The Sanctifying Value of the Stillness

In the Scripture we are told to labour to enter into His Rest. This rest we are told to enter is an inner state of Stillness, that we are drawn to by the Spirit, that is the same as the rest that Christ entered when He ascended, then offered His blood on the heavenly altar and finally seated at the right hand of the Father.  Because the Father cannot be seen of conceived of, to be seated at His right hand is to  be seated in a place where all thought has ceased, for He is beyond conception.  Because it is a seating in the heavenlies in Christ it is also the place of absolutely satisfying Presence of the Divine. 
The Fathers describe a transition in the life of prayer and this is the descent of the 'nous' into the heart.  The nous is the eye of the heart and when it returns to the heart, it sees intuitively  as in a mirror the heavenly vision.
When this first happened to me, I was utterly amazed and discovered that my daily routine of prayer facilitated the daily return of the nous to the heart.
After a period of time I noticed that, whereas my 'nous' would descend into the rest, it was not a given, that it would be seated in the rest.  The rest of God beckoned me on, but I discovered that I would find my thoughts going this way and that, or else I was really desiring to be somewhere else than in hesychastic prayer.  I discovered that when the Lord showed me these things,  He was showing me subtle idolatries that emanated from my heart, and which required simple confession. And as they were confessed the beatitude of the Stillness would come and then I would find perfect rest and contement simply to be before the Father, ineffably, in Christ.
The Stillness, then, served as a perfect backdrop as it were, to reveal the idolatrous motions of my heart and to offer them to the Lord for His dispositions. 

Was the Sandwich Made with Love

When I was a podiatrist and had a satellite office in Harrison, Arkansas, we often ate lunch at the Mennonite Sandwich Shop.  The sandwiches were fantastic, carefully made, with quality ingredients, and carefully packaged,  but there was something more to them; there was an indefinable something about those sandwiches, and it occurred to me that they had been made with love.  And there were times that we would buy the sandwiches, and even though the quality was there, something was missing, and it seemed to my intuitive self that the missing ingredient was, again, love. For some reason, on that day, the sandwich, though made with expertise was not made with love, and it left us unsatisfied.
Have you ever been to a four star hotel?  Perfect appointments, impeccably clean, every possible creature comfort at your disposal....  the same with the services delivered by our airlines.  Fantastic service can be rendered. Yet in both these instances the driving force is not love but competition and the desire to make a profit.  I do not know your experience but even in such perfect circumstances there is a vacuum of the spirit, that leaves one empty.  The service, though impeccable, does not reach to the deepest levels of our need for beatitude, the beatitude that only love can bring to our souls.

It is recorded in I Corinthians 13 that without love nothing we do is ultimately profitable.  When we turn my attention to the world of manufacturing where I work, I see the same principle at work.There is a considerable degree of restiveness amongst some of the employees;  though the pay is 'competitive' with similar work in similar companies, and the benefits as well, there is a sense of deep dissatisfaction.  And I believe that sense of dissatisfaction comes down to the fact, though it has not been articulated by the employees, that they are being used as a means to an end, and are not a part of the 'end' of the company.  The company is in the pursuit of maximum profitability, and part of their formula is keeping the employees happy enough so that the end of maximum profitability can be reached.  But human beings do not find their deepest needs of affiliation met with mammon and material security- they need love to live in a state of beatitude.  Yet the corporatist model, corporatist capitalism, functions to produce maximum profitability.
Likewise, management at our work has a certain degree of restiveness with the employees.  Our CEO addressed our shift. They had had round tables where employee grievances were expressed, and some were not placated by the things that were offered to the employees and they expressed those grievances.  The CEO came back with a 'love the company, or leave it' sort of speech.  And as I have thought about it, the CEO as well, was suffering for a want of love from the employees.  And it is the truth that not only does the company treat the employees as a means to an end, but the employees treat the company as a means to an end as well, for they are working, not out of love for the company and its mission and for management with whom they co-labor, but are working to get money- they are treating the company and management as a means to an end as well, and not loving management or the mission of the company.

