Quote of the Week May 1st - 22nd, 2011

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

Quote of the Week: April 24, 2011

Although in truth the term sacrifice is altogether meaningless, it does have meaning in the world. Like all things in the world, its meaning is temporary and will ultimately fade into the nothingness from which it came when there is no more use for it.  Now its real meaning is a lesson.  Like all lessons it is an illusion, for in reality there is nothing to learn.  Yet this illusion must be replaced by a corrective device; another illusion that replaces the first, so both can finally disappear.  The first illusion, which must be displaced before another thought system can take hold, is that it is a sacrifice to give up the things of this world. What could this be but an illusion, since this world itself is nothing more than that?

ACIM Manual For Teachers, 13,1

Last week we explored the idea that the perception of separation is the perception of illusions.  This dovetails nicely into this week’s quote which provides a clearer understanding of the meaninglessness or illusory nature of sacrifice.  The idea of sacrifice is one that is highly regarded by the world, and is in fact lauded as the primary means for attaining anything of value.   It is at the foundation of our learning and education systems, our work ethic, our system of rewards and punishments, our relationships, and at the heart of our concepts about God and salvation.  It is an accepted idea that in order to attain any level of success one must pay a price by sacrificing something, usually referred to as the “price of success.”  

This idea of sacrifice is mirrored in the often quoted biblical passage "For God so loved the world, that He 'gave' (read that as ‘sacrificed’) His only begotten son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”  John 3:16.  This passage speaks about God's love for the world and for His son, implying that God created two different things and sacrificed one (His son) for the sake of the other (the world.)  This is certainly a boon for the world and the believers of the world, but it also means that God created the world without giving it everlasting life, and later corrects the situation by offering it to us if we believe in His son.  But we are His son and the whole creation is God's son-ship.  We certainly did not create ourselves, so who else but God is our Creator, and He created us in his likeness, i.e. spirit, formless and free.  Everlasting life is a given, a gift of inheritance from the Creator to His son-ship.  This passage is true only if ‘His son’ and ‘the world’ are identical, then it would read:  “For God so loved the world that He gave it to His only begotten son ... .”  God created one son and that one son is everything in creation.  We are that one creation, that one son, that son-ship, i.e., the sum of everything in creation is the son of God.  

But just because an idea is accepted does not mean that it is true, and since we are interested in truth, let us examine this accepted idea of sacrifice*.  Sacrifice means that an item of lesser value is given up in order to acquire something of greater value, and in order to make the correct choice, a proper evaluation and subsequent judgment of each is necessary.  If either item is evaluated incorrectly or incompletely, the judgment based on that evaluation will also be incorrect or incomplete, and this would lead, perhaps to inadvertently giving up the item of greater value for the item of lesser value, which indeed would be an unfortunate sacrifice.  It is ironic that the term sacrifice is associated with “loss” when what is accomplished through it is actually “gain,” indicating that our sense of value lies more with what is lost than it does with what is gained.  For instance, the idea of loosing one's soul to gain the world would be an unfortunate sacrifice, if it were possible, but the idea of loosing the world to gain one's soul would be most fortunate, and by comparison not at all a sacrifice.

Clearly there are two worlds, the world God created and the dream-world we created and typically experience as "real."  God's world is the experience of oneness and unity, whereas our world is the experience of separateness, struggle and strife.  Last week's quote talks about why we did this.  So how can we correctly evaluate our world and the world God created?  Because sacrifice is meaningless to one who has everything and is everything, it is meaningless to God.  And since we are the children of God, then it is also meaningless to us, but only if we appreciate our true value as children of God, i.e. god-children, created by God, in the image and likeness of God, and endowed with the knowledge and power of God.  Since this is not how we typically value ourselves, it meas that our sense of value is skewed, which causes a skewed or incorrect evaluation of everything.  We value the world we created over the world God created, because we forgot our knowledge of God’s world, which led to our dependence on perception, evaluation, and judgment, rather than on knowledge.  We cannot perceive God’s world, as we learned from last week’s quote because 'what is one cannot be perceived as separate', so we therefore value God’s world little because we cannot perceive it evaluate it or judge it, even though it offers us everything.  Our world by contrast offers us no lasting peace and abundant fear, yet we value it greatly just because we can perceive it, thus proving that we value perception over knowledge.  Fortunately because something is lost does not mean we do not have it, it only means that we have forgotten what we have and therefore can potentially remember it.

