A Course In Miracles, Lesson 297 states "Forgiveness is the only gift I give." In one of my early posts I offered a blessing. This blessing contains the gifts of God - Love, Life, Light, Peace, Joy, Truth, Power, Strength, Free, Safe, Open, and Holy.
The gifts God gives are given to His Creation. I, the part of me, that believes I'm separate cannot offer these gifts because I see myself as separate from Creation. However, I don't have to offer them because God has already given them to everyone and everything.
What I can offer is forgiveness because that is a function of the separate part of me. I forgive the world and I forgive myself.
Forgiveness used to mean to me that I had to prostrate myself on front of another separate entity and beg them to forgive me for my transgressions. Or, I had to confess my sins to a priest and beg him to give me Atonement. This usually meant doing penance that involved pain and suffering.
Atonement means becoming one with God's Creation. Now all I have to do to forgive is to see everyone and everything as one with me. When I judge I enforce my belief in separation. When I see the world as evil I am damming myself to remain outside Creation.
Damming and damning are pronounced the same way, and funnily enough convey a similar outcome. Build a dam and block the flow of water, damn and block the flow of Love.
Tom Jones used to sing a song "Please forgive me, let me go..." And that's all forgiveness means - let all our judgments of each other go. Forgive and forget - if we really have forgiven we have forgotten.
The part of us that believes we are separate is really an illusion which will disappear like a puff of smoke when we accept that we are as God created us.
Heaven is here, there is no other place.
Heaven is now, there is no other time.
Welcome to Heaven, welcome home.
Showing posts with label heaven. Show all posts
Showing posts with label heaven. Show all posts
10 July 2012
Sadness Sounds 5 August 2011 exLJ
On Wednesday night I posted two very sad songs to Facebook. Sean Curran asked the question. "What's up with all the sadness?" My response was "Just something I get into every so often when I need to remind myself where I am." That was the quick response. I have been thinking about it a bit.
Then Tantra Maat posted the Choir of the Crickets that slowed down cricket sound and made it sound like a human choir. I said this to "Zarkia" and she told me about a slowed down version of the theme from Jurassic Park.
So what is it with certain sounds and our emotions? Sound directly affects our heart. The Institute of Noetic Science and Heart Math have shown that there is a brain in our heart that is directly connected to the brain in our heads. And under certain conditions the heart-brain overrides the head-brain.
And then I started to read A Course in Miracles, Lesson 182. "I will be still an instant and go home.
"This world you seem to live in is not home to you. And somewhere in your mind you know that this is true. A memory of home keeps haunting you... a persistent feeling, sometimes not more than a tiny throb, at other times hardly remembered, actively dismissed, but surely to return to mind again...
...some try to put by their suffering in games they play to occupy their time, and keep their sadness from them. Others will deny that they are sad, and do not recognize their tears at all. Still others will maintain that what we speak of is illusion, not to be considered more than but a dream. Yet who, in simple honesty, without defensiveness and self-deception, would deny he understands the words we speak?"
It goes on to speak about a Child within my mind. A Child that knows what home is, not my family home or the place I was born, but Heaven.
I realise now that the sadness comes from this feeling deep in my mind of missing Heaven, of missing the innocence of the Child by striving so hard to be a "man of the world".
And all I have to do to recover my peace is to be still an instant.
In fact, many instants throughout the day.
Then Tantra Maat posted the Choir of the Crickets that slowed down cricket sound and made it sound like a human choir. I said this to "Zarkia" and she told me about a slowed down version of the theme from Jurassic Park.
So what is it with certain sounds and our emotions? Sound directly affects our heart. The Institute of Noetic Science and Heart Math have shown that there is a brain in our heart that is directly connected to the brain in our heads. And under certain conditions the heart-brain overrides the head-brain.
And then I started to read A Course in Miracles, Lesson 182. "I will be still an instant and go home.
"This world you seem to live in is not home to you. And somewhere in your mind you know that this is true. A memory of home keeps haunting you... a persistent feeling, sometimes not more than a tiny throb, at other times hardly remembered, actively dismissed, but surely to return to mind again...
...some try to put by their suffering in games they play to occupy their time, and keep their sadness from them. Others will deny that they are sad, and do not recognize their tears at all. Still others will maintain that what we speak of is illusion, not to be considered more than but a dream. Yet who, in simple honesty, without defensiveness and self-deception, would deny he understands the words we speak?"
It goes on to speak about a Child within my mind. A Child that knows what home is, not my family home or the place I was born, but Heaven.
I realise now that the sadness comes from this feeling deep in my mind of missing Heaven, of missing the innocence of the Child by striving so hard to be a "man of the world".
And all I have to do to recover my peace is to be still an instant.
