“Paradox is the language through which God communicates with us. Of course, we do the same in return. We delight, for example, in imagining God in nature or seeing the divine expressed in the birth of a child. In these settings and events—cameos of the divine—the “alchemy for awe is perfect.

When we have these divine moments, we are usually feeling spiritually or physically safe. Our hearts are open and our spiritual defenses are down. We do not expect to hear the voice of God in the mouth of a newborn or flaring out from a setting sun, so we feel safe looking at the world around us and can afford to see God everywhere.

We are rarely open, however, to seeing the presence of God within ourselves and we fear intimacy with the divine unless it is on our terms. When we need help, we want that help to come exactly as we need it, exactly when we need it, causing as little discomfort as possible.

We want constant proof that God hears our prayers and monitors our physical survival, but we do not really want to make eye contact with the divine because of the consequences: After encountering God, we would have to live a relentlessly conscious, compassionate life, and we would have to overlook the behavior of people in our world who continue to live as we once did, consciously unconscious, and treat them with understanding and compassion.

Investing time and energy in learning about higher-consciousness teachings and practices, and then deciding that you would prefer not to be quite that conscious, will lead you into spiritual chaos. Your fear of God will feed itself with superstitions about a divinity who punishes, who takes away your wealth and makes you ill.

Yet, paradoxically, you have no option but to pray to that God to help you maintain your wealth and your health—and your faith. You will attempt to look for God everywhere in your life but not really want to see him anywhere; at least you will not want to see him in a way that makes the divine undeniably real.

Deep in our cell tissue, we know that a mystical experience of the divine melts away doubts. We want it, we fear it, we know that it will empower our souls to reorganize our lives and priorities. We know instinctively that the more mystically we see the world, the more we will be inspired to take action. So, to keep this mystical consciousness at bay, to keep the status quo, we deliberately nurture doubts in ourselves and in God.

In the first mansions of the Castle, you address this conflict between the pull of earthly emotions and higher laws. You aim to work on them, level by level, and to see deeper into them until you can consciously animate the power of higher truths in your system.

To animate a truth is to feel it, sense it, recognize it moving within your soul. And with this consciousness comes the responsibility to pray for the strength to think and act in accordance with it, to live it—and also to pray for the “poor in consciousness.”

When you see, experience, breathe, feel, and know in your soul that God is in all people (even though they do not see the same in you), you have to be the peacemaker, the forgiver, the nonviolent one, the caregiver, the one who does not judge because you now must see clearly. You have to act at one with your faith. As the great mythologist Edith Hamilton wrote, “Faith is not belief. Belief is passive. Faith is active.”

Excerpt From: Myss, Caroline. “Entering the Castle.”