A Man of the Field
Forming The
Volume 1: Reformation
The
Struggle Against Nonduality
Volume 2: Enlightenment
The
Spiritual Sense of the Writings
Volume 3: Regeneration
Spiritual
Disciplines For Daily Life
Volume 4: Uses
The New
Church Mind In Old Age
By Leon
James
October
2002
(draft 17a)
Author
information appears at the end. This document is in the process of being
revised. Please note the draft version marked on top. To print this document,
see Printing Note at the end.
A field means doctrine (AC 368)
A "man" signifies faith
and truth (AC 427; 4823)
Volume 3
Regeneration
Spiritual
Disciplines For Daily Life
Chapter 3
Additional
Regeneration Disciplines
Table of Contents
Access other Chapters and Volumes here:
Additional Regeneration Disciplines
2. Laundry
And Housecleaning Disciplines
3. Daily
Disciplines Of Studying The Writings
4.
Monitoring Whats In My Mind
5.
Monitoring Whats On My Face
6.
Monitoring What Are My Eyes Doing
8.
Conjugial Grooming Rituals.
9. The
Discipline Of Junk E-Mail
10. How To
Handle Junk Phone Calls
11. The
Spiritual Discipline Of Eating Half-Portions
12. Arrival
And Departure Rituals With The Wife
13. The
Spiritual Discipline Of Colon Cleansing
14.
Acknowledging The Lords Co-Presence
15. Talking
To The Lord Is To Apply The Letter To The Letter
16.
Rational Consciousness Of The Lord Now Conjoins
17.
Rational Consciousness From Applying The Letter To The Letter
18. So Far
As The Lord Is Present, So Far He Speaks With The Man
19.
Cleanliness And Health Disciplines
20. Not
Detachment, But Right Attachments
21.
Self-worth, Self-esteem, Self-efficacy
22. Remains
Are The Cornerstone of Self-worth
23.
Shunning The Rage-Depression Spin Cycle
www.soc.hawaii.edu/leonj/nonduality.html
Every
spiritual truth in the Writings
is a Divine Commandment
It is said in the Word, that everyone shall be judged
according to his works; for the end, or the love of his will, and the cause, or
the reason of his understanding, are together in the effects, which are the
works of his body; thus the quality of the whole man is in them. (ISB 7)
These are
briefer treatments of additional spiritual disciplines for helping to form the
Always do
your work as if TV cameras are all around, recording everything for all to see.
Its an issue of truth in advertising regarding the reputation you enjoy as
someone who has respect for others. Do not touch their food with your hand,
pretending you used a serving spoon. Do not give them a drink from a bottle you
drink from. Etc. Volunteer to take over certain things on a
permanent basis so that people depend on you for it. Examples:
q
Washing all dishes after meals.
q
Washing pots, utensils, counters,
etc. while someone is cooking or afterwards.
q
Preparing lunch bags for others.
This includes shopping for the ingredients.
q
Be responsible for maintaining and
adding items to the weekly grocery shopping list.
q
Go shopping with whoever does it for
the family and help find and carry things.
q
Volunteer to prepare meals and
insist on cleaning up after yourself.
q
Offer to mop the floor when needed
(extend the offer to vacuum the carpets).
q
Etc.
After several years of the discipline of washing the dishes and cleaning up the kitchen, I find amazing mistakes and ignorance about basic things in my willing and thinking. Recently Diane pointed out that I'm doing the last wipe of the pan with the sponge before putting it away. What about contamination by the sponge I denied that the sponge is contaminated by bacteria since I squeeze it dry under running water with each dish. After seeing that I'm continuing to disagree, she fetched the hydrogen peroxide bottle and I poured some on the sponge, just like we had seen it done on TV. It bubbled and frothed! The truth of the evidence convicted me! I apologized to her with a kiss and she walked off no doubt in conjugial victory. Since that hour I use a paper towel for the final wipe off and wash the sponge itself at the end of each use. How could I be so blind as to assume that the sponge itself needs no cleaning
2. Laundry And Housecleaning Disciplines
Doing it
Folding the
clothes the way she wants it and while they are still warm
Knowing
where they go in the drawers
3. Daily Disciplines
Of Studying
The Writings
Our ability
to cooperate in our regeneration requires that we study the Writings as often
as possible. I believe that daily study is necessary. Find different way of
doing this. For instance:
q
Read the volumes systematically so
that you get through each Work, one by one, from the first page to the last.