In fact, many instants throughout the day.
12 March 2012
David Narby - Chapter 9 - Simple Truth
As I arrived in GF, Clivid attacked me, saying, “Hix is gone! You made her do it...”
I was shocked and wasn’t listening to him anymore. Had Hix committed suicide? I looked around at the others and none of them looked too happy.
I asked, “What happened?”
Will answered, “Hix left you a letter and asked us not to answer any of your questions until you had read it.”
He handed me the letter and I wondered if it contained a suicide note. The envelope was addressed simply as ‘To David, please read aloud at your next Thursday session’. As I opened it my hands were shaking. The letter was a few pages long. I began to get my hopes up, suicide notes are usually only a paragraph long. The handwriting was beautiful, nothing like I would have expected.
Dear David,
Thank you very much for what you have done for me. You have opened my eyes to a different way of thinking and given me a new perspective on the world.
I asked Clivid not to attack you after I was gone but he kept saying that you were an ‘asob’ and that this was all your fault.
I asked, “What’s an asob?
Clivid answered angrily, “You’re an Arrogant Son Of a Bitch.”
Don’t worry about what Clivid tells you. He’s seeing this as a tragedy. He uses that expression a lot especially for anyone he thinks is more intelligent than him. I can see why he thinks you are arrogant, though, I used to think the same. Now, I realise that you are always so certain of what you speak about that it comes across as arrogance. It’s just your style.
Over the last while I have been talking quite a bit with Will, Smigs and Darukin. I asked them not to talk to you about our conversations and not to bring it up at any of your Thursday sessions. When Smigs talked about our history going back hundreds of thousands of years I wondered if I really knew anything and began to doubt what I had learned in school.
But, I suppose, I really have to thank Clivid. As you are aware Clivid regards himself as a Born Again Christian and is fond of barking biblical quotations at people. I challenged him once to show me where these were written down. He was very loath to show me. Eventually, after much badgering, he showed me a battered copy of The Catechism. Believe it or not, he actually allowed me to look through it. He explained that there used to be a Penny Catechism that is not published anymore. The lessons from the penny one were marked with an asterisk in the one he had.
When I got to Lesson Six I stopped. I began to use it to counter all of Clivid’s proclamations.
I asked, “What is Lesson Six?”
Clivid answered, “Lesson Six: God is everywhere. God is in Heaven.”
Clivid continued, “I should never have let her see that. She was never the same again. I could not get a rise our of her. Whenever I attacked her, she would just smile and say ‘Lesson Six’. Sometimes she would draw an outline of a 6 in the air or hold up six fingers. All I got from her was 6, 6, 6!”
I found this the best lesson I had ever learned. When Clivid tried to convince me that I was evil, I would just smile at him and say ‘Lesson Six’. He used to get so annoyed. However, I began to wonder, if this was the simple truth, why was there a need for all the other stuff in the catechism. I also began to question everything that I had ever learned.
Smigs and Darukin were invaluable in helping me understand our history, how our thought system developed and how it has been manipulated. Even though I’m still not sure if I want to believe it, their explanation of the event on which all Christian religions is based really upended me.
I looked at Smigs and Darukin. They shrugged their shoulders and Smigs said, “Keep reading, we agreed with Hix that we would only discuss this when you had finished reading the letter.”
Before that, though, let me emphasise why I found Lesson Six so great. It’s the greatest counter-argument to all our ideas of separation, to all our egos’ mad schemes, to everything we see going on in the world. The logic of it is overwhelming.
Yeshua Ben Yosef was the name of the man that we would call Jesus Christ. And when we use that name we think it is a first name and a surname. It’s not, Jesus is the man who became the Christ. Yeshua was the first man to fully realise that he was as God created him, that he was God’s Son, the Christ.
God is everywhere. God created Christ. Christ is everywhere. In the words of St. Patrick the mystic,
“Christ with me, Christ before me,
Christ behind me, Christ in me,
Christ beneath me, Christ above me,
Christ on my right, Christ on my left,
Christ when I lie down,
Christ when I sit down,
Christ when I arise,
Christ in the heart of every man who thinks of me,
Christ in the mouth of everyone who speaks of me,
Christ in every eye that sees me,
Christ in every ear that hears me.”
St. Patrick is not talking about Christ as a body, he’s talking about a state of mind. And this state of mind is accessible to us all.
What I had believed was that Jesus Christ ascended into Heaven forty days after his resurrection. Smigs assured me that this idea was borrowed from the Egyptians. In fact, he asserts that most of the ideas presented to me as Christian were taken from older religions and reworked.
The way I had learned it, God created us and then abandoned us. We screwed up. Jesus Christ was crucified to redeem us. He resurrected and then abandoned us. We have to wait for his second coming before the world will be put right.
