matter how challenging, which your Divine Companion leads you to undertake.

Miscellaneous Metaphors

Living like a pauper although you are actually living in a mansion

How sad that someone might live like a spiritual pauper in their townhouse when God is so close to them yet, in their ignorance of God’s closeness, they never benefit from God’s light and love which is so nearby and quite available to them.  For them, their townhouse feels like a hovel although it has the potential to be a wonderful home; they can bear virtually no spiritual fruit because they are cut off from the inner source which nourishes their spiritual fruiting.  They are like a starving person who doesn’t feed themselves even though a banquet table laden with great food is so close to them.  You would never stand by and let a starving person in that situation die of physical malnutrition.  All the more important that, if a person with spiritual hunger is starving, you do whatever you can (praying for them, listening to them, sharing spiritual food from your own inner table with them) to help them enjoy the wonderful spiritual nourishment of their inner banquet which is abundantly provisioned by their own Divine Companion on their own tables in their own interior townhouse.

Phoenix

[Dwelling 7; chapter 3]

Like a caterpillar entering its cocoon so it can “die” and be reborn as a butterfly, retreating into your soul is like entering a cocoon-like place where your ego can dissolve and you can be reborn as a new person.  Like an ailing phoenix bursts into flame so that a newer and more robust bird can emerge, a far-from-perfect ego burns away its false delusions so that a far more wonderful self can emerge.  Such losses only seem sad or frightening if you are unaware of the brighter life that lies on the other side of an apparent death of self.  After being reborn, any sense of loss or cost seems trivial compared to all that you have gained; you feel only the finest joy, untainted by any negative emotion at all.  Afterwards, any dread of future “losses” or “sacrifices” transforms into an eagerness to relinquish even more so you might be reborn again in a more uplifted way.

God reaching out to you via a love letter

The circumstances of your life may sometimes feel as if your Divine Companion has sent you the most eloquent love letter that communicates in ways perfectly attuned to you.  Of course, you should always reply back with your own letter addressed to your Divine Companion.  Try to be as eloquent as your Beloved’s letter; try to harmonize on the notes of your divine melody.  A fitting postscript for any letter to God might be (paraphrasing St. Paul): “What would you have me do?  Please, dear God, illuminate my mind so that I see your directions and understand your requests as clearly as possible.”  God won’t leave you hanging but will show you what you need to know to serve God.

God’s ingenious ways of communicating with you show God’s great ability to care for you in ways which draw you closer to God; your response is to abide more cooperatively with your Divine Companion in the common soul you both share.  God’s loving tenderness is more than adequate for all the wounds and trauma you have suffered!  The divine letter writer can heal your most grievous wounds and strengthen your weakest points.  How blessed to find yourself in deep dialogue with you listening intently to God while God listens intently to you.  Such deep sharing undergirds those brilliant collaborations which make beautiful co-creations.

The soul as a little piece of heaven

The rooftop is like a little heaven, a second home for God to dwell in when God comes from his primary residence in Highest Heaven to dwell within you.  God takes up a second residence atop the interior townhouses of all God’s children.  If you see each person as having a devoted Divine Companion living within them, you’ll be much more motivated to treat everyone with the respect and compassion that they deserve, with the same great tenderness with which God treats them.

The Highest Heaven, the dwelling place of God the Father, must be an exalted place quite different from other parts of the universe.  In the same way, your soul is quite different from even the highest human sections of your interior townhouse.  Miracle of miracle, the soul on your rooftop seems to have the same tone (surely diluted so that you can appreciate it) as the tone of the Father’s dwelling place in the Highest Heaven.  How blessed are you to have an opportunity for such a sublime experience while living here on Earth!

A branch grafted onto finer rootstock

When a weaker branch is grafted onto a stronger root stock, it now receives the more abundant nourishment and clear water from the well-established roots which draw from good soil.  In the same way, being embraced by your Divine Companion is like having your human nature grafted onto a finer nature (God’s nature) which uplifts you with the rich spiritual nourishment that flows into you from your Beloved who is so firmly rooted in the divine streams.

Being so fully embraced by your Divine Companion can obliterate any sense of being alone and isolated, of being abandoned and orphaned.  That terrible feeling of being all on your own is delightfully and completely dissolved.  The embrace is like a wonderful breath of fresh air into a townhouse that was polluted by smoke lingering from the destructive fires of earlier trauma!

Nightlights (God lights) on the inner stairway

[Dwelling 4; chapter 2]

When you have an awe-tinged appreciation of the great blessing of divine companionship, God lights the treads of the interior stairway making it easier to find your way in the top section like small nightlights illuminate steps in the dark.  God seems to open your spiritual eyes (the capabilities of your spiritual mind) so you can better follow God’s ways.  How good to see God in that richer and warmer light than trying to navigate the upper stairway using only the limited light of the bottom section to form your ideas of God.

Perhaps you have lived only on your ground floor for so long that you have no idea how to find your inner stairway.  Perhaps you never gave a thought to your upper floors but now want to explore them.  Your Divine Companion is exquisitely sensitive to and aware of your fondest desires, your deepest values which motivate you.  Whenever your holy desire flares up and burns more brightly (and your lesser desires dim), God sends a soft light that guides you to the first steps of your stairway which lead to your indwelling companion.  Even on the first steps, your Beloved sends a divine melody to assure you that you are now climbing closer to a wonderful intimacy.  The sweetness of your Divine Companion’s voice is so lovely that it becomes much easier to leave behind life’s far coarser pleasures of the ground floor.

The Shepherd’s Music

The music of the Good Shepherd’s pipe directs and guides any lost sheep back to the safety of the sheep hold and the company of the flock.  The music of God (which is the same as the melody of Jesus and your Divine Companion) can safely guide you back to the divine arms if you are spiritually lost.

Your relationship with your Divine Companion continues after death

God promises that your relationship with your Divine Companion will continue after you die if you have been faithful to your partner during this earthly life.  Surely, you’ve noticed how your Divine Companion isn’t like a one-night-stand lover at all.  Far from it: your Beloved would never be content with just a one-life stand with you but instead wants to be with you for all eternity and to increasingly entwine your human nature with the divine nature.

God’s providence in this life is sure and ample for those dedicated to living aligned with God’s ways.  Those divine graces seem to say: “Please trust me in every way.  Please trust me even when you can’t see what lies ahead in this earthly life.  Recognizing my care for you on Earth, please trust that I will continue to care for you throughout eternity.”

The channel from your Divine Companion to you

The channel through which divine infusions flow from your Divine Companion into you opens further when you more fully align your will with God’s, as if more fully partnering with God opens a valve through which divine waters can flow from your Beloved’s fountain into the basin of your mind.

QUOTE

[Dwelling 4, chapter 2, paragraph 3 from The Interior Castle]

“I believe that in each smallest creature God has made, though it be but a tiny ant, there are more wonders than can be comprehended.”

PARAPHRASE

“Everything and everyone created by God is a profound treasure that reflects an aspect of God’s personality.  Even the most confused person contains more wonders that you (or they) imagine.  Who would have ever thought that Saul the persecutor would ever become so committed to spreading the word of Jesus?  Or that Brother Lawrence, the simple-minded one, would ever be a spiritual light to so many people?  Their lives can help you more vividly imagine how God dwells right now in each and every person you encounter, even when it’s not apparent.  Their lives can kindle your imagination of who you might become if you allowed your Divine Companion to more thoroughly remodel your interior townhouse.”

Appreciating that God dwells within each person changes your view of them so that the material aspects of their townhouse fade into the background and you more clearly perceive the Divine Companion who lives atop even the humblest townhouse.  When someone is spiritual ignorance of their treasures, pray that they sense what they are doing and that they become more receptive to their Beloved.

But recognize that some people are intent on killing off their possibility of partnering with God.  Some people, often the high priests of established religious organizations, have so thoroughly and consistently sabotaged their relationship with their Divine Companion that the spiritual potential of their life is virtually lost.  Even today, some high priests misrepresent God’s loving nature for their own social standing or political benefit; if Jesus appeared today, they would likely persecute him as terribly as the Pharisees did centuries ago.  If you are chagrined, imagine how their Divine Companion feels being totally stifled by their host’s total lack of spirituality!  Seeing this situation, deepen your sympathy for that Divine Companion’s plight of being bound to a person who so completely dismisses them.

Two springs

Imagine that your mind is fed by two springs: a human spring and a divine spring.  Imagine that both earthly and celestial waters flow into your mind to nourish you and shape your thinking.  The earthly spring represents humanity’s hard-won accumulated knowledge; the celestial spring represents your Divine Companion’s infusions of insight and understanding.  Everyone partakes of the earthly waters; they are simply too much a part of life to avoid.  In contrast, you must intentionally seek out the celestial waters; they are too subtle to be noticed without your efforts to find them.  Seize the opportunity of this life to be fed by both springs so you cultivate a robust character.

Trade imbalance in the spiritual economy

[Dwelling 5; chapter 4]

The higher you ascend the inner stairway, the clearer it becomes how much more your Divine Companion contributes to your life and your relationship than you do.  What you receive from the human-divine relationship is always much more than you could ever give in return.  There’s a tremendous trade imbalance between how little you can give to God yet how abundantly God gives to you.  Before ascending the stairway, this imbalance isn’t clear and you may be deluded, thinking that you contribute much to the exchanges between you and God.  But such foolishness becomes more obvious as you climb higher up the inner stairway; how stunning that the human brain can embrace such foolish short-sightedness and, all the while, consider itself to be quite wise.

You live in two economies: an earthly one and a celestial one.  The earthly economy is very transactional; it is obsessed with winning, with getting the best deal by giving the least and getting the most.  This economy runs on a bean-counting mentality.  It despises giving something for nothing; it doesn’t give gifts without strings attached.  The earthly economy seldom extends credit if your accounts are in arrears.

In contrast, the celestial economy is very relational: it is all about giving and sharing.  God happily gives much even when you can give very little.  God gives so generously that God seems to want to give away everything God has; God certainly is no hoarder of the divine riches!  The celestial economy doesn’t keep strict even-steven accounts; it often gives wonderful gifts in return for your small offerings.  God is always willing to extend credit to any sincere individual simply based on their holy desire; God doesn’t require collateral (stupendous good deeds) to include you in the human-divine transactions.

The earthly economy runs on the base coin of human nature: getting ever more material goodies.  Believing that there’s isn’t enough for everyone means that the more someone else has, the less you can have.  This view creates selfish behavior.  The biggest “winners” in this economy are those who get the most and give the least; their greedy and self-centered character shapes how people treat each other.  The economy’s “winners” delight in despising and abusing the economy’s “losers.”

In contrast, the celestial economy runs on the purest gold of heaven: love and sharing.  Seeing and trusting God’s inexhaustible provident care, people are moved to give as generously as God does.  This view creates loving people who delight in giving without any recompense; their kindness spreads and shapes how people treat each other.  The biggest contributors in this economy are those who serve the most graciously in the most demanding circumstances.  They delight in lifting up all lonely and struggling souls.

The earthly economy is limited by its erroneous view that there can only be a few people in the winners’ circle or in the most favored group.  The celestial economy is virtually unlimited: the web of loving connections can always be expanded to include more people.

Spiritual stock market

[Dwelling 5; chapter 2]

Spiritual growth requires an initial investment from you: investing your time in spiritual pursuits and divesting yourself from baser desires.  These investments might seem quite burdensome at that time but eventually they will seem trivial compared to the wonderful spiritual dividends they bring in due time.  If spiritual growth were a stock market, even the smallest investments of taming your lusts and purifying your desire would yield the most amazing returns.  God makes nearly miraculous use of even your smallest investments, even your smallest willingness to cooperate with God’s leadings.  Imagine the spiritual returns when you hold nothing back and invest all of yourself!  God runs a very generous stock market.

Damage from water leaks

When you neglect your townhouse, water can seep into the walls.  Out of sight, mold grows in the dampness in the hidden spaces and gradually weakens the wooden framing.  Each bit of water adds to the damage until eventually the framing rots and disintegrates. Don’t allow spiritually corrosive thinking and living to penetrate too deeply into your heart and mind where, bit by bit, they feed the mold that rots away the framing of your interior townhouse (that rots the core of your character).

Just as mold working unseen within the walls of a wooden house can slowly disintegrate it, baser human forces working unseen within your townhouse’s walls can gradually rot your soul.  But the situation within the walls of your human mind—your abode for this earthly life—isn’t entirely bleak; psychological mold isn’t the only thing happening unseen within your inner walls.  A spiritual current also pulsates there that can power your spiritual growth.  Both forces—inner decay and an inner spark—lie within but unobserved by most people because so few spend time to understand their inner townhouse.  Knowing that you contain both forces enables you to maintain your interior townhouse so that it becomes a place to cultivate a robust character, to germinate your spirituality and blossom into a gracious lover of other people.

