January 1st - The Eighth Holy Night - The Intention to Wonder

[Note: please consider the thoughts, perhaps re-reading and visualizing a few times. Then do as many of the exploration steps as you have time for.]



  Thoughts   

The first seven Inner Christmas messages explored the soul's mysterious reflection of our life processes ending with the intention to birth new thoughts, new feelings and new deeds.
With the life processes we interact with life.  We receive life through breathing, warming and nourishing.We find our free relationship to life through secreting.  Finally, we express our commitment to life through maintaining, growing and reproducing.
 
These processes are key natural activities of our life body but within our soul's reflections, processes ask us to bring them into conscious inner intention.  Within the soul these inner intentions provide us with a knowledge of the world, create a free relationship with the world and fulfill our presence in the world with living thoughts, living feelins and living deeds.
 
We are here to live and to love.  The remaining five inner intentions are the elements of the deed of loving ourselves, others, the world, the spirit, and the future.
 
In the highest intention for life, to reproduce, we discover a sacred emptiness or nothingness.  We give up what is to create what will be.  The first intention in the deed of loving also requires us to be empty of all things. The first intention for loving is to wonder.
 
When we wonder we have no preconditions, no requirements, no selfish desires living in our soul.  We are a void waiting.
 
Imagine being a void waiting! This is not a lifeless void.  This is a vibrant, fertile void. And the waiting is a vibrant and fertile state. The vibrancy and the fertility awaken in our wondering souls a capacity to draw in, a suctional quality. Free of all deadening conditions and controls, the waiting void of wonder does not know what it attracts. Like a newborn emerging from the womb, the void is open to receiving all. Emptiness awaits fullness.
 
If we want to love, to truly know, we let go of knowing anything. In letting go of knowing anything, we become capable of knowing everything. Not knowing allows for true knowing.
 
Our souls long to wonder. If just once in a lifetime we manage to truly wonder, we open to love. A moment of real wonder, transforms our lives.
 
The spiritual world wonders at us, especially during the Holy Nights. We wonder at the spiritual world, especially during the Holy Nights.  It is wonder that lifts the veils between ordinary consciousness and spiritual consciousness, between who your have been and who you are becoming, between you and another, between now and the future. Wonder creates the grace of oneness with what wants to be known.
 
On this eighth Holy Night, wonder at wonder. Feel the place in your soul where the void waits in wonder.
 
If you have trouble wondering about wonder, consider this.  Do you want to be seen for who you really are and known from every possible perspective, to be loved unconditionally?  Imagine meeting another's wonder.
 
Wondering is not for sissies.  It takes courage to wonder, but if we want to truly love, we must risk fulfilling the intention to wonder.
 
 
 
 

The Theme - Inner Intentions

The Meaning of “Inner”

Let’s begin with inner.  Inner refers to the inmost life of the individual, the sense of self least shaped and affected by the outer forces of family, traditions, culture, and times. A place where you are free of the challenges of your biology and the prejudices of your biography.  Inner is the place where you find yourself free to be your truest self.

Each year during the Twelve Holy Nights the path to your individual inmost being is easiest to find and follow.  Between December 25 and January 6, an inner star, a personal sun, a sun being, lights your way and guides you into yourself, to your inmost self. 

In your inmost self, you touch, you discover, you connect with your truest thoughts, your most harmonious feelings and the goodness living in your will to act. 

When you reach the inmost place of self you come to know the greatest mystery of the inner experience: you are suddenly capable of the most powerful outer gestures. Going in leads you out as a portal lies at the core of your inner life, the threshold between what you strive for and what you manifest.

Designed by your truest thoughts and visible to your most harmonious feelings, this portal is the entry to your destiny. Your will filled with goodness opens the portal and carries you across its threshold. You stand in the portal and cross the threshold as the true, beautiful and good expression of your individuality, a spiritual being seeking to fulfill your destiny in the material world and an earthly being expressing your ineffable and eternal spiritual essence.

The Meaning of “Intention”

Intention is an imagination of a purposeful course of action.  By intending, we gather our will forces in service of a potential result, ideally a desired, ultimately good result.

The inner intentions I write about over Twelve Holy Nights are universal intentions that form our individuality. They live in all of us as the processes by which we become uniquely ourselves. The degree that we are able to imbue these intentions with adequate will forces supported by right thinking and right feeling brings all our other intentions into the world as full expressions of our individuality and our humanity.

These intentions create right knowledge and right relationship. I don’t say “right” with arrogance or righteousness or fundamentalism. "Right" indicates the knowledge and the relationship are living in freedom and flowing with love.

The Twelve Intentions

The first seven intentions come to our creative knowing and describe the processes through which we experience what lives outside us, how the experience dwells within us and finally how we evolve the experience into something the moves out of us.  With each message I am certain you will find a clearer understanding of yourself.  You will find a new freedom for your creative and fulfilling future.

The final five intentions will explore how we love. These five shape our relationship to all things. 

Knowledge and relationship, freedom and love connect with the beginning and end of the Twelve Holy Nights - the Nativity and the Epiphany.  You can find within the creative knowledge and the loving relationship the full gesture of your innocence and of your wisdom.  You express your individuality and your humanity in dynamic and exquisite balance. You are absolutely you in the moment.