Geoffrey Wood Quotes

Guilt, if cultivated in a Christian client, can render their Christianity worthless to themselves and others.

At the same time, they find their mind-god has played a trick on them. For mind is a part of the very system it has closed around it, and being inside, there is no reason to think any statement made by some part concerning the whole has any validity. Mind was caused by the material universe, if mind is right. But only the greater can accurately define the lesser, never the other way round, so if mind is right, mind would never know.

Everyone needs to calm down! Okay, you got a weird cookie. So what? I don't mean to swat your ego here, buddy, but this smacks a little narcissistic for me. God is not trying to communicate to you through a cookie. It doesn't work that way. God's not all Jack-and-the-magic-beans and tooth-beneath-the pillow voodoo. You don't just close your eyes, flap open your Bible, and slam a steak knife into a verse. It's that sort of thinking that leads to witch trials and Senate probes.

Where faith costs nothing, faith loses respect, even to those who possess it.

Chant to him: "An individual thinks for himself." Then roll that around in his head till it means: "If I didn't think of it, it has no bearing on my life.

When some one mortal yet eternal human merely being relying on precisely nothing but the audacious love of his Maker, calls on Him to part the Heavens, well, we are undone.

Press them continually with memory and dream and have them waste their Present there.

Faith is where they learn about their God; but Prayer is where they explore Him.

Life, liberty and the pursuit of gratitude, now that would've worked. They would have been readily led to contentment, which would've then better lead them on to happiness.

God didn't give Moses ten fortune cookies in a to-go box. God didn't lead the Israelites through the wilderness with a neon all-you-can-eat sign. And God doesn't speak to people in bathrooms, public or otherwise.

Indeed if they ever once saw the endless supply of eternal opportunities The Adversary offers them every temporal moment of day after day of their fuddled little lives, they would stagger at the sheer industry and prodigality of His efforts. Conversely, if they ever gained a glimpse of how their ordinary actions actually effect and shape things not only under time but without, the very vast weight of that would almost certainly end in their becoming humble.

In general, it's not too hard to corrupt an American, mostly a matter of supply to their demand. Supply should be variegated to encourage the Illusion of Choice. Other than that they're looking for numbness, so be ready to sedate. Drugs, booze, television, shopping, etc ...

Turning an experience about to observe it, results in a lessening of the experience directly proportional to the amount of observation. To think about it is, to some degree, to stop the pleasure, to stop the experience, to step outside it.

Never let them try out this gratitude, for they would immediately discover that it supplies the first and most important component to happiness: Contentment.

If God gives you a hundred bucks, you better bet He's going to ask you what you bought.

For example, your man might think: I don't steal. Maybe on my taxes, everyone does that, but not in the way I heard so and so stole from his company. See? Those men for whose opinion he cares approve of embezzlement in one area, not the other. He uses them to maintain a claim on goodness while at the same time stealing.

Why not have a God in your back pocket for when you need Him? That's all most of them mean by 'Christian.

When sex was something godlike, Lust was the profane curiosity that killed many a straying cat. Now, having removed mystery, Lust is less a long-standing, overpowering yearning, more a sudden craving of the appetite. Less quest, more impulse buy.

We have deficited upon their attention in the most disorderly fashion.

Without God, reality is madness. Reason will tell you so. You either madly trust in God, or you trust in a world gone mad without him.

A tiny adjustment, but a tasty one. Poof! And somewhere in the back of their minds the godlike thought glimmers.

They forget that for a Creator to create, He must be greater than His creation, thus He must be by definition not less than emotional.

The Americans want a surplus stocked up to supply their every whim. And their appeals are much less requests, more demands. Indeed, the phrase might be more aptly put: Demand and Surplus.

Trust becomes the only road home, back to love.

An imagined pleasure is never really the pleasure, but an imagined pain, in a very real sense, is the pain, because so much of pain is the consciousness of it. It makes itself objective. Whereas to think about pleasure is to step outside of it; to think about a presently felt pain is to step inside it. And in a very real sense, we've already got them in Hell.

Somehow they fail to see that for someone aggravated by depression, self-help will be useless, indeed, it is precisely the self that needs to be forgotten.

They prefer a God of an altogether softer flavor. Nothing too extreme. Complaisance, not magnanimity. They do not think upon the "God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God." They prefer to think in terms of "God liking them." That's the God they've conjured for themselves.

Truth, with a capital T, was swapped for Fact with a capital F, then both lower-cased - facts the new trues.

The Americans' great wealth (and their great love for it) makes it precisely the appropriate metaphor. Supply and Demand as a principle has permeated their minds. As a practice, it stains all the way down to their souls.

They all want to be happy. They all think they should be happy. And they're quick to trot out their most cherished document and point to where they were promised "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." But you'll find that though they all parrot that little phrase, they think none too hard about that word "pursuit". To follow, to chase, to inquire, to hunt, to seek. To track in order to overtake and capture. This they don't do. Instead, having been offered a promise of happiness, they progress to a feeling of entitlement for happiness, then make the leap that happiness should, therefore, be easily won, automatic. There's too much wrong in there to even scratch at that!