Tortoise

[Dwelling 4; chapter 3]

Like a tortoise withdraws into its shell for protection from worldly threats, you can withdraw into your top section for protection from worldly intrusions and assaults.  You can withdraw even further into your innermost room, your Shekinah, and be even more protected from life’s distortions and your own weaknesses.  Just as a tortoise must eventually come out of the security of its shell and seek nourishment in the outer world, you too must eventually leave your innermost room so you can participate in the material world and in social relationships.

QUOTE

[Dwelling 4; chapter 3; paragraph 7 from The Interior Castle]

“Let the spirit … abandon itself in the arms of divine love: His Majesty will teach it how best to act, which chiefly consists in its recognizing its unworthiness of so great a good and occupying itself in thanking Him for it.”

PARAPHRASE

“Give yourself over completely to your Beloved;

allow the divine goodness to flow into you.

Don’t allow anything—such as a busy-bee mind or the alluring fragrance of the most attractive nectar—

to distract you from the nourishing beauty of your Beloved.

Abandon your desire for control and

give your Divine Companion complete authority to reshape your inner world.

Appreciate how amazing this blessing is: you have a perfect and devoted lover

who is so far out of your league.

Never stop thanking God for generously loving you so richly.”

Elevator-like assist from your DC

Just as an elevator reduces the effort needed to reach the higher floors of a building, your prayers reduce the human-powered effort needed to climb the inner stairways of your interior townhouse.  Elevating prayer centers on cultivating your inner attitudes:

your attention (directing the spotlight of your focus to notice your Divine Companion);

your intentions (curating what you value most; cultivating holy desire);

having a sense of who you are and a sense of your life’s purpose (aligning with God);

wisely choosing a life path (pursuing intimacy with God rather than lavish material goodies).

Snowball-like effect of your own efforts

Spiritual progress is like a snowball rolling downhill: the more you grow, the more your growth accelerates.  Each time you revere your Divine Companion, God can show you more of the divine character; each deeper experience of God’s character elevates your desire for your Divine Companion above any other desires.  Ascending the stairs to the top section still requires effort on your part but each bit of your energy will be matched by an even greater contribution of energy from your Divine Companion.  Each step you take up the inner stairway creates a snowball effect: making one spiritual advance helps you make the next one.

A spiritual updraft augments your efforts

Ascending the inner stairway always requires your effort, your wise choices and your persistence.  When you reach the stairs in the top section, your efforts will increasingly be supplemented by an uplifting current that helps you ascend the stairway, like the updraft in a column of air helps a balloon soar even higher.  The spiritual ascent still requires your effort but each bit of your energy is matched by an even greater contribution of energy, as if your interior townhouse contains a divine force that augments each of your human efforts and wants to see you succeed in climbing as high as you possibly can.

Your Divine Companion seems to reach down to you and extend a hand to help bring you up the highest steps of the top section; as if climbing those last steps requires contributions from both of you, both your consecrated desire and your Divine Companion’s assistance; as if no one can climb the final steps and reach the rooftop without the help of their Beloved.

The little dove

The little dove represents the soul who flies to reach the rooftop in order to enjoy the embrace of the Divine Companion.  This metaphor suggests that your interior townhouse has an inner column of ascending air which, analogous to the inner stairway, enables you to move from the bottom section to the top section and ultimately to the rooftop.  This metaphor emphasizes that an inner assistance is baked into your human nature which helps you find your Divine Companion.  Of course, the little dove must choose to leave its favorite roost and enter into that ascending column of air; and you must choose to leave your treasured room on the lower floors and enter into the parts of your interior townhouse that bring you closer to God.

Ox in a double yoke

[Dwelling 5; chapter 2]

The great human-divine collaboration seems to blossom almost instantaneously in the moment you pledge yourself fully to your Beloved.  In that fully committed relationship, with seemingly minimal effort, you will be able to accomplish what previously felt utterly impossible.  Moving from trying to live only on your own resources to living in partnership with your Divine Companion is like being an average ox working alone in a single yoke who is then paired with a larger ox in a double yoke.  Your load now feels much lighter because you are working with a far stronger and wiser partner.  You are no longer exhausted by trying to do everything on your own; you are no longer lonely living without a loving partner.  Together you and your Divine Companion can accomplish much more than you could ever do alone.  And the companionship feels wonderful!

Furnace

[Dwelling 6; chapter 2]

Drawing close to your Divine Companion is like drawing close to a furnace with a raging fire.  Imagine that, as you draw close to the furnace, a spark flies out its open door and lands on your bare skin.  The searing heat of the spark on your skin makes you oblivious of all other feelings.  One small spark is enough to fully experience with undiluted intensity the much larger fire burning in the furnace without being consumed by the fire.  When drawing close to God, you may feel as if a pure bit of divinity leaps out and lands on your soul.  That spark of divinity is enough to experience the full and undiluted intensity of the nature of God and you cease being aware of anything else within you.  But the small divine spark doesn’t start a too-large fire which would destroy your human nature; a spark of God carries just enough of God’s nature that you can assimilate it.  In contrast, an overly rich experience of God is like entering the furnace and being engulfed in an inferno that would destroy your interior townhouse; but such intense experiences leave nothing which you could assimilate.

When the spark of divinity lands on you, it is so intense that it totally disrupts the normal operations of your inner world.  The mental disruption is akin to how intense pain diverts your attention away from everything else that might have concerned you. But the word pain doesn’t describe and communicate the lovely feeling of being touched by God.  The spark of God landing on you is an intensely joyous experience; it brings such a wonderful and engulfing pleasure that you wish the spark would totally consume your entire townhouse so that only the flames of God remain.  But fire of God never destroys your townhouse (your human personality and existence) because your Divine Companion only wants to enhance you and never wants to obliterate or erase you.

If you are blessed to experience the spark of divinity landing on you, please trust that this experience is a true grace bestowed on you by God.  Please don’t diminish this wonderful experience by thinking that it might be an aberration of the human mind or an imaginative deception created by your ego.  Such hubris to think that the human mind, even though divinely created, could ever produce such a sublime experience on its own!  Please trust that this extravagant gift is from God; allow it to stimulate your fervor for God and to make your service to others more gracious.  The experience so clearly bears your Divine Companion’s imprint and has your Divine Companion’s tone that it can’t be mistaken for anything other than a real encounter with God.  Properly understood, the stimulus from one such experience is likely to motivate you for many years to come.

Far better to err in trusting this magnificent experience than to make the terrible mistake of dismissing it as something unholy created by your ego.

A storm seeps over the land

The immediate first-hand experience of divinity is like a powerful storm that sweeps over a landscape and utterly transforms it.  The inner transformation wrought by the divine storm may feel painful because it disrupts the familiar contours of your interior world but at the same time the profound changes also feel pleasurable because you are certain that your re-sculpted self is now much more aligned with God and that you are being better prepared to serve others more compassionately.  In the midst of this storm, you know that you will gladly bear any difficulties encountered in pursuing doing God’s will.  The enduring spiritual joy that follows an intense influx of divinity makes clear how spiritual fruit is far richer and longer-lasting than the smaller happiness from any material pleasures; the once alluring goodies of the outer world and the quite small dreams of your bottom section become ever less appealing after experiencing God’s great beauty.

A powerful aroma overwhelms you

A powerful aroma overwhelms your sense of smell when you walk through a grove of aromatic trees as they release their perfume when bright sunlight shines on them.  In the same way, the divine fragrance may overwhelm your soul, perhaps in a moment when your prayer gives way to a moment of unadulterated worship of God.  Get the play on the word “unadulterated:” when your spiritual sincerity is like the pure love of one who would never betray their Beloved by an adulterous affair with another; unadulterated love for God is a love so loyal and trustworthy that you would never abandon your Divine Companion to seek solace in the arms of any worldly lover.

The divine fragrance, like the tone of the divine voice, gives you a feel of God’s personality.  Unlike the divine spark or the storm, the divine fragrance doesn’t carry a penetrating sensation of “pain.”  You can be assured that the inner fragrance is truly of God because it enkindles a great desire to share your life more fully with God; sensing the divine fragrance brings on spontaneous praise of God; it enables you to act spiritually and heroically in ways that would otherwise be impossible for you to do.

The divine spark, storm and fragrance are all metaphors to express how your Beloved sometimes displays the divine nature in extremely blatant ways which are quite different from the more common subtle ways.  Your Divine Companion has so many wonderfully creative ways of wooing you!  Pay attention and notice God’s overtures, both quiet and unmistakable, so that your attachment to your Beloved grows more secure.

Distillation apparatus

[Dwelling 6; chapter 6]

In a laboratory, a distillation apparatus heats a mixture in a flask so that the purified essence arises and is separated from the mixture.  The embrace of the Divine Companion is like an apparatus that distills your highest spiritual emotions from the mixed soup of all your emotions: the baser human emotions remain behind in the flask and the higher spiritual emotions rise above and are purified.  The higher spiritual emotions are distinguished by a gentle joy that soothes a person rather than the uncontrolled exuberance of a human-origin emotion which often unsettles a person.  The higher spiritual emotions are also distinguished by the humility which accompanies them and a deep gratitude that God has been so generous to you (as opposed to lower emotions which are often accompanied by a sense of being better than others which leads to parading your spiritual experiences in front of others as a sign of being superior to them).

Dual citizenship

[Dwelling 6; chapter 6]

As you grow spiritually, you may feel as if you are living in exile: exiled from the place where you really belong and exiled from the spiritual country of which you are a true citizen.  But in fact you have dual citizenship for your earthly life: you are a citizen of the material world as well as a citizen of the spiritual realm.  You have a precious opportunity in your life on Earth to declare your Divine Companion as the sovereign of your inner world.  In doing so, you make your interior townhouse an outpost of the spiritual realm; you establish spiritual citizenship as your primary allegiance while still living in the earthly realm.  Just as the butterfly is a creature of both the air and the land, you are a creature of both the material world and the spiritual world; you must, for this lifetime, go back and forth from one to the other.

Twin edifices: interior townhouse and the divine cathedral

A great cathedral is hand-built, slowly constructed by the small acts of many masons working from a common blueprint designed by a brilliant architect.  Each mason adds one seemingly insignificant stone after another; the structure grows slowly but eventually becomes a strong cathedral which can stand for many centuries.

In the same way, a great spiritual cathedral is now slowly being built, constructed by the small acts of many individuals working from a common blueprint designed by a brilliant architect: God. The divine blueprint shows how God is connected with you by bonds of love and how those bonds can be extended to others.  The spiritual cathedral is built, not with stones, but with the seemingly small kindnesses which together form an amazingly impressive aggregate.  This cathedral doesn’t have a physical address; it can’t be seen with human eyes; it isn’t ruled by a religious hierarchy. This cathedral is the invisible Beloved Community which includes every person, no matter how far apart, who has welcomed their Divine Companion and followed God’s leading to serve others.

Imagine the great spiritual edifice created when many individual townhouses join together.  Although each one is relatively small, together they can form a large cathedral, an extended community unseen by the eyes of the world.  Because this community is organically built by many individual acts, it grows slowly but becomes strong enough to endure through hard times (much like an interior townhouse steadily built by many small acts of devotion can withstand harsh circumstances).

You are not alone in your interior townhouse; trust that you are accompanied by an unseen but wonderful housemate.  In an analogous way, you are not alone in the world; trust that you are accompanied by unseen kindred spirits who are moved by the same values as you. Although you may not yet see it, imagine the wonderful sum total created by many widely separated individuals each doing seemingly small acts of genuine love.

Imagine that the two-step dance (one step of inner cultivation and one step of outer service) is simultaneously building two structures.  The inner steps are making your townhouse more spiritually hospitable to God and the outer steps are constructing the invisible cathedral of the Beloved Community.  I pray that as you draw close to your Divine Companion, you also draw close to other kindred souls as if you are pulled together by unseen spiritual threads that must surely be of God’s making.  I pray that together you build and expand the unseen cathedral of the Beloved Community where you can worship God and encourage each other.

The eyes of a newborn kitten

If you live mainly on the ground floor of your interior townhouse, if you are mainly preoccupied with material issues and social standing, then your insight (your ability to see your inner world) can be weak like the unseeing eyes of a newborn kitten.  Your barely developed eyes, your barely developed ability for reflection, won’t enable you to see the full extent of your interior townhouse where you spend your entire life.

A shuttered room

Imagine sitting in a darkened room after being brought into the room while blindfolded.  Even after the blindfold was removed, you’d have absolutely no sense of the layout of the room or what it contained.  But if someone opened the shutters to that room for a just brief moment, the light streaming in would enable you to clearly see the shape of the room and what it contains.  Even if the shutters were closed after that brief moment of light, you would still retain a much enlarged and clearer understanding of the room even though darkness has returned and you can’t see the room in this moment.

