My Self is ruler of the universe

Quote of the Week

My Self is ruler of the universe:   It is impossible that anything should come to me unbidden by myself.  Even in this world, it is I who rule my destiny.  What happens is what I desire.  What does not occur is what I do not want to happen.  This must I accept.  For thus am I led past this world to my creations, children of my will, in Heaven where my holy Self abides with them and Him Who has created me.

ACIM Lesson 253

Would that we could believe the grand vision of ourselves (our Higher Selves) as expressed in the above quote.  Not from a place of egotistic arrogance, but as the normal, natural result of our divine heritage.  Indeed it is arrogance to deny this inheritance given that it comes to us from the perfect Lord of Creation, who certainly is beyond error.  Is this not the inheritance befitting one whose identity is that of a child of God.  Could we expect any less be offered by God to His children?  Yet, even though we can agree that we are indeed children of God, we have a difficult time reconciling that grand truth with the apparent reality of our daily existence.  Where almost all our thinking addresses worldly concerns like, “Why oh why can’t I get a higher credit limit on my American Express card?”  As opposed to the thinking that acknowledges and expresses our divine inheritance as ruler of the universe.  How can we bridge the distance between these two ways of being, thinking and doing?  The obvious solution is to spend more time contemplating, embracing, and expressing the implications of what it means to be a child of God, of what it means to be ruler of the universe.  The motivation for such an endeavor need only be that it may have a profound positive effect on our understanding and experience of life.   It would indeed be a worthy endeavor, even if the universe we are ruler of is our own minds, for not many of us can truly say that we are the ruler of our own mind.  Such an accomplishment would be of great benefit to us, so let us consider the implications of the statement “My Self is ruler of the universe.”  The word ‘Self’ is capitalized implying that it is not our ego-driven individual self, that is being talked about here, but our Higher Self, that part of our being that is pure, perfect and always connected to our Creator and to all of creation.  We could think of it as our unifying right brain connection, as opposed to our familiar ego-driven, dream-making, analytical, and judgmental left brain* connection.  Our Higher Self is unified with our Creator, and therefore with everything in the universe, even with our illusory ego self.  Our Higher Self therefore knows all that could be know as to what is in our individual best interest, now and in the future, and how it impacts all of creation; it is therefore the only one rightly able to rule the universe.  Our ego-driven self is easily overwhelmed in trying to understand the implication of even one action, on us and those directly affected, and is therefore incapable of judgment simply because it does not have all the data and processing power necessary to evaluate the infinite variables involved.  Clearly then it is in our best interest to develop a close working relationship with our Higher Self, for that alone will bring maximum success to all our individual endeavors, and do so in harmony with the desires of everything else in creation.  How do we go about developing such a relationship with our Higher Self? How do we become more friendly with our Higher Self?  Easy.  Be Still!  Practice being quiet for a few minutes every day, sit comfortably with an open mind and heart, putting aside all concerns and open our awareness to the tranquil silence of our Higher Self.  Being willing to lean not onto our own understanding of things, but open, not expecting, but open to new insights, new awareness, and the deep and perfect wisdom of our closest friend, our Higher Self.

Peace, Edmond 

* See Jill Bolte Taylor's stroke of insight talk on TED and her book by the same name, for first hand information on the functioning of our left and right brain hemispheres.  Also listen to her interview with Terry Gross on NPR

Quote of the Week: March 28th, 2010

Projection makes perception. The world you see is what you gave it, nothing more than that. But though it is no more than that, it is not less. Therefore, to you it is important. It is the witness to your state of mind, the outside picture of an inward condition. As a man thinketh, so does he perceive. Therefore, seek not to change the world, but to change your mind about the world. Perception is a result and not a cause. And that is why order of difficulty in miracles is meaningless. Everything looked upon with vision is healed and holy. Nothing perceived without it means anything. And where there is no meaning, there is chaos.

ACIM Chapter 21,1

So here is the way to change what we see outside ourselves. Choose to change how we think (and therefore how we feel) about what we see. This is an internal process based upon the understanding that our inner state is the cause for our outer perception. What we perceive outside is a direct reflection of our inner state of being, and that state can be consciously and deliberately modified through our thinking. What we think and believe about the world is what we perceive in the world. The world then, is our projection, it is the 'concrete' expression of our inner state, or a mirror reflection of our mental state, and for this reason, we already have all we need to change it to our liking. No one else but us is responsible for what we see in the world, because it is our own personal projection that determines what we see in the world. This is why no two people can have an identical experience with respect to a particular person, place, object, thought, or feeling. They certainly can have similar experiences, but not identical. What to one may look like a problem to another it looks like an opportunity. So this is how we create our reality, i.e. our own personal experience of the world, we project our inner state onto the outer world. And it is this projection that drives our present moment experiences and future expectations, simply because we usually perceive and evaluate our current experiences with respect to our past experiences, and so set the stage for similar future experiences. Perception then is easily distorted, which can either be a blessing or a curse, depending on whether we enjoyed our disliked our past experiences. In either case the process for change is clear, and totally in our hands, or more correctly, in our minds: 'change your mind about the world' and the world cannot help but change.

If we change our mind about anything, then our experience of that thing must also change to match our inner state of mind. And as we perfect this technique of changing our mind, we will begin to see that we can change anything in our experience, for it is just as easy to change our mind about a cold as it is to change our mind about cancer; in the same way that it is just as easy to cash a check for $10 as it is to cash a check for a million dollars. Thus 'Everything looked upon with vision is healed and holy,' without orders of difficulty. This is what is meant by Vision. It is the ability to look clearly at our present perceptions, and if we want to change them, look past them, or more correctly, not mind what we perceive through our senses and instead imagine what we would like to see. This is vision, the act of directing our attention or focus away from what we do not want, and placing it instead only on what we do want. This is the ability to not condemn something we would like to change, and instead visualize it the way we would like it to be.

This is our God given power, our inheritance as children of God. This is the way we can heal any situation, any sickness, and anything else we would like to change, thus 'Nothing perceived without it (vision) means anything.' This does not suggest that we deny the present state of things, or pretend that they are not what we experience them to be. No! That would be disingenuous. It would be a form of Self-denial, or mood-making. We are the creators of our present perceptions, and to deny their existence would be to deny our own. We instead, acknowledge that things are the way they are, but we also and more importantly acknowledge that the most effective way to change what is, is to imagine it--often and consistently--the way we want it to be. In this way we make peace with our past and our present while we visualize or re-create the next grandest version of our future.