I suppose the idea of abandonment appealed to me because up until your last visit I had believed my parents had abandoned me. I have now accepted that they made a decision, a decision that I didn’t like, but, still and all, a decision they were entitled to make.
When I remind myself that “God is everywhere” I wonder why I believed that I had to die to get to meet God, even if it was only for the moment when he was sentencing me to eternal damnation.
I think this is part of a deeper conditioning. As a child the promise of a treat was used to make me be good. At school the boredom was relieved by the thoughts of the playground and going home after school. At work the drudgery was overcome by thinking what we’d get up to at the weekend.
Needless to say all this upset me. Will tried to console me by telling me that it was all just ‘broken promises’, that my parents and my teachers were doing their best and that there was no sense in blaming them or anyone else. I felt betrayed. I had invested an enormous amount of time and effort in learning all that garbage, and now I was learning that it was all lies.
I had bought into a though system that was completely wrong. The whole system rested on one totally flawed idea - we are separate, and our belief in the possibility of separation has convinced us that we are bodies.
What galled me the most was the constant harping on about us being sinners, and as such we are here to suffer. Clivid and his ilk always kept on and on about fire and damnation. Because we keep breaking the commandments and going against scripture we deserve to suffer, to roast in the eternal flames of hell.
Their selective quoting of texts from scripture did get me curious and I decided to read it for myself. Again, when I got to Matthew 20.29 I stopped. It states “God is one. Love God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength, with all your mind, and love your neighbor as yourself. This is the only commandment.”
Again I applied Lesson Six to this. God is one. God is everywhere. Then oneness is everywhere. I don’t see myself as being one with everyone and everything. I can’t see God everywhere, but I’m hardly going to start blaming God for not showing Himself to me. Then I realised that the second bit were the instructions for achieving the first.
Unfortunately, this had always been quoted to me without the last two words “as yourself”. The idea of loving yourself was selfish and frowned upon. I told myself to stop thinking about what had been said to me and concentrate on what the words said. Anyway, I don’t now and never did see any signs of people obeying the ‘love your neighbour’ bit.
“As yourself” means that I love others like I love myself. How could I? I never loved myself. I’ve always seen myself as a miserable little bitch who would be better off dead and the world would be better off if I had never been born.
Will explained to me that the purpose of our neighbours is to act as witnesses for ourselves. As we see ourselves we will look on them. If we see them as evil, then the evil is within us. We project onto them what we feel about ourselves. He also said that a Mental Asylum is maybe not the best place to look for witnesses.
The cases in here are too extreme. I feel safer in here than I do in the big bad world outside. He argued that I had become institutionalised and that the constant reminding by psychiatrists of my mental condition was not conducive to dropping that condition.
He liked to quote R.D.Laing, a psychiatrist he had worked with in Glasgow, Scotland.
“The secular psychotherapist is often in the role of the blind leading the half-blind. The fountain has not played itself out, the Flame still shines, the River still flows, the Spring still bubbles forth, the Light has not faded. But between us and It, there is a veil which is more like fifty feet of solid concrete. Deus absconditus. Or have we absconded?”
So, I have decided to leave GF, not to seek fame or fortune, but simply to be myself and to love myself. Love is an attribute of God. God is everywhere. Love is everywhere. (Yea, Clivid got fed up of me saying that all the time, too.) It is also an idea that can be shared. The more I share it the more I get.
I may be that, like Laing says, I’ve got fifty foot of concrete to break through. I’ve started chipping away at it, and I know for certain that one day I’ll make it to the other side.
Let me revisit Lesson Six one last time. God is everywhere. God is in Heaven. So Heaven must be everywhere, within us, all around us, all the time. I know, David, that it is what you are searching for, and it is my fervent hope and prayer that you get there soon.
All my Love, Helen, ‘Hix’.
PS Keep it simple, David. For life really is. Complications and complexity have been introduced to keep us in the dark and to allow experts to thrive on our ‘ignorance’. Ask Smigs for his New Testament example of this.
That was it. Why all the drama? Couldn’t they just have told me that Hix had signed herself out of GF.
Will said, “Sorry about that. Hix asked us all to play along with her little charade to see how you would react. She wanted to see if you would be concerned that she might have committed suicide”
I said, “Yes, I was concerned, but I didn’t think that Hix was the slightest bit worried about what I think or how I would react.”
Will said, “That was a mask she used to not let people get too close to her. As she said in her letter, she really was afraid of being abandoned. Allowing her feelings to show had always led to her being hurt. She’s not over it completely yet. She left here intending to be herself and she said if other people didn’t like her that they could go and make love to themselves.”