The eye is to light as the soul is to God.

For a week the sun had been nothing but a puffy, seamless sheet of white, and this Tuesday had begun the same. But as the day progressed, the grayness receded like a mist, the sky's white became more illumined from behind, then occasionally a patch of blue would open. Then another here and there, until blue touched blue and they became background for streaks and wisps of cloud. Sunlight, rays of it, gave a brightness like spring, a direct and golden-yellow brightness unlike the trapped, refracted glow of a winter's day, and to that homogeneous cityscape that lay so inert and wide and flat, just a few spring rays of sunshine gave a sudden depth and dimension to everything. Individual things came alive, as if each stood brightly before you, each with its own story.

Once a man discovers that his obedience is primarily for others' sake, that every miracle that ever amazed happened because of someone's obedience somewhere, that properly understood, his obedience prepares the way for His visitation, well, then we run up against the appalling result of attentive servants gladly going about His bidding without the slightest hesitation. Indeed, in the worse cases, they run where He says run with reckless abandon.

Finally, slowly, drippingly, degrade the term Choice down to its most meager means: The red car not the black one. The 9:25 showing, not the 7:15. Ritz not Wheat Thins.

I've seen a disobedient client simply turn his attention toward The Adversary and ask "Are You still there?" and suddenly all was made well between them.

That's where thinking started, where thinking stopped, where all her prayers so long ago had dried up. She no longer prayed, nor even dreamed of changing her father. Her dreams now played variations on the theme of escape. And they were nothing more than that - just dreams, just play. She'd been alone at the end of her dreams so many times before and never had God helped her escape her father, because God couldn't, because she would never escape her need to love him.

They think that if they were allowed to do anything they desired, they would be satisfied and the more desires the better. But all desires divorced from The Desire eventually collapse in on themselves.

Your suffering only matters if it connects you to the suffering of others, if it heals them too.

There will be a solidity to their faith which is very dangerous to our designs and difficult to dissolve. There is a luminosity to it. Just one Christian of that type can dispel years worth of diabolical delusion.

But as I say, if you look to the state of their souls you'll find the situation nowhere near as grave as polls suggest. There's more to being a servant of The Adversary than signing up.

That sense of entitlement is precisely where we want them because the right to happiness is directly opposed to one of The Adversary's greatest curatives - gratitude.

If we blind them to The Adversary - decrease their desire for The Desire - while at the same time encourage them to do anything else they desire with increasing "freedom of choice," then eventually we snuff out desire while leaving demand in tact.

The more we train a man to labor, deliberate, dictate and demand over the inconsequential, the less capable his mind becomes of holding that of consequence.

This is why we apply the LCD Principle or Lowest Common Democracy. In short, this is social interaction based not on the best possible good, but on the least possible offense. Without saying so, the parties involved have entered into the following arrangement: What is the least we can all agree on and still get along? Of course, you can see this means no one is pleased.

Make them imagine repentance more like an appearance in court before a cranky old judge, less like a child knocking on his father's study door to have a chat.

Joy is that paradox where a man so trusts, is so enraptured, as to be caught up and lost in the other, while at the same time, being utterly known by the other, thus utterly himself.

Though I despise it, I do not doubt His Love for the creatures. I have seen it - His ever-reaching outward for any hand that might reach back. At His love, I tremble yet believe.

It seems The Adversary needs neither their guilt nor their request, but simply their return. In other words, since repentance is the process whereby guilt is turned into gratitude, He doesn't mind if they skip a step and go directly to gratitude.

There is a mathematics to all his relationships, underlying each and every one. He wants it to all add up in his head and he wants to do the adding. And should someone step outside his ciphers, the circle his mind has drawn, his trust evaporates.

Besides, these box-checking Christians having such a majority is largely in our favor. Their ubiquity is inversely proportional to their efficacy.

Teach them the shame that tells the lie, "I am unforgivable," when the truth is, "I feel unforgivable, but it was out of my control." Never let them switch those round right or The Adversary will liberate them in a heartbeat, like a bird flying from a cage.

A man walks into a coffee shop. As the man talks across the counter, the coffee guy makes his coffee and sets the cup and saucer between them. But the man doesn't drink it; he keeps talking, so the coffee gets cold, useless. The coffee guy pours it out and pulls another, sets it up. The man still can't stop talking and the next one goes bad too. So the coffee guy throws that one out, makes another. And this goes on, see? You may think you're the coffee guy in the parable, but you're not - you're the espresso. (It's like that in parables.) You're not for you. You're someone else's beverage. And God, the coffee guy, he's going to keep remaking you again and again, as many times as it takes until you're drinkable. God's pulling the shots and he's got standards.

Grace runs downhill and now all his time is being redeemed.

Still, despite all our noise, this universe hinges on a melody, that's the dismal truth of it. Oh, we can propagandize all we wish, it doesn't change the fabric of things. This universe was not made for the fallen, only the redeemed.