Keep a marker so you can start each time from where you left off. The point is
not how fast you can get through but whether you do it daily.
q
Keep a note book or cumulative
folder with your thoughts as you read, or when you're done, or at any time
you're inspired by an idea. Mark it with a reference to the Number in the Work
so you can go back to it when you want to.
q
Consult your notes and make summary
statements. Try representing the content in the form of lists, tables, and
diagrams. Use your school literacy to do an effective job.
q
Learn to use New Search, either on
your computer, or on the Web. Spend time searching the Writings by subject or
topic. Do it until you're skilled. Try to enjoy it or else, act like you do.
Use your skills to study and develop topics of interest.
q If you read articles and collateral works about the Writings, check the references to the passages are thy really relevant and do they actually support the claims being made
q
Acquire audio books of the Writings
(General Church Recording Library) and practice listening under appropriate
conditions. I found that its excellent for listening during my physical
workout, in waiting rooms, on airplanes, while driving, and especially when
going to sleep.
q
Enroll in group study and lessons
about the Writings.
4. Monitoring
Whats In My Mind
We do not
know accurately whets in our mind until we monitor ourselves by taking
systematic samples through self-witnessing. Some cumulative record of these
samples needs to be kept in some form--notepad, audio recorder, form sheets that
list items you can circle, etc. These records should specify how many minutes
you spend thinking and daydreaming about various subjects, and in what
way, e.g., with anger, with denigration, with compassion, with humor, etc.. Also, what are the topics you discuss with others. Also, how many minutes you spend
watching TV and movies, and what type of content it has. Also, how much
time you spend with your wife doing what specific activities and talking about
what specific topics. Also, how many times certain events occur: a fight with
her, a disagreement, having a good time together, how many you made her laugh,
how many times you kissed her, or praised her, and the like.
Obviously
this is not an easy or insignificant task in terms of involvement and effort.
One way to make it more manageable is to specialize in certain topics or
activities depending on what seems to impede your progress in conjugial union.
It may be helpful to share the data with your wife so that she can give you her
advice.
5. Monitoring
Whats On My Face
The
Writings reveal that the face is a mirror of our thoughts, feelings, and mood.
For example:
The face, with the ancients, signified internal things,
because internal things shine forth through the face; and in the most ancient
times men were such that the face was in perfect accord with the internals, so
that from a man's face everyone could see of what disposition or mind he was.
They considered it a monstrous thing to show one thing by the face and think
another. (AC 358)
The
disposition of the mind in the celestial or regenerated individual projects
itself by correspondence to the physical features of the body and face. While
we are regenerating in the physical body we struggle to hold in aversion our
inherited face which denotes the evils and falsities in our unregenerate
mind. It makes sense therefore that we watch our facial expressions so that we
can become conscious of what our inherited evils are (CL 202).
As I got
older (I'm now 63) my face wants more and more to settle into a few caricatures
of my uncles and cousins whom I haven't seen for decades. My wife was the first
to sound the alarm when she briefly met one of my uncles in his 50s and
afterward began noting that my face made certain expressions that were almost
identical to those of my uncle. As is normal for me to do, I dismissed her
idea. Of course there is a resemblance. I noted that myself, but I rejected the
notion that my expressions were a near copy to his. After all, I was modern,
educated, enculturated, and he was still somewhat from the old country in his
ideas and orientation. Nevertheless, as my wife kept up her conjugial anti-face
campaign, I started looking at my face at other times than the morning shaving
routine.
1. Look at
your face in the mirror. Completely relax it. This takes a little while. Tell
yourself what our Yoga always says in rest pose: Let go of all muscles that
create expression. Let your flesh fall off your bones. Observe your face at
rest. Monitor your reactions and thoughts. Repeat this exercise on different
days for awhile. It will give you a baseline familiarity for your facial
expressions.
2. At different times of the day, look for opportunities to see
your face. When you're in the bathroom, or other place where there are mirrors
around department stores, restaurants, restrooms. You can also carry a mirror,
of course, though the size limits the view to a portion of the face. Doing this will allow you to get to know what your face is doing.