I have a friend who works at Bunn Corporation and they are a company that fascinates me because their corporate vision is more or less this 'to do what we do well enough to take care of our people.'  And that is what they do; I have heard a number of stories that reflect this vision and it is inspiring. This is love in the corporate world.  It is not corporatist capitalism but commonweal capitalism- an engagement of the market with the good of all in mind, and not merely the bottom line.   The employees response to this 'love' is a loyalty to the company that is a love response.   This is the place of beatitude, and it is the sort of environment, all other things being equal, that gives a sense of blessing to those involved.
How can an employee avoid using their employer as a means to an end?  It requires faith and hope and love. Christ taught us that He would take care of our material needs as we sought to live for Him first. Living for Him first means that we love God supremely and our neighbor as ourselves.  For an employee that means working for the employer not in order to obtain an income primarily but as an expression of love to God and of love for neighbor, who in this case, is the boss.  Because the employee is looking to God for his provision, he is free to love in the workplace by producing an excellent service.  How can an employee love even in a company whose management is using him as a means to an end, a company that is committed to corporatist capitalism?  The Christian employee recognizes that his daily calling is to deny self, and take up his cross, and follow Christ.   To take up the cross of an unpleasant work environment is folly to those who do not know the Lord but to those who know the wisdom of the cross, know that all crosses have been transfigured by Christ's cross, so that they become the very portals to personal transfiguration unto participation in the Divine Nature. 
The two corporate models are diametrically opposed.  Commonweal capitalism is service and sacrifice oriented. The management works to the end of the service of their customers and to the well-being of their employees.  There must be an implicit faith in such a view, that in doing the right thing, that a way will be made in an otherwise hostile world, a world where the other model, corporatist capitalism dominates. The latter's model is the domination of others as a means to an end and the production of a product in order to extract good from the customers.   It inspires management to be willing to sacrifice their employees if need be to achieve maximum profitability, and inspires the employees to do less than their optimum, out of self-interest, as their work is only a means to material security.   It is a terrible model that leaves all dissatisfied.
The Gospel of Jesus Christ offers us the only clear image in contrast to the world's model of living.  The King of King and Lord of Lord's took the form of a servant in order to bring us all the well-being that came from His love for us.  He leads us by the ultimate sacrifice. In contrast the leaders of the world promise us the world, but despoil us, and unless they are saints fall prey to the predatory habits of those in control and devour us for as much as they can get away with.
I suggest that we all come to Jesus and learn of His ways.  Let us make our sandwiches with love.

