Thursday, April 7, 2016

Conscious Faith, Love and Hope




Faith of consciousness is freedom.
Faith of feeling is weakness.
Faith of body is stupidity. 

Love of consciousness evokes the same in response.
Love of feeling evokes the opposite.
Love of body depends only on type and polarity.

[The bold] Hope of consciousness is strength.
[The doubtful] Hope of feeling is slavery.
[The vicious and fearful] Hope of body is disease. 

Only he will be called and will become the Son of God who acquires in himself Conscience.

–G.I.Gurdjieff, All Everything, First Series–

These wise words are a perfect explanatory complement of the so called theologal virtues: Faith, Hope and Love, mentioned by Paul in the famous passage of Corinthians 13, which contains one of the most beautiful descriptions of Conscious Love, known as Agape, different from Love Eros:

Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends. As for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away. When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways. For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known. So now Faith, Hope and Love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is Love (Corinthians 13, ESV)

When manifesting "I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known", Paul refers to a very important divine quality, Self-Consciousness, in which, as Meister Eckhart said: The glance through which I know Him is the glance through which I am known.

Consciousness  does not depend on the body, thoughts or emotions, for it is the invisible, silent, loving and intelligent Light directly emanated by the Common Father.

Such Loving Consciousness contemplates the world and ourselves from within, waiting to be recognized and cultivated. It is the Word, the Divine Mind that finds itself within the human.

By emptying oneself of vain thoughts, fears and desires, accepting life without resistance, one allows conscious love to kiss one´s presence in silence, and thus one is really begotten, fed and uplifted over sufferings and imperfections, as Jesus Christ and Buddha, who in the Pali texts was also called Son of the Father Truth.

Hence the sentence of Gurdjieff:

Only he will be called and will become the Son of God who acquires in himself Conscience.

Without such quality, there can´t be anything genuine, no matter how much religiousness is displayed.

True faith is trust on that perfect, sublime and immortal essence that we don´t see yet, but somehow know inside

Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen says Paul in Hebrews 11, the Letter on Faith.

In the same way, true conscious love only wants to give perfection and help others participate on it, aided by true faith.

And what other thing can we hope if it´s not the full manifestation of Divine Perfection in ourselves and others? There lies true conscious hope.

Philip the evangelist seemed very aware of that when he wrote [1]:

God´s farming has four elements: Faith, Hope, Love and Knowledge. 
[...]

Faith receives, love gives. No one will be able to receive without faith. No one will be able to give without love.   

___________
[1] Gospel of Philip: 

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