I asked, “What did she mean by her PS at the end of the letter?”
Smigs said, “When she stopped reading the bible she asked me why there was so much scripture when the only bit that matters is so simple and so short. She said it was the same with the Catechism, everything is made complex, and complicated with concepts that contradict the simple truth.”
“Wow” I said, “That must have been a difficult question to answer.”
Smigs said, “I think that it was a rhetorical question. She wasn’t really looking for the answer. She was just annoyed that everything she had learned had all been designed to keep her ‘locked out’ of her mind. No one, until she met you, had ever questioned the reality of our thought system or the basis of our civilisation.”
I said, “What answer did you give her?”
Smigs said, “I gave her an example from the New Testament. In Matthew 20.29 Jesus Christ states a simple commandment as the only one necessary for attaining the Kingdom of God. In the Acts of the Apostles you can see this idea being subverted as the Church leaders struggle to establish their religion. In 325 AD the Synod of Nicaea formulated a creed that makes no mention of Love, a creed which they then go on to use to slaughter people who would not accept it.”
Will said, “I’m sorry lads, I’m going to have to break this up again. It’s getting late. We’ll have to pursue this some other time.”
I was shocked and wasn’t listening to him anymore. Had Hix committed suicide? I looked around at the others and none of them looked too happy.
I asked, “What happened?”
Will answered, “Hix left you a letter and asked us not to answer any of your questions until you had read it.”
He handed me the letter and I wondered if it contained a suicide note. The envelope was addressed simply as ‘To David, please read aloud at your next Thursday session’. As I opened it my hands were shaking. The letter was a few pages long. I began to get my hopes up, suicide notes are usually only a paragraph long. The handwriting was beautiful, nothing like I would have expected.
Dear David,
Thank you very much for what you have done for me. You have opened my eyes to a different way of thinking and given me a new perspective on the world.
I asked Clivid not to attack you after I was gone but he kept saying that you were an ‘asob’ and that this was all your fault.
I asked, “What’s an asob?
Clivid answered angrily, “You’re an Arrogant Son Of a Bitch.”
Don’t worry about what Clivid tells you. He’s seeing this as a tragedy. He uses that expression a lot especially for anyone he thinks is more intelligent than him. I can see why he thinks you are arrogant, though, I used to think the same. Now, I realise that you are always so certain of what you speak about that it comes across as arrogance. It’s just your style.
Over the last while I have been talking quite a bit with Will, Smigs and Darukin. I asked them not to talk to you about our conversations and not to bring it up at any of your Thursday sessions. When Smigs talked about our history going back hundreds of thousands of years I wondered if I really knew anything and began to doubt what I had learned in school.
But, I suppose, I really have to thank Clivid. As you are aware Clivid regards himself as a Born Again Christian and is fond of barking biblical quotations at people. I challenged him once to show me where these were written down. He was very loath to show me. Eventually, after much badgering, he showed me a battered copy of The Catechism. Believe it or not, he actually allowed me to look through it. He explained that there used to be a Penny Catechism that is not published anymore. The lessons from the penny one were marked with an asterisk in the one he had.
When I got to Lesson Six I stopped. I began to use it to counter all of Clivid’s proclamations.
I asked, “What is Lesson Six?”
Clivid answered, “Lesson Six: God is everywhere. God is in Heaven.”
Clivid continued, “I should never have let her see that. She was never the same again. I could not get a rise our of her. Whenever I attacked her, she would just smile and say ‘Lesson Six’. Sometimes she would draw an outline of a 6 in the air or hold up six fingers. All I got from her was 6, 6, 6!”
I found this the best lesson I had ever learned. When Clivid tried to convince me that I was evil, I would just smile at him and say ‘Lesson Six’. He used to get so annoyed. However, I began to wonder, if this was the simple truth, why was there a need for all the other stuff in the catechism. I also began to question everything that I had ever learned.
Smigs and Darukin were invaluable in helping me understand our history, how our thought system developed and how it has been manipulated. Even though I’m still not sure if I want to believe it, their explanation of the event on which all Christian religions is based really upended me.
I looked at Smigs and Darukin. They shrugged their shoulders and Smigs said, “Keep reading, we agreed with Hix that we would only discuss this when you had finished reading the letter.”
Before that, though, let me emphasise why I found Lesson Six so great. It’s the greatest counter-argument to all our ideas of separation, to all our egos’ mad schemes, to everything we see going on in the world. The logic of it is overwhelming.
Yeshua Ben Yosef was the name of the man that we would call Jesus Christ. And when we use that name we think it is a first name and a surname. It’s not, Jesus is the man who became the Christ. Yeshua was the first man to fully realise that he was as God created him, that he was God’s Son, the Christ.
