Musings: Invitation to Love’s Presence
“Undoing the blocks to the awareness of love’s presence” is the curriculum of A Course in Miracles. It is a required course….undoing the blocks, that is. Only the time we take it is voluntary.
Everyone, without exception, wants to feel love’s presence informing their thoughts and actions while moving through this world of time and space. As our natural inheritance, it goes with us wherever we go.
Love is singular so there are no separate wills. The One Will for us is perfect happiness. It’s our will as well. Why should we choose to go against That Will? That’s a good question.
Perhaps we think we have a private will and would like The One Will to deliver on our terms. Bob Dylan once sang in the song, When Ya Gonna Wake Up, “Do you think that God is just an errand boy to satisfy your wandering desires?”
God gives us more than we know how to desire.
Those things we think we want are childish and self-centered. They are part of dreaming but they will not give us what we really want. God’s Will is beyond anything we can imagine.
When we begin the journey home we don’t believe that there is something more fulfilling than having our personal needs and wants met. We are familiar with the dreams and even though their pleasure is fleeting we prefer them to an unknown surprise that might awaken us from dreaming entirely.
Sharing the journey with others encourages us to give up the belief in sacrifice. Love does not demand sacrifice of any kind. Our own plans for happiness fade as we begin to feel love’s presence. I hope we can learn this together.
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: The Healing Purpose
The following was a letter to a friend who was in prison for a crime committed during one of his many bouts with addiction to cocaine. He wanted to wake up but was fixated on his particular dream.
I had known my friend for ten years and during this time he had been incarcerated four times. This time it was for ten years. Prior to this he had been incarcerated at least five times, all while on a cocaine rampage. He was released at the age of 50 having spent most of his life in prison.
Without purpose that can be applied regardless of the circumstances of his life, his situation would have been cause for desperation. My point in sharing this letter is that without purpose we are all hopelessly caught in our pitiful little dreams, be they pleasurable or painful.
Dear Friend:
This answer to your concerns about your incarceration comes from the heart. May it go to the heart, find its mark, and be helpful.
The brick and mortar prison that you find yourself in is a metaphor for the situation we all find ourselves in. The prison I am referring to is the mind that is ruled by the ego.
The ego is the thought of separation taking form. It is a prison house of our own making. Self-centered and selfish the ego sees everything in relationship to itself. The ego thinks the body is its home.
As if imprisonment were not bad enough the ego’s practice is to inflict pain or suffer pain instead of helping one another to escape. Of course I am speaking metaphorically. The escape from the prison house we have all made is accomplished only by learning that the person we think we are, that long lasting separate entity, is not what we are.
No one asleep and dreaming knows the way out of the dream he is dreaming. After all he believes it is real. He needs help.
The escape is through the mind and everyone, regardless of the circumstances of his life must come to that realization. Humans tend to make comfort, safety and security their goal and when they get them they think they have escaped the prison of separate interests. What they have attained is a pleasant form of fear.
Changing the circumstances of our life is not a change at all because it is the mind that needs to change. It is not hard to see that we take the thought system that we live by with us wherever we go. It’s all about us. To use a common analogy, changing circumstances is like shifting around the deck chairs on the Titanic. What difference will it make? The mind ruled by the ego is a sinking ship. It needs a new captain, not a change of location.
Once you have made the decision to become a happy learner from The Teacher for Truth the outcome is certain. You will escape the dream. How long the journey takes depends upon your trust in The Teacher and your willingness to bring the darkness in you to Him.
Choosing between the ego thought system of self-absorption and The Teacher’s thought system of healing is the only power the mind has. The rest of the time it’s idling, going nowhere.
Our relationships provide the opportunities for us to learn what’s in our mind. The ego’s thought system of separation goes like this:
1. The other guy is the guilty one.
2. If it weren’t for him (the other guy), my life would be peaceful and happy. (Conclusion: My anger is justified.)
3. I’m right. He’s wrong.
4. Somebody should pay, and it’s not going to be me. I’m innocent.
5. The other guy should be the one to suffer.
Behind every encounter some version of the above is always going on when the ego is ruling your mind. It only takes one person to stop playing this game. You. To do this you must have the desire to learn from a different teacher—the one that would free you and your brother together.
The Holy Spirit’s thought system, which you have chosen to learn because you are a student of A Course in Miracles, sees your brother differently. He sees
1. The other guy is innocent regardless of his behavior because he is not a body.
2. He is present in your life to help you escape from your dream of isolation.
3. There is no loss to anyone. Both parties gain.
4. Your attitude toward your brother is your attitude toward yourself.
5. You and your brother are joined in mind. Changing your mind changes all minds.
“Together or not at all” is the Holy Spirit’s mantra.
You get to choose between the ego and the Teacher of Truth. That makes you the ultimate Decision Maker. All power and glory is in your hands. It is the only freedom you have in this world.
To choose the Holy Spirit as your Teacher you must recognize when the ego is in charge, acknowledge that you no longer want it to rule your mind and ask the Holy Spirit for His Teaching instead. It’s really simple to tell which you have chosen. When you operate under the ego’s rule you don’t feel loving and happy. Simple.
Everyone you meet is your savior from isolation. By seeing our relationships in this way, every day becomes an exciting chance to remember our true undivided nature. Purpose is everything!
Everyone engaged in dreaming is trying to get rid guilt by dumping it on someone else. Refuse to blame the other guy for your misery. (The real source of your misery is your choice to be a self-centered, special, individual entity.) Ask The Teacher for help. You are not going to be able to rehabilitate yourself.
“Humility … does require that you be not content with less than greatness that comes not of you.” – A Course in Miracles, T.381.