It does not take much to realize that the world we created even though it has its happy moments, could not have been crated by God because it is not in accordance with the abilities we attribute to God, namely omniscience, omnipotence, and omnipresence.  For one endowed with such abilities, is it not reasonable to expect a world that is at least free from suffering?  This question leads us to one of two conclusions:  either God did not created our world, or if He did, then He must not be compassionate, and values suffering and pain and strife.  This is one way of logically concluding that God indeed did not create our world, and because He did not create it, it cannot be real, and because it is not real, it has no value, and because it has no value, it therefore cannot be a sacrifice to give it up.  Once we understand that it is not a sacrifice to give up the things of this world, we are well on the way home to remembering who God is, and who we truly are.

* Sacrifice connotatively also refers to the idea of “self-sacrifice” or of “doing without something.”  Again, this idea is antithetical to God, for He is everything.

Quote of the Week: April 3-17, 2011

What is one cannot be perceived as separate, and the denial of the separation is the reinstatement of knowledge.  At the altar of God, the holy perception of God's Son becomes so enlightened that light streams into it, and the spirit of God's Son shines in the Mind of the Father and becomes one with it. Very gently does God shine upon Himself, loving the extension of Himself that is His Son.  The world has no purpose as it blends into the Purpose of God.  For the real world has slipped quietly into Heaven, where everything eternal in it has always been.  There the Redeemer and the redeemed join in perfect love of God and of each other.  Heaven is your home, and being in God it must also be in you.

ACIM Chapter 12,VI,7

‘What is one cannot be perceived as separate, ... .’  This is why we cannot “perceive” God, or Christ or the Holy Spirit. or even ourselves as we truly are, i.e. as God created us.  The whole creation is the sonship of God, and each member of the sonship is one with each other member and with the Father, but we cannot see this oneness since it is not open to perception.  What is left to perception is the illusion that we are separate from each other and from God.  To perceive separation then, is to deny that which is true and to accept that which is false or illusory.  

Because we perceive separation we perceive ourselves as having bodies, separate from each other, from our environment, and from God, and we are unable to perceive the connections that make everything one.  Perception at best can only lead us (back) to the knowledge of oneness, indeed that is its highest function, and in the presence of knowledge, perception is unnecessary.  Perception itself is only an illusion, a dream that hides reality and shows us only what we wish to see.  Perception is an illusion that we created to hide the truth about the oneness of God’s reality from ourselves.  Another way to say this is that perception is an illusion we created out of our curiosity to know what it would be like to not be in oneness with All-that-is, i.e. separate from God.  This curiosity immediately threw us into the state of deep sleep, for only in dreams can such a wish be fulfilled.  We could say that the fulfillment of this wish is our apparent banishment from the garden of Eden; our exit from the oneness of God’s reality and our birth into the dream world of separation.  The implication is that we who perceive separation must either be insane or asleep, and in either case sanity or awakening is restored by denying the illusion of separation we perceive.  This denial is our wish ticket out of the illusion and our re-awakening to God’s reality, which in truth never changed at all while we slept.  

So how does one go about denying the perceptions of the world and reestablishing the knowledge of reality and the vision of oneness?  One way is to apply the principle of oneness known as the golden rule:  “Do onto others as you would have them do onto you.”  Since in truth we and all others are indeed one, what we do to another is being done onto us.  This rule is a clear denial of the perception of separation, and an absolute denial of the ways of the world.  With the universal application of this rule, all conflicts end, and love becomes established in our perception, for then we perceive all beings in ourselves and also in God.  This is a gentle and loving awakening that requires full and conscious participation on our part and on the part of God, though His part has already been fulfilled; it is our part that is holding back the completion of our vision of oneness.  Our part is simple:  be willing!   Be willing to release our incomplete concepts and distorted understanding about what the world is, and about what God is.  

