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To Read or Not to Read? That is the Question

By Sebastián Blaksley

 

While in prayer one day I felt an immense “greed” for knowledge of God, which impelled me to read and instruct myself in many things from Heaven. Then my sweet Jesus made himself present in all his beauty and goodness. During his visit, he told me what I share below, so that he can serve others just as he has served me.

“Beloved soul of my soul, in less time than the blink of an eye, I can instill more wisdom into your mind and heart than you can acquire by reading and studying all the books in the world. Indeed, the less knowledge of the world you acquire, the easier it will be for you to receive the knowledge that does not come from them but from Heaven. Happy are the simple of heart. Meditate upon this.”

And then it was given to me to understand to a greater degree the prayer of Jesus when he said: “I praise you, Father, Lord of Heaven and Earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and intelligent, and revealed them to little children.” (Luke 10:21)

I understood that many times our mind is cluttered with information which can in certain cases be very useful. However, by doing so our ability to receive revelation from our divine self, from that part of the soul that is in constant communication with God, is hindered or obstructed.

Filling our minds with thoughts, many of which come from studying and learning, can be a real obstacle to accessing wisdom. How many times do we see brothers and sisters who seem not to be well-versed according to the intellectual criteria of the world, and yet who show us enormous wisdom? Where does that come from? Jesus explained to me that theirs is “the wisdom of life. They are the ones who have made life itself their teacher.”

Meditating on all this, I asked myself: What am I to do? Should I stop reading books? Not quench my thirst for knowledge through reading, seminars, or listening to learned people? Or should I instead take the knowledge received as part of my spiritual path? And I got this answer:

“The secret, my beloved, is neither to read or not to read, to study or not to study. The question is to let yourself be guided by the spirit of wisdom that lives in you. It will instruct you directly and often. Others, on the other hand, may do so through the living word, either written or spoken, or in art and other expressions. It will let you know what to read and what not, how much, and when. Read with your soul. Be instructed, not in order to know more, but as a response from your heart to the call of beautiful knowledge, which comes from the Christ in you.”

After having received this revelation, I freed myself from the compulsion to want to hoard knowledge, from the greed to want to know more and more, including from God. And I began a new stage in which spiritual books, which I have always loved so much, come to me.

And I have discovered to my happy amazement that they do. In other words, the divine knowledge that needs to come to me comes without delay or doubt. It comes in whatever form it has to come. Sometimes it does so in the voice of those who, through their wisdom, reveal an aspect of the truth to me; I can feel that it is the Holy Spirit itself speaking through them. Sometimes that knowledge manifests itself in the events of my life. Sometimes, in it arrives through books that my heart knows how to recognize as being sent from Heaven.

Then I no longer read with my thinking mind but with my heart. I “pray-read.”

Often we launch ourselves to acquire more and more human knowledge, which is not always knowledge but information, and we get tired, mentally speaking. We create a mental state of limitation in which we attempt to receive the newness of Christ. Yet as Jesus also said two thousand years ago, “You do not put new wine in old wineskins, because it will spoil.”

I have seen that an excess of information or stimuli tires the mind and closes it to receive the soft trail of beautiful knowledge. In addition, it causes us run the risk of acquiring a fixed position on ideas and beliefs, which leads to a dogmatism that separates.

For this reason often it is more useful not to fill the mind with ideas, but to empty it of all of them—making us ignorant of the world to be wise in the way of Christ.

Often the less we have of worldly knowledge, the more our soul is filled with the knowledge of Heaven. It is by emptying ourselves of preconceived ideas, of what is apparently known through our intellectuality, that finally something new can be brought to it. And something new does arise, which comes from a knowing that is beyond the world, and which has the power to bring Heaven to Earth.