Someone just unsubscribed from the messages saying she found my thoughts too intense and that she wanted something clear and concise. Ah, if only the human soul was simple instead of complex, convoluted, multilayered and glorious.

The twelve messages on Encounters with Thou are simply designed into three sets of four topics. We have completed the first set: Encounters with Thou that bring wholeness to your feeling life. Tonight we begin the second set and contemplations on Encounters with Thou that bring freedom to your thinking life. The final set of four messages will address Encounters with Thou that bring manifestation to your willing life.

Wholeness. Freedom. Manifestation. Not even on a superficial and ordinary attention are these simple, clear or concise.

If I think of myself or think of you, there is no straightforward language for what I experience.

That said...let's get intense and sacred in our Holy Night's attention to Thou as the awakener of freedom in thinking.

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Thou as Teacher is not about the classroom teacher. We are spending these moments seeking recollections of those individuals have held open the possibility that we each could think new thoughts and gave us guidance on how to think with freedom and in freedom.

Who were the ones who saw in us a small flame of freedom and taught us to see the flame ourselves? See the light. Feel the warmth. Surrender to the radiance of I.

In the course of a single day, neuroscientists tell us we will think 70,000 thoughts. That's a lot of thinking.  Most of these thoughts are not new...they are habit, ingrained, instinctual, monotonous, and unfree.  Don't worry about this, even Einstein, Aristotle, Joan of Arc, and Jane Austen - saints, scientists, philosophers, and artists spent much of their thought life in dull, lifeless realms.

Who have you encountered that took a thought and turned it inside out or linked it to another seemingly opposing thought. Who listened to a song with you or looked at a painting and shared or suggested a response that brought a whole new experience in such a way that you will never listen to music or look at art in the old way again.

Celebrate those who gave you a new way of thinking and set your thought life free. Their Thou brought your Selfhood into your thinking life.