This is the willingness to not be so certain that we know all there is to know about any subject, most of all God; the willingness to acknowledge that there may be something we don’t know, the knowing of which could change everything; the willingness to ask that the answer to any “problem” be given us, and the willingness to accept the answer that is given, even if it does not fit in with our perception or understanding of what the correct answer should be; the willingness to be open to different perspectives on all things, and to see all things as shades of grey, instead of either black or white; and most of all, this is the willingness to forgive everyone and everything for what we believe they did or failed to do.  

This forgiveness comes easier to us when we are determined to trust in the wisdom and power of our Creator, and in the understanding that each of us is suffering in some way and under these circumstances we are all doing the very best we can.  The truth about each and everyone of us is that we are the holy perfect creation of the holy perfect Creator, and as such we are can never be diminished or changed in any way.  Only in our dreams can we imagine ourselves to be separate and somehow less that what God created us to be.  Within us is all we need to be anything we can ever dream to be; it must be so for that is what perfection means.  

Be willing then, O’ Holy child of God, to dream a better dream by remembering that ‘Heaven is your home, and being in God it must also be in you.'  How therefore can there be any lack in you.  If anything exists, it must exist in Heaven, and if Heaven is in you, O’ holy child of God, how could you be anything less than completely whole and perfect.  This is the truth about you and I, and the denial of all but this is the reinstatement of the knowledge of our true Self.

Quote of the Week: March 27, 2011

Death is the central dream from which all illusions stem. Is it not madness to think of life as being born, aging, losing vitality, and dying in the end? We have asked this question before, but now we need to consider it more carefully. It is the one fixed, unchangeable belief of the world that all things in it are born only to die. This is regarded as “the way of nature”, not to be raised to question, but to be accepted as the “natural” law of life. The cyclical, the changing and unsure; the undependable and the unsteady, waxing and waning in a certain way upon a certain path,—all this is taken as the Will of God. And no one asks if a benign Creator could will this.

Manual for Teachers, 27,1

At the source of all illusions is the concept of “death.”  It is an idea so ingrained into our awareness that it forms the central theme of all our thoughts, and activity.  To us it is a given, an undeniable, unavoidable, and apparently obvious fact of life:  that all things that have a beginning have an end; that the goal of life is death.   We can all agree that we do experience life as cyclical, changing and unsure, undependable and unsteady, waxing and waning, and finally ending in the dramatic transformation we call death, but what we fail to question is whether or not this concept and its experience is true, or even makes any sense.  If we agree that our lives end in death, then God, who created us in his image and likeness must also be subject to death.  But this cannot be for it directly contradicts our basic understanding of God’s nature, namely:  all powerful, all knowing, and all present, which all testify to His eternal nature.  Furthermore to believe in death is to believe that God is cruel and vengeful, as opposed to benign, benevolent and caring.  

 

Clearly there is a glaring flaw in the idea that death is the goal of life.  But let us examine this concept from our common experiential level by asking the question:  Does anything really die?  What becomes of a tree or a human being when it “dies?”  We need not consider the “Soul” in our analysis, because it is an accepted fact that it continues on after “death”, so we have only to consider the physical material parts that remain, which slowly decomposes into their component elements.  Is it not more accurate then to say that what we perceive is not a death, but simply the deconstruction and subsequent transformation of one life form into another.  This is a process that is constantly going on in and around us, which we simply call growth, or evolution.  As time passes each of us grow from being a baby, to a child, to a teen, to a young adult, to a mature adult, to a senior, with each stage arising from the previous and giving foundation to the next.  And in each of these transformations we could say that the previous stage “died” to give birth to the next stage, but instead we simply say that one stage grew into the next.  The only difference between this and the more dramatic transformation we call “death” is that in the case of humans, we don’t easily perceive or know what the next stage of transformation is.  But for another species, the caterpillar, we are able to perceive the next stage which is the creation of the butterfly, where it is clear that there is no death, only an elegant and continuous process of growth.  

