Galatians 3:3 Meaning Are You So Foolish

There is a knowing that arrives in stillness, when the mind grows quiet and you sense the deeper life within you. That is the beginning in Spirit. But the mind soon returns and tries to seize it, to turn a living presence into a set of rules and efforts, a project to be completed.

The flesh here is the striving self that believes it can perfect itself by doing more. Yet no amount of effort takes you where only surrender can. What began as an opening cannot be finished by grasping, because presence is received in letting go, not achieved by the very striving that once obscured it.

The Spirit here is imagination, the one creative power, and the flesh is the world of outer effort your senses report back to you. To begin in the Spirit is to assume the feeling of the wish already fulfilled; to be made perfect by the flesh would be to abandon that inner conviction and hunt for the same thing through struggle in the outer world. That reversal is the foolishness. A person who has felt himself to be the man he wants to be, and then rushes about trying to earn it by action, has walked away from the very power that alone brings it forth.

What starts inwardly is finished inwardly. Imagination enters the desired image and remains there until the image hardens into fact, and no amount of outer labor can complete what was conceived within. The state a person holds becomes the state he lives from.