Acim Village

Mayor’s Journal, 3rd June, 2011:




The Far Shore

[In preparation for some teaching I would like to begin this September, I began this morning to write some notes to myself and these following thoughts began to flow. I share them with you here.]

There can be an exciting time when we first begin our study of this course during which we feel we are finally making some real progress toward a real goal. This can be because we feel we are making a connection with a true spiritual presence that will lead us out of our darkness. Or it can be because we are learning that we do not have to be imprisoned by the past, by our regrets and grievances. It can be because we are learning to hear a voice that tells us authoritatively to give less belief and less importance to our judgments and hatefulness. It can be because we are hearing a loving voice that reassures us that our truth is not hateful but beautiful, that gives us hope that the end of life is not death but Heaven. It can be because we hear a voice that tells us we are deserving of goodness and beauty, and undeserving of judgment and punishment. It reminds us that innocence is true and an inherent part of us.
All of this is wonderfully magical and already gives us much hope and much to look forward to.

On the other hand, it is just a beginning; the real work lies still before us, and there are many bridges to cross before we arrive at the far shore.

For there is, indeed, a far shore. Heaven is not here, it is not in the world we see before us, but in another, altogether different perception of life. We must eventually learn that the person that Jesus is talking to is not the one we think, but another, non-physical self outside the traditional home of ourselves we call our body. This is when the work gets difficult, since there are few among us who really want to leave this concept of ourselves, to learn that there is another, heretofore unseen and unsuspected life to which we belong that is our real Life.

The image we see before us in the mirror Jesus helps us to learn is an illusion, unreality. It is holding on to this image as our self that is the cause of all our pain and guilt. It is the reason that God and Love seem distant and separate; it is the reason we feel there is a war being waged in some part of our minds. While we grip tightly onto this image as our self, we battle with God for our self-definition. We cannot truly know our Selves; and while we are confused about our identity, we will feel endangered and fearful.

The answer is simple, it is beautiful, it is wonderfully kind and loving. The answer is forgiveness, to forgive what we believe we have accomplished but have not. The only problem is that we do not want it. We do not want it because we believe we know what our happiness is, and that it lies within validating these bodies as our true existence. And so we will persist in seeking to make this illusion our home, but would attenuate the fear and guilt it encompasses. Unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on our point of view, this effort cannot possibly win. We cannot separate ourselves from our Home; we cannot make unreality reality.

Ultimately, we can only learn to accept our Reality as it is. That is our only true power. And while this seems like a tragedy to a part of us, it is the soft touch of Heaven’s blessing to another, wiser part of us. A child might scream when you wake him from a nightmare and open the curtain to allow in the morning sun. We can be reassured that our dream of separation does not have to end in a scream of fear, but in the gentle falling away of an old piece of haggard and odious clothing. Our fear, guilt, sadness, hatred and anger will quietly drop away, little piece by little piece when we learn one tiny, simple, elegant lesson: this is not being done to me.

My feelings come only from my fear that separation is real. But it is not. One simple lesson, I need but forgive and this fear and upset shall disappear. I need condemn myself no longer for what was never done. For it is only my condemnation of myself that I see in all the shapes and images of this world, in all the comings and goings in my daily life. My own fears