 

From still another perspective, all religions state that there is something after “death,” something happy or something unhappy, but in either case “something” exists after “death,” so where O’ where death is thy fearful sting, which we seek so desperately to postpone as long as possible?  Even science which understands everything to be energy or more correctly vibrations, declares in its first law of thermodynamics that the total quantity of energy in the universe is a constant; that no energy can be created or destroyed, and that all life is simply the transformation of energy from one form to another. Clearly this fundamental belief in death has no real foundation, for it is found wanting from every perspective.  

 

Perhaps it is not so much death that we fear, but much more the aftermath of death, what religions call final judgment.  Aha that indeed would be something to be feared, but only if we believed in a vengeful and punishing God.  For those believing in a loving and compassionate God, final judgment is a welcomed homecoming; an event for celebration; a reunion; the return of the long lost prodigal son to his father; indeed, the awakening of the holy son of God.  

 

So be not saddened by the idea of death my siblings for it is but an illusion, a dream that engenders fear in those who see it not as an illusion.  The wise, however, recognize it for what it is and therefore grieve neither for the living nor the “dead,” knowing both to be illusions that arise and fall like waves on the ever stable and unmoving ocean of eternal bliss consciousness that is God.  God suffices because there is nothing else that exists but Him.  God is dependable unavoidable and inescapable for He is One, and never changes, even while appearing in all the infinite multiplicity of forms in creation.  You and I are part of that unchanging multiplicity, so we too are One with each other and One with Him.  In scientific terms, in the mathematics of infinity: One + One = One, and in the immortal words of the Upanishads:

Aham Brahmasmi (I am Brahman, the totality); 

Tat Tvam Asi (you too are that totality);

Sarvam Khalvidam Brahma (All this is Brahman, the totality).

Purnam adah purnam idam purnat purnam udachyate
purnasya purnam adaya purnam evavashishyate
(That absolute existence is full; this relative existence is full;
from that absolute fullness, this relative fullness comes out. 
Taking fullness from fullness, what remains is fullness.)

Quote of the Week: March 13th 2011

Recognize what does not matter, and if your brothers ask you for something “outrageous,” do it because it does not matter. Refuse, and your opposition establishes that it does matter to you. It is only you, therefore, who have made the request outrageous, and every request of a brother is for you. Why would you insist in denying him? For to do so is to deny yourself and impoverish both. He is asking for salvation, as you are. Poverty is of the ego, and never of God. No “outrageous” requests can be made of one who recognizes what is valuable and wants to accept nothing else. 

ACIM Chapter 12,III,4

 
The distinction between what is valuable and what is valueless is an important one.  It is easy to relinquish the invaluable when it is recognized as having no value, and easy to cherish what is valuable when it is recognized as such.  But if the distinction is not correctly made, there is a potential to treat that which has great value as though it was valueless, and to treat that which has no value as though it was valuable.   For one who knows this distinction, his path is clear and simple:  keep what is valuable and release what is valueless.  Certainly you would have no reason to deny a request of someone who asks you for that which you recognize to be valueless.  He requests it because he believes it to be of value, so if you refuse, you would be agreeing with him that his request is valuable, and so are joining him in his inability to correctly distinguish between the valuable and valueless.  Therefore:  ‘Recognize what does not matter, and if your brothers ask you for something “outrageous,” do it because it does not matter.’   

In addition, God’s law of giving and receiving which states that what is given to one is given to all, and what is received by one is received by all, is an additional reason for granting the request, outrageous though it may be for that which is valueless; for to deny it would be to deny both our brother and our self the opportunity to correctly distinguish between the valuable and the valueless.  A child that asks an adult for a toy believes it to be of value, but the adult who know it is valueless can easily begin the process of correcting the child’s value error by granting his request.  If the adult denies the request, he is then endowing the toy with even greater value in the eyes of the child who then becomes even more convinced that the toy is valuable.  The job of the adult, which is to teach the child to correctly distinguish between the valuable and the valueless, is now much more difficult because the child’s wrong conviction is greatly increased.  Furthermore, if the adult only grants the request of the child and does nothing more, he has done some little bit, but has not helped the child learn to make the distinction for himself.  With this purpose in mind, it becomes clear that both the valuable and the valueless (as requested) must be given so that the child can learn to correctly distinguish between them.   