Just as you initially had no awareness of that darkened room, you may have no sense of your rooftop or who dwells there.  Just as a brief opening of shutters reveals so much, even the briefest time on the rooftop reveals what you couldn’t grasp before: God dwelling very close to you in the form of your personal Divine Companion.  Just as even the briefest shutter opening reveals a room and what it contains, even the briefest rooftop experience clearly reveals God’s personal love for you.

Just as a person remains quite aware of the contours of the room after the shutters close, you remain quite aware of the contours of your Beloved’s personality after the rooftop embrace.   When divine light shines into your mind even briefly, you remain aware of the wonderful human-divine intimacy possible within your inner world.  After the shutters of your mind close again, you still can feel your Divine Companion closeness even though you aren’t experiencing the divine presence as immediately as you did on the rooftop.

Rest assured that when the time is right, your Divine Companion will open the shutters again and you will again have the sublime experience of seeing God more clearly and embracing your Divine Companion more intimately.  But you may likely have to wait for that moment.  So please do whatever you can to remember and recall this precious experience as clearly as possible; the human memory can be a poor recorder of even your finest experiences.  Perhaps you might journal about your first-hand grasp of God in as much detail as you can; or create a visual souvenir that reflects a felt sense of your spiritual experience; or design your own personal ritual that helps you vividly recall your most sacred experiences.  These concrete things may help you re-call your original experience of the divine embrace so that it can continue to nourish you and encourage you.  Back on your lower floors, these concrete things help you enjoy the indescribable delight of knowing that you are securely attached to God.  If these concrete remembrances even partially articulate your spiritual experience, you may be honored to help someone prepare their shutters to be opened by God allowing divine light and love to flood into their inner world and change their perspective forever.

A friend’s house

The layout of a friend’s house often seems fuzzy when you first stay there; you may wander almost aimlessly to find a certain room.  But after you have stayed in their house for a while, you can easily find your way around, even in the dark.  When you have actually worked on the house, you become very familiar with its many aspects.  If you persist in exploring your interior townhouse, you will know its layout like the back of your hand.

These wordy descriptions of your inner world may seem abstract or overly complicated as you first read them.  But, trust me, the more you have first-hand experience of your inner townhouse, its layout and ways will come to feel quite simple and straightforward.  Wordy descriptions will become unnecessary: you will readily know your way around your inner world and you will be able to find your Divine Companion even in darkened times.

A firm foundation

Your heart (your values, the depth of your reverence, your core choices) is the foundation for your interior townhouse.  A tall townhouse that reaches up to a high rooftop requires a solid foundation so that the house doesn’t become unbalanced and fall over.  God seems keenly aware of your heart and won’t damage you by allowing your townhouse to extend beyond what your heart can bear and put you in danger of toppling over.

Stabilize your interior townhouse by pouring deep pilings of humility and reverence; be comfortable in a low spot with little social acclaim; be observant of others and serve their needs (not your needs); revere God’s greatness even though your Beloved’s closeness may make the divine seem quite familiar.  These deep pilings (humility and reverence) make a foundation firm enough to support a tall townhouse enabling you to reach greater spiritual heights.  Unlike a house, which requires that a foundation be laid first and then not reinforced later, you can begin your foundation with strong psychological footings and then expand it with spiritual reinforcements for as long as you live.  Prayer (dialogue with your Divine Companion) is a powerful way to strengthen your foundation.  Serving others is another powerful way to firm up your foundation.  Immerse yourself in a rich prayer life and also delight in doing the unsung work of serving others.

Metaphor: raging river cleans the riverbed

The powerful currents of a river in flood stage scour the riverbed carrying even large rocks and debris out to the ocean.  The embrace of your Divine Companion is like a powerful current that can sweep away even the greatest limitations and errors of your life.  You may likely need several spiritual floods to clear all the accumulated debris that clogs the riverbed of your mind, to clear away the errors accumulated over a lifetime and persist in your interior townhouse.

Poetic Passages

QUOTE

[Dwelling 5; chapter 1; page 6]

“I dare venture to assert that, if this is genuine union with God, the devil cannot interfere nor do any harm, for His Majesty is so joined and united with the essence of the soul, that the evil one dare not approach, nor can he even understand this mystery.  ...  Oh, blessed state, in which this cursed one cannot injure us! What riches we receive while God so works in us that neither we ourselves nor anyone else can impede Him! What will He not bestow, Who is so eager to give, and Who can give us all He desires! You may perhaps have been puzzled at my saying ‘if this is genuine union with God,’ as if there might be other unions. There are indeed—not with God, but with vanities—when the devil transports the soul passionately addicted to them, but the union differs from that which is divine and the mind misses the delight and satisfaction, peace and happiness of divine union. These heavenly consolations are above all earthly joys, pleasure, and satisfaction. As great a difference exists between their origin and that of worldly pleasures as between their opposite effects, as you know by experience.”

PARAPHRASE

God’s love is quite powerful;

God’s protection is so strong that nothing can intrude into the human-divine intimacy,

not even your ego

not even the Devil.

It’s as if the divine embrace is too far above your earthly weaknesses

for them to diminish your relationship with your Divine Companion;

It’s as if your ego is forced to recognize that this human-divine engagement is far out of its league.

Secure attachment with God is quite different from attachment to earthly things

both kinds of attachment can run quite deep.

But the joys of the divine embrace are infinitely finer than the best of solely human joys;

the fruits of the divine embrace are infinitely better than the best fruits of solely human efforts.

The joys and fruits of the divine embrace flow from a holy source

and are quite different from earthly happiness and pleasure.

But you only can taste the difference when you have experienced both of them.

=====================

“But I have found that whenever I have surrendered in obedience [to God’s leadings], impossible things become simple.”

(p. 30, Prologue, Starr)

“But knowing the power of obedience, which makes things easy that seem impossible, my will is determined to undertake the work very cheerfully, though nature seems exceedingly averse to it, because our Lord has not given me such virtue that I should be able to accomplish the task…”

(Preface, Dalton translation, 1852)

“May He who has helped me with even more difficult things than this one help me now.  Into His mercy, I deliver my trust.”

(p. 30, Prologue, Starr)

PARAPHRASE

My Divine Companion has performed such miracles in my inner world:

erasing what seemed like problems etched into my mind and

uncovering resources far beyond what I ever imagined lay within myself.

Having experienced my Divine Companion’s abundant support and wisdom,

I will attempt doing God’s will

trusting that the divine support will never peter out

as long as I follow my Beloved as closely as I can.

PARAPHRASES

[Dwellings 1 through 3]

I can’t stop my soul from singing

Experiencing God’s abundant graces makes my soul sing praises to the One

who so generously nurtures any imperfect creature

who willingly and happily allows God free rein

to roam their interior townhouse,

to remodel their inner world,

to shape their values which determine their choices in their life.

God’s presence within you is infused with a deep and divine affection.

An encounter with your Divine Companion overflows

with the felt experience of being loved

by an extraordinarily capable lover.

These precious blessings of coming to know the personality of God

enable you to really grasp God’s great love for you,

a love so deep that you will need an eternity to know its full depths.

Each dive into the depths of God’s sublime love brings sweet joy.

Surrender

Surrender!

Surrender your often-selfish wishes

and often shortsighted desires

so that God can elevate them

into much better wishes and desires.

In other words, at every fork in the road of your life,

let go of your own preferences and

and follow your Divine Companion’s leadings.

Kindred spirits

If ever possible (and it’s too seldom possible),

seek the company of someone who has also

climbed the stairway of their interior townhouse.

Your spirits will be lifted and your insights clarified

by spending time with a kindred spirit

as together you discern God’s leadings and ways,

and distinguish your own preferences from God’s preference for your life.

Together, you’ll recognize the threads of your Epic Journeys

and see the arc of the spiritual path amid earthly matters.

Like fledging birds dare to fly by watching their parents soar,

each of you may encourage the other to fly as the saints flew.

Teresa’s Love Song for her Divine Companion

My dearly Beloved,

My precious Indwelling God,

The supreme blessing of you living alongside me staggers my human mind:

that you, the One most beautiful of all,

would come so close to me so that

I can glimpse your loveliness within me,

the beautiful tone of your voice can penetrate my heart,

your refined wisdom can infuse my struggling mind.

Thank you, thank you, thank you for

endowing each of us with capabilities so we can perceive your presence

so each person can know that a wonderful Divine Companion lives within

endowing each of us so we can distinguish “that of God” from “that of us”

so we can sense how wonderful a divinely shared life is compared to the solo human life.

Your beauty uplifts me and inspires my life,

your faithful and reliable goodness satisfies all of my human longings,

your wisdom guides me so surely in every decision I face.

The beauty of your character is so powerfully moving that I find that I must

give myself wholly to you and

dedicate my life to you and your purposes and nothing else.

My only remaining desire is

to be more pleasing to you, my stunningly beautiful Beloved;

to make my inner world more hospitable for you, my refined Divine Companion;

to remove anything within me that displeases you and interferes with our intimacy;

to revere you, the Indwelling God, who is the same as the God of Highest Heaven,

I want to live this way

with every part of me,

with all my heart, mind and soul,

with every value I hold,

with every thought I entertain,

with every choice I make;

I want with all my might

to harmonize my will with yours

so that I can better collaborate with you on our divine tasks;

to bear fruit for you, my amazingly generous God,

so that another person might be led to their own Divine Companion.

My Wish for You, my Kindred Soul

Once you grasp how close God has come to you,

once you grasp the goodness and beauty of your Divine Companion,

once you fully commit yourself to becoming the best possible partner for your Beloved,

once you share all of yourself with the God who dwells within you,

once you collaborate more wholeheartedly with your divine partner,

then you will experience the depths of God’s great love for you,

you will forever lose feelings of loneliness,

your yoke will feel lighter because of your partner’s strength;

then you will shift from living

a self-centered life shaped mainly by your own ideas and desires

to a God-centered life that harmonizes your ways with your Beloved’s ways.

As you more fully integrate your Beloved into your inner household,

as you more fully commit yourself to this precious human-divine relationship,

as you more securely attach yourself to your Divine Companion,

then you will bear the spiritual fruits that grow so well in the soil of this relationship:

a deep peace in your inner world, securely attached to your Divine Companion

and a gracious way of caring for others in the outer world.

Return to place in main Text (Inner Housemate)

Limitations of my words

even Teresa’s eloquent words can’t move a heart of stone

What I say will mean nothing to a person with no sense of their inner world or to a person without a sense of God’s great and lovely character.  Perhaps God might rouse them from their spiritual stupor but I doubt that my words could awaken a person fully committed to the material life or who completely rejects and neglects their spiritual life.  This book shouldn’t harm such a person: if your mind is dead set against experiencing intimacy with God, nothing I say could make that happen.

Some have told me that sharing these spiritual ideas will only frustrate people in traditional churches who don’t experience God in their inner world.  Yes, the ideas in this book won’t resonate with them.  Perhaps they won’t be overly offended if they ignore this book as simply another book that isn’t relevant for their lives.

But not writing this book would deprive others who sincerely desire an inner experience of God but need assistance and encouragement.  This book might be useful if you have 1) a rudimentary sense of your inner world and 2) some sense of God’s beauty and deep concern for you.  If so, please trust that you too can experience the wonderful divine companionship that others before you found.  Hopefully this book helps you better understand the spiritual parts of your inner world; perhaps it might help you trust that God really is very close to you; perhaps it might encourage you to cultivate your inner world to be more hospitable to your Divine Companion who can then assist you better; perhaps it might motivate you to search out that inner place where you can intimately bond with God.

Inadequate description of your Divine Companion

Adequately describing the spiritual splendor of the Divine Companion is impossible.  So you might be tempted to not even try.  But I think it’s far more noble to attempt to imperfectly articulate the beauty and goodness of the Indwelling God so that even one person might be encouraged to devote themselves to cultivating their own relationship with their own Divine Companion.  What a tragedy if everyone who felt God’s embrace left no trace of their experience behind so that everyone must start their own inner search for God from scratch.  Knowing another’s spiritual experiences can help you understand and trust your own experiences.  Pooling spiritual experiences better illuminates their shared common core.

The inability to express something doesn’t mean it’s not real

Being unable to fully or definitively describe something doesn’t mean that thing isn’t real.  This situation of being unable to adequately articulate something happens all the time.  Words alone can’t communicate the taste of food you’ve never eaten or the sound of music you’ve never heard.  But that food and music are quite real.  Clearly, being unable to adequately describe or define something in words doesn’t mean that thing isn’t very real (and possibly a quite wonderful experience you might enjoy a lot).  In the same way, the fact that my words fall short of describing your Divine Companion doesn’t mean that God isn’t dwelling within you.