Blessings,
Lyn
Musings: Who Is Looking?
What would you be willing to give to absolutely know, without a shadow of a doubt, that a happy outcome to all things is sure? That there is nothing to fear? That there is no need to feel loss, pain, or suffering? That there is no death? This knowledge is your inheritance. It has already been given you.
All that stands in the way of knowledge are illusions, believed to be true. The problem, as the quote from the great sage Nisargadatta points out, is solely mental—in the mind. There are no real problems.
“It is all the mind can do—
Discover the unreal as unreal.
The problem is only mental.
Abandon false ideas, that is all.
There is no need of true ideas.
There aren’t any.” –Nisargadatta Maharaj
The miracle shows you that illusions are illusions; that the false is false; that the unreal is unreal. This all you need learn to let all fear fall away.
Seeing the false as false may not sound very glamorous if your idea of awakening is that it happens to “some one”. I mean, seeing illusions as illusions! Come on! What’s fun about that?
Seeing illusions as illusions cannot be done by a body at all. That’s what’s amazing about that!
The shift from seeing through the body’s eyes to seeing through the impersonal eye of one Self is a miracle. It is a leap from physical identity to mind (not to be confused with intellect) within Mind. It requires vision and vision is a gift. A body cannot give it because the body does not possess it. Vision is given. Would you first attempt to give yourself a miracle and then ask for one?
“God is my strength. Vision is His gift.” Lesson 42
The miracle is a shift out of the body identity and into the one Mind. It is a shift in looking through a different set of eyes: not physical eyes but spiritual eyes. It is a different way of seeing. The who in who is looking is no longer personal. It is not a someone.
While the body’s eyes can only see illusions, spirit can only see what is. The body’s sensory apparatus was made exclusively to validate the existence of the illusory person.
(Note to you, the reader: I am writing about something here that can only be recognized and known. That must be understood. Perhaps, you can be set up for vision to dawn. I am not sure. So this instrument seems to be doing this, in service to that. The process goes something like this. Thoughts come. There is silence. An image comes. There is emptiness. There is a mind in service to That Mind and then there is Mind Only and Silence presides over everything. There is no lyn. She materializes when there is a story.)
Most of us think we are earnest spiritual seekers until we realize it means letting go of our stories about ourselves right up to this very one we are in right now. The story and the lyn character are the illusion, the dream of separation. That’s what we need to look at in a different way, through different eyes. We need to learn how to look at the dream from an impersonal point of perception.
You can’t have both the dream and waking up. Most want both. Your problem is that you like some parts of the dream and not other parts. A dream is a dream. Choices within the dream are meaningless because they lead no where. Dreaming or waking? That’s the only choice. Which will it be? You cannot be forced. It is the one choice you have in this world. All other choices are choices for the unreal.
“Where are dreams but in a mind asleep?” ACIM
The “undoing of what never was” (personhood, individuality, separation, specialness) is personally insulting to an ego. After all it tells us who we are, what’s important, where to go and what to do. And now it is being called into question. What’s goin on?
If you will look earnestly you will find you are frequently working and reworking the story of yourself: that self-made (synthetic) individual that you have accepted to be what you are. Over and over you piece together a story of a life in a body in order to convince yourself and others that your personhood is real….that you exist!
“Nothing that can be visualized or imagined is real.”
Prior to the undoing, relationships can’t be anything but self-serving. We use others to maintain the story about ourselves, whatever that may be. After undoing there is no “other” to love or to hate. Love is inclusive; it is not “two who have become one”. It is “not-two”, period. There never were two.
As you become happier about learning what you really are you lose interest in the dream figure and all the related stories that feed it and keep it alive. Personhood starts to dissolve, to recede, and the freedom that becomes apparent following its dissolution bring companions of joy, peace and impersonal and indiscriminate Love. The belief that it is a sacrifice to let personhood fall away is based upon the assumption that the separated self actually existed in the first place.
What happens to the dream figure, when we cease making it? It is recognized to be the empty vessel that it is. Neutral. There is nothing in it. There is no body home! We never were located in the body in the first place. The separation never occurred.
What remains is genuine stillness. Nothing is left of “me”; stillness is. Now we understand the meaning to Jesus’s directive to “Be Still and Know.” Be still from the constant assertions of making a self. When that ceases there is “no thing” separating What Is from What Is.
Note: I know this sounds like the ravings on a Dr. Bronner’s label. This is the dilemma of trying to put into words what can’t be spoken of.
“To be your self is to be no self at all.”
What of the character that continues to appear in the dream? Has it any use at all?
All gifts are given through the mind that is immersed in Mind, known as the “Christ Mind”. It has vision, the alternative to judgement and separation. Christ’s vision is a gift given to all, without exception. It reflects the indiscriminate love of our Creator. Healing, forgiveness, and blessing (they all mean the same thing) extend without any awareness of someone doing something. This is a constant outpouring of love. Meanwhile the body carries on with the details of living in the world without angst or effort.
“Nothing of lasting value can happen to someone who knows exactly what they want.” Nisargadatta
The most perfect Stradivarius violin needs a player for it to make beautiful sound. Likewise, the body instrument in the hands of The Maestro functions flawlessly. Used by the ego it will gather information for its stories. Bla, bla, bla, bla, bla.. The instrument itself is empty and filled with Silence. Its potential is fulfilled only when it is played by One Who knows what it is for and how to play it. When The Maestro plays there is a different world to see. Fear cannot be found. It is no where present.
A problem arises only when there appears to be a doer: some (separate) one who can take credit or blame. It is this that we attempt to do when we believe we have a life and a will of our own. A Course in Miracles refers to this as the authority problem.