This is how it is between us and God.  We his children, are constantly asking for that which is valueless, for we have a conviction that it is valuable.  To correct our mistake, God grants us the wisdom of His voice in the form of the Holy Spirit who knows this distinction clearly, as well as all that we desire believing it to be valuable, but which He knows is valueless.  God knows us, for He created us, and by granting our request and in addition providing the contrast of the valuable, we are now able to make a better choice.  Of God, ‘No “outrageous” requests can be made’  for He clearly knows the distinction, and so it is for us as well, when we too correctly recognize the difference.  We can just as easily substitute the words “real”  and “unreal” for valuable and valueless respectively, for both are the same.  That which is of God, like His children, are valuable, and nothing else is of value. Our value is inherent in what we are:  the Holy children of God, endowed with all the power, wisdom and glory of the Father.  When we acknowledge and accept our true identity, we too will recognize how simple it is to decide between the valuable and the valueless.

Quote of the Week: March 6th, 2011

Suppose a brother insists on having you do something you think you do not want to do. His very insistence should tell you that he believes salvation lies in it. If you insist on refusing and experience a quick response of opposition, you are believing that your salvation lies in not doing it. You, then, are making the same mistake he is, and are making his error real to both of you. Insistence means investment, and what you invest in is always related to your notion of salvation. The question is always twofold; first, what is to be saved? And second, how can it be saved? 

ACIM Chapter 12,III,2

This idea that ‘insistence means investment ’ and its corollary that ‘what you invest in is always related to your notion of salvation,’ is both startling and unfamiliar to our normal way of thinking.  It is fairly easy for us to see that insistence is a result or reflection of investment, and indeed this concept is at the basis of our laws regarding “conflicts of interest.”  We recognize that to be invested in someone or something creates a powerful bias in our perspective of anything related to that person or thing.  In other words, because we wish to protect our investment we loose our objectivity with respect to that person or thing.  The corollary that our investment is always related to our notion of salvation is less familiar to us, and it is this that the quote is bringing to our attention.  

 

Our insistence in doing or not doing a certain thing indicates where our investment lies, and our investment is a statement of our notion of salvation.  We would not invest in something unless we believe that it will bring us to a better place on some level, whether physical, mental, emotional, or spiritual, and the investment of our time, attention and resources is always in proportion to our edification.  We choose:  our friends, and acquaintances, our education and social connections; our career, political and spiritual affiliations, our neighborhood, possessions, and even our style of dress, all for our own edification.  Furthermore we are willing to fight tooth and nail, to suffer and commit insult and injury in the defense of our choices, because at a very deep level of our consciousness we believe our very salvation depends on these choices.  

 

This belief in our choices as a means to our salvation is at the root of all our conflicts.  We believe our choices are the way not simply to edify, but to deify ourselves.  We believe this because we believe we are something much less than the divine children God created us to be.  Instead, we see ourselves as: bodies, limited, weak, frail, vulnerable, sinful, and therefore desperately in need of salvation -- what a different world it would be if only we believed in our God given divinity.  In truth we need no salvation, for we are now, always was, and always will be as God created us, since we cannot change the will of God.  But we do need salvation from our belief in the ego-personality we created and the concept of “sin” which gives rise to our belief in salvation, thus giving rise to the questions of “what” is to be saved, and “how?”   It is only our minds that need salvation, for it is our mechanism of decision, and it can only be saved by the removal of conflict and the establishment of peace.  

 

The conflict is our wish to have a Truth different from the Truth God created and established within our minds.  And since Truth and illusion cannot abide in the same place, we split our minds and projected our wish, the cause of the conflict, outside our ego-personality, superimposing it on the world God created.  Our projection is an illusion that covers (without changing in anyway) the Truth God created, and this is why conflict is inherent in our experience of the world, for it is literally built on conflict, better known as duality*.  

