Roberta Grimes

Resetting Our Lives

Posted by Roberta Grimes • July 29, 2023 • 16 Comments
Jesus, The Source, The Teachings of Jesus

I am weak but Thou art strong.
Jesus, keep me from all wrong!
I’ll be satisfied as long
As I walk, let me walk close to Thee. 

Just a closer walk with Thee.
Grant it, Jesus, is my plea!
Daily walking close to Thee.
Let it be, dear Lord, let it be.
– From “Just a Closer Walk with Thee,” Traditional African-American Spiritual (19^th Century)

“The unexamined life is not worth living.” It was Socrates who famously said those words some twenty-five hundred years ago, although just what his statement may have meant to Socrates himself feels less than certain to me. How much of an inner life did anyone have twenty-five hundred earth-years ago? Evidence suggests that most people who were alive when Socrates talked about the unexamined life had probably nary a thought that extended much beyond a concern about where their next meal was coming from. There is evidence that as late as Jesus’s day, most people still had little going on upstairs beyond the daily search for food and shelter and the superstitious need to avoid their own human-created gods’ wrath; and I have sometimes had the thought when reading Jesus’s Gospel words that He was saying things meant for people who seldom had much to think about beyond satisfying each day’s survival needs. When you read the Lord’s words, you can see Him patiently and gently helping His listeners to turn up the brilliance of their own inner lights so they each could begin a personal spiritual journey toward achieving an ever-richer inner life. Jesus was urging His followers to look inward in their prayer lives, too, saying, “When you pray, you are not to be like the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and on the street corners so that they may be seen by men. Truly I say to you, they have their reward in full. But you, when you pray, go into your inner room, close your door and pray to your Father who is in secret, and your Father who sees what is done in secret will reward you” (MT 6:5-6).

And even today, so many of us take the possibilities inherent in our potentially rich inner lives so much for granted. But it is essential that we not do that! There are breadths and depths to be discovered in the more effective use of our deeply extensive minds that even most twenty-first-century people have not very much explored at all, so those possibilities remain buried under what by the time we reach midlife are entrenched habits of daily trivialities. And therefore, a great many of us continue to live what are essentially still Iron-Age-level lifestyles. We just have nicer homes and better food choices. I almost added that at least we have better entertainment choices now, but in the Iron Age their primary sources of entertainment were telling stories and waging wars. And now we have TV, politics, and video games. Not very much improvement there, either. I may be simplifying the extent of our modern spiritual deficit to some extent, but I wish I could say that I was entirely missing the mark. Sadly, I don’t think that I am. The percentage of modern people who deeply examine their lives and seek to use the full powers of their minds to enrich their spiritual growth is hardly greater today than it was when Socrates first made his exhortation.

We tend to think of beginning anew as something that we do each January. We make our New Year’s resolutions, and we start the new year with a hopeful  new life. But actually, a new start like what I am about to suggest is probably much better begun around this time of year. If it occurs to you that you want to work on making a better and more spiritual use of your mind, well, that is going to be a fairly substantial process, is it not? And if you begin to work on it now, then you might start to show some positive progress in the coming fall, and be building some solid new habits over the fall season that will help you to roar into 2024 with what is going to amount to a whole new life! So, let’s start to talk about it now, shall we? And then let’s see where we can go with it from here?

The first thing that I urge you to do is to begin to think of your mind as your forever home, and as a home that is far vaster and much more important and more infinitely complex than you ever heretofore have imagined it to be. Your mind is where you live and where you spend time with God. It is a profoundly sacred place. It also is a richly complex and very well-provided place, a world so dense with resources that you could spend all day of every day of the rest of your earthly life exploring what you might possibly do in and with and employing your mind as a place to explore and as a set of tools, and still you would not even begin to exhaust what it might be possible for you to do with your mind. It is a playground many times the size of this universe! And it also is a toolbox whose standard-issue tools will leave you slack-jawed with awe as you first begin to appreciate their possibilities. Every mind is all of this, and more, even in the limited version that each of us brings into this lifetime. But sadly, most people live their whole lives while for the most part altogether ignoring most of their vast, eternal minds’ possibilities.

Conveniently, your mind also is flexible in size, and nearly all of us live with our minds shrunk down to a cozy living room. Furthermore, each of us treats our mind as if it is our private home, a place that is off-limits to everyone else. And we live in our mind more or less the way we lived in our first studio apartment out of college, with paperback books of questionable propriety in cinder-block bookcases beside old sofas with food stains and cigarette burn-holes that we cover up with afghan throws. The shades are always down because their pulls don’t work, and all of that is just as well, since the place is full of empty beer cans and old pizza boxes. We speak to our friends, to our boss, and even to God from there in our most articulate voice and with every word thoughtfully considered, and we assume that no one has any clue what a mess of awful ideas and shabby, inappropriate thoughts lurks behind our well-constructed nice-person façade. We head out from there to live our public life groomed to the nines, so everyone must assume that our deepest mind is as put-together as we always look and sound.

Each of us probably got our first job that way, walking out nicely groomed from a disastrous mental apartment. Some of us have later moved on and mostly cleaned up our mental act, but since I personally never undertook the kind of rigorous mental tidying that really is required to live a fully spiritual life until about twenty-five years ago,  I assume that there are others, too, who have been similarly lax. Most people have only lately come to understand the primacy of consciousness, and when you first gain that insight,  you look at the way you have been living in your mind for your entire life, and you begin to feel uneasy about it. You know that every mind is part of the one vast, eternal mind which includes all other minds, and includes God at its Apex. So, OMG, what does that mean? How deep does this consciousness-based dense mental togetherness actually go?