Being unable to adequately describe your inner spirituality doesn’t mean that it’s something weird or mystical.  Many people can speak their native language very well but can’t articulate the rules of the language they use every day; young children clearly grasp what is being said by their parents several months before they can articulate their response in their own words.  Being unable to adequately define your inner processing in words doesn’t indicate that they aren’t real.  In the same way, the fact that my words fall short of capturing the workings of your spiritual mind (your top section) doesn’t mean that you don’t possess those capabilities.

Facing doubts about your own experience

The experience of the divine embrace is so much better than all other human experiences that, long after the embrace has ended, you may doubt your own experience because you don’t think that anyone could be that wonderful; or you may doubt that you are worthy of receiving such love and insights.  If these doubts take root, you might then think your embrace was merely a flight of fantasy, merely a projection of what you wanted rather than a bona fide experience which really shows the lovely character of God.  Such is the slippery nature of our inner experiences!  Or, even worse, you might consider such a divine gift to be a tainted and devilish byproduct of the ego’s cravings.

Being in the divine embrace may feel as if you have left your mortal existence and entered a heavenly house far above your human townhouse; but you have no tangible evidence of this experience to present to others.  Don’t let that make you doubt this precious experience.  You will know that your inner world is now quite changed and is filled with the light and love of your Divine Companion.  The “proof” that assures you of actually reaching the rooftop is the sweeter spiritual fruit you bear afterwards.

Hopefully this book might help you trust that your wonderful spiritual experiences are very real; perhaps even the most real experience you will ever have here on Earth.  How terrible if healthy circumspection or unfounded misgivings metastasize into such grotesque proportions that your doubts choke the vitality out of the very spiritual experiences that can nourish you.

Final disclaimer

I am fully aware that, as a human being, I don’t know everything about spirituality.  But you can be sure that God knows everything needed to cultivate a relationship with you.  You can trust God that all will be well on your spiritual path even though you can’t see all of the path or grasp all of God’s ways.

Even the most eloquent words fall far short of actually experiencing the intimate company of God for yourself.  At best, this book might motivate you to begin exploring your interior townhouse and lead you to the first steps of your inner stairway.  I hope these words, although inadequate, may move you to nurture and deepen your relationship with your Divine Companion who is waiting and longing for you.

Your Brief Stay in your Interior Townhouse

In the grand scheme of things, in geological time, your life is quite short.

You have only limited days to make the core choices that will either make your life precious or a waste of time.  Choosing to pursue intimacy with God redeems you and uplifts your character.  Choosing to pursue only material goals places you in thrall to worldly attractions that corrode your character.  What a precious life you create when you choose to align yourself with God’s values!  What a terrible waste of a grand opportunity if you choose to align yourself with selfish and material values!

You have only a limited amount of energy to invest in any endeavor in the days allotted to you; the energy spent adorning the façade of your townhouse depletes the energy available for bonding with the God dwelling within you.  Knowing that the relationship with your Beloved is the highest purpose of your interior townhouse may motivate you to invest your energy more wisely and make your one townhouse (your one precious life) as rich and full as it possibly can be.

But perhaps climbing the inner stairway seems too complicated to undertake.  Some projects, like knitting or roofing, seem incredibly complex and difficult in your first attempts.  As a beginner in any task, you need to methodically study each step; your first attempts are laborious, slow and filled with mistakes.  But, if you persist, you will gradually master the principles and necessary skills until eventually what first appeared so complex now feels quite simple.  At that point, you can complete much more complex projects than you first could.  If you persist in climbing the inner stairway, eventually you will become adept at spiritual cultivation: it will no longer seem overly complicated and you can climb much further than you first imagined.

Ascending the inner stairway involves developing both inner and outer core capabilities.  The core task of inner development is purifying your desires: wisely ordering what and who you treasure most; and freeing yourself from your lower urges.  The core task of outer development is growing more compassionate with others, a compassion formed by the divine infusions you have received have woven into your character.  Please diligently cultivate your inner world so you make the most of this one-time precious opportunity of your life on Earth.

Return to previous place in text

More Varieties of Spiritual Experiences

Further rooftop experiences

[In addition to the rooftop embrace, Teresa described other experiences that seem to happen beyond the confines of your own spiritual mind.  Because only a very few people may experience them, those descriptions are separated into their own section.]

Hearing specific words

[Dwelling 6; chapter 3]

Most often, your Divine Companion doesn’t speak using words like a person would.  Metaphors like a spark, a storm or an aroma suggest the nonverbal nature of the communication that flows between you and your Beloved.  But, in a few instances, you may hear distinct words in your mind that seem to be “spoken,” words that are so wise and holy that only your Divine Companion could have uttered them; sometimes the words may teach you how you can better cooperate with your Beloved partner.

The words perceived in your mind are almost always a product of your own thinking; only very rarely do they arise from a divine source.  This makes discerning the divinity of specific inner words more difficult than simply absorbing the wordless experience of your Beloved’s embrace.  You must discern between several possibilities.  One possibility is that the specific words have a divine source: they are so spiritually vibrant that they could only come from God’s lips in heaven to your mind; or perhaps you heard your Divine Companion’s voice within you; or perhaps they were uttered by an angel.  Another possibility is that the specific words are a partial spiritual message which got mixed to a greater or lesser degree with you mainly human thoughts: perhaps the specific words popped into your mind stimulated by something you heard (which may be either a thought aligned with God or a thought mainly aligned with something that appeals to your ego).  Or perhaps the specific words are your own thoughts emerging from the top section that could be mistaken for God’s words because they reflect your highest spiritual concepts.

The reason for much caution with specific words

I fear that many times, specific spiritual words come from a person’s mind, especially if they have a lively imagination or feel their emotions very intensely in general, not just spiritually.  Such a person may be prone to interpreting their own inner monologue as a supernatural influx of insight.  They are likely to be so sure of themselves that no one will be able to persuade them otherwise.  Don’t waste your energies by suggesting that their specific words aren’t 100% divine; you might be more helpful by simply not making too big a deal about their experience of hearing them.

Sometimes a person hears specific words referring to a certain thing they desire which isn’t something their Divine Companion desires.  They think that eventually getting the desired thing proves that the specific words were indeed spoken by God.  The self-centeredness of such “proof” is clear to a person with spiritual depth but isn’t obvious at all to a person who hasn’t cultivated their spirituality.

Odds are quite high, especially on the lower parts of the inner stairway, that specific words heard in your inner world come largely from your own experiences and thoughts.  Regarding your own experience (not regarding another person’s experience), remember the significant damage so often done by erroneously elevating your own human words to the status of divine words.  Appreciating the great harm caused by erroneously elevating your own thoughts, it’s often wiser to consider that specific words weren’t divinely uttered.  This caution protects you from the error of mistaking human ideas as divine ideas.  If the words are divine, your Beloved is likely to repeat them again or teach you in other ways.

Human origin words are more like an enjoyable dream or a fantasy that doesn’t produce spiritual fruit or persistent devotion to God; they may produce a short season of spiritual elation and modest spiritual fruit that wilts when a person encounters difficult times.

Yet who of us is worthy to judge God’s ways or place limits on what God can do within a person?  Imagine the terrible damage to a person’s faith if you feed their doubts that God has truly stirred within them and “spoken” specific words into their mind.  Even if they are misperceiving those words, how terrible if, in your rush to correct what you perceive to be an error, you crush their tender trust in God.

Believing that your own human words are actually divine is likely to inflate your pride.  But words that truly come from the Spirit are accompanied by profound humility; a sublime conviction that doesn’t inflate your pride, only your humble gratitude; a quiet confidence that doesn’t require being accorded higher status as an exalted person who hears God’s words.

Discerning a genuine spiritual voice

A good friend with spiritual depth can be a tremendous help when discerning spiritual matters; they need not have an exalted title or position (external credentials aren’t a reliable measure of a person’s spiritual depth).  A spiritually ignorant person (a credentialed person who is unaware of their limited spiritual experience) can do tremendous damage when trying to understand specific words.  A red flag for such a person is their doubts that God is present and can act in your inner world.  Don’t be discouraged by their callous and insensitive undermining of your spiritual experiences; simply recognize their spiritual immaturity and move on.

But if you are blessed with a friend of spiritual depth and understanding, fully disclose the specific words you’ve heard and listen to their perspective.  If both of you see that the words have merit, then you can rest assured of their spiritual validity.  If this reliable spiritual friend has doubts about the specific words (while also trusting that God is indeed active within you), then pause before you act on the specific words while you weigh the matter in your heart for a longer time.

signs of genuine specific spiritual words

God is powerfully creative in the divine ways used to reach you.  God can speak in your inner world if that would have spiritual value to you or to God’s larger plans.  Specific words aren’t spoken simply for amusement.  Some signs that specific words or leadings are actually divine:

--they are in harmony with the core gems of spiritual wisdom;

--they produce good spiritual fruits: humility, reverence, joy, gracious service;

--they heal psychological wounds or ease psychological burdens;

--they bring great conviction about your mission which enhances your spiritual endurance.

As you ascend higher into the top section, you will better recognize specific words as divine because they are so distinct from your typical self-talk; they certainly aren’t like your normal human patter.  The tone of the words testifies to their divine nature, a tone that resonates with your Divine Companion’s voice.  You will know the true words of your Divine Companion by

their crystal-clear language and piercing truth;

a few words can communicate so very much;

the words as given need no revising;

their powerful effect on your inner world;

the quantum leap they bring in your capacity to serve others;

the great increase in understanding which far exceeds the number of words spoken;

the peace and light which they bring.

The case for trusting specific words and directions

perhaps Teresa is explaining specific leadings behind her staunch motivation to establish new communities

If, in fact, the specific words you hear are truly spiritual, then surely your Divine Companion will say them again in moments when they can be spiritually beneficial: moments when the specific words can increase your devotion to God and improve your service to others.  Words of genuine spiritual origin (those words or directions that actually come from your Divine Companion) have a very long half-life as if they are indelibly imprinted in your memory, as is they are quite firmly woven into your mind compared to the words heard when other people talk.

Perhaps you hear specific words that direct you to undertake a certain task which your Divine Companion wants you to perform.  Often, to your human mind, such tasks seem impossible to accomplish; the specific task which has been laid upon your heart may seem so daunting that even the most fervent person would be besieged by their own doubts as well as the doubts sown by spiritual directors.  Despite all hesitation and doubts, a genuinely divine direction will instill an unshakeable conviction in you: an unassailable sense of certainty remains steadfast at the center of your heart.  It’s as if your doubts are exiled to the bottom section of your interior townhouse and cannot do anything to extinguish the flame of fervor for this divinely assigned task which lives in the top section and is out of doubts’ reach; human doubts may surge on your lower floors but they can do nothing to quench the ardent spiritual desire that burns so firmly in the top section.

If you are so blessed that, after much time and effort, you finally see the holy task accomplished, you are more delighted by the faithfulness of your Beloved’s leadings than you are by the actual completion of the task.  Your delight seamlessly flows into sincere praise for the goodness of God.  Regardless of the outcome, being assigned a task to complete for your Beloved engenders your highest praise for God who is willing to involve you in such spiritual work.

Possible examples of Scriptures as divine specific words

Sometimes specific words are individualized just for you. Other times specific words are familiar words from Scripture but which have come alive with very personal meaning for you.  Both individualized words and words from Scripture are a powerful balm which soothes and calms the strongest worries, even better than the kindest and wisest human words can.

Perhaps inwardly hearing the words “Be not troubled” lightens your load when you feel greatly burdened.  Then your agitation turns into peace; sorrow mellows into acceptance; and darkness of mind recedes as spiritual light pours in.

Perhaps inwardly hearing “It is I, be not afraid” assures you that your Divine Companion is really present within you after so called spiritual advisers have said that your experiences are delusional or totally wrongheaded.  These specific words deepen your trust so you can bond more securely with your Beloved.

Perhaps inwardly hearing the words “Be at peace; All will go well” assures you when you are assailed by serious doubts about the spiritual task that you have been assigned.  These specific words can make worries vanish and allow a quiet confidence to pour throughout you, a confidence that remains rock solid even as you encounter many formidable obstacles to performing the task entrusted to you.  Although you cannot see the entire path for accomplishing your task, you are sure that the path will lead to completion if you persevere and do your best at each step along the way.

God’s voice is impossible to ignore

You might be able to mute, ignore or silence an inner persona’s voice who lives in the bottom section, such as an Inner Critic.  But the spiritual voice of the top section is so penetrating that nothing you can do will ever mute it.  Your Divine Companion’s voice is so compelling that you will hear it eventually.  No human thoughts or defenses can ever stop God from speaking into your inner world; no sincere soul can ignore forever the words which the spirit speaks into the human mind.  The One who created you can still your mind far better than the best techniques ever could; God stills your mind briefly so, in a moment of quiet receptivity, you can better grasp the loving nature of God.  In the sweet inner stillness, you can really assimilate that a much greater housemate really lives within you, one can run the inner household much better than you. With clearer receptivity, you can more reliably receive any specific words spoken by your Divine Companion without too much distortion.

