How to find inspiration when we don’t feel it
Adapted from an on-line consultation with a patient :

Please feel free to share this with a friend who might be looking for inspiration
Taken From; www.susandane.com

Question:
Why do we sometimes read the Bible or other things and feel totally inspired and even experience healing--and at other times it just seems completely dead—just words on a page?

Answer:
It depends on who is reading it.

In both instances we might think we are the same person opening the book, but we aren’t. In one instance, we have a living hunger, an actual opennes in the depth of our heart. In the next, we are just going through the motions. We may fool ourselves with our protests of wanting the Truth, or wanting to be shown, but we can’t fool Spirit. By it’s very nature Spirit fills all space. If there is space in our heart, Spirit is there—simultaneously. It doesn’t take two hours, or even two minutes for Spirit to “find” us. Spirit pours into the open heart even as it opens.

When we read without this openness, the page feels dead because we are reading the projection of our mind. Without the influx of Spirit, our mind is as dead as that page! It may be functioning by some scientific measure, but by Spirit’s measure, it’s dead! Spirit’s message is secretly encoded. Only the heart can decipher it. The brain has no access. So when we read with our brain, Spirit’s transformative Word is reduced to the babble of our own thought. It feels like z-e-r-o because without Spirit, that is exactly how much genuine intelligence (or light) our minds have!

Question:
So how can reading Scripture help me get this light if I don’t have this desperate hunger or whatever every day inside of me. Why bother to even read when I don’t feel it?

Answer:
Scripture is a bridge between heaven and earth. It is the Word of God in the language of humankind. The words cannot make us hear them. But like an invitation to a magnificent symphony, they invite us to stop and listen. When all we hear is the drone of our own mind—i.e. nothing we really want to listen to all that much—Scripture is reminding us that we aren’t stopped, and that we aren’t listening. So even by the absence of inspiration, it guides us. In a manner of speaking, the dead page is saying: Hellloooo? I’m talking to you. Where are you anyway? Listen up! I’ve got something great to tell you!

Question:
So how can I make myself listen or hear when I can’t. Lots of times I try and nothing happens. I feel like I’m just faking it and God knows.

Answer:
Spiritual hunger is most often aroused through life’s disappointments and pain. Ironically, we are most “awake” when we are most tired. That is to say, we are most awake to Spirit’s revelation when we are most tired of the world’s promises, its ways and means. Is there an easier road? Tell me if you find it.

C.S. Lewis says something wonderful in his Letters to Malcolm : Chiefly on Prayer, [Harcourt]. Quoting the French philosoher, Pascal, he speaks of the “error of stoicism” to imagine that “we can do always what we can do sometimes.” I think sometimes we get spoiled and just want the “sound and light show”—the “ah-ah moment” that makes us feel good. We think Spirit is like some sort of a drug experience. When we imagine this we suffer all the same symptoms of any addiction—the high, the hang-over, and the appetite for more. But true inspiration isn’t a high. In fact, it is often a low. It digs down to the depths of our soul and psyche and rewrites us from the ground up. This is not always a pleasant experience. I believe it was the Indian teacher, Ramana Maharshi who was asked : “How can I reach enlightenment”? His answer? “What makes you think you will like it?”

We don’t need the “high” of inspiration to love Truth, and to strive to live it. When inspiration fails, while waiting to become conscious of Spirit’s fire already burning in our hearts, we can still hunger for the hunger! The first real prayer I remember praying, when I was about 20 and in a very dark space, was: God, I don’t believe in you really. But if you exist, I am willing to know you. The rest has to be up to you, ‘cause otherwise, it would be me inventing you.

That prayer was answered.

Click Here: To read on for some specific ways to approach Scripture when it doesn’t just rush in with a white light!

Please send your questions to BeyondSelfHelp@aol.com

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