It turns out to go very deep indeed, I am afraid. I wrote a blog post on this topic almost five years ago now, and I cannot much improve on it so I urge you to go back and read that post again. Nearly all of us think of our minds as the ultimate private space, where we can think even the shabbiest and nastiest and most disgusting thoughts, and no one else can access them. But in point of fact, our minds are all part of one vast, eternal Mind, so it is far better simply to assume that your mind is a fully public space, and to clean up your act entirely and then open wide the top of your head and invite God to come inside.

I first did this twenty-five years ago, and I cannot begin to tell you how much doing it improves the quality of your entire life! It feels a bit naked in the beginning, to imagine that the top of your head really is wide open and to be inviting God to come in and hang out inside your mind with you. But if you are persistent, you soon get used to it. A few who had followed my recommendations the first time I posted that blog post told me then various things, like that they had imagined a special chair for God, although of course God is not physical. Or they had sensed God’s presence in their mind-room. I know what that feels like! And in fact, the more comfortable you become with the sense that the top of your head is always open and a “Welcome, God!” sign is always posted, the more often you will feel Spirit’s presence in your life. Many people have told me over the years that they want to do God’s work, and they have asked me how they can best get started. I credit everything, all the books I have been given to write in the past twenty-five years, all the work I have been led to do, all the contacts I have had with Jesus more recently, and His choice to use me in doing a part of His work, I credit all of it to my yielding my life to God back then as I describe it in that blog post.

So now, what about our friend Socrates? How can we turn a largely unexamined life so far into one that even Socrates himself would consider to be an examined life according to his own terms? Before you do anything about that, of course, I urge you strongly to clean up your living room, and from now on please keep it always as a place where you can comfortably meet and visit with God. Until you do that, all your efforts at elevating your personal consciousness vibration are going to be hampered by the negative detritus that inevitably clutters your mind as a result of your simply living day by day in this modern Western culture. And yes, I am fully aware that for many people this is a very big Ask! Television. Movies. News. Politics. Video games. Sports. Religions. Social Media. I am suggesting that you give up for the rest of this lifetime the entirety of modern Western culture as too negative and much too stressful. I did this twenty-five years ago, and I can personally testify that it is amazingly easy to opt out of all of it altogether!  I have since been told by those who have experimented that some mild doses of some of these cultural poisons can be retained without doing much spiritual harm. But I am skeptical. And I still suggest that you attempt a cold-turkey withdrawal from all of it for at least six months. Allow yourself to know how that freedom feels. Please give yourself at least that gift!

Then once you have cleaned up your mental living room, at least a few times each week simply find the time to sit quietly within it. Doing this was never possible when it was a mess of trash thoughts and negativity, but now you can comfortably invite God to join you inside the haven that is your mind. There are various ways that you can do this. You might play a bit of music first, to re-set your mood. Then begin this quiet time of half an hour with God by reading what I consider to be the most important words of the entire Old Testament. They were sung in the reign of King Jehoshaphat by a psalmist of no special note, but someone who clearly was channeling God. Jehoshaphat was born in the year 905 BCE. He was the Fourth King of Judah in the lineage of David. His psalmist sang, “Be still, and know that I am God. I will be exalted among the nations. I will be exalted in the earth” (Psalm 46:10). As people first began to develop an inner life, hundreds of years before Socrates was born, God here first began to reach out to humankind. “Be still, and know that I am God.” And as you go about your day, simply open your heart as you might think of it to that simple inner invitation from God, thinking, “Be still, and know that I am God.” Invite God’s response to your acceptance of God’s call. This sounds like meditation, but it doesn’t feel like meditation. It feels like a joyful yielding to God at God’s own first-ever call to humankind. As you sit quietly with God, if you do this consistently, you will feel your relationship with God ever deepening on God’s Own gentle, awesome terms.

You are ready then to make Jesus a part of your precious time spent with God. It was teaching us to open our minds and redirecting them toward more effective spiritual growth that formed the greater part of what Jesus came to teach. I have favorite Gospels passages that I read and sit with. Perhaps you have a red-letter Bible. Or since the Roman Emperor Constantine edited the Gospels in 325 CE to suit Constantine’s own fear-based religion-building purposes, you might be someone who worries  that we cannot trust every word of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John as being the Lord’s actual spoken Words. So then perhaps a more trustworthy way to use His Gospel teachings without running afoul of Constantine’s fear-based religiosity might be to go to teachingsbyjesus.com and go through Jesus’s Core Teachings, one by one. Perhaps read one each day, and then let it play in your mind as you use it to examine your own life.

Either way, simply invite Jesus to help you to relate His teachings to the way that you are living your personal life. Take in His thoughts in the presence of God as they are reflected back to you from your own heart, in the soft silence. “Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened” (MT 7:7-8). Remember that God is only perfect love, so if you ever feel even the slightest twinge of fear, then that is not from God. It is just a random remnant of Constantine’s religious nonsense, and you might ask Jesus to help you ease it out of your life.  You will find that as days and weeks pass, Spirit will help you to examine and to strengthen your understanding of your life in the sweetest and most love-filled way, as Spirit always works in our minds. Whatever your question might be, you will find that you and God already are finding and living the answer.

When my feeble life is o’er,
Time for me will be no more.
Guide me gently, safely o’er
To Thy kingdom’s shore, to Thy shore.

 Just a closer walk with Thee.
Grant it, Jesus, is my plea!
Daily walking close to Thee.
Let it be, dear Lord, let it be.
– From “Just a Closer Walk with Thee,” Traditional African-American Spiritual (19^th Century)