Musings: Save Yourself, Bless the World
“Let Him teach you what you need to learn to lay all fear aside, and know your Self as love, which has no opposite in you.”
Please consider this today. There is a Presence that surrounds you, which is your Self. It is constantly informing you of your True Nature which is love without opposite. The environment in which it resides is a state of grace.
When you are absorbed in your body self, consumed with fear, conflict and self interest you cut off the possibility of harmonizing with this Loving Presence which would make your day purposeful and effortless.
Private (what about me?) thoughts of worry, anxiety, lack, inadequacy, and so on, must be brought to the light of this Presence so they can be shined away and you can return to alignment with the Self that you are. This is your responsibility now. This is your salvation and the salvation of the world.
Forgive your personal insanity and the insanity of the world so that this Presence can transform your thoughts and actions in this moment bringing peace to you and to the tired and aching world. This is your part in The Great Awakening that is occurring in all humanity now.
This strength is yours to feel and to give. It is your joy. Your part is essential now.
Musings: Only the Mind is Real
“Only the mind is real because only the mind can be shared.” (T-6. V.A. 3:2-3).
The body is neutral. Think of it as a mindless puppet and you are the one who pulls the strings. The puppet only responds to the decisions of the mind. The body has no thoughts, feelings or experiences of its own. It does what its master tells it to do. It is a symbol of what the mind dreams we are—a separated individual with a will of our own.
“The body is the symbol of what you think you are. It is clearly a separation device, and therefore does not exist.” (T-6.V.A.2:2-3).
If you want to try to prove that you are a body—that you are right and God is wrong, that separation is reality and perfect oneness is a lie—then you (the one pulling the strings) will want to make it seem that the body has power of its own and it can tell you who you are and how you feel. What better way to do that than for the mind to direct the body to feel pleasure and pain? This is all part of the ego’s plan to keep you mindless. Now it seems like life is in the body and not in the mind of the one pulling the strings.
“The body neither lives nor dies, because it cannot contain you who are life.” (T.6.V.A.1:4).
The real question you should ask yourself is what rules the mind? Who is it that is pulling the strings of the puppet? Is it the ego that wants separation, individuality, and specialness to be reality? If it is then the body/puppet must be made to appear to be alive because it seems to prove that separation is real. Under the ego’s direction the puppet will attack (judge) other puppets, and feel pleasure and pain. It will be different from others of its kind. This is the ego’s world, based in the tiny mad idea of separation, ruled by separate interests, all coming from the mind.
There is another way but you first must get back to the mind and recover your power as a decision making mind. You are the chooser of what rules your mind and therefore what directs the body. If you like being a person in a dream in a world of separate interests then you are probably not going to want to do this.
The shift from the body to the mind is what transformation is all about. It requires willingness to abandon the ego as your teacher in order to learn from a teacher who is outside the dream. In A Course in Miracles that teacher is Jesus, because he is a symbol of perfect, ego-less, love. You could use any other symbol that works for you.
It is impossible for you to make this transformation from fear to love, body to mind without help. All the talents, skills, abilities that you have developed over the years have been useful only for navigating the ego’s dream of separation. These same skills cannot be used to shift your identity from the body back to the mind. Again, the ego’s purpose is to keep you from ever knowing you are a decision making mind. After all, if you knew you would choose against it.
Be forewarned. When the ego gets wind of this it will become one of its two predominant moods: suspicious or vicious. It will threaten you with sacrifice and loss as it sees its days of specialness are numbered. Awakened mind, Suzanne Segal, author of Collision with the Infinite, A Life Beyond the Personal Self, expressed the fear this way:
Life in a state of freedom from the ego “bears no resemblance to the stark emptiness that fear might paint it to be. People who tell me they don’t want to give up the personal because they believe they would be giving up love or joy or deep feeling don’t understand that the personal never existed. Nothing is given up. Love that appears to be personal is based on an ego-constructed sense of being separate.”
At no one instant does the body exist at all. It is always past or future. In this very instant it can’t be found. Life is now and is in the mind. Hurry home.
A question to ponder: Why would it matter how long the body lives?
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?
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