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

Quote of the Week January 23, 2011

Unfairness and attack are one mistake, so firmly joined that where one is perceived the other must be seen. You cannot be unfairly treated. The belief you are is but another form of the idea you are deprived by someone not yourself...

ACIM Chapter 26,X,3

This week’s quote: “You cannot be unfairly treated. The belief you are is but another form of the idea you are deprived by someone not yourself.”  is a more generic version of last week’s quoted expression that 'we are the only ones who can deprive ourselves of anything.'  Indeed it follows that if only I can deprive myself of anything, then I cannot be unfairly treated by anyone other than myself.   Thus I am the cause of the effects I perceive in how I am treated, i.e. it must be my projection, for if I perceive deprivation, it cannot come from any other source but myself. 

 

This may seem like a difficult concept to swallow, but it is something we experience every time we dream.  Every character in the dream, every plant, animal or object we perceive in our dream state is created by our own mental projections.  Nothing outside us is needed to create a dream according to our desires.  One part of the mind writes the script, casts the actors, sets the stage, the props and costumes, arranges the sequence of events and projects it all onto the screen of another part of the mind as a sequence of events in which we usually play a leading role.  In this projected play, we enact the events according to the script, with as much believability and “reality” as we accord to our waking-state experiences, because that part of our split mind that witnesses the play has conveniently forgotten that it created all this, and so experiences it as though it is reality.  

 

Now since this is our common dream experience, is it not plausible that the apparently “real” waking-state experiences are also dreams on another level of awareness?  Is it not plausible that we forget that we wrote, produced, directed, and are starring in the projected drama we call our “real” life?  But because we believe it to be real, we find it reasonable and logical to attribute the cause of certain events in our waking-state drama to other players in the drama and not to our self.   

 

But consider how differently we would behave, either in our dream or waking state, if we came to know, even faintly, that it is not really “real,” but simply our own mental projection.  Could we, knowing this, attribute cause to anyone or anything in the dream?  Certainly we could, but that would simply be an obvious act of denial.  If we had some inkling that we are having an illusory experience, would it not be wiser for us to take things more lightly, to bear patiently the events of the illusion, enjoying the contrasts, the joys and sorrows, the ups and downs, knowing that all is well since everyone and everything in the illusion is a part of myself, part of my own creation.  

 

Instead of believing everything we experience in the illusion is real, we could instead marvel at it all, knowing that when it ends, however it ends, all will still be well, for it is just a dream, with no lasting effects other than the experience of it all, just as actors in a play know that the play is unreal.  In the least, would this awareness not bring some measure of relief to “unpleasant” dream experiences and thereby prove that they are indeed dreams, for absolutely reality, unlike a dream, is unchangeable.   Such changes are called miracles, and one of the many thing that miracles do is  prove that the apparent reality of our experiences are false.  The practice of miracle mindedness is the practice of changing experiences by the power of intention or will, when we know or at least suspect the experience to be unreal.  Miracle mindedness is the culmination of accepting the truth expressed in the preface of the Course that: “Nothing real can be threatened; nothing unreal exists; herein lies the peace of God.”

Peace, Edmond

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.