Did Christian Faith Succumb to Neo-Platonism

I doubt if I am up to answering this question.  But I will give it a try, and I shall begin with the idea of the person in Greek thought. In Greek thought there was no sure idea of the person as we have come to know it in the West.   In Greek thought the Absolute, the One was an Impersonal Absolute, and since all things ultimately resolved into the One,  anything that appeared as person was a mask of sorts and not an aspect of being.   Prosopon in Greek conveyed that as did Persona in Latin. This more or less applied as well to 'souls' and to their pre-existence, and their relationship to the Impersonal Absolute.  You also see it in Buddhism which seems to follow closely Greek philosophies.  In Hellenism there was no ontological ground for the person.  Drama was important in Greek culture because that which was depicted as person was enacted in dramas where masks were added, in a sort of myth of personhood.  The Impersonal One did not supply an ontological ground for personhood. 
In marked contrast the Source of All in Christian thought was the Person of the Father who derived freely from all Eternity, the person of the Logos, and the person of the Spirit, as well as the common Nature that belonged to all equally.  Thus from All Eternity there was not an Impersonal Absolute, but a Person who amplified Himself in Eternity into a Communion of Persons.   So,  the eternal absolute, if you will in Christian thought was a Communion of Persons, and one in which the Three equaled One.  The ground of all being was a Communion of Persons, that gave ontological ground to both the notion of the person and also of the possibility of geniune community and the overcoming of existential isolation as isolated existents. 
This ontological uniqueness of Christian faith was derived from Scripture, Old and New Testaments, which utilized neo-platonic terms, but did not succumb to neo-platonic categories, but redeemed, if you will greek theological speculations by the impetus of revelation.
Christian revelation also fulfilled the apophatic impulses of Greek thought that nevertheless was never able to escape the limitations of thought and syllogism, to conceive of any existence utterly different from the created.  Reason and logic are qualities of the created order, and if the Transcendent can be conceived by reason and logic, then it ceases to be transcendent and we fail utterly to conceive anything beyond our experience. Greek thought usually was followed by to an Impersonal Abolute, the One. Greek thought was captive to the created order and could not point to anything beyond.
Christian revelation came on the scene and redeemed the captivity of Greek thought, first by positing the ground of Being as a Communion of Persons, but more so by a Communion of Persons where three equals one.  It does not submit to human reason, nor to mathematical verities, and points to an existence beyond the Created order and incomprehensible to it.  Christian revelation redeemed the Greek captivity to creation.
But if we were left only with a Transcendent God, how could there be revelation?   How can it be that the God who could not be known, reveal Himself.  Orthodox thought came to the rescue again by the distinction of the Essence and Energies of God.  The Essence is the unknowability of God; the Energies is the presence of God outside of His Essence. The Energies enable the Transcendent God to be Known in His Immanence.  Greek thought had no means of dealing with this either, and the Aristotelean neo-Platonism resolved it in an unacceptable way and led to the big mistakes of the Catholic Church that would fully emerge after the first millennium.  

How I Was Protected In Prison Camp

I was getting rid of most that I owned as I cleaned up my home, and prepared to enter Federal Prison Camp.  I had fear of harm that could happen to me in prison and I prayed to the Lord about my fear.  I was inside the house; I went out to one of the sheds we were emptying and I reached down and pulled out something that had been in storage for a decade. It was a framed portion of Scripture.  It said

"Behold, I give you power over serpents and scorpions; and nothing by any means shall hurt you." 

This 'jumped' out at me and lodged in my heart. It was a word of God to my heart, given to garrison me against fear and to assure me that no harm would come to me in prison.

When I arrived in the Camp they said my papers had not arrived and so they were going to send me to the "Hole" in the Big House.  This was something else.   23 Hour lock-down with inmates of every description.  Into a cell as the third man in a cell built for two.  The first guy I met, said,  'don't worry, our other cellie is a black guy and he's ok.'   My other cellie showed up and immediately began to educate me to prison life. He basically took me under his wing so to speak and explained the basics.  Later, we would both be in the Atlanta minimal security facility, next door to the Big House.

After a few weeks I was put to work in the Mess hall. I was a server.  It was my responsibility to serve the guys as they came in to eat.  There would sometimes we limits on food items- two boiled eggs at breakfast, for example.  There was lots of favoritism shown by inmates to their buddies in this system and when the guards were not looking, they would give their buddies as much as they asked for.  I felt honor bound to respect the rules and not respect the persons, and I was soon making some guys very irritated because I would not comply with their demands for more eggs, or whatever.
I felt like I was making enemies. 
But the Lord was watching over me, and two guys who had been in a long time and who had become friends, intervened, and managed somehow to get me a job away from food service and in carpentry.  I remember when it was getting very tense with some inmates but at that moment I felt the presence of my guardian angel over my right shoulder. And the Lord opened a way in the wilderness and I escaped. 
Then there was the time my cellie began acting very funny one day.  In my cube, he began accusing me of outrageous things, totally untrue.   Then he stood up and began to cry and said 'the voices, the voices, the voices; they are telling me to hurt you; help me, Ben; help me."  Whereupon I  rebuked the evil spirit in the name of Jesus and commanded it to leave him.  He began to hyperventilate and lay down on his bunk and unbuttoned his shirt, like he was too hot, and after a period of agitation, finally relaxed and got still.  Then he stood up as normal as anything, and said to me "Ben, what's been happenin?"  I explained to him the going's on; he did not believe me, but my other cellie- for I was in a two man cube that had three guys- confirmed what had transpired; quite shaken at having seen an exorcism.  The news spread quickly throughout the dorm.
The authority given over serpents and scorpions had Protected me from harm, according to the promise of Jesus. 
Then there was the time we were having an inspection of our dorm by the guards; someone had upset them.   They made the rounds of the entire place that ended right at my cube; and as I was standing there, one of the guards took out a switch blade, threw it opened on my locker and said, 'here it is; I give you a chance; why don't you come after me."  What?   I was one of the most docile of all their inmates.  I just mumbled something incoreherently, and in frustration he took the blade back and left.  That guy could make someone nervous- he went around the prison camp with a baseball bat, like a Federal variation of Buford Pusser.  But, mysteriously, the FBI came around a few weeks later, and he was never heard or seen again, in that Camp.   I had said nothing, but something had been done to remove that mentally unstable man from our supervision.
"nothing by any means shall hurt you." 

