Musings: Only the Mind is Real
Musings: “Your way will be different!”
“Your way will be different. … A holy relationship is a means of saving time. One instant spent together with your brother restores the universe to both of you.”
A holy relationship! This is the means A Course in Miracles has given us for returning to the home we never really left, that quiet center of rest where we need do nothing.
Have you paid close attention to Jesus’ instructions for saving time and saving the world while saving ourselves by waking up together? Here is the pearl worth any price, the keys to the kingdom, the goose that lays golden eggs, and the fountain of youth, and more.
If you have overlooked the possibilities I feel compelled to present them in a way that I hope will gain your interest, open your mind, and have you come away with a whole new appreciation for your brother and the opportunity he is giving you and you him, to awaken together. There is no sacrifice in this, although you may be thinking it.
I want to help you to understand, feel and appreciate what a relationship is honestly for so that you can recognize the holiness of all relationships, without exception. I guarantee you it has nothing to do with what the ego plans for your relationships.
Some of this may be very difficult to hear because the sense of being a separate individual is threatened. When you truly join with your brother there will be no awareness of the body. It is left behind. That is called a holy instant and that is where a holy relationship resides. It is not here, in a body, in a world, although you will still appear to be here.
The ego cannot imagine you without a body. It is specialness that has you hold on to the body as if it is you. Wanting to remain separate is what the ego wants. It is terrified of Oneness, which is of the mind, because it is the ego’s demise.
The ego, individuality, and specialness are limits that you have placed on love. You chose to do that and you will eventually choose to turn away from those limitations when you understand the cost.
Those costs will be pointed out to you here. What you don’t like or don’t want to hear will tell you who is reading, listening, and perceiving these words. The ego wants and promotes separate interests. It wants everything on its terms. It doesn’t want change. Notice when it arises. It is very useful information.
I am hopeful that I can illuminate the holy relationship so that you will find it desirable rather than something to run from. Perhaps it will be helpful to think whole when you read holy instead of conjuring up images of halos and doe-eyed faces.
Holiness (wholeness) is not something that can be possessed so the ego has a problem with it. The ego exists by possession of others to fulfill its needs and wants. Without others it can not exist. The ego is not going to like this.
You on the other hand will love it! Now I am talking to your right mind that wants something different than what the ego wants. You may not know what it is, but you know what it is not. It is not possession, bargaining, manipulation, control. It is not doubt, fear, and guilt.
You want another way and you are willing to become a learner of that way. You are the chooser, not a body with a brain. The chooser resides between the right mind and the wrong mind; the part of the mind that chooses holiness and the part of the mind that chooses the body. It’s up to you.
The Lie
We are all living a lie here. Our very existence as separate bodies with a life and will of our own is a lie, and we re-enact this lie with “others” on a daily basis. It is here in our special relationships that we will heal the cosmic lie of being separate from our Creator, Oneness, Love and Eternal Life.
Why do we stay with the lie of our separateness and the few special relationships that seem to give us some comfort? It is to protect the ego’s thought system of separation. The ego asserts separation is real, I am real, and don’t you forget it!
The purpose of our special (and not holy) relationships is to keep us mindless, fixated in the lie. There is a “me” and there is a “you” and let us take our comfort here in separation and never look for another way. It’s a strange sort of comfort, but it keeps our belief in individuality safe.
For more on what is the holy relationship: click here
Musings: What’s Valuable?
“Nothing is so easy to recognize as truth.”
Regardless of what state I am in right now there is a river of peace underneath all of it.
It goes with me wherever I go, in spite of everything going on in my ordinary life. It is not subject to any of it. It cannot be harmed or hurt. It cannot die; it was never born. It is eternal. It is what is looking through these eyes right now. It is what hears the sound of the night and it is the sounds themselves. It is what writes these words.
It is so very close to me that I am not apart from it. It is what I am.
It is arrogance, not humility, that won’t accept what I am. It is arrogance that asserts I am something else—worried, anxious, fearful—when it has tasted what can only be recognized as real. It is arrogance that thinks it can make itself some way other than the way it is.
It is what I am apart from anything I might call myself: sick, a failure, powerless. It is not affected by any of the disappointments I have endured or any of the awful things I have ever done.
It is what (not who) I am prior to any role that I have played: mother, teacher, wife, lover, liberal, woman, artist, friend, writer.
Why haven’t I noticed it as more than just a passing state before? Why haven’t I noticed that it is always there? Why haven’t we all?
Might it be that I have not paid it the slightest bit of attention and so it went unnoticed. Yet this alone is worthy of my full attention.
“Nothing is so easy to recognize as truth.” T. 137
This that I am goes on while shopping, doing the dishes, writing, sleeping, going for walks, being with friends. Sometimes I get caught up in a dream and I lose contact for a while. I start to feel out of sorts before long as a reminder that my attention has wandered from what is truly valuable because it brings me peace.
I can’t outrun it, hide from it, overcome it, rise above it, get around it, or go below it. It is with me wherever I go, whatever I do. Even when I forget it is there waiting for me to return.
