Remember this

Remember this: development that stays with you in the spiritual realm is not about holding a lot of surfacy knowledge in your mind at the same time. It is about developing your essential self. Your essence. It's kind of beyond words and ideas and so forth in this sense, though influences are carried in such ways.

So, for instance, just reading the Bible complete does more for you in real development. Reading Homer complete. Deep languages. Learning music. Athletic development. But also if you identify spiritual warfare and the knowledge associated with it as most important then having the *language* of the Bible in you complete is more real for development than reading twelve commentaries on a particular book of the Bible. Obviously. Also, with Work, seeing just one feature of false personality in real time in yourself and managing to have some real degree of control over it does more than going through the mental gymnastics of figuring out time and recurrence and so forth in that purely surfacy knowledge way. Obviously.

Pure and simple clock and real will efforts at rote, backlash, schedule, and event self-remembering and non-identifying do more than you can see or feel at the time of doing it. Development for these kinds of deeper efforts is like the slow hand of a clock: no visible movement, yet movement.

Something important, difficult to articulate

I think it's a big thought whether God can trust me. *He* knows, but for us to ask the question it creates a unique, important perspective.

Here is something in the same realm: internally orientating ourselves in the moment as if we are now in God's Kingdom. I don't mean acting as if we are watched. Just shifting context and perspective. Coming out of worldly thoughts and behavior that are silly or worse.

The Work practice of New Thinking is involved here.

I.e., is being obsessed with some resentment worthy of a being who knows of and has been called into God's Kingdom?

It's something you *feel* in the moment. Of course wrapped up in all Work practices and being.

It's big because it's a thought that controls and contains most all else.

Three connections of the Work and Christianity

Three connections of the Work and Christianity:

1. Progressive sanctification
2. Spiritual warfare
3. The Two Conscious Shocks as means of being in covenant with God

A summing up on this subject of the Work and Christianity

The Work is like theology where you constantly have to go back and reiterate the basics. Then you sound like - to some - you never knew the basics, or that you're not aware that you are going over old, well-known things.

Let me sum up this subject I've been stumbling over too long:

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The ideas, practices, and goals of the Work can be done without the foundation of regeneration by the Word and the Spirit, but it will ultimately just be screwing around leading to emptiness or parlor games or worldly groups focused more on sex and money and power than provoking and extending limits.

The ideas, practices, and goals of the Work done on the foundation of regeneration by the Word and the Spirit become (with the Word of God though an extra-biblical language) the substance of progressive sanctification and the means and environment of spiritual warfare.
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