Becoming Receptive to Grace
Excerpt from BECOMING RECEPTIVE TO GRACE
GURURAJ ANANDA YOGI: The basis of the question is, what is grace? How can something indefinable really be defined? One can use analogies to explain it. It is like a plant growing. There are forces in nature and beyond nature that bring the right amount of minerals to the growing plant; the right amount of sun to it, the right amount of water to it to make the plant grow. What is that factor which brings all these things about in the proper combination? It must be the right combination because we know that too much fertilizer could kill the plant. The factor that brings about the proper combination is grace.
When Man understands grace with his mind he does not know what grace is. Grace is a force or a power — we call it gurushakti. Grace is a force, a power that the mind cannot understand, but that can be experienced within.
Experiencing this grace within, Man still needs to translate it outwardly. The only means he has to translate it or even to have some inkling of itis with his mind. So, that which is experienced inside has to be brought to a conscious level of the thinking mind. Now how does this happen? What are the mechanics? When a person experiences grace, he always tries to find an object for grace. He looks for a mirror in which he would view that grace flowing through him in the mirror.
Everything in this world is a mirror. Everything in this world is a mirror in which we look at ourselves. Do we look at the world clearly in its true value? Or do we allow our own personal experiences to influence what we see? The old saying is that beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder. To one person a certain object might seem so ugly while to another person it might seem so beautiful. The mind — the conscious mind and the subconscious mind — act as filters through which grace flows, for without grace you could not even see. So, man influences the purity of grace by the experiences, the patterning, and conditioning of his own mind, and that is why different people will have a totally different perspective of any object in view. Yet grace is working all the time; for nothing else exists in this universe but grace — that force, that spiritual force, that spiritual power.
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