Others see it clearly so we need to know what others can see. This is called
objectivity on oneself.
3. When you
have occasion to look at your uncles and cousins monitor their facial
expressions by being conscious of them rather than merely being reactive in
sudden memory (see Chapter 8 Section 1).
Get to know
their expressions so that you'll be able to recognize these expressions in your
face. You can have a similar focus when you see photographs or videos of them.
Explore the kind of emotions you experience as you recognize yourself in them
and them in you. At first I was sort of proud and reassured. It gave me a belongingness, and upon occasion I might even feel some
close connection and love for them. But this was followed by a feeling of
embarrassment when I became educated and enculturated and was inspired by the
feeling to put my origins behind me and to be the new modern man. I thought I
had put them away from me, until my wife started telling me that my face was
them.
4. Search
the Writings and talk to the Lord about your face. There may be a difficult
conflict for you to overcome here on account of our inherent attachments to
family and race. There is a nonduality to fight and get out of the way of
regeneration. This is the corporeal idea expressed in popular logic as blood
is not water. Every institution in our society raises family loyalty to a
virtue and patriotic duty. And this is indeed commendable. But in the
First,
familial ties are for the most part not recognized in the afterlife (AC
3815[2]). Parents do not know their offspring and vice versa except at initial
stages of arrival when we are still in the external natural memories of our
life in the physical body. And this makes sense because everyone can know that
their thoughts, opinions, feelings, emotions are often not like those of their
parents and family. Hence conflict, disputes, and anger, which are quite
common. Since our interiors are therefore different and even opposed to our
family members we are not going to be with our families in the afterlife where
only those who are interiorly similar can be present to teach other (HH 193).
Second, the
Writings reveal that the hereditary line is totally mixed so that we inherit
and pass on innumerable evils that tie us to the hell societies in everything
we do all day long (CL 202). From our families hereditarily we only have the
infernal and the animal (AC 1438). Anything genuinely good must be acquired for
ourselves by rebirth and regeneration. You might be
vexed at this and naturally think in protest: But what about the good things I
have from inheritance Like my desire to be a perfectionist. My
compassion for people in need. My loyalty to religion
and patriotism. My muscular body build. Most of
us in our family have these things. Perhaps. But in
any case we need to remind ourselves that whatever good we receive from any
source is not from that source but from the Lord alone. Therefore we ought not
to attribute spiritual value to what we inherit in the unregenerate natural
mind.
These two
important points allow us to free ourselves from the bondage of the family
face, to the extent that we take them to heart. This means monitoring when we
are prejudiced on some issue and automatically favor our family or our race. We
must systematically undo these harmful connections in our mind. They are
harmful because they impede our regeneration. The target goal in our
regeneration is to leave all that is in our mind from natural sources, and
replace it with things from spiritual sources only. Then our external mind,
still natural, will be in the Lords order and obedient to spiritual
affections.
When our
mind reflects our spiritual affections, our face is no longer similar to our
inherited family face. It is a new face to go with the reborn
character. This new face is celestial and is similar to the faces of the angels
in the heavenly society in which you live (AC 4797; HH 47).
Remember
that your face-control program is going to be successful to the extent that you
let your wife give you feedback at any time she is moved to do so, and then
only to the extent that you take her feedback to heart and do not dismiss it as
exaggeration or imagination. This I have been guilty of for years.
The face is
an external vessel for representing the minds life and spiritual orientation.
It stands to reason that building a new face for yourself ought to go together
with building your reborn character. Further, as the
face solidifies with age into family caricatures, the new spiritual affections
we are trying to foster have nowhere to settle, and like Noah's dove must
return to the
Similar
things as were said concerning the face need to be applied to the way we laugh,
the way our voice sounds by which it is recognized by others, and the style of
body activity--gestures, posture, sitting position, and moving.
6. Monitoring
What Are My Eyes Doing
Everyone
knows the old adage that the eyes are the window to the soul. It is preserved
in our linguistic socialization so every individual is cultured into that idea.
In our unregenerate state we do not know what kind of a window this is. We
imagine that its like partition between two places, one called the soul and
the other called the eyes. We realize that eyes are out there in the open while
soul is in there, hidden from observation. Yet somehow by looking at the eyes,
we imagine, one can see into the soul. These are natural ways of thinking about
it.
