The Metanoia experience: Encountering the Spirit of the Divine.
The prodigal son sat in a pigsty and received a rare moment of enlightenment, and right there and then he “came to his senses.” King Nebuchadnezzar intoxicated by power was banished to live like an animal; there, he met his revolutionary spiritual decisive moment, and he acknowledged and worshipped the one and only true God.
A Metanoia moment is a moment where your spirit is simply invaded by the Spirit of the Divine, a moment when the question, “What must I do?” is unavoidable. That question rightly answered is the point of a Metanoia breakthrough, the beginning of a journey with ever opening possibilities. You are anxious beyond and not anxious below, you are anxious about tomorrow, yet you are not anxious because you know who holds tomorrow. Your sanity or insanity is determined by how you maintain a suitable balance between those resulting tensions.
On a higher level, repentance is like walking into a dark room and switching the lights on, the darkness is suddenly swallowed, and it can’t return for as long as there is light. Repentance is allowing the light of the Divine and universal mind to enter the darkness of the essence of our being and to break up the imprisoning psychological shackles of one’s past.
Essentially, “Metanoia” is allowing the Spirit of God to rain fresh waters on the parched ground of our own spirit and to allow new spiritual seed to sprout even on the hard rock of a spent volcano. In repentance, one opens up to the reality of one’s own spiritual-ness as opposed to one’s physical-ness; the two are not mutually exclusive one over the other, yet there is a transformation of the inside out. A spiritual awareness is created in the interconnectedness of being as a whole. In that awareness, the human spirit is returned to the beginning, and the disrupted relationship between one’s spirit and the Spirit of the Divine is restored. Right there, Ro 8:16 “The Spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are God’s children.”
Religion tends to separate the interdependence and connectedness of our whole being with an overemphasis of one over the other. In asceticism the emphasis is on self–denial and/or abstinence from physical indulgence, in mysticism there is a “spiritual flight” of sorts into a “Nirvana.” In the former, you “beat” the body because it denies you spiritual access, and in the latter, you “leave” the body to gain spiritual access.
In repentance one’s spirit opens up to the reality that life is one, and it is spiritual, the physical exist within the spiritual. We are as successful in separating the two, as we would be in removing light from a flame.