2012- What We Know, What We Can Infer, and What We Don't Know

The year 2012 has been an interest for quite some time and has produced a movie based on some of the thoughts surrounding the year.  The inspiration for our interest in this year springs from ancient traditions that seem to suggest it as a time for the end of things as we know them.  There is much in Scripture that could lead one to conclude that the End of the Age is near.  Finally, there is the interesting fact that major players in the scientific world have suggested that there are some very possible scenarios that could unfold that might usher in an EOTWAWKI event.
What is is that we know about 2012, what is it that we can reasonably infer,  and what is there that we know is false and finally what is there that we don't know?

Let us start with science.

1.   We know that there is a hole in the magnetosphere 10 times larger than anyone had ever imagined.  As commented on in a Jesse Ventura Conspiracy Theory episode Ventura-2012 -'the shields are down', alluding to Star Trek and the Star Ship Enterprise and its force shields that protected it from all sorts of nasty weapons.  This was discovered and reported in December 2008, by five Themis satellites put up there to snoop around and was discovered within the last five years.  NASA-breech

• We know that the sun has an eleven year cycle of activity that involves a peaking of solar sun spots and coronal mass ejections and that will occur in 2012.   According to all the scientific opinion I have been able to glean, this peak of the eleven year cycle should be an especially nasty one,  admitted by NASA to be the worst in 50 yearsThere is a prominent physicist who makes the mainstream media rounds who sees real risk with this and talks about problems for our satellites in orbit, and the commmunications that depend upn them. NASA-11 year sun cycle 
• We know that in 1859 that there was a huge solar flare, and that it fried the only serious electronics available at the time, and that was on the planet earth, and not in orbit around the earth,  and that was the telegraph communications network of America.  We also know that if we had a similar solar flare, it would take out the American power grid, knocking out most all the technology we depend upon for the most basic of needs, for many months to many years.  This is not just the lunatic fringe talking; this is NASA and NSA.   NASA-1859 Flare
• We know that there is a marked upswing of earthquakes in this new millennium, though there are postings that a misleading and no real evidence that there was an increase during the 20t Century. Earthquakes last Century but in this Century and increase, both in magnitude and in number during the last decade.  Quake increase this decade
• The weather has been getting more and more crazy all over the world with the Jet Stream doing nutty things. For the third year in a row it is, for example, hanging very low over Britain,  and causing disastrous weather events, and floods and droughts, that are wreaking havoc on many agricultural harvests. Whacky Weather This Decade
• We know, that in addition to an upswing of earthquakes, there have been clusters of earthquakes occuring more or less in the same time frame, and associated with serious perturbations of the Earth's magnetosphere.  The satellite images of the magnetosphere show it being deformed even to the loss of the magnetic lines that come from the South Pole.  Furthermore these perturbations are not caused by any phenomenon that we currently know causes such things- there is not solar activity to account for it. 
• We know that there is been a rapid shifting of the earth's magnetic north pole; it has been moving at a rate of about 37 miles per year for the past 15 or so years.  
• We know from time lapse photography that there has been a skewing of the rotational axis of the earth slightly away from the North defined by the star Polaris.  In time lapse photography, we notice that the true center axis of the earth's rotation has been pulled a little off its traditional fixation on Polaris.  
• We know that several nations of the world have become extremely interested in looking away from the earth with half dozen or more infrared satellite telescopes, that are not looking towards earth, and are not looking at the sun.  They are looking somewhere else.
• We also know that on Dec 21, 2012 the earth with all the planets on one side of the sun will align both with the sun and the center of the Milky Way galaxy.
• We know that the planets Uranus and Neptune have an obliquity in their orbits that cannot be explained by any gravitational effects in the known solar system, and that such gravitational effects have caused scientific speculation as to its cause for hundreds of years.  
• And we also know that there is something going on that is altering the entire solar system in the same direction at once- it appears that there is a warming effect of some sort happening to all of the planets.  On Mars its polar ice caps have decreased 30 percent. Other planets are appearing more luminescent. Our moon is getting a sort of atmosphere from a rare gas. Warming of Whole Solar System

