The Healthy Management of Reality - Stanford University

do is done with Him at my side. With Him at my side, everything I do becomesholy. Peeling potatoes is as holy an act as praying in church. There is nothing I door think which is separate from God. And, because I am never away from God, Iam always in His care, never alone, never forgotten. As he practiced thisconsciousness of the presence of his God, Brother Lawrence learned that, at first, ittook effort to retain this mind state. But, as he reminded himself to do so, theconsciousness of being with his God, became second nature to him. And he foundthat this practice resulted in a deep sense of peace and happiness. The book is acompilation of his letters to others who sought to become close to the ChristianGod. They make fascinating reading.Other traditions provide similar spiritual practices, such as the practice ofmindfulness in the Buddhist tradition, the use of communal prayers at certain timesthroughout the day, practiced by Islam and many other religions, and the traditionof having conversations with one's God, as in some of the Jewish writings and thepractices of Christian mystics. Practices such as these are intended to bring theattention of the faithful back to what they understand to be the ultimate reality, bethat understood as a person-like entity, a Supreme Being, such as the ChristianGod, or a more ethereal, ineffable reality, inherently incomprehensible by thehuman mind, such as the Tao.My life experiences have led me to have a deep respect for the large varietyof religious experiences that I have encountered. I was brought up in Perú, acountry in which Catholicism was, for practical purposes, the only religion. As achild, I was a deeply devout Catholic. I believed that only those who had beenbaptized Catholic and who had lived according to the teachings of the RomanCatholic Church would be saved. At age 10, my parents immigrated to SanFrancisco. I met many people from a wide variety of traditions in the next 10HMOR.July2005.Muñoz.doc 97