"Pay attention to yourself and the doctrine, keep doing that; for when you do so, you shall save yourself and those who hear you."
That's actually re-translated from the Norwegian translation of the first letter to Timothy, chapter 4, verse 16. That was how I heard in my heart this morning. Here are some other translations:
"Watch your life and doctrine closely. Persevere in them, because if you do, you will save both yourself and your hearers."
"Take heed unto thyself, and unto the doctrine; continue in them: for in doing this thou shalt both save thyself, and them that hear thee."
"take heed to thyself, and to the teaching; remain in them, for this thing doing, both thyself thou shalt save, and those hearing thee."
Paying attention to yourself and the Truth may be two simple things to do, but I never said they were easy. The average human has actually a pretty low level of consciousness. Even concentrating on a clerical job, as most people do these days, can wear you out. Observing yourself while doing this seems utterly impossible. We tend to forget ourselves when we work, when we socialize, when we eat, when we play, when we read, when we watch movies or even when we listen to music. We tend to even consider this a good thing. Even if we sit down and just observe our own thoughts meditatively, we usually find that within seconds or (in rare cases) minutes, they have wandered off and so has our attention.
Observing ourselves is a lifetime project, I think. It is difficult. It can be boring. And occasionally it can be terrifying. But the strangest thing of all is that it seems to be Biblical.
2 comments:
Self observation is the only game in town, if you think about it.
It is the starting point for any kind of spiritual life. Indispensable.
It is not an easy discipline. Agreed.
What helps the process is to learn to enjoy it. It is actually kind of like entertainment, if you detach a little a put a little space between yourself and yourself, so to speak.
I agree with you and Mouravieff that it really does seem to be the basic, the starting point, which simply must come first in order for all this spiritual talk to make any sense at all.
One can be a moral person without this. Very much so. But with it, a number of religions and philosophies start to make sense, and make the SAME sense (though not necessarily to the same degree) as if hand-drawn maps of the same landscape. That's what I mean when I sometimes say "you got to have been there".
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