Well, that is a list of what we know from science. 
That something us up for 2012 is also apparent from the political behavior of nations- specifically the building of hardened, underground survival shelters for the continuity of the government and other essential service providers.  The United States has been in a building frenzy for the past decade all over the Nation, building such facility with blast doors, and capable of being submerged underwater, and with life support facilities and defense mechanisms built in.  This has been a rumor for a very long time on the internet, and with some amateur documentation, but totally unmentioned in the Establishment Media.  Jesse Ventura has outed this quite effectively in a recent Conspiracy Theory Episode, in which he showed some video footages of them, an interviewed an architectural engineer that is also building similar structures for the Rich, altering old Atlas ICBM silos in Kansas for survival from forces as strong as nuclear blasts, and submersion under water for long periods of time.  Under water for long periods of time in Kansas!  This man had inside knowledge of government programs, and stated that the target date for his facility and the governments is readiness by 2012.  He hinted at one such facility under a major United States airport.Denver Airport-Survival Bunkers-Ventura
The Russians have been into this sort of activity as well building a facility that would support 100 thousand people under the Yamantau Mountain in the middle of Russia.Yamantau in Russia  A Russian Company vivos is also building survival shelters for 2012 in the USA.  US Underground Private Shelters The Norwegians are also known to have done such a thingNorway 2012, and the Israelis are involved as well, due to be completed by 2011. Israel Ready 2011  . The British and the Germans are in on it as well, but these facilities could also be used to survive a nuclear event.  Germany and Britain  The  the Rockfellow/Bill Gates  Foundations have come  together to build a Hardened Seed Survival Bank near the Arctic Circle.  Globalist Seed Bank
There has been as well  the construction of a myriad of prison-camp like barbed wire detention centers all over the United States, designed to hold families, also done in a hidden way, with no stated purpose, but with the obvious purpose to manage restive masses of people.

So,  for 2012 we have a lot of governments working in a feverish way to prepare for something big, and they are not telling us, the common people, about it.  They are working to ensure the survival of a few.  This is significant.  When Y2K loomed and it appeared that our computers might crash and take down our infrastructures, we and the nations of the world got busy and did something about it.  We did some patches and some work arounds and fixed it for the whole planet.    But now they are preparing for something so very big in their estimation, that they cannot prepare for all of us, and so they are going to extreme measures to protect the elite, without telling us about it.  And they are preparing for something they expect will take place in 2012.  Furthermore, they are not basing their decisions on the well-known Mayan calendar, but upon some other more hard evidence.   Finally, their preparations include massive numbers of detention camps to manage the general population, as if there will be something that comes to the attention of the general population that will be very disturbing, but that can be managed only by detention. 