God is everywhere. God created Christ. Christ is everywhere. In the words of St. Patrick the mystic,
“Christ with me, Christ before me,
Christ behind me, Christ in me,
Christ beneath me, Christ above me,
Christ on my right, Christ on my left,
Christ when I lie down,
Christ when I sit down,
Christ when I arise,
Christ in the heart of every man who thinks of me,
Christ in the mouth of everyone who speaks of me,
Christ in every eye that sees me,
Christ in every ear that hears me.”
St. Patrick is not talking about Christ as a body, he’s talking about a state of mind. And this state of mind is accessible to us all.
What I had believed was that Jesus Christ ascended into Heaven forty days after his resurrection. Smigs assured me that this idea was borrowed from the Egyptians. In fact, he asserts that most of the ideas presented to me as Christian were taken from older religions and reworked.
The way I had learned it, God created us and then abandoned us. We screwed up. Jesus Christ was crucified to redeem us. He resurrected and then abandoned us. We have to wait for his second coming before the world will be put right.
I suppose the idea of abandonment appealed to me because up until your last visit I had believed my parents had abandoned me. I have now accepted that they made a decision, a decision that I didn’t like, but, still and all, a decision they were entitled to make.
When I remind myself that “God is everywhere” I wonder why I believed that I had to die to get to meet God, even if it was only for the moment when he was sentencing me to eternal damnation.
I think this is part of a deeper conditioning. As a child the promise of a treat was used to make me be good. At school the boredom was relieved by the thoughts of the playground and going home after school. At work the drudgery was overcome by thinking what we’d get up to at the weekend.
Needless to say all this upset me. Will tried to console me by telling me that it was all just ‘broken promises’, that my parents and my teachers were doing their best and that there was no sense in blaming them or anyone else. I felt betrayed. I had invested an enormous amount of time and effort in learning all that garbage, and now I was learning that it was all lies.
I had bought into a though system that was completely wrong. The whole system rested on one totally flawed idea - we are separate, and our belief in the possibility of separation has convinced us that we are bodies.
What galled me the most was the constant harping on about us being sinners, and as such we are here to suffer. Clivid and his ilk always kept on and on about fire and damnation. Because we keep breaking the commandments and going against scripture we deserve to suffer, to roast in the eternal flames of hell.
Their selective quoting of texts from scripture did get me curious and I decided to read it for myself. Again, when I got to Matthew 20.29 I stopped. It states “God is one. Love God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength, with all your mind, and love your neighbor as yourself. This is the only commandment.”
Again I applied Lesson Six to this. God is one. God is everywhere. Then oneness is everywhere. I don’t see myself as being one with everyone and everything. I can’t see God everywhere, but I’m hardly going to start blaming God for not showing Himself to me. Then I realised that the second bit were the instructions for achieving the first.
Unfortunately, this had always been quoted to me without the last two words “as yourself”. The idea of loving yourself was selfish and frowned upon. I told myself to stop thinking about what had been said to me and concentrate on what the words said. Anyway, I don’t now and never did see any signs of people obeying the ‘love your neighbour’ bit.
“As yourself” means that I love others like I love myself. How could I? I never loved myself. I’ve always seen myself as a miserable little bitch who would be better off dead and the world would be better off if I had never been born.
Will explained to me that the purpose of our neighbours is to act as witnesses for ourselves. As we see ourselves we will look on them. If we see them as evil, then the evil is within us. We project onto them what we feel about ourselves. He also said that a Mental Asylum is maybe not the best place to look for witnesses.
The cases in here are too extreme. I feel safer in here than I do in the big bad world outside. He argued that I had become institutionalised and that the constant reminding by psychiatrists of my mental condition was not conducive to dropping that condition.
He liked to quote R.D.Laing, a psychiatrist he had worked with in Glasgow, Scotland.
“The secular psychotherapist is often in the role of the blind leading the half-blind. The fountain has not played itself out, the Flame still shines, the River still flows, the Spring still bubbles forth, the Light has not faded. But between us and It, there is a veil which is more like fifty feet of solid concrete. Deus absconditus. Or have we absconded?”
So, I have decided to leave GF, not to seek fame or fortune, but simply to be myself and to love myself. Love is an attribute of God. God is everywhere. Love is everywhere. (Yea, Clivid got fed up of me saying that all the time, too.) It is also an idea that can be shared. The more I share it the more I get.
I may be that, like Laing says, I’ve got fifty foot of concrete to break through. I’ve started chipping away at it, and I know for certain that one day I’ll make it to the other side.