 

Peace comes only when illusions are recognized for what they are and relinquished in exchange for Truth--the only state of lasting peace.  In the state of peace, the mad idea of “separation” from God and from our divine inheritance is simply laughed at, for in that state, we recognize clearly our true identity with God and with each other; there we recognize the law of giving and receiving in a different light:  that what we give to each other we give to ourselves, and what we receive all others receive as well.  When we see this clearly, we also recognize what is real and what is illusion, and in recognizing illusion, we also recognize that there cannot be orders of magnitude between one illusion and another, and therefore no orders of magnitude in the solution to any of them.  Regardless of how outrageous and different they may seem, illusions are unreal, have no effects, and do not matter at all.  The solution to any illusion is always the same, bring it to Truth, like darkness to light, and watch it disappear.  

 

As we relinquish our hold on illusions we begin to withdraw our projection and awaken to the real world God created; we understand that neither our illusions nor our brother’s matter, and in this awakening we can easily do whatever outrageous thing our brother asks of us, for then we recognize that his “outrageous” request like our own is simply a request for salvation, and to deny him his request would be to deny it from ourselves.  We are one, so what is given, is given to all, and received likewise.

* The Brhadaranyaka Upanishad 1,4,2 states: “Dvtiyad via bhayam bhavati”  Certainly fear is born of duality.  Duality gives rise to fear and fear is the source of all conflict.

Peace, Edmond

Quote of the Week of February 27th, 2011

Seek not outside yourself.  For it will fail, and you will weep each time an idol falls.  Heaven cannot be found where it is not, and there can be no peace excepting there.  Each idol that you worship when God calls will never answer in His place.  There is no other answer you can substitute, and find the happiness His answer brings.  Seek not outside yourself.  For all your pain comes simply from a futile search for what you want, insisting where it must be found.  What if it is not there?  Do you prefer that you be right or happy?  Be you glad that you are told where happiness abides, and seek no longer elsewhere.  You will fail.  But it is given you to know the truth, and not to seek for it outside yourself.

ACIM Chapter 29,VII,1

‘Seek not outside yourself’  is a statement of what is true about us as holy children of God.  We cannot actually seek outside ourselves because our Self is everything, so it is impossible to seek for something outside of everything.  We are everything because God, who is everything, created us like Himself and so we share His characteristics and identity as one with everything.  This does not mean that we are equal to God, for He created us but we did not create Him.  But because He created us like Himself, we too can be Father to our creations and share our oneness with them.   

A tidal wave is one with a small ripple on the ocean because they share the common characteristics of ocean-ness and wetness, but they are certainly not equal in size or power.  To say that two thing are one is to say that they share a common basis, that theey share the same characteristics and potentials, that what is possible for one is possible for the other.  But to say that they are equal is to say that they are one and the same thing, with no distinction between them.  This is also true of our relationship with God, we are one and the same, but this divine oneness makes sense only from His perspective.  From our perspective there is still the distinction that He created us.  

‘Heaven cannot be found where it is not, and there can be no peace excepting there.’  Peace of mind is what we want most, and the only place we can find peace is in Heaven, and since Heaven is within us, true and lasting peace can only be found within us.  The thing that separates our inner Self from our outer self is the body, which acts as a fence or a limitation on our one true, eternally unlimited Self.  The body is the outward expression of our insane desire and vain attempts to find peace outside of God’s kingdom.  It is impossible to separate into parts that which is everything.  Just as it is illusory to see a ripple, a current, a wave, or a whirlpool as separate or distinct from the water of which it is a part, just so it is illusory to see a body, or an ego-self as separate or distinct from the one eternally divine consciousness of which it is a part, and from which it arises, is sustained for awhile, and finally resolved back into.  

All that we want now, ever wanted, and will ever want, is here inside us, for that is where God, the source and fountainhead of all that is exists, and we too exist along with Him in our true state without the illusory limitations imposed by bodies.  So why insist like petulant children on searching outside ourselves, demanding that what we want is there, rather than where it truly is.  Choose happiness instead of righteousness and find the peace you seek where it is, inside yourSelf.  This inner searching is not only simpler and more fruitful, it is the only sure path to peace.