QUOTE (Dwelling 6; chapter 3; paragraph 27 from The Interior Castle)

“For He Who could stay the sun on its course (the prayer of Josue, I believe) can so quiet the faculties and the interior of the spirit as to make it perceive that another and a stronger Lord than itself governs this castle; it is thus affected with profound devotion and humility, seeing that it cannot but listen. May the divine Majesty vouchsafe that, forgetting ourselves, our only aim may be to please Him, as I said.”

PARAPHRASE

The God who set spinning all the spheres and galaxies of the universe,

the God who set in motion the intricate coordination of the cells and tissues of the human body,

can so easily and fully still the incessant mutterings of the human mind,

not out of a desire to control you,

only out of a desire to reveal the amazing One who dwells with you in your inner world.

If your mind receives this generous blessing of being stilled by God

and the eyes of your soul open in that sublime quiet,

in profound devotion and humility receive the divine gift of experiencing how

God loves to be with even a dense but spiritually hungry person.

Surely the only possible response to such a wonderful blessing is

to listen and feel the depth of your Divine Companion’s holy words,

to obey whatever leading they convey,

to love God more,

to be ever more trustworthy and faithfully devoted to God,

to beautifully praise God with every fiber of your being.

Surely the only possible mindset after glimpsing God’s lovely character is

to forget all about yourself and your lesser dreams,

to be only concerned that God, not you, is pleased with what you do with your life,

to make much room for God’s plans and dreams for your shared abode,

to cede full leadership of your life over to your Divine Companion,

to make yourself smaller so that God may grow larger.

And then, like so many other spiritual paradoxes, your interior townhouse will blossom much more than when you claimed and retained sovereignty over it.

Flight of the Soul

[Dwelling 6; chapter 5]

Teresa described the flight of the soul as leaving herself behind and going beyond her rooftop experiences of her Beloved.  In the flight of the soul, she felt lifted far above her interior townhouse and being brought close to heaven where she grasped spirituality and God in a wholly new way.  Her descriptions are similar to some people’s near-death experiences of heaven when they grasped higher truth in ways that they never could before.

The divine embrace feels like an experience solidly anchored atop your townhouse: you don’t leave yourself; you are clearly on your rooftop and securely held in the arms of your Divine Companion.  The flight of the soul is another kind of spiritual experience in which you leave the comfort and familiarity of your townhouse far, far behind.  Leaving known territory requires great courage and unshakeable trust that your Divine Companion is directing this excursion and keeping you safe while you are so far from your familiar home turf.

Metaphor: a straw being lifted up

The flight of the soul shows how powerfully God can act in your inner world when your marriage is fully consecrated.  The flight of the soul is clearly the work of your Divine Companion: not even your greatest human efforts could ever produce such an experience but God seems to lift a sincere soul as easily as a strong person lifts a piece of straw.  God (the strong person in this metaphor) is in total control of where the person (the straw in this metaphor) goes when it is lifted.  Your preferences regarding this flight won’t change where you go or even whether you go: you will go where God directs this flight just as certainly as the straw goes where the strong person takes it.

You won’t get dragged along on this wonderful adventure against your will.  The flight of the soul only happens when you have given your life so completely to God that you no longer consider it as your own possession, a thing that you can do with as you wish.  You now consider your life a shared thing and you want God to do with you and your life whatever God wishes.  Having wholeheartedly placed yourself and your life in God’s hands, you are quite content to be the straw lifted by the strong person; you are quite content that God takes full control of you during the flight of the soul.

Metaphor: an inner tsunami

In the top section, the divine waters calmly pour into an inner cistern where they gently nourish you.  But during the flight of the soul, the divine waters seem like a powerful wave that lifts you like a tsunami lifts a small boat.  Just as even the strongest rowing by the sailors on that boat can’t affect where it goes, you can’t control where God takes you in the flight of the soul.  The powers of the human mind (your preconceived ideas and wishes) have no effect on where your soul (the boat) will go.  Although your journey is thoroughly out of your control, the vessel (your soul) is quite safe because it is under God’s control and direction.  Unlike a real tsunami, you aren’t in danger of being seized by out-of-control currents; instead, wise and wonderful spiritual currents guide you on this flight.

New “sights” during the flight

The flight of the soul transports you far beyond Earth to a more spiritual realm which is lit with a light quite different than any earthly light and full of wonders far more beautiful than the highest earthly splendors.  During the flight, you seem to be endowed with spiritual eyes: a new kind of perception which enables you to see things that are beyond the range of human vision.  These spiritual wonders are far more beautiful than the finest human art or melody; they are so different from worldly creations that you need senses beyond your usual five senses to perceive them.

Richer ways of connecting

During the flight of the soul, you might even be so fortunate as to experience the sublime friendship shared by the holy ones of this realm who are close to God.  Unlike human friendships which gradually build on many conversations with words, friendship with a holy being forms in an instant of deep connection which, although wordless, enables you to fully grasp who they are and how much they love you.  This kind of connection hints of richer ways of engaging than the human ways of most people.

Deeper ways of understanding

In this higher realm, spiritual teachings can be instantly infused enabling you to immediately understand and grasp spiritual matters that you could barely understand after many years of intense and laborious human study.  Like the new sight of spiritual eyes, the new ways of understanding are quite different from human ways of learning and understanding.  The teaching of this realm isn’t conducted with words but, in an instant of time in this holy place, you might fully grasp deep spiritual concepts, as if you have developed a new mindset (perhaps better called a “soulset”) which can absorb spiritual perspectives and divine ways of living; this new mindset reminds me of a very young child who is a sponge and learns so much each day.  These spiritual teachings are far wiser than the best earthly “wisdom.”  This new way of understanding hints that your spiritual mind has capabilities quite beyond those you nurtured before the flight.

Spiritual souvenirs

Memories of the flight of the soul are like souvenirs from the spiritual realm that help you recall your experience which has no parallel in your other human experiences.  The souvenirs remind you of the beauties of the spiritual realm which you will know more fully after this life.  They encourage you to keep walking the spiritual paths which are held in great contempt by so many people.  The flight of the soul assures you that a realm more wonderful than this earthly one exists, a realm which will be enjoyed by each person who fully gives themselves to God; the flight assures you that a richer life awaits each person who trusts God with every fiber of their being.

Metaphor: sun and sunrays

Sunrays carry the light and heat of the sun to you so you can feel the distant sun on your own skin.  In an analogous way, your Divine Companion carries the light and love of the Father who dwells far off in the Highest Heaven right into your inner world so you can grasp God’s kind personality in your own skin, in your own first-hand experience.  In this way, your Father in Highest Heaven (which is so far away) comes directly into your inner world as your Divine Companion (who is so intimately close).  Your Divine Companion is pure essence of God dwelling atop your interior townhouse just as sunrays are the pure essence of the sun, not the essence of something else (like gravity).

The sun always remains in its celestial position yet its rays can be felt throughout the solar system.  In an analogous way, God the Father always remains in the Highest Heaven yet his divine personality can be felt within each spiritually receptive person.

Metaphor: a quantum leap

When light shines on an atom and resonates with it, one of its electrons is instantaneously elevated to a higher level and given more energy.  In the same way, the light of God can resonate with your purified desires and powerfully lift you to new spiritual heights.  This metaphor attempts to describe how God can both embrace you tenderly as well as lift you powerfully up high spiritually.  During the flight of the soul you experience God’s perfect blend tenderness and power.

Of course, the light of God must be able to shine into your interior townhouse before it can resonate with you.  You must first clean any grime from your crystal walls before God’s light (God’s lovely personality) can enter your townhouse with minimal obstruction from grimy crystal walls (from lower desires and distorted thinking).

Metaphor: slingshot

The flight of the soul begins instantaneously like a stone propelled from a slingshot.  You are rapidly flung far, far away from the familiar comfort of the slingshot (your interior townhouse).  You are flung into terra incognito, a realm so different that it could be quite terrifying … unless you fully trust your Divine Companion.  The experiences on the flight are the opposite of terror: a deep sense of comfort despite the unfamiliarity of this new realm; a deep assurance that all will be well in this wonderful realm that is so completely new to you.

After the flight: the graces

The flight of the soul seems to impart several specific graces afterwards:

1) Your sense of God’s greatness penetrates more deeply into you because you had such higher experiences of God.

2) You see yourself much more clearly, warts and all.  This clear sense of yourself makes you appreciate the deep miracle that a lover as perfect as your Divine Companion is so devoted to such a far less capable partner as yourself.  Being more appreciative of God’s great generosity in bestowing the divine love, your motivation to please God more and displease God less intensifies.

3) You feel a protective sense towards all that your Divine Companion has given you; you want to enshrine God’s blessings and endowments in your interior townhouse so that you never forget these magnificent gifts God has bestowed on you.  Deep appreciation of these gifts is important so that they can continue to nourish you; forgetting or not really appreciating them is a terrible insult to the Magnificent Gift Giver … and a terrible loss of nourishment for you.  Pray to live in ways that are worthy of all the great gifts you have received from God.

4) After the flight, all earthly things that are divorced from God so totally lose their appeal that they now appear almost like filth (quite different from their previous shiny and attractive appearance!).

Appreciate how precious the graces are which flow from the flight of the soul!  Cultivate them so they continue to help you grow into a worthy partner for your Beloved.

Like the rooftop embrace, the after effects of the flight are profound enough to shake loose the strongest grip of the worldly pleasures that attract you the most.  These wonderful blessings make it easier to turn away from an addiction or any thoughts that make your inner world inhospitable to God.  Keep alive this deeper awareness of the relative worth of material things which has now been made so clear.  How terribly offensive to the divine gift-giver if you think too lightly or make poor use of such a wonderful gift!

A great gift (such as the divine embrace on the rooftop or the flight of the soul into spiritual realms) can be terrifying because great gifts come with great responsibilities.  Taking the flight requires great courage to leave your interior townhouse and great trust in God’s sure navigation of your life.  Stepping into larger responsibilities after the flight requires the same degree of trust and courage: trust that God’s path is a very good thing for you to walk and courage to continue walking on the path that very few have walked on.

After the flight: uncertainties

After the flight, you might judge yourself very harshly, feeling that you didn’t do enough to receive such wonderful grace and nourishment.  You might even go to the extreme of thinking that you are too disgusting to merit your Divine Companion’s company.  But that perspective is the fruit of the human mind warped by the traumas it has undergone.  God’s perspective is far different.  Trust that God’s love is quite real and allow that love, not traumas or earthy disappointments, to determine your level of self-respect.

Or, after the flight, you might be beset by a sense of being utterly unqualified for undertaking greater spiritual responsibilities.  If you beseech God for help in such downcast moments, God will show you the divine view: everyone, including Jesus, works hard yet reaps what feels like a meager spiritual harvest at that moment.  God simply asks that you bear up nobly in such discouraging moments and, like Jesus, continue to work faithfully and diligently, trusting that all will be well even though it doesn’t seem possible now.  Be grateful that you have an opportunity to become loyal and trustworthy in times of spiritual uncertainty.

It’s always good to see yourself clearly, including your human weaknesses and limitations; that awareness is the soil in which true humility grows.  But balance that with how precious you are to your Divine Companion who counts none of your limitations and weaknesses as reasons for breaking your engagement to each other.  What a generous and considerate lover you have in God!  Please take a leap of faith and seize the divine affections that your Beloved gives you.  What a terrible waste not to seize this precious and personal gift that God bestows on you.

Your soul may take flight (such flight being instigated by God, not by you) at inconvenient moments when you are with other people.  If so, be prepared to be slandered for these experiences.  Because you are human, their opinions may raise doubts in your own mind about the reality of the divine embrace or your spiritual flight.  Because so few understand these inner experiences, you will wish that they didn’t happen when others can see you; you will want these moments to remain private so you don’t suffer their opinions. But because you have no say-so in when or whether these flights take place, you can only resign yourself to the actions of your precious partner.

Only a well-prepared person is taken on flights of the soul; if they really were an abomination to God, you would go to any lengths to stop them because you care only about pleasing God not accumulating spiritual feel-good experiences.  Regardless of what others say, the flights create a rock-solid assurance that you really were drawn closer to God.  These experiences are so filled with joy and spirituality that you can’t help but want to have them again.