This that I am has no weight and no dimension. It has no past and no future. It doesn’t have problems and it isn’t afraid. It doesn’t have moods. It doesn’t suffer. It has no need to plan. It does what needs to be done when the time comes to do it. It thinks when necessary and then it is still. It enjoys everything and resists nothing.
When A Course in Miracles came into my life many years ago it made some things very clear to me: that I was miserable; why I was miserable; and how I could leave misery behind.
The change didn’t happen overnight (in fact it continues to deepen). My misery had become very familiar. Who or what would I be without it? The emptiness was frightening each time I saw through some painful story I was telling myself and let it go. Would something come to fill the space that opened up when fear didn’t occupy every corner of my mind?
I waited impatiently, and then one day I waited patiently, with the certainty that something–I knew not what– would come to me. I didn’t care any longer how long I needed to wait. It was certain. And it did. It is never ending.
We suffer. But it doesn’t need to be that way. It is a choice. We can learn to make a different one that points us straight to what we are. It is there waiting for us to recognize, to bow down to in ourselves; in everyone.
It is possible that the only real desire I have left is help others come home to the Self they never left but only forgot for a while. It is the only thing that interests me when I meet someone or am with my family or friends and they have not yet turned to the constant source of joy within. I find myself silently saying turn, turn. It is so easy once you see it.
There is a point where you know “a happy outcome to all things is sure.”
Do you know it? Would you like to?
Musings: It Never Happened
“As long as there is a ‘you’ doing or not doing, thinking or not-thinking, meditating or not meditating, you are no closer to home than the day you were born.”
There is whole-hearted joy without an opposite and peace that is completely still. There is no other explanation other than something was removed because what is recognized is already here; it could not have been something added. It’s closer than the body. Palpable.
Feel oneness everywhere… here, now. There is no one left to worry.
I realize that this sounds like the ravings on a bottle of Dr. Bronner’s. That’s why folks don’t talk about this much. We sound like blithering idiots.
Time has stopped……….
There is only what’s happenin’ now. And what’s happenin’ now is perfect. My point of view has shifted. It is above the battleground that we call life.
From here nothing needs to be fixed or changed. The battleground is a dream. Seen from above it is clear that we can neither hurt or be hurt. That’s forgiveness. Hurt only happens in dreams of madness.
We don’t forgive. That’s not how it works. We drop our self concept of victim and victimizer and there we are above the battleground. The world is forgiven. It is so simple it is hard to believe. The whole thing is healed in an instant. Gone.
What we thought occurred has not. There is no world to be in. No one did anything to anyone. It was guilt, projected from the mind that thought it could get rid of a bad thought in the mind by projecting it.
What happened in the mind? A tiny mad idea of separation that was corrected the instant it occurred.Nothing happened. It had no effect except in the mind that thought it and then believed it. We are innocent of making a world of suffering.
We are caught in a time/space dream that is over.
Come and wake up!
Wake up!
Musings: A Little Willingness
“Salvation is easy just because it asks nothing you cannot give right now.” – A Course in Miracles, Text, page 382
It is of enormous relief to know—finally, and with certainty—what our only function is. We should be looking one another in the eye and winking the “we’ve got a secret” look of lovers in love.
The secret is that we have the key to our happiness in our very hands. It is nowhere else.
The key to happiness is forgiveness. It is the simplest thing you will ever learn because it requires nothing of us that we cannot give right now. How do you like them apples? Do I have your attention, or did you turn away again? From the bottom of my heart I hope not, because this is the “pearl worth any price.”
The key is in your hand: guaranteed!!!! Think mind when you read hand. Hopefully you will learn here and now how to turn it: also in your mind. Learning requires that you be right-minded as opposed to wrong-minded.
Wrong-mindedness fears change. It fixates on what it thinks it knows. It thinks happiness is getting what we want. It thinks a whole lot of things are real, all of which turn out to be illusions.
Right-mindedness is willing to question what it thinks it knows, including where happiness comes from. It is willing to learn another way of seeing. It is willing to turn away from all assumptions of what reality is and walk the razor’s edge where our true education can begin.
The choice is yours. You have the willingness; it has already been given you. Don’t let fear hold you back. Give it to the One Who gave you willingness instead. Daily, a thousand times a day, you make this choice.
In order to learn from the teacher of forgiveness who knows the way to happiness, you must resign as your own teacher. This is signified by the little willingness. This is the only way that you can ever be happy.
“If you listen to the wrong voice, you have lost sight of your soul.” – A Course in Miracles
There is a silent voice in you that will show you the way. Every second that you do not plan is an instant made available to the one who can give you your function. Your function is your happiness. To learn that your function and your happiness are the same is the simplest thing you will ever do. Any effort that you make will interfere. The following prayer from The Little Willingness, shows us how small our part is.
“I who am host to God am worthy of Him.
He Who established His dwelling place in me created it as
He would have it be.
It is not needful that I make it ready for Him, but only
that I do not interfere with His plan to restore to me
my own awareness of my readiness, which is eternal.
I need add nothing to His plan.
But to receive it, I must be willing not to substitute my
Own in place of it.”
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