It takes great learning both to realize and to accept the fact that the world has nothing to give. What can the sacrifice of nothing mean? It cannot mean that you have less because of it. There is no sacrifice in the world’s terms that does not involve the body. Think a while about what the world calls sacrifice. Power, fame, money, physical pleasure; who is the “hero” to whom all these things belong? Could they mean anything except to a body? Yet a body cannot evaluate. By seeking after such things the mind associates itself with the body, obscuring its Identity and losing sight of what it really is.
ACIM Manual for Teachers 13,2
This week’s quote expands the topic of sacrifice and the meaninglessness of the world we created, as opposed to the world God created, which has been the topic for the last few weeks. Here in this week’s quote, a larger view of the concept of sacrifice emerges: “There is no sacrifice in the world’s terms that does not involve the body... . Power, fame, money, physical pleasure...” these are the things the world deems valuable and therefore these are the things we both strive to attain and are willing to sacrifice for. But clearly these things have meaning and value only to the body, and therefore only hold meaning to us because we associate ourselves with the body. But that association is the greatest sacrifice of all: we the holy children of the all-mighty God, by choosing to identify ourselves as bodies also choose to sacrifice, give up, disbelieve, ignore, or deny our true identity. A greater sacrifice has never occurred, for here we gave up the reality that we are everything for the illusion, the dream, the mere fantasy that we are bodies, separate from God and from each other, frail, temporary, and vulnerable. And we hold this body association not only as valuable, but as defensible, in spite of all the apparent and continued suffering it creates for us.
“Yet a body cannot evaluate.” Only the mind can evaluate, discriminate between two choices, and decide which is the better, the more meaningful, or more valuable. And so it must be that our mind chose to associate itself with the body because that was the best possible choice it could make. The deeper question then is why did the mind decide that it was more valuable to associate with the body than with its true identity as a child of God? What was its reason for choosing to associate with a body? The obvious answer is that the mind saw the alternative choice of its true identity as more fearful and therefore less desirable. The motive for a particular choice is always based on one of two observations: either we perceive one alternative as having or leading to more joy, advantage, etc., and so we lean towards that alternative, or we perceive one choice as having or leading to more pain, loss, etc., and so we lean away from that alternative. The quality of our choice depends of course on our ability to evaluate correctly and exercise the mental clarity to choose in our own best interest.
These are the variables in the equation of choice. Faced with a fearful alternative we will naturally lean away from that alternative, even if it may mean embracing a less desirable but less fearful alternative. We call this "choosing the lesser of two evils." ACIM states that this is the scenario that caused our minds to choose association with the body. What is the one thing that you are missing when you have everything? The answer is the experience of not having everything, or of having nothing. It is a frustrating though common experience among parents to find that regardless of how much they try to give their children the “best” and help them avoid the “worst”, that the children will in some way or another endeavor to experience something that was not given to them or something that was restricted from their experience. But wise parents know this impulse well, if not from their own childhood experiences, then surely from their experience as parents. The story of the Buddha is a classic example of this scenario. His parents tried to fulfill his every physical desire and avoid any experience of suffering, sickness and death, yet it is precisely these he choose to experience and conquer for his benefit and the benefit of the world. The story of Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden is a similar scenario, where Adam is told he can eat the fruit of every tree except the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and sure as the sun shines, he eventually chooses to eat of that one restricted tree.
The cliche that curiosity killed the cat indicates a possible outcome of curiosity, even though it is the primary motivation for gaining knowledge. In the cosmic scheme of things, God created us in his image and likeness, making us forever a part of Himself, and thereby endowing us with His power, wisdom, and presence. This experience of complete unity, with access to complete power and knowledge is almost perfect, except that we could not know what it would be like to not be in union with God. Being curious, we had a desire inquire about that state of disunity, separate and apart from God. The result of this curiosity, as is the result of any desire of God and His children, is that it became fulfilled immediately and completely, for God is omnipotent and exists not in time, but in eternity. This curiosity of ours could never be fulfilled in eternity, for there where God is, there is no change, separation, or individuation, and no concept of place and time apart from the eternal here and now. Furthermore there is no other time or place outside of God where something other or apart from God could exist, for God is omnipresent, i.e. present in the only place and time that truly exist, the eternal here, (i.e. every-w-here) and the eternal moment of now. The only way to fulfill our curiosity then, given the paradox it creates, is to create a dream place and a dream time; a dream time with the illusion of past and future, in a dream place nowhere in particular in the every-w-here! This was the solution to the paradox of having to be simultaneously in time and in eternity, and in some particular place in the omnipresent everywhere. Try fitting that on a bottle cap or t-shirt!
One other thing occurred. Because we cannot hold the world of eternity and the world of time in our awareness simultaneously, the fulfillment of this curiosity created a split in our mind. Quite literally but in simple terms, we have two minds, the left brain and the right brain, both of which function independently of each other, but with some measure of communication or information transfer between them, i.e. the left brain vaguely acknowledges the existence of the right brain, while the right brain is aware of but not too interested in the functioning of the left brain. The left brain gives us our experience of time (past, present, and future) while the right brain gives us our experience of eternity. In eternity we are asleep and in that deep sleep we temporarily loose awareness of our eternal identity, a kind of death experience, and are born into the dream of time and space, where we can experience disunity (To die, to sleep; to sleep perchance to dream*.)
This is how the great sacrifice occurred: in order to experience disunity, we had to forget the knowledge of our eternal unity with God, for to remember it would be to diminish the experience of disunity. It is probably more correct to describe this experience by saying that curiosity put the cat to sleep! :)
So here we are in our dream world, separate, but still who we really are as one with God; asleep, in eternity but awake in time, anticipating our re-awakening to eternity and to God. The knowledge and understanding of the world is the knowledge and understanding of sleep, dreams, and fantasy. Understanding our ordinary worldly life in the context of a dream life is what allows us to forgive the world and everyone and everything in it, and by so doing we gain the vision of the world as something within us, as opposed to something outside us, different from us that victimizes us. Instead we begin to view the world and everyone within it as what they truly are: the individual expressions of our one, single, unified, collective consciousness. With this vision then comes the ultimate challenge, to choose in our individual expressions to incorporate and express ourselves more and more as our single collective consciousness, as the son of God, the Christ consciousness—the individual expression of our unified collective consciousness.
*.From Shakespeare's Hamlet
