🔎 Introduction
✨ In this profound teaching, Master Woo Myung explains the deeper spiritual meaning of the phrase, “Take up your cross and follow me everyday.”
The cross, once an instrument of death, symbolizes something far greater — the daily death of the individual self. 🌿 True life does not come from preserving one’s ego, but from completely denying and discarding it.
According to this insight, the one who fears dying cannot truly live, but the one who fully dies to the false self is reborn as Truth itself.
ORIGINAL WRITING BY MASTER WOO MYUNG
‘Take Up Your Cross and Follow Me Everyday’; He Who Does Not Fear Dying Shall Live but He Who Wants to Live Shall Die
The cross was once an implement of death. So for us to ‘take up the cross everyday’ means for us to die everyday. It means that he who truly denies himself and eliminates his individual self will be born again as Truth and live. But he who wants to live is a person who still has his self — his own demon. Therefore, he will die because he has no life in him.
Many people, while in the process of eliminating their selves, are defeated by their own delusions and are thus unable to continue throwing their selves away. Such people eventually die. But he who has completely thrown away his self is reborn as the living God inside him and receives new life. He who truly dies will live, but he who wants to live — he who maintains his individual self — will die.
– Woo Myung
🌿 Reflect at Santa Clara Meditation
At Santa Clara Meditation, practitioners are guided to understand that true rebirth comes only through complete self-denial. 🌠
To “take up the cross” is not symbolic suffering, but the daily practice of discarding the false individual mind.
Only when the self fully dies can one be reborn as Truth, as living life itself.
This is the paradox of spiritual life:
- He who clings to himself loses life.
- He who completely lets go is born into eternal life.