Emmaus walk

[Dwelling 6; chapter 8]

The apostles’ friendship with Jesus

2,000 years ago, people engaged with Jesus in the immediacy of face-to-face interactions.  In the company of Jesus, they must have certainly experienced something of the personality of God which is best grasped through a relationship, through actually being with a divine person: Jesus.  Just as students learn so much better with in-person teaching compared to remote learning via Zoom or Facetime, you learn the essence of Jesus so much better when you walk with him compared to reading even the best accounts of his life.  The people who interacted with Jesus probably didn’t understand everything that he said and taught (who could?) but they certainly grasped what a wonderful friend and companion he was.  They absorbed some of the essence of God by being in the presence of Jesus who embodied the divine traits of God in ways that the human mind can grasp.

Current day Emmaus walk

The rooftop embrace is the immediate experience of your Beloved in your inner world: a divine presence so personal that it feels like intimacy shared with a dear friend.  But more rarely, you may be blessed with experiencing divine companionship as if it is happening in your outer world, as if you Jesus walks with you on a current-day Emmaus walk.  Although clearly Jesus isn’t there in a physical body that could be seen with or touched with your human senses, you experience him palpably right by your side (not in your inner world).  Such experiences aren’t intellectually imagining Jesus is walking alongside you; this immediate experience of Jesus’s company is far more “real” than even the most entrancing ideas you might conjure up on your own.

The embodied company of Emmaus experience is like inhaling Jesus’s tenderness directly into your personality.  The close company of Jesus fuels your spiritual blossoming: a more robust dedication to God who is so devoted to you; a more fervent desire to serve God by enthusiastically doing whatever your Divine Companion desires you to do.  Knowing that Jesus is so near spurs you to tame your lower desires because you are certain that he would be hurt if you succumbed to the primitive urges of the human brain, such as anger or addictive pursuits of any kind.  Without the Emmaus-like experience, being human, you might become lax about taming your lower human urges, thinking of God as far away and not affected by your unspiritual thoughts and deeds; feeling Jesus close by your side powerfully counteracts that human tendency.  Your increased vigilance isn’t about beating yourself up; it more forward-looking and concerned with preparing yourself for deeper intimacy and greater collaboration with your Divine Companion.

Experiencing that Jesus, in ways beyond human comprehension, actually walks right beside you can be unnerving and frightening.  If so, remember what Jesus said to the two men on the Emmaus walk who felt unnerved: “Don’t be afraid: it is I, Jesus, who loves you and accompanies you this moment.”  The experience that Jesus walks besides you is so powerful that it leaves no room for doubt about its authenticity.  The experience carries within it a quiet and certain assurance that Jesus really is with you and alongside you.

In the Emmaus walk, you experience Jesus as a powerful companion in your prayers and your daily activities.  You may exchange thoughts as Jesus walks beside you.  Jesus may not respond to each of your inaudible utterances but trust that he will definitely respond in the moment when it will benefit you.

When the experience that Jesus walking alongside you fades, you will likely crave that Jesus return to your side once again.  But you can’t initiate or end the experience of Jesus walking beside you; this precious experience’s beginning and ending are determined by God.  Even after the actual experience ends, the benefits Emmaus-like experience last for a very long time as if Jesus has imbued your mind with some of his own mind which enables you to far better distinguish what is true from what is distorted or completely false.  After the Emmaus experience (or the divine embrace or the flight of the soul), you can more clearly discern the small gems of spiritual truth even in grossly distorted representations of God preached by some religious organizations.

No definitive “hard proof”

Like many higher spiritual matters, the Emmaus experience can be only partially articulated and understood with the reasoning and language abilities of the bottom section.  The inability to fully articulate and understand these experiences reflects the limitations of the human mind not whether or not these experiences are “real.”

To be perfectly clear: you are unlikely to see the physical face of Jesus in the Emmaus experience; you won’t be able to describe his face to others later on.  That inability may cause them to doubt your experience and, if you believe them, such doubts can undermine you and lessen the benefits of this wonderful blessing.  But just as the companionship of a true friend buoys your spirit when you can’t see them, the very closeness of Jesus, though unseen, can lift you far more powerfully than the presence of a person you who can see quite clearly with your body’s eyes.  Sensing Jesus beside you is like the attunement between two dear friends which enables each one to sense what the other is thinking and feeling.

Compelling assurance

Experiencing Jesus right by your side must be spiritually genuine rather than humanly imagined because of its unmistakable spiritual nourishment; it fills you with such sublime joy; it deepens your desire to please God and to root out anything that interferes with God’s full presence within you; it delivers the ultimate pleasure of knowing that Jesus hears you when you reach out to him.  If the Emmaus-like experience was produced by the mental processes of the bottom section (by the mental actions of your psychological mind), it would bear the fingerprints of the ego: excessive lower emotions; feeling as if you (rather than God) are exalted; increased pride rather than increased humility; being impressed with yourself rather than being bowled over by God’s tremendous beauty.  Genuine spiritual experiences leave you amazed that God would ever deem you worthy enough to merit the sweet gift of divine companionship; this amazement creates a heart overflowing with thanks for receiving that wonderful gift which surpasses all earthly treasures.

The wonderful fruits of the Emmaus walk assure you that it is a genuine spiritual experience.  If it was a deceptive mirage manufactured by your ego rather than created by God, its benefits would not last so long or be so consistent; it would not bring the deep peace to your soul that surpasses any other peace; it would not make you a much more compassionate friend to those who are neglected and spurned; it would inflame your ego rather than gently taming it.  The ego isn’t very likely to dream up someone else who was greater than itself; the idea of spending time in the company of someone greater than itself can be very grating to the self-important ego.

The other-centeredness of your Emmaus experience is another quality that shows it was a truly spiritual experience.  Human experiences that you might consider “spiritual” (but really aren’t) tend to make you snobby: thoughtless about others and overconfident in yourself (which is nearly the opposite tone after you are tenderly and humbly assured of Jesus’ loving presence and wise leading).  If you deceive yourself and make public displays of your supposedly superior piety, you won’t do much to help another person draw close to God; the exquisite experience of Jesus by your side is never a reason to exalt yourself above others.  Willingly and graciously serving another person discretely are far more likely to whet someone’s spiritual appetite or nourish their spiritual growth.

The bona fide Emmaus experience inspires you to praise God more, to thank God more, to serve others more humbly and graciously.  Rather than feeling exalted, you might think somewhat less of yourself because you don’t feel that you merit such am amazing blessing.  Rather than feeling that you are better than others, you are likely to be keenly aware of your stumbles and the ways that you could be bearing more spiritual fruit.  Like other spiritual experiences, the Emmaus-like companionship of Jesus by your side, and all its spiritual fruits, is always a sign of God’s goodness, not your personal merit.

Emmaus Variations

Rather than Jesus walking beside you, you might instead experience that another spiritual being, perhaps an angel, walks by your side.  God and spiritual beings are so far above our human nature that we probably can’t distinguish one from another; you may not be able to identify which spiritual being accompanies you.  What matters more than precisely identifying exactly who walks alongside you is absorbing whatever they want to teach you.  Encountering any spiritual being will certainly enrich you and guide you.

“Seeing” the heart of God

Perhaps you might be temporarily blessed with an entirely new sense, a heightened spiritual insight which enables you to “see” God’s lovely nature much more deeply.  This new way of “seeing” doesn’t produce a concrete picture such as one formed by your biological eyes; nor is it a mental picture created by your human mind.  Instead, this spiritual “sight” makes clear some aspects of God that were previously beyond your grasp; this new spiritual sense immerses you in God’s personality so intensely that some of the divine nature can flow into your own human nature.

Your biological eyes are a marvel at depicting the world around you: all kinds of neural processing enable you to recognize people, animals and objects through low-level decoding of lines, shapes and colors.  Your biological eyes can see the body of another person.  Your spiritual eyes are a marvel of a completely different kind that enable you to “see” spiritually rather than materially: all kinds of capabilities must be cultivated before you can be blessed with this heightened perception.  Your spiritual eyes enable you to sense, not the body, but the essence of your Beloved, enabling you to “see” how lovely your Divine Companion is.

Moments of deep connecting enable you to know a person far better than reading their biography or an in-depth personality assessment.  “Seeing” the heart of God is a blessed moment of deep spiritual connection when you perceive your Beloved very intimately and “see” the divine personality in ways far richer than your psychological mind could ever see.

The sublime beauty perceived with spiritual insight assures you that you have really “seen” the God who dwells within you, not something conjured up from your highest human ideals.  The beauty of God’s essence surpasses even the finest human personality:

the tone of God’s “voice” is far sweeter than the most pleasant human voice;

the affection of God’s embrace is far warmer than the best human embrace;

the wisdom of God’s views is far more inspiring than the highest human-only ideals.

Moments of intimately “seeing” God change you drastically in ways that many long hours or days of experiencing a humanly manufactured vision never could.  Like every genuine spiritual experience, these moments bear good fruit.

Forgiveness

The blessing of spiritual insight creates a quantum leap in your appreciation of how God forgives you when you have “hurt” God; knowing that, you can more graciously forgive those who hurt you.  Forgive anyone who slights you with their inconsideration; forgive each person in advance for how they may be inconsiderate in the future.  Forgiveness flows more easily when you grasp how much God has already forgiven you and will continue to forgive you.

Uplift

Without such an intimate experience, you might be quite sure that you know much about God’s divine nature and you confidently preach your very strong views about God to others.  But intimately “seeing” the heart of God produces such a quantum leap in understanding God that your previous grasp of God will then seem infantile.  Having a much-enlarged sense of God’s nature is like having new light that enables you to see God’s path for your life, a path that can only be seen by the light shed by your Divine Companion.  Having “seen” the heart of God enables you to much more graciously help another person see the beauty of their own Divine Companion.

Doubts

If you are blessed to receive one of these high gifts of God, such as the divine embrace or the “sight” of God or the sense of Jesus walking alongside you, please don’t let of an “I’m not worthy” attitude interfere with fully owning and absorbing these wonderful blessing, high gifts from your Divine Companion.  The more you accept that, in God’s eyes, you are worthy of such wonderful gifts, the more fully these wonderful gifts can nourish and uplift you, the more wholeheartedly you can become bound to your Divine Companion and the more beautiful your praise of God can become.

The backlash

If you have the delusion that experiencing a visual sense of God in your inner world will boost your reputation in the outer world, then you are in for a rude awakening!  This blessing of seeing the heart of God, like all exalted divine gifts, only entitles you to undertake ever more demanding acts of service to the lowest among us.  These sublime gifts never entitle you to being fast-tracked for a higher place in the pecking order of the world, even in the pecking order of an earthly religion.  Instead, these gifts are often a sure path to receiving an extra dose of ridicule and dismissal.  Expect that many will despise you and attack you if you share your higher spiritual experiences too broadly.

Pierced by the Divine Lance

The divine piercing of your heart

God may respond to your pure desire and intense consecration with a surge of divine affection so powerful that it feels as if your very heart is pierced by a divine lance of love.  Of course, this experience doesn’t involve an actual lance and the piercing isn’t a physical wound.

The lance seems to have a miraculous ability to reduce all unholy parts remaining in your bottom section to dust: perhaps a lust for a particular pleasure or a desire to be acclaimed by others.  Like a lightning bolt, the lance of God burns away all that is unholy within you.  In a delicious respite from the ego’s self-preoccupation, all self-centered desires instantly disappear; all that remains is a thoroughly unselfish desire to allow God to clean house, to purge your interior townhouse of all that isn’t harmonious with God’s ways so that your inner world is more hospitable to your Divine Companion.

After the experience of the lance, you are no longer the mistress or master of your own townhouse because you have given the keys and all rights to the townhouse to your Divine Companion; you have ceded ownership of your house to the One who created it and gifted it to you for your use in your one precious earthly life.

The piercing of the divine lance isn’t like the hostile act of an enemy’s lance thrust into an unwilling victim.  Of this you can be sure: God will never attack you.  Instead, the lance of God only pierces you when you willingly offer God permission to enter all of you, when you welcome God into your interior townhouse as the sole leader of your inner world.  How much you lose when you (your persistent and persnickety ego) are so full of yourself that you refuse to give God the keys to “your” interior townhouse.

On the cusp between earthly life and heavenly life

In the moment of being pierced, you are equidistant between Heaven and Earth.  You have one foot in your earthly existence and another foot in a heavenly existence.  And heavenly life is far more appealing!  Nothing on Earth is remotely as wonderful or satisfying as even a small taste of Heaven.  Being spiritually pierced is like being on the bubble of life where you have an opportunity to permanently leave Earth so that you can reside in Heaven, in a place where you continue to grow and align with God but without the great limitations of the human body and brain. You may want to leave your earthly life and put both feet in Heaven so you can feel your loving bond with your Divine Companion continually rather than sporadically.  Although you may dearly want to leave Earth behind, you yield to whatever your Divine Companion deems best for you.  An intense conflict may momentarily rage in your soul if you want Heaven so much that you are tempted to ignore your Divine Companion’s leading; but, when that moment passes, you fully cooperate with what your Divine Companion chooses.