But when we
gain in understanding of the dualities in the Writings we realize that there
must be a correspondential relation between the soul which is in the spiritual
world and the eyes which are in the natural world. The eyes react by
correspondence to what is going on in the soul. This is why we can say
rationally that the eyes reveal to outside observation what type of willing and
thinking is going on in the mind. Have you ever tried to look at someone in the
eye and see what they are willing and thinking My own observation has been
that this approach yields almost no results. I cannot know what another is
willing, intending, thinking, or reasoning no matter how much I stare in their
eyes. The closest where I do have some success is babies and infants.
So there
must be another way of understanding the statement that the eyes are the
windows to the soul. The solution lies in thinking about our own soul and
our own eyes rather than another's. Yes, our own willing and thinking is
very obscure to us, we hardly know a very tiny fraction of one percent of it.
This is not very much. For instance, if we think two thoughts per second, say,
and are awake for sixteen hours, we've had about xx thoughts on that one day.
How many of them do we know what they were Very few. And fewer for yesterday, and how much the year before, and the
decade before You can see that we get to know a tiny fraction of one
percent even when we have an introspective personality. So we must conclude
that our willing and thinking is largely unknown to us. This is why it is
referred to as the unconscious or the subconscious (xx).
Now back to
our eyes. Its a feasible task to monitor our eye movements for brief periods.
We can do this more easily than we can witness our willing and thinking. Now
the old adage applies perfectly: monitoring what my eyes are
doing reveal to me what I'm willing and thinking.
I have
found this to be an informative discipline in some specific situations. I have
gained more specific knowledge of my unruly affections and imaginations. When I
drive my eyes used to constantly rove around to pick up things of interest--what
other drivers are doing, what they look like, what expressions they have, what
they are doing with their hands. When a car passes me I had to look to see who
is doing this to me. When I passed a car that was moving slower than traffic, I
had to look at the driver to see who is this person
doing such an annoying thing. As I used to walk to my office from the parking
lot, my eyes roamed around at will. Whatever I had an
affection for, the eyes were obedient in delivering it to my attention
and focus. Passers by: I would look at their body parts, their clothes, the
condition of the clothes, the folds on the clothes, the shape of the fingers,
the kind of shoes they wore--everything that I felt a delight in.
In
restaurants my eyes would focus and stare at how people put food in their
mouth. It seems that I had an endless collection of affections that were
satisfied through control of the eyes. My wife would have to remind me from
time to time as we were sitting at table: Honey, you're staring. I was embarrassed,
but only for a moment. Mostly I was fascinated by the difficulty I had in
controlling my eye movements. I asked how she accomplished it and she answered
that she had to train herself to accept the idea that it was rude and an
invasion of privacy. Just because you can doesn't mean you should. I'm still
working on the problem, at age 63.
When I was
in my adolescence there was a song popularized by Dean Martin that had a
refrain: Standing on the corner, watchin all the gals go bye etc. This was a
delightful idea to me. I used to pick dark sun glasses to wear so that I can
willfully look at whatever I pleased without being detected. Instead of shame,
I felt power. I was my own god. I was alone in my mind. I was the ruler in that
domain. I did what I pleased. Then in my early forties I began to read the New
Testament as a book of God. And I was amazed to read in there that what I did
in my mind was no different from committing adultery with the body. Until then
my colleagues in psychology encouraged their clients in adulterous fantasies
which they claimed are beneficial for a healthier or zestier sex life for
married partners who did not cheat on each other. But mental pornography and
fantasy adultery was not considered cheating. But now, since the Lord commanded
it, I knew I had to reform. And then I discovered how difficult it was to keep
my eyes from being taken over by illicit affections.
The mere conclusion in the mind, that adultery is not sin,
renders a man an adulterer; - [shown] from those things which have been said on
this subject in The Doctrine of Life. Every conclusion in the mind constitutes
endeavor in the body, which is the essential act.
I told adulterers, that, in heaven, there is perpetual potency; and they said, if they had known this in the world, they would never have committed whoredom, so that they might come into heaven. But I said, that, in heaven, it is permi