If we are serious about our relationship with God or the divine, then this is a good reminder: God is primary. Place God first, be a good steward for your life, and don’t allow yourself to be too distracted for too long by anything else than your relationship with God.
Don’t even get too distracted by saints, or angels, or teachers and priests, or the details of certain practices, or the intricacies of theology, or anything else. Keep it simple and place God first.
And anything in your life is part of and can be an expression of your relationship with God.
Allow prayer and whatever other practices you engage in transform you, and everything will be an expression of your relationship with God.
This is the more conventional understanding of placing God first. (It’s how I guess it looks based on my limited understanding of Christianity and some other religions.)
IN A MORE IMMEDIATE SENSE
We can also understand it in a more immediate sense.
What do you find you most fundamentally are in your first-person experience? What do you find if you use slightly structured inquiry like Headless experiments or the Big Mind process?
How is it to notice this in daily life? How is it to live from this noticing?
How is it to have this noticing as primary in your life?
How is it to prioritize it here and now? And now? And now?
Of course, in daily life, our attention will shift between this noticing to tasks that require our attention. And yet, as we get more familiar with this noticing, it will always be here. It will be the context for our daily life and daily life activities.
Over time, this noticing can become primary.
TWO WAYS IT APPLIES TO IMMEDIATE NOTICING
There are two ways this applies to a more immediate noticing of our nature.
Over time, it’s good to remember that our primary focus is on the noticing and living from it. Anything else – teachings, teachers, methods, theology – is secondary. It’s natural to get a bit caught up in all the secondary for a while, and eventually it’s all about the immediate noticing and living from it.
And here and now, how is it to remember the noticing as primary? How is it to life from and do my daily life activities from within this noticing? It’s natural to get a bit caught up in our daily life tasks, so how is it to notice this, notice our nature, and do our tasks from here? How does this change over time? Does it become more natural and familiar to notice and live from it?
SIMILAR DYNAMICS
Whether we understand this is a conventional sense or a more immediate sense, we find similar dynamics.
We find the importance of placing God first.
Of not allowing other things to distract us too much and for too long.
That placing God first can be the context we live our life from.
And perhaps a few things about this process in general. For instance, it may work best if we allow this to emerge naturally for us. To not make it into (yet another) should. To tie it into our existing natural and effortless motivations. Nurture joy, passion, and fascination for this exploration. Hold it all somewhat lightly. See how it unfolds for us with some curiosity and receptivity.
INITIAL OUTLINE
- god is primary
- conventional sense – place God first, don’t allow yourself to be too distracted by everything else
- in a more real sense
- noticing what you are is primary
- explore how it is to live from this
- ….
….
How is it to prioritize the pragmatics and the direct noticing over anything else? Over teachings, teachers, the intricacies of intellectual understanding?
Immediate noticing (a) over time, is primary, (b) here and now is primary
….
We can also understand it in a more immediate sense.
What do you find you most fundamentally are in your first-person experience? What do you find if you use slightly structured inquiry like Headless experiments or the Big Mind process?
How is it to notice this in daily life? How is it to live from this noticing?
How is it to have this noticing as primary in your life?
How is it to prioritize it here and now? And now? And now?
Of course, in daily life, our attention will shift between this noticing to tasks that require our attention. And yet, as we get more familiar with this noticing, it will always be here. It will be the context for our daily life and daily life activities.
Over time, this noticing can become primary.