Their guilt plus their repentance should have equalled forgiveness. But they don't feel forgiven, so they failed, which makes them feel guilty, which was why they repented in the first place, so they're stuck right where they started: Guilty.

If we can keep the Christians thinking of themselves as sinners not sons and daughters, we can make them view their relationship to The Adversary as a negative-sum-game: They fall in a hole, He pulls them out, they fall back in, etc... That way they never get anywhere; they're always either standing next to a hole or down in it.

All this has been happening around them all the days of their lives though they couldn't see it, then one day, Prayer removes the veil and everything changes. Think of it this way: Picture a man whistling a tune, when out of nowhere, first a harmony joins, then another, and then suddenly he is taken up into a whirlwind of music, countless instruments playing soaring complexities that the man's whistling is, indeed, a part of, but now he begins to see how small a part; the longer he listens, he realizes that his is not the melody and where he had thought he was whistling alone, the truth had always been the music playing, though never before that moment heard, and now what had been noise becomes symphony.

With addiction, a client's fears can be ripened into some very pleasing fruit: Irritability, suspiciousness, isolation, paranoia, and finally on to that grand banana - the fear of Fear itself.

In every human act of charity, something larger, greater, divine has come down to visit the act.

The trick here is, while the actual pleasure begins to recede and blur, we simultaneously bring the imagined pleasure more fully into focus. And when we do, even the memory of the pleasure becomes more and more heightened and imagined, thus anticipation is increased. This kind of anticipation is the spiritual equivalent of a Cheeto and we want them to eat the whole bag.

That dusty hill we can scarcely look upon and then only with pain, The Adversary, also with pain, does and must ever witness The Crucifixion.

Remember, this type doesn't really believe He'll forgive them, by repenting they are trying to earn what they do not think, in any case, He will pay.

Denial makes it easier to keep an addiction progressing smoothly along and, being a lie, it's just better form.

True Prayer is the work of relationship, where He moves them from mere information about Him to a one-on-one experience with Him, so that now when they talk about "knowing God," they mean more than, "I understand what you're saying about God," but also, "It fits my experience of Him.

Consumerism, the new black. I want my burger my way. Shaken not stirred. Sauce on the side and rare but not rare rare. Venti, two-pump, sugar-free vanilla, non-fat, two Splenda, extra-hot, extra-whip, extra-mocha Mocha and can you put the Splenda in before you pour the milk? (See, this is where it gets positively delicious!) Under the auspices of that wonderful word Consumerism, not only is this not seen as overly demanding, it's positively encouraged by everyone.

If we must tempt to Pleasure, how do we tempt to the least amount of Pleasure? Or better yet, tempt them to its opposite? But how to tempt them to pain.

Indeed, if their wristbands asked them the question: "What-Would-Jesus-Buy" - well now, that could very well revolutionize the Christian church in America.

With Truth, Reason, and Morality off the board, we then capture their last Rook - that prissy little virtue, Temperance - for she depends on those other three for her beauty and was thus left wholly undefended.

Courtesy, not control, that was His means. Just as He requested the stars to sing and they leapt into bright being, so request was to be their rule over bird and beast, seas and trees, mountains and moons and all the dancing distances between the heavenlies filled with the unending song of Creation.

No earthly act escapes its eternal echoes, echoes more substantial than the acts themselves.

In general, Americans would walk a mile uphill in the rain to avoid pain, unless the walk could be shorter and level and the day sunny, which they'd prefer.

So in a man's mind, he appraises, negotiates, defines, delineates, weighs the information, and that includes God. As you can see, this is a relationship of management, not trust. You don't trust things you can manage, you manage them. And so, God as information is managed and no relationship of trust is fostered.

They view repentance as the thing they have to do in order to earn forgiveness, therefore the more difficult they make it, the more credit they tally up.

In Joy, to lose one's life is to gain it, and Joy never loses an opportunity to be lost in the other.

I shouldn't need to remind you that it was words that created the universe and The Word that now holds it together. While your man was simply reading one little book, something not unlike Genesis was stirring in his skull, and you didn't think to stop it?

And once their imaginations are liberated, they begin glimpse the grand interconnectedness of all things. Eternity begins to peek out from behind the everyday things and they see the trappings of any earthly moment as the stage and props for Heaven to reveal itself. There is now nothing ordinary. Everything is being used and spun out for His vast scheme and in His eternal economy, nothing is wasted. Suddenly, all the myriad moments and minutiae of a lifetime show their orchestration - there was nothing that did not lead to this! They look over all their time to find that His redemption has always been rushing, swooping, swerving through their experience, racing to and fro to intervene and infuse Grace.

I say "illusion" of choice because, in many cases, the nature of their choices hardly reaches the level of will, but of merely perfunctory activity. For the most part, their desires are not too strong, they are too weak, apathetic and easily placated. They often can be tempted into doing Nothing.

They think that if they had more belief they would pray more, so keep them lacking. Never let them realize that the opposite is true: If they prayed more, they would have more belief.