Quote for the Week of February 20th, 2011

To the extent to which you value guilt, to that extent will you perceive a world in which attack is justified. To the extent to which you recognize that guilt is meaningless, to that extent you will perceive attack cannot be justified. This is in accord with perception's fundamental law: You see what you believe is there, and you believe it there because you want it there. Perception has no other law than this. The rest but stems from this, to hold it up and offer it support. This is perception's form, adapted to this world, of God's more basic law; that love creates itself, and nothing but itself.

ACIM Chapter 25,III,1

Perception is key to how we experience, and perception rests on our beliefs, which in turn rest on our will to have things be as we desire.  “This is in accord with perception’s fundamental law: You see what you believe is there, and you believe it there because you want it there.”  This statement gives us a glimpse of the immensity of our mental power and will.  Because we want a certain experience, we project that experience outside ourselves, and conveniently forget we did this.  Then, we employ our senses to see our projection as we wanted to perceive it.  The senses are only verifying our original projection, but because of our forgetfulness we accept their messages as proof that what we perceive is “real” and so we experience what we wanted as something that is happening to us, as opposed to through us.  

In this complicated mental gymnastics, the culprit or enemy is our desire to have things not as they are (created by God) but as we want them to be.  As aptly stated in the Bhagavad-Gita:  “It is desire, it is anger, born of rajo-guna, all consuming and most evil.  Know this to be the enemy here on earth.”    So what is this all-consuming desire that motivates us to “want” what God created not?  It is the guilt we feel in response to taking seriously the mad idea that we can somehow be separate from God.  

That this mad idea came into our awareness is only a small part of the problem, the major part is our forgetting to laugh at such a preposterous and obviously untenable idea, for how could there be anything separate from the One that is All-That-Is.  But having entertained this idea, the next mad idea occurred, that God would be angry or at least displeased with us for attacking His creation, which is what considering this mad idea amounts to.  This second mad idea is as preposterous as the first, because the all powerful Creator certainly knows His own creation, and knowledge implies awareness of all the possible thoughts and actions of His creation, so how could He be angry at what He knows He created.  But even if God could be angry at us, who is part of His creation and therefore part of Himself, why would He every punish us, for that would mean He punishes Himself, which would make no sense at all.  

But we did not stop to consider the insanity of our first two mad steps.  Instead, fearing revenge and punishment, we sort for a hiding place—yet another mad idea, for where could we hide from One who is omnipresent?  The answer is of course nowhere, except in fantasy.   For what cannot be real in waking is easily imagined and made real in dreams.  And so the holy son of God fell asleep and dreamed the dream of a make-believe world where he can hide in safety from the imagined wrath of God, for even God Himself is barred entry to this fantasy world.  Here we, the holy unified children of God, dwell in dreams of separation from ourselves and from God, in dreams of unreality that we perceive and experience as "real."  

But while God or Truth or Eternity cannot enter illusions and time, God also cannot abandon His children even while they dream.  Knowing His children sleep, God keeps a part of our minds safe from illusions, established in His eternity, peacefully and at one with Him.  While we, His one creation, has the freedom to choose between reality and illusions, He keeps a part of our mind holy—literally filled with His Holy Spirit—unaffected by our dreaming so that when we are ready, we can choose to turn away from illusions and awaken to our true identity.  With the invaluable help of the Holy Spirit, our way out of this fantasy is guaranteed, and forgiveness is the means.  

Forgiveness for all our perceptions, for everyone and everything we perceive, not for what our perceptions did or didn’t do, but because we realize or will realize finally that NOTHING happened that needs forgiveness.  It is just a dream we made up and convinced a part of our mind that it was real, motivated by our fear and judgment.  This realization is our awakening, our way out of the dream and our glorious return to reality and to God.

*  Chapter 3.26-27:  This is Lord Krishna’s answer in response to Arjuna’s question “What is it that impels a man to commit sin, even involuntarily, as if driven by force, O Varshneya?”

Quote of the Week of February 13th 2011

There can be no order of difficulty in healing merely because all sickness is illusion. Is it harder to dispel the belief of the insane in a larger hallucination as opposed to a smaller one? Will he agree more quickly to the unreality of a louder voice he hears than to that of a softer one? Will he dismiss more easily a whispered demand to kill than a shout? And do the number of pitchforks the devils he sees carrying affect their credibility in his perception? His mind has categorized them all as real, and so they are all real to him. When he realizes they are all illusions they will disappear. And so it is with healing. The properties of illusions which seem to make them different are really irrelevant, for their properties are as illusory as they are.

Manual for Teachers, 8,5

Our belief in orders of difficulty is what causes us to perceive the illusory world of differences.  Truth like God is unchanging and therefore stable and constant, whereas illusions can only exist where there is instability, differences, and change, and therefore they exist nowhere in God’s creation since God’s creation is all that exist.  Truth gives rise to knowledge, while illusions give rise to perception, which implies a lack or loss of knowledge.  The fact that we do percieve illusions must mean that we are either not in God’s creation, asleep in God’s creation, or in God’s creation but not in our “right” mind, i.e. insane.  Since we obviously do exist, we must be in God’s creation, for there is no other place we can be, so we must either be asleep or insane.  I posit that these states are essentially the same.  

Those asleep have two important things in common with the insane: they both believe in the illusions they perceive, and the purpose behind their use of illusions is identical—they both desire to have Truth be false, and false be True.  The asleep and the insane, like tempetious children, want to have their way, have the world bend to their desires.  They wish to remake creation in their own image, to change God’s creation into their own.  This causes them to feel a deep sense of guilt, which in turn leads to fear of retribution, which in turn leads to the need to escape.  And where would one hide form the Creator of all creation?  

