Step Two Hundred and Sixteen

Step 216. There Is A Spiritual Presence In My Life.

The spiritual presence in your life is ever with you, ever available to you and ever reminding you to look beyond your own judgments. It is forever providing for you the support, the assistance and the guidance necessary to minimize the wrong application of your mind and to strengthen the right application of your mind to allow Knowledge to arise within you.

You are now learning to receive and to respect this Spiritual Presence, and in time you will realize its great importance to you and to the world. This will generate greatness and humility all at once within you, for you will realize that you are not the source of your greatness, but the vehicle for its expression. This will keep you in true proportion and relationship to that which you serve. In relationship you receive all of the benefits of that which you claim to be your own. And yet, with Knowledge you will not become self-aggrandized because you will realize your own limitations and the depth of your own need for Knowledge. With this understanding, you will realize and accept the source of life. With this, you will realize that you are in the world to serve Knowledge and that the world is meant to be the recipient of Knowledge.

There is a spiritual presence in your life. Feel this upon the hour as you repeat today’s idea. In your two deeper practice periods enter deeply into this Presence, for this Presence is most assuredly with you and wishes to give itself to you this day.

Practice 216: Two 30-minute practice periods. Hourly practice.

Here you will find the entire book free for download
http://stepstoknowledge.com/

Here you will find pointers for getting started if this is your first encounter with this practice: Taking the Steps to Knowledge.

November 16, 2013 Round One: I am facing a situation today where I truly wish to strengthen the true application of my mind and feel the spiritual presence in my life guiding me in the right direction.

I have been reading Listening for Knowledge today and one paragraph spoke to me in particular as I contemplated my dilemma.

"The only way you will know if you are making the right decision is by having the experience that you know. The only way you can be sure if you are making a mistake is to have the experience of all the doubt and restraint and anxiety that goes along with making a wrong decision. In other words, it is being really aware and attentive to your experience. And here you gain the ability to discern what is real from what is not, what feels correct and what does not. You do this not at the level of your wishes or your fears, but at a deeper level that is much wiser and much more powerful in these matters."

I am paying particular attention to the following sentences in this Step:

“This will generate greatness and humility all at once within you, for you will realize that you are not the source of your greatness, but the vehicle for its expression. This will keep you in true proportion and relationship to that which you serve. In relationship you receive all of the benefits of that which you claim to be your own. And yet, with Knowledge you will not become self-aggrandized because you will realize your own limitations and the depth of your own need for Knowledge.”

This tells me how to recognize the difference between what may be my arrogance and presumptuousness and how I may be acting as a vehicle for Knowledge, so keeping me in true proportion and relationship to that which I serve. I am trying to understand this and apply it to what is happening in my life today.

March 8, 2015 Round Two: "The spiritual presence in your life is ever with you, ever available to you and ever reminding you to look beyond your own judgments."

This is my experience today. There is a spiritual presence in my life. This is beyond any shadow of a doubt.

February 9, 2019 Round Three: Twenty-six years of official marriage to Sasha. I wouldn’t have remembered if I had not been reading back in my journal for this day last year. I have no doubts there is a spiritual presence in my life and I receive it. I am not the source of my greatness, I am the vehicle of its expression. In relationship with this Presence, I receive all the benefits I claim to be my own. They are not my own, they are endowed upon me, I receive them in exchange for my willingness to respond.