# 9 – Thought, Feeling Love

Notes from John Main’s Christian Meditation Lectures
Presented by The World Community for Christian Meditation
www.wccm.org   or www.wccm-usa.org

Notes compiled By Mary Sargent

Each one of us can know that the love of Jesus – his power and purifying energy is released and working in our hearts.  When we think of our inner lives, we think of emotion.  Thinking and feeling lead us to imagination, not to the reality of Christ’s presence in our hearts.

Spiritual life based on emotion leads us to religious intolerance.  Our goal is to be rooted in love.  Thought and feeling are essential elements on every pilgrimage, but we can pass beyond them into reality.  What we discover in meditation is that God is the only foundation we can build on.  In Him alone can we find the courage to see
what we need to see and travel the road we must travel.  In Him alone can we find the strength to take up our cross.

If the pilgrimage is to bring us to fulfillment, we need the discipline of meditation.  Do not think about God or analyze our feelings about Him.  We say our mantra with faith in the presence of absolute love.  In meditation, our thoughts and emotions are purified by his forgiveness; his love.  This purity frees us for the great task of brotherly love – to leads others to this purity of consciousness and clarity of vision. There is nothing greater we can do for our neighbor.

Never forget the discipline of The Way:  Say our mantra; return to meditation with love.   Listen to Saint Paul’s Letter to the Hebrews:  “Now Christ has come.  His priesthood is not belonging to created world.  His blood has secured eternal deliverance in his spiritual, eternal sacrifice.”  Meditation is the entry into that reality.