Let me revisit Lesson Six one last time. God is everywhere. God is in Heaven. So Heaven must be everywhere, within us, all around us, all the time. I know, David, that it is what you are searching for, and it is my fervent hope and prayer that you get there soon.
All my Love, Helen, ‘Hix’.
PS Keep it simple, David. For life really is. Complications and complexity have been introduced to keep us in the dark and to allow experts to thrive on our ‘ignorance’. Ask Smigs for his New Testament example of this.
That was it. Why all the drama? Couldn’t they just have told me that Hix had signed herself out of GF.
Will said, “Sorry about that. Hix asked us all to play along with her little charade to see how you would react. She wanted to see if you would be concerned that she might have committed suicide”
I said, “Yes, I was concerned, but I didn’t think that Hix was the slightest bit worried about what I think or how I would react.”
Will said, “That was a mask she used to not let people get too close to her. As she said in her letter, she really was afraid of being abandoned. Allowing her feelings to show had always led to her being hurt. She’s not over it completely yet. She left here intending to be herself and she said if other people didn’t like her that they could go and make love to themselves.”
I asked, “What did she mean by her PS at the end of the letter?”
Smigs said, “When she stopped reading the bible she asked me why there was so much scripture when the only bit that matters is so simple and so short. She said it was the same with the Catechism, everything is made complex, and complicated with concepts that contradict the simple truth.”
“Wow” I said, “That must have been a difficult question to answer.”
Smigs said, “I think that it was a rhetorical question. She wasn’t really looking for the answer. She was just annoyed that everything she had learned had all been designed to keep her ‘locked out’ of her mind. No one, until she met you, had ever questioned the reality of our thought system or the basis of our civilisation.”
I said, “What answer did you give her?”
Smigs said, “I gave her an example from the New Testament. In Matthew 20.29 Jesus Christ states a simple commandment as the only one necessary for attaining the Kingdom of God. In the Acts of the Apostles you can see this idea being subverted as the Church leaders struggle to establish their religion. In 325 AD the Synod of Nicaea formulated a creed that makes no mention of Love, a creed which they then go on to use to slaughter people who would not accept it.”
Will said, “I’m sorry lads, I’m going to have to break this up again. It’s getting late. We’ll have to pursue this some other time.”
23 June 2011
Peace of Mind Healing 1. World View
I've always liked riddles and in my teens was introduced to the Zen variety when an older brother asked me to figure out, "What is the difference between a duck?". The latest one I've come across is "The last one out opens the door!" They don't make sense at first look, and they are not supposed to. They are geared at making us think. You can try and figure the first one out for yourself. I'll give you my understanding of the second one.
We are all in this together. We all believe that we are separate from each other. As long as anyone continues to believe in separation then we are all kept separate. Even though I believe that we are all one, and you may believe that we are all one, we still have to wait for the last person to give up their belief in separation. So, the last one out of separation opens the door to all of us becoming one again.
There are many ways of looking at the world. We can see it as a hell on earth. We can see it as a large biosphere floating through space. We can see it as totally neutral. We can even look at it as a school. Singer songwriter Paul Brady may have got it right when he sang, "The world is what you make it, baby."
The idea that the world is a school leads to the common belief that we will always be learning. That we are here to learn our lessons, and if we don't learn them all in this life, then we will come back again and again until we do. This is not necessarily true. If we could live our lives in complete peace and happiness, then our learning would be over and we'd have no need of school anymore.
We are all making decisions all the time. Some of us are aware of this and are conscious decision makers, others go along with the flow and allow others to make our decisions for us. But, allowing someone else to make them for us is also a decision.
When we believe everything that the Media tells us we are allowing them to determine the way we look at the world. We are handing over our power to decide for ourselves to them, even though they may not have our best interests at heart. The view of the world that is portrayed is very bleak and that of the future is even bleaker.
Whatever the future may hold there is one thing for certain, the way we look at the world will end whenever we decide to change our thinking about what it is and, most importantly, what we are. For most of my life I believed that I was a body, limited to its range of perception. I now know that we have an infinite range of perception and the only thing limiting me is my thinking.
When we were in school the teacher always asked the questions and was always looking for the right answer. This makes us believe that there is only one right answer to any question, and once we get the answer we stop looking for any other. Fortunately (and sometimes unfortunately) for me, I did not go along with this and began to look for answers other than the orthodox ones.
This has led me on a merry dance of research and exploration for the past fifty years. In retrospect it has all been to do with our minds, how they work and how we get deluded about ourselves. In 1996, I started working with "A Course in Miracles" (ACIM) and it has been the biggest influence in my life, mainly because it gave me a thought system that made sense of all the others. I have been studying it for the last fifteen years and am currently on my second go round of the lessons. The reason it has taken me so long is that I am loyal and stubborn and had great difficulty letting some of my crazy belief's go.