Sweet agony

The holy feelings in this pierced state are so intense that agony seems like an appropriate word to describe the powerful holy desires raging within you.  Agony also hints at how much you will miss the deep penetration of God’s lance when this sacred moment ends.  The ensuing loneliness stings worse than any prior loneliness because now you have felt how deeply attuned and securely attached you can be.  When the experience recedes, as all such experiences must, the ending really stings.

The far sweeter pleasures

But the word agony conveys nothing of the deep pleasures and joys that accompany God’s lance entering you quite deeply; God’s lance is not like a weapon that slays but rather a lance of love that infuses you with the most beautiful love imaginable.  Any “agony” component of this experience is totally eclipsed by the joy of being so deeply infused with divine love.  Perhaps the lance is more like an IV line which delivers life-saving medicine; although the spiritual IV may sting for an instant when first inserted, the benefits received in the moments afterwards are so great that they dwarf any initial discomfort; the brief sting is quickly forgotten.

The “pain” of spiritual longing is a worthy pain because it brings you closer to God.  Unlike pointless human pains that hurt you without helping you (although there are wonderful exceptions to that generality), this divine pain seems to be a conduit which delivers the finest spiritual gifts.  Any worldly allures lose their hold on you; you have no interest in gaining the approval of a church hierarchy or the acclaim of a congregation.  Having communed so deeply with your Divine Companion, you have no hunger for any of the world’s much less nourishing salves for the gnawing loneliness that so often underlies our lives.

Being cocooned in a trance during the piercing

Your Divine Companion may likely induce a trance so you can better tolerate the “pain” of being pierced by the divine lance.  Oddly enough, the spiritual “agony” seems to momentarily erase any physical agony you might have had before this moment.  Anyone who observed you while in this state will know that you were experiencing something very special but they would have no clue about the experience itself, only that something significant was happening within you.  When you return after such a trance, you may feel physically spent but, at the same time, also spiritually rejuvenated.  You know in your heart that such precious rejuvenation is a pure gift: it never could be something that you earned on your meager merits, no matter how great your merits might seem to some in the world.

An enduring and very useful gift of standing on the cusp between earthly life and heavenly existence is that God graces you with the eloquence needed to dodge the darts thrown at you by religious people who have no desire to be touched by their Divine Companion (but who desire to attack and persecute anyone who has made that personal acquaintance with God).

Gratitude for great gifts

Let us recount the many ways that God bestows wonderful high graces:

admitting you to the rooftop where you see God’s nature without the limitations of the human mind;

embracing you in the arms of your Beloved so you feel the full warmth of God’s love;

taking you on a flight of the soul far above your human existence to experience God’s higher ways;

sensing that Jesus is actually walks beside you;

being pierced of the divine lance that uplifts you.

How much gratitude God deserves for these many lavish gifts!

These highest spiritual gifts often seem to come when you are bearing a heavy cross or suffering a grievous psychological wound.  Of course, God might also give you such wonderful gifts at other times, simply because God delights in your pure joy when you receive a divine gift.  Who are any of us to impose limits on how God operates in our lives!

Discerning a true spiritual vision from human creations

Sometimes the mind of your bottom section (the part of you that thinks without involving your Divine Companion) can manufacture some very charming visions.  If you can recognize such humanly-crafted visions, then you can avoid becoming too enamored of your own musings about God; such discernment reduces the chances of becoming so inebriated by trivial goodies that you reduce your efforts in cultivating your relationship with your Divine Companion.

A very abstract and overly erudite sense of God may satisfy the cold needs of the intellect but it does little to warm the heart or the soul.  A more felt sense of seeing the kind and caring face of Jesus satisfies both the mind of the bottom section and stirs the higher emotions of the top section.

Return to previous place in main text (Inner Spiritual Experiences such as rooftop experiences)

The Illustrated Interior Townhouse

Two PDF files illustrate the parts of Interior Townhouse with drawings:

Interior Townhouse Brief Tour is about 25 pages long.

Interior Townhouse Long Tour is about 50 pages long.

Two narrated videos correspond to these files are:

Interior Townhouse short video is about 10 minutes long.

Interior Townhouse long video is about 16 minutes long.

These video files are in PowerPoint format (*.pptx) to minimize file sizes.

These files are available at DivineCompanion.org.

Like everything else on the website, they are free.

Asides

Three Difficulties

Three difficulties of ascending the stairway

It seems that everyone who ascends high into the top section must face difficulties.  Each person faces their own personal difficulties and the ones you face may be different from the ones listed here but the general themes might still be of some use to you in facing your personal difficulties.

Worldly difficulty #1: being rejected and shunned

A common hardship is being rejected and severely criticized by significant people in your life.  Some will try to undermine you by calling you a spiritual poser but they are only trying to shore up their own status by tearing you down; they detest admitting that you (or anyone at all) could be any better than they are.  Some friends who you considered supportive may desert you and even bitterly attack you for your spiritual experiences, telling you that you are deluded; that your soul is thoroughly debased; that you are actually motivated by very base human emotions not high ideals; that you are spiritually lost and anyone who follows you will also become spiritually lost.  Such may be the attacks of people who you considered to be good friends!

You may doubt whether the world contains even one soul who might be a kindred spirit, just one person who understands your inner experiences.  Your detractors will be many; they will spread their opinion of you so that others’ minds are strongly biased against you before you even have one interaction with them.  A true kindred soul will be extremely rare; treasure that person should you be so blessed to meet them!  Trust that God’s Providence will enable you to find just enough harmonious souls to sustain you.

Alternatively, excessive and effusive praise for you will feel intensely uncomfortable because such human-focused praise misses the great contribution of your Divine Companion.  Effusive praise seems so inappropriate when you are keenly aware of how pronounced your character weaknesses were prior to the divine embrace.  You may at first be very uncomfortable with such praise but you can develop ways of easily deflecting it.  Perhaps someone’s high opinion of you simply reflects their own high ideals; you may simply be a catalyst for their own spiritual growth spurt that was gradually building momentum within them quite independent of you.

Over time, you may become quite indifferent to being maligned or being praised.  You recognize that people can be either so negative or so positive about you that their reactions are quite disconnected with who you actually are.  The human brain often projects much—either negative or positive qualities—onto another person.  If only the human brain had more accurate perception and less projection (fewer distortions)!

Ascending the inner stairway usually reduces your focus on yourself so that either negative or positive comments no longer affect you very much; either kind of comment may feel as if it was made about someone else rather than you.  Instead of being greatly concerned with how others see you, you become almost wholly concerned with how well another person sees the lovely Divine Companion dwelling within their interior townhouse.  Shifting your focus from self to other enables you to better articulate the inner world to a hungry soul.  But you never know how a person will react when you talk about these matters.  Knowing full well how much contempt some people will heap on you, you continue sharing your experiences hoping that just one person (not whole hordes of people) might draw closer to their Divine Companion.

With such a consecrated desire to do God’s work, you are relatively insulated from the dangers of people praising you because you don’t really care much for personal praise or public acclaim.  You might even feel a sense of peace when you are disrespected because it almost feels like a testament that you are more aligned with God’s values and less aligned with the worldly values that form the basis of other’s critique of you.  You may even get to the mindset where such worldly trials invigorate you rather than deflate you; and you might love those who assail you rather than detest or despise them.

Worldly difficulty #2: intense physical pain

Intense or chronic physical pain can be so overwhelming that everything else, even the most robust spiritual devotion, is obliterated from your mind.  The most intense pain often makes person wish to die quickly rather than to endure such chronic and unrelenting pain any longer.  The only silver lining is that the most intense episodes of pain don’t last forever; they eventually subside.  But the pain hasn’t left permanently; it is apt to return later.

Perhaps having little sense of entitlement might help: meaning that you don’t consider yourself so absolutely wonderful that you are entitled to a pain-free life.  Perhaps, in your humility, you accept pain as an unavoidable part of life; that a pain-free life is guaranteed to no one so that you don’t take your pain as a personal affront.  Perhaps you might find courage to continue when you meditate on how even Jesus, the only perfect person, also suffered intensely while on Earth.  Yet he remained devoted to doing God’s will; even when inflicted with the most cruel and intense pain, he remained filled with spiritual love and light.  With that perspective, perhaps you might discover the stamina to endure your own terrible pain.

[The human body can have bursts of intense physical pain when it seems that the body no longer works as it was designed.  In the same way, the human brain can have bursts of intense emotional pain, such as intense anxiety, anger, sexual craving or addictive yearning.  In those moments, the brain no longer works for the high purposes for which it was designed.  Critical mental capabilities seem to almost completely disappear which allows lower urges to predominate.  Like physical pain, these intense emotions also have the silver lining in that, although quite intense, they are seldom long-lived.

Perhaps you can gradually develop a capacity for enduring pain by noticing how your brain forgets that pain passes and then trusting that these painful moments will also pass (despite how quickly the brain forgets that).  Perhaps you can retain a small thread of awareness of the Divine One who dwells within you and would feel intensely unwelcome and disrespected if you were to let down your guard and indulge in these baser choices that people so often make to dull their emotional pain for a short time.

Remember that your divine housemate experiences whatever you do, just as one housemate must hear the music which another housemate blares quite loudly.  One housemate cannot escape what the other housemate inflicts on them.  Cravings motivated by painful emotions often grow stronger each time that you indulge them; the temporary pleasure or relief you experience only intensifies the pain you will feel after the crash.  Indulging in your baser emotions exposes your Beloved to these emotional blasts; understanding that might help you resist them rather than indulge in them.  When you bravely face and tame your baser emotions, you remodel your inner home to be more hospitable for your Divine Companion to visit and spend time with you.  The increased company of your divine housemate will make sacrificing human and worldly pleasures seem like a very small price, like the bargain of a lifetime.]

Worldly difficulty #3: being ill-advised by a spiritually ignorant director

Some spiritual directors haven’t climbed very high on their inner stairway—and they have no sense of their spiritual limitations.  They will likely be suspicious of anything you tell them about your experiences on the floors which they haven’t reached yet.  They are only comfortable with the experiences of the lower floors and might consider any other spiritual experiences to be humanly impossible.  In their spiritual ignorance, they may tell you that your higher spiritual experiences are delusional or flights of emotional fantasy; that they are, in fact, not spiritual at all.

Each new spiritual experience is so novel that you are quite vulnerable to believing a limited advisor’s assessment of you.  What a torment to be so poorly assessed and undermined by someone who appears to be spiritually developed!  What a torment if, believing them, you come to consider your most profound spiritual experiences to actually be spiritual deceptions.

Spiritual experiences leave you straddling two opposite senses of yourself:

1) a keen awareness of your human (and quite understandable) weaknesses which leaves you with a sense of being unworthy of such a divinely loving partner;

2) a first-hand experience that you also contain some amazing spiritual endowments and that a perfect lover really desires you as their partner.

You may lean towards the first view of yourself (thinking that you are too flawed to be so graced) because spiritual experiences are often fleeting and evidence of your human weaknesses is felt much more consistently.

But leaning into the first view of yourself is a recipe for intensifying the torture that results from poor spiritual direction; unlike other challenges you may face, such torture produces no spiritual fruit.  Apprehension about God’s ability to operate within you and God’s desire for you never helps you know God’s great goodness more clearly.  But trusting that you have really felt the divine loveliness inspires your devotion to God and heightens your will to live according to God’s ways.  Hopefully, you won’t absorb the quite distorted views of a limited “spiritual” director that would cause you to discount your Divine Companion’s sustenance for you and fervent desire to be with you.  Hopefully, you recognize the errors of views that lead to thinking of God as distant and that obscure the truth of how close the indwelling God really is.

It’s painful to be misunderstood by a person who appears, at first glance, to be spiritually knowledgeable but then dismisses your inner experiences of your Divine Companion.  You face a choice between: 1) believing that the person is correct or 2) that your inner experience is real and true.  It’s quite anguishing to be stranded and vacillate between such opposite interpretations.  You might feel as if you are going through the most terrible human strain possible.  Doubts, fertilized by another’s ignorant opinion, may grow to gigantic proportions in your mind leaving you utterly exhausted, hopeless and uncertain whether you have been graced by God or terribly deceived by your own ego.  If this inner conflict persists too long it might even intensify any preexisting physical illness or weakness.

But God seems to want to intervene and relieve the torment of a sincere soul caused by such poor spiritual advising.  God has miraculous-seeming ways of using a small event or a passing thought to immediately resolve the conflict between poor spiritual advice and your first-hand inner experiences.  Such a sweet dramatic turn-about when that happens: to be able to trust with finality what God has done in your inner life!  The resolution of such inner conflict illustrates how the infusions of your Divine Companion are powerful enough to resolve even the knottiest and thorniest of human dilemmas.  The resolution reinforces how powerful God’s ways are compared to even your best human capabilities which, on their own, aren’t enough to resolve this dilemma.