What fits the bill for this sort of catastrophe?  It is possible that there will be a coronal mass ejection in 2012 Solar Flare 2012that will take down our infrastructure but would not require the use of concentration camps to detain a population that learns well in advance of an earth-shattering cataclysm but can do nothing about it, and for which our government has prepared the instruments of survival only for a small elite.   Could it be that they are preparing for a global nuclear war?  It seems unlikely that all the nations of the world would know in advance that in 2012 we are going to hold a global nuclear war.  The shelters could be built  in such a way that they would also serve an additional purpose of surviving nuclear war but preparations for one to be pre-scheduled for 2012 seems unlikely.
There are other possibilities out there-  that such shelters would help in the event of a rapid pole shift, but once again that would not be fixed to such a date as 2012. 
What then is such an event that would fit the year 2012, and explain some of the other anomalies we have been seeing for the past decade, and be of such a catastrophic scope that the governments would decide to prepare only for the survival of the elite?
In 1983 the IRAS infrared satellite telescope found an object they had been looking for.  For centuries  the orbits of Neptune and Uranus had perplexed astronomers because they showed a distinct skewing of their orbits that could be explained only by the gravitational pull of an unknown mass in the vicinity of our solar system.  In 1983 IRAS found the existence of a hitherto unknown planet that was dubbed planet X.  The announcement made some of the news media of the country, and I remember myself reading this with interest.  Here is a clip from the Washing Post

Washington Post, December 30, 1983
Possibly as Large as Jupiter
"The mystery body was seen twice by the infrared satellite as it scanned the northern sky from last January to November, when the satellite ran out of the supercold helium that allowed its telescope to see the coldest bodies in the heavens. The second observation took place six months after the first and suggested the mystery body had not moved from its spot in the sky near the western edge of the constellation Orion in that time. "This suggests it's not a comet because a comet would not be as large as the one we've observed and a comet would probably have moved," Houck said. "A planet may have moved if it were as close as 50 billion miles but it could still be a more distant planet and not have moved in six months time."
Some period of time after that, there was a sudden reversal, and the media said, 'oops, big mistake.'   At the time it seemed a very weak argument, and I resisted the new conclusion.  There was also a high level authority Dr. Robert S. Harrington, the chief astronomer of the U.S. Naval Observatory, died before he could publicize the fact that Planet X is approaching our Solar System. who was willing to talk about it after the abrupt black-out of information, and that same man suddenly died in very mysterious circumstances.  Harrington 1983  In the 1987 New Science and invention Encyclopedia , the work of the space probes Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11 shows a clear map in which the two probes were able to triangulate the location of planet 10.  Pioneer and Planet 10 . 

NASA admits to Nemesis March 11, 2010.  It is called Nemesis or Death Star,  and is said to be larger than the planet Jupiter.    NASA NEMESIS . 
The notable thing about this is that it is not taken up by the Mainstream news, and we have been conditioned to accept as reality only what is emphasized in the Mainstream media.  We know also that very alarming events are being deliberately under or unreported by the Major Media.  There was a major asteroid Impact in Columbia this year that was not reported in American Media.  Columbia Asteriod Impact
There was also a huge meteor impact i Mexico that was unreported in the Mainstream Media
mexico meteor
In 1979 the name 'global warming' was chosen as a cover story to hide form the public the apocalyptic events that they knew then were coming our way now. 
We also know that the solar year for earth changed from 360 days to 365 days in the 17th Century Before Christ.
 Sumerian , Mayan predictions  http://yourownworldusa.com/planetx/2006/planetx-2006-12a/2.shtml
Infrared Telescope Satellites pput in place since 2000.  http://neartheyear.com/astronomy/nibiru/the-hunt-is-on/
http://yourownworldusa.com/planetx/2006/planetx-2006-12a/2.shtml

Google Sky has deliberately blocked out the exact coordinates that relate to the locate of Planet X.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iKn_2neBSyo 

gulf Stream Dead.  Gulf Stream Dead

Earth passing into energy cloud
energy cloud goat

Russians say the whole solar system is changing and we are passing into an energy field
Energy field
also reported in Nature   Energy Cloud
Gulf Current dead  http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread639506/pg1
Gulf dead.