We are all teachers. We teach what we have learned. We are always sending messages to those around us. At a body based level these messages take the form of words and gestures. Our body language tells people what we are thinking much more reliably than what we are saying, and most of the time we are not aware of, or in control of it.
We are all searching for something. We seek new things. We become attached to our possessions. Take a look around at all the things you have got. This is your investment. We are very reluctant to give it up. Don't worry, I'm not going to ask you to leave them all behind. We have a much bigger investment in our thought system. This we have been investing in since we were one month old. And this one is nearly impossible to let go. But ask yourself what is the return on your investment?
Back in the 60's McGregor and others proposed a management theory called Theory X Theory Y that proposed two different views of people at work. This was based on Maslow's hierarchy of needs.
In Theory X, people are assumed to be inherently lazy, dislike work and will avoid it if they can. As a result of this, we have to be closely supervised and comprehensive systems of controls developed. A hierarchical structure is needed with narrow span of control at each and every level.
In Theory Y, people are assumed to be ambitious, self-motivated and exercise self-control. We enjoy our mental and physical work duties and regard work as natural as play. We possess the ability for creative problem solving, we seek out and accept responsibility and exercise self-control and self-direction in achieving goals to which we are committed.
During training, managers were asked which theory they would like applied to them, most went with Theory Y. When asked which theory they applied in their work-place, most went with Theory X. I fully embraced Theory Y and used it in all my management roles. The thing that amazed me most was how difficult it was to convince the people working for me to adapt Theory Y. It was like Theory X was ingrained in them.
At the time I was working in a very specialised area and was very insular in my views. I though that a management theory applied only at work. As the years rolled on, I began to take a more generalised view and realised that Theory X Theory Y applied to the world. But nobody used these terms and anytime I brought them up in casual conversation, people looked at me as if I had two heads. So now instead of talking Theory X I say "fear" and instead of Theory Y I say "Love". (I've capitalised Love, which is general, to differentiate it from the special state we refer to as 'in love')
It is apparently simplistic to think of everyone in the world living their lives based either on fear or on Love. But it depends on how we look at it. They are mutually exclusive, we cannot be in both states at the same time. If we are in Love we cannot be in fear. If we are in fear we cannot be in Love. We can switch from one to the other and I'm proposing that we spend more and more time in Love and less and less in fear.
In "A Course in Miracles" lessons 128-132 define three mind states: a world based on fear, a world based on Love, and Heaven. The fear and Love states we can talk about, but Heaven can only be experienced. Heaven can be hinted at and we can even get instructions on how to achieve it, but, ultimately each of us finds it in our own way.
In the lessons the first two states are described as 'this world' and 'the world beyond'. And to have any chance of gaining the Heaven experience we have to move out of 'this world' and start embracing 'the world beyond'.
Beyond fear, there is Love.
Beyond darkness, there is Light.
Beyond death, there is Life.
Beyond conflict, there is Peace.
Beyond misery, there is Joy.
Beyond illusion, there is Truth.
Beyond control, there is Power.
Beyond weakness, there is Strength.
Beyond danger, we are Safe,
Beyond slavery, we are Free.
Beyond bounds, we are Open.
Beyond evil, we are Holy.
Exercise: World View
What is your view of the world? What do you see happening in the world? What do you think is going on?
Notes:
1. Media refers to any form of communication other than personal experience, and includes television, newspapers, internet and gossip.
2. This blog could be filled with links to sites that I have found useful. I prefer to let you make your own choices. If you don't understand a word or an idea, enter it in your search engine and then decide which sites you want to look at.
We are all in this together. We all believe that we are separate from each other. As long as anyone continues to believe in separation then we are all kept separate. Even though I believe that we are all one, and you may believe that we are all one, we still have to wait for the last person to give up their belief in separation. So, the last one out of separation opens the door to all of us becoming one again.
There are many ways of looking at the world. We can see it as a hell on earth. We can see it as a large biosphere floating through space. We can see it as totally neutral. We can even look at it as a school. Singer songwriter Paul Brady may have got it right when he sang, "The world is what you make it, baby."
The idea that the world is a school leads to the common belief that we will always be learning. That we are here to learn our lessons, and if we don't learn them all in this life, then we will come back again and again until we do. This is not necessarily true. If we could live our lives in complete peace and happiness, then our learning would be over and we'd have no need of school anymore.
We are all making decisions all the time. Some of us are aware of this and are conscious decision makers, others go along with the flow and allow others to make our decisions for us. But, allowing someone else to make them for us is also a decision.