What a terrible thing if you were to mistrust your own experience of God’s tremendous love for you and wonderful actions within your interior townhouse.  The grace of God’s hand in your inner world would still remain but, in disbelieving it, you would then live as if you were a spiritual orphan beyond the reach of God’s tender care.  An ignorant spiritual adviser may direct your focus to only your less-than-perfect traits and not see and appreciate your sincere love for God which is the most wonderful trait anyone could ever cultivate.

This important choice of how you see yourself can’t be resolved using only the mental operations of the bottom section, the reasoning and emotions of the purely human mind.  Even your best spiritual practices may help only a little with this dilemma.  Your Divine Companion is your finest ally when you are facing this profound decision and vacillating between the two possibilities.  Your Divine Companion enables you to discern what is really true from what only seems to be true; your Divine Companion is a far better guide than prevailing sentiments or another person’s opinions.

If possible, you might help yourself when facing such a spiritual dilemma by, for a time, shifting your focus from your inner conflict to serving others in the outer world.  Being a servant to another person may open wider the channel through which your Beloved infuses your mind, assures you of God’s presence and calms you with the peace beyond human understanding.

Worldly difficulty: core theme

Some matters that generate smaller inner turmoil can feel quite troubling even though they are actually a wonderful opportunity to strengthen your character and grow into a partner more befitting your Divine Companion.  But an unresolved core dilemma can be debilitating if you remain ambivalent and unable to choose as you face the most critical decision of your life.  The core dilemma is choosing between two views of your inner spiritual experiences: 1) trust that, despite your weaknesses and flaws, God’s love for you is real and that a vibrant relationship with your Divine Companion is possible for you; or 2) rely on the ruminations of the human mind (the bottom section of your interior townhouse or the opinions of others who haven’t climbed their inner stairway very far) so that you distrust your first-hand experiences of God.  Ambivalence is another word for being half-hearted, rather than wholehearted, in your love for God.  Left unresolved, ambivalence may fester and become so entrenched that it nearly paralyzes the capabilities of your human mind; ambivalence may become so severe that it weakens your soul’s desire for intimacy with God.  You will be much relieved and greatly strengthened when you make a final and determined choice that God really does dwell within you.

The Inhabitants of the Interior Townhouse

Quite likely, your interior townhouse feels as if it is inhabited by others.  The most familiar inhabitants seem like distinct people.  They are your personas, a name emphasizes that they are experienced as another person living within you and active within your mind.  Personas are immature inhabitants but they will try to become the leader of your inner world if there’s a vacuum of inner leadership.  If they do assume that role, they will inevitably fail because they don’t have a very big perspective on life; being immature, they can very easily fall to squabbling amongst themselves.  They can be amazing parts of you but they are wholly inadequate to be the inner leader.  They blossom when you assume inner leadership, guide them and help establish harmony amongst themselves.  Your one precious life can be frittered away if you fail to become a wise leader of your inner personas.

Less familiar inhabitants are your Inner Director and your Divine Companion.

Your human parts

Personas

A persona can have many different personalities, such as:

Inner Critic (“You always screw up!”)

or Inner Encourager (“I’m just fine as I am”);

Inner Imp/Rebel/Anarchist (“I don’t need to follow no stinkin’ rules!”)

or Inner Compulsive Rule Follower;

Inner Warrior (“I won’t take that slight sitting down!”)

or Inner Coward (“Don’t say a word and maybe it will all go away”);

Inner Pharmacist: (“Eat more Oreos/chips/ice cream: they are powerful medicine!”)

or Inner Purist (“My body is a temple”);

Inner Pig who just wants more, more, more (who doesn’t want to share its piece of the pie)

or Inner Ascetic (“If it’s fun, don’t do it”);

Inner Artist who longs to dance, create, etc. (who may be frustrated or delighted)

or Inner Dullard (“There’s nothing more to life than the simple facts”);

Inner Control Freak (who has to be in charge and detests accepting input)

or the Inner Free-Spirit (who wants to explore everything);

Inner Saboteur (who is afraid of succeeding and standing out)

or Inner Champion (Patron, Permission Giver);

Inner Angel (optimistic and hopeful)

and Inner Demon (pessimistic and battles the Inner Angel).

Often one or two personas dominate the others and have an outsize influence on your inner atmosphere.

A staff of workers in your interior townhouse

Another way of seeing your inner world is imagining your mind’s set of capabilities as being a full staff of workers living in your interior townhouse, each one responsible for keeping various aspects of it in working order.  They are like worker bees who answer to you, the owner of the interior townhouse.  The staff of your interior townhouse includes:

--A group of thinkers who analyze information and draft plans; they may be diligent and insightful or they may be lazy and clueless.

--A group of emoters who evaluate ideas, people and options (“this one is great” or “that one is terrible”) when you encounter a new idea or a new person or when you face a choice; these inner workers may have keen emotional sensitivities to life or, being consumed by bouts of intense negative emotions, they may not really pick up on what is actually happening in your life.

--A group of emotion tamers who regulate your primitive emotions and cultivate your higher emotions; they may be skilled or inept at their role.

-- A chief storyteller who combines the ideas of the thinkers and the feelings of the emoters to craft the core narrative which you use to interpret your life experiences, understand other people and guide your choices about your future.  The storyteller can be a gifted weaver of many diverse threads or a confused repeater of unconnected snippets.

Of all the workers in your interior townhouse, the storyteller’s abilities have the largest effect on your life.

Left to their own devices, without your direction, these workers are seldom cooperative; sometimes they may even be antagonistic to each other.  They can work collaboratively but that usually requires being wisely directed by you.  Inner harmony among your various human parts is seldom the default state of inner affairs.

Return to Deeper Dive (Bottom section)

Your human core

Personas and inner workers are supporting characters in your inner life.  Your Inner Director has the leading role in your townhouse. Other names for this part of you are: Decider-in-Chief, Inner Master of Ceremonies, Inner Steward, Inner Mayor, the deed-holder to your interior townhouse, the owner of the townhouse.  These names indicate this part’s critical leadership role.

Your Director is responsible for executive functioning (selecting the deep values for making the big decisions which shape your life) as well as clerical details (following up on all the small pieces so that big decisions are actually enacted).  Ideally your Inner Director

evaluates your beliefs and values which form your ways of responding to life;

keeps, preserves and strengthens the good beliefs and values;

casts out the harmful ones and decontaminates the interior townhouse from them;

seeks out and absorb new beliefs and values that keep you fresh and growing;

decides whether to protect yourself or open up and deeply engage with another person;

tends to the details of regular life and maintaining your spiritual practice.

As with all your personas and workers, your Inner Director may be doing a wonderful job or may be barely functioning at all.  Your inner townhouse can be a hot mess teeming with misery or a smoothly running home filled with much beauty.  It all depends on your inner leadership.

If your inner world is led by an inadequate steward, all the lesser personas will become misguided servants who are so poorly led that they create even more chaos.  Such a misled inner world can create much meanness and ugliness on this planet.  Such a miserable inner world will be blind to the great beauty and wonderful love that is so close to you, that lies right within you ready for you to enjoy if you only appreciated God’s presence and sought God’s company without hesitation, with all of your heart’s unambivalent desire.

Your Inner Director makes your “final answers” to the questions life poses to you; your Director is superior to your personas.  Your interior townhouse can be a wasted hovel full of misery and missed opportunities or a magnificent mansion brimming with love and deeper meaning.  Why not rise to the demands of inner leadership to ensure that you make the very most of what your interior house can be, to make the most of its very extensive possibilities?

Your Director can always request a life line (assistance in making a decision) from a persona or another person but remains responsible for making the final answer.  A wise Director will always seek the guidance of your Divine Companion when making important decisions.

Your Divine Companion

All the preceding inner inhabitants of the interior townhouse (personas, inner workers, Inner Director) are human; they are part of your human nature.  Your Divine Companion is also an inhabitant of your interior townhouse but is a divine being, not one of your human aspects.  Your Divine Companion is God of Highest Heaven who comes to live within you as your personal housemate.  The extent of your Divine Companion’s involvement in your life is determined by you, the owner of the interior townhouse.

Your one precious life is so very precious because it is the one and only opportunity for you, with all your human limitations, to trust your Divine Companion before her amazing glory becomes blazingly obvious when this life ends.  How would you feel knowing that you ignored the most beautiful being in your earthly life? knowing that you spurned the invitation to the divine betrothal?  Why not spare yourself such future agony by opening your arms, by opening your heart, by opening your mind to the perfect lover who pursues you so ardently?

A life divorced from God is a tiny fraction of its full potential.  An impoverished life happens when your personas and Decider-in-Chief (akin to inner politicians who determine how your inner world operates) create a shabby and foolish inner government; when you cede your allegiance to foolish beliefs; when you outsource your spirituality to the second-hand theology of an organization so that your spiritual muscles of discernment atrophy leaving you a powerless pawn in the hands of very manipulative and untrustworthy sources of information about God.  Without understanding the essence of your inner life, you might easily get entranced by superficial things in your inner life and not be able to distinguish them from the core of what happens within you.

Life lived in partnership with your Divine Companion is rich and full.  Once you have experienced the great beauty of your Divine Companion, your Inner Leader will likely be transformed by clearly seeing the vast difference between the human aspects of your inner world and the divine aspects that you are host to.  You know that your finest moments are only conceivable because of infusions from your Divine Companion (and are impossible on your own); you cultivate your precious human-divine partnership; you praise God abundantly; you forget yourself for a moment so you can, like Jesus, attune to the person you are speaking with attunement which is a wonderful way to serve another human being.

Indwelling Father:

what a miracle that you,

the purest God of Highest Heaven,

dwell within me, your humble created one!

Indwelling Creator,

what a miracle that you,

the Creator of all, dwell with me and

wishes to co-create beauty with me as a creative partner!

Divine Companion,

what a miracle that you,

such a perfect lover, have chosen me to love

and we are living our life together!

Table of Contents

Editorial Notes

Preface

Teresa’s Introduction

Overview of the Interior Townhouse

Your wonderful housemate

Your townhouse’s layout

Bottom section

Top section

Inner hallways

Inner stairway

Outside your townhouse

Porch, patio, community commons

Rooftop

Your townhouse’s purpose

Climbing skills

Insight: self-understanding

Bugs in the brain’s software

Wonderful endowments

Balanced Self-understanding

Humility

False Humility

True Humility

Purified holy desire

Your center of gravity

Secure attachment

A Tale of Two Worlds: the outer world and the inner world

Prayer as inner dialogue

Metaphors for prayer

Teresa’s Prayer

What is your prayer seeking?

Quieting your mind

The Divine Two-Step Dance

Jesus is your ultimate spiritual guide

Appreciating Jesus’ human nature

Courage

Inner spiritual experiences

In the top section

A brief glimpse

The higher spiritual emotions

Spiritual (and non-spiritual) fruit

On the rooftop

The divine embrace

Relapse Prevention

Deeper dives

Editorial Comments

The Bottom Section: Your Mainly Human Floors

Purpose

Gradient

Permeability of townhouse walls

Vulnerability to worldly allures

Pollutants masquerading as good air

The capabilities of your interior townhouse

A shift in center of gravity from psyche to spirit

Dwelling 3 can be secular or spiritual

Diverse references to a Divine Companion

The rooftop

The rooftop vs. the top section

God reveals God to you through a relationship

After the wedding embrace

Improving inner insight

Making peace with your human limitations

Missing your subtle lack of humility

Seeing only the bottom section of your interior townhouse

The distortions of the lower floors

Harmonizing your bottom and top sections

Along the climb

Willing to suffer like Jesus did

Hard times: your assayer and teacher

More About Relapse Prevention

Spiritual advisors

Treasury of Metaphors

Intimate Partners

Oasis metaphor

Tree Metaphor

A wisely cultivated inner garden gets better

Caterpillar Metamorphosis

The Divine Fingerprint

The Soft Wax

Gravity

Inner Sovereignty

Dilation

Inner Martha and Inner Mary:

Muscles of your mind

Crystal Walls and Crystal Globe Metaphor

A mash-up of metaphors

Rooftop metaphors

Miscellaneous Metaphors

Poetic Passages

Limitations of my words

Your Brief Stay in your Interior Townhouse

More Varieties of Spiritual Experiences

Further rooftop experiences

Hearing specific words

Flight of the Soul

Emmaus walk

Pierced by the Divine Lance

The Illustrated Interior Townhouse

Asides

Three Difficulties

The Inhabitants of the Interior Townhouse

Your human parts

Your human core

Your Divine Companion