The only place where God and Truth cannot enter is the world of illusions, the nowhere that holds nothing, and exist only in the imagination of those asleep or insane.  In this nowhere place we hide from the imagined wrath of God, and here create our insane dream world in a dream-time and dream-space.  Motivated by our need to escape we created our insane dream world based on orders of difficulty, differences and contrasts as opposed to God’s world of oneness.  In our illusiory world we use our senses to validate and verify the “reality” of our world to our split or ego-minds through perception.  If we did not believe in orders of difficulty, we would have no need for perception, for knowledge would surfice.  But here in our created world of insane dreams, a world based not on truth, but on perception, our senses report to our ego-mind the differnces in what they perceive, which only further convince us that our belief in orders of difficulty is true. 

Our sense, for example, report that a button certainly appears bigger and more complex than a castle, so our ego-mind concludes that it takes more resources, time, and energy to create the castle.  This is typically the way we validate our believe in the concept of orders of difficulty.  The same kind of thinking is applied to healing, for we perceive cancer as much more difficult to heal than a common cold.  And this is the point of this week’s quote, that they are all illusions, the cancer and the cold, the castle and the button, all are part of our insane dream world illusion, in which one form of unreality is equal to any other form of unreality, appearances notwithstanding.  

In the world of Truth—in God’s creation where all is one, and outside of which there is nothing, illusions disappear like darkness in the presence of light, and truth alone remains.  Here orders of difficulty do not exist; it is just as easy to heal a cold as it is to heal a cancer; it is just as easy to create a button as it is to create a castle, for here knowledge rules, not perception.  Here oneness prevades differences, which are known only as superfical transformations of the one universal underlying truth—LOVE.  And it is here in God’s world that the son of God slumbers, believing himself to be in his insane dream world of orders of difficulty, differences and contrasts.  And it is from this dream world he will awaken when he comes to know his Father as he really is and remembers his identity and oneness with Him.   

And when he remembers his true identity here in his dream world, the son of God will realize he has no need to fear retrebution, for his Father is Love itself.  With fear gone, guilt soon follows and now the holy guiltless son of God having no more need to “hide” in illusions from his Farther, steeps away form all illusions and awakens to find himself in Heaven, resting safely and peacefully in God’s loving arms, which he never left.

Quote of the Week of February 6th 2011

Quote of the Week  
Do you not want to know your own Identity?  Would you not happily exchange your doubts for certainty?  Would you not willingly be free of misery, and learn again of joy?  Your holy relationship offers all this to you.  As it was given you, so will be its effects.  And as its holy purpose was not made by you, the means by which its happy end is yours is also not of you.  Rejoice in what is yours but for the asking, and think not that you need make either means or end.  All this is given you who would but see your brother sinless.  All this is given, waiting only your desire but to receive it.  Vision is freely given to those who ask to see.

ACIM Chapter 20,VIII,2

The resounding answer to the three questions asked in the quote is Yes!  And it is wonderfully assuring to know that all this is mine but for the asking and the willingness to see my brother as sinless.  The question now becomes how easy or difficult is it to see my brother as sinless?  Certainly there are times when it is easy to see each other as sinless, as when we are feeling happy, but at other times, especially when we have judged someone’s behavior to be inappropriate or ‘bad’, it is significantly more difficult and occasionally inconceivable to see them as sinless.  So how can we accomplish this?  

 

The solution is quite simple, but its simplicity does not lessen the one-hundred and eighty-degree shocking change that it brings to our perception and understanding of things.  The solution is simply to realize that nothing really happened!  I’ll say it again, so that your intellect can begin to recover from the shock of having the rug pulled out from under you:  all the things that we believe happened, never actually happened!  And again:  nothing that anybody ever did was actually done, even though we did experience it as having been done, it never really happened!  I did warn you that it would be shocking, ya!  

 

Ok so now let’s put the rug back under you, with some explanation.  Nothing that we think happened ever really happen simply because it is all part of our dream!  Yes, and here’s another shocker, you and I and God are all one.  You and I, a permanent part of the totality that is God are asleep having a dream that we are somehow separate from God, the “All-That-Is.”  In this dream we’re having, we imagine ourselves to be weak, frail and in constant fear of loosing whatever meager possessions or short lived pleasures we own or enjoy to other humans, or to other forces far superior in strength to us.  In this crazy dream we live for a short time, and just as all worldly joys fade, so too do we fade away and die, leaving all that we acquired for others to quarrel over and divide amongst themselves for a little while, before they too follow us into the Great Unknown.  Certainly, some would argue that there are great joys, learning's, and accomplishments that make worldly life worth while, but I ask again, what good is such a prize when it is guaranteed to be ripped from the cold hands of a corpse?  

 

Be glad instead that this world is all a dream, a nightmare from which we are beginning to awake.  Rejoice in the knowledge that God’s love for us never entertains the setting of suffering as the criterion or prerequisite for joy, learning, or accomplishment.  And rejoice further that God, like any benevolent and loving parent,  instead protects His creations from all suffering and clears their path of any and all possible danger, so that their happiness, joys, learning, and accomplishments grow in a garden of increasingly positive and blissful experiences.  Such would be the intentions of any benevolent parent, so we must conclude that these worldly experiences cannot be real even thought they seem to be, and therefore we must conclude that we are caught in a dream.  By realizing that the world is a clever illusion we crated, to convince ourselves that we are not who we really are, we can begin to see and believe the truth, that our brother is as sinless as we are, for nothing really happened, and we could say:  "What happens in the dream stays in the dream!"  Now vision comes to us; now we know our true identity; now we have certainty; now we are free of misery and have lasting joy!

Peace, Edmond