When we believe everything that the Media tells us we are allowing them to determine the way we look at the world. We are handing over our power to decide for ourselves to them, even though they may not have our best interests at heart. The view of the world that is portrayed is very bleak and that of the future is even bleaker.
Whatever the future may hold there is one thing for certain, the way we look at the world will end whenever we decide to change our thinking about what it is and, most importantly, what we are. For most of my life I believed that I was a body, limited to its range of perception. I now know that we have an infinite range of perception and the only thing limiting me is my thinking.
When we were in school the teacher always asked the questions and was always looking for the right answer. This makes us believe that there is only one right answer to any question, and once we get the answer we stop looking for any other. Fortunately (and sometimes unfortunately) for me, I did not go along with this and began to look for answers other than the orthodox ones.
This has led me on a merry dance of research and exploration for the past fifty years. In retrospect it has all been to do with our minds, how they work and how we get deluded about ourselves. In 1996, I started working with "A Course in Miracles" (ACIM) and it has been the biggest influence in my life, mainly because it gave me a thought system that made sense of all the others. I have been studying it for the last fifteen years and am currently on my second go round of the lessons. The reason it has taken me so long is that I am loyal and stubborn and had great difficulty letting some of my crazy belief's go.
We are all teachers. We teach what we have learned. We are always sending messages to those around us. At a body based level these messages take the form of words and gestures. Our body language tells people what we are thinking much more reliably than what we are saying, and most of the time we are not aware of, or in control of it.
We are all searching for something. We seek new things. We become attached to our possessions. Take a look around at all the things you have got. This is your investment. We are very reluctant to give it up. Don't worry, I'm not going to ask you to leave them all behind. We have a much bigger investment in our thought system. This we have been investing in since we were one month old. And this one is nearly impossible to let go. But ask yourself what is the return on your investment?
Back in the 60's McGregor and others proposed a management theory called Theory X Theory Y that proposed two different views of people at work. This was based on Maslow's hierarchy of needs.
In Theory X, people are assumed to be inherently lazy, dislike work and will avoid it if they can. As a result of this, we have to be closely supervised and comprehensive systems of controls developed. A hierarchical structure is needed with narrow span of control at each and every level.
In Theory Y, people are assumed to be ambitious, self-motivated and exercise self-control. We enjoy our mental and physical work duties and regard work as natural as play. We possess the ability for creative problem solving, we seek out and accept responsibility and exercise self-control and self-direction in achieving goals to which we are committed.
During training, managers were asked which theory they would like applied to them, most went with Theory Y. When asked which theory they applied in their work-place, most went with Theory X. I fully embraced Theory Y and used it in all my management roles. The thing that amazed me most was how difficult it was to convince the people working for me to adapt Theory Y. It was like Theory X was ingrained in them.
At the time I was working in a very specialised area and was very insular in my views. I though that a management theory applied only at work. As the years rolled on, I began to take a more generalised view and realised that Theory X Theory Y applied to the world. But nobody used these terms and anytime I brought them up in casual conversation, people looked at me as if I had two heads. So now instead of talking Theory X I say "fear" and instead of Theory Y I say "Love". (I've capitalised Love, which is general, to differentiate it from the special state we refer to as 'in love')
It is apparently simplistic to think of everyone in the world living their lives based either on fear or on Love. But it depends on how we look at it. They are mutually exclusive, we cannot be in both states at the same time. If we are in Love we cannot be in fear. If we are in fear we cannot be in Love. We can switch from one to the other and I'm proposing that we spend more and more time in Love and less and less in fear.
In "A Course in Miracles" lessons 128-132 define three mind states: a world based on fear, a world based on Love, and Heaven. The fear and Love states we can talk about, but Heaven can only be experienced. Heaven can be hinted at and we can even get instructions on how to achieve it, but, ultimately each of us finds it in our own way.
In the lessons the first two states are described as 'this world' and 'the world beyond'. And to have any chance of gaining the Heaven experience we have to move out of 'this world' and start embracing 'the world beyond'.
Beyond fear, there is Love.
Beyond darkness, there is Light.
Beyond death, there is Life.
Beyond conflict, there is Peace.
Beyond misery, there is Joy.
Beyond illusion, there is Truth.
Beyond control, there is Power.
Beyond weakness, there is Strength.
Beyond danger, we are Safe,
Beyond slavery, we are Free.
Beyond bounds, we are Open.
Beyond evil, we are Holy.
Exercise: World View
What is your view of the world? What do you see happening in the world? What do you think is going on?
Notes:
1. Media refers to any form of communication other than personal experience, and includes television, newspapers, internet and gossip.
2. This blog could be filled with links to sites that I have found useful. I prefer to let you make your own choices. If you don't understand a word or an idea, enter it in your search engine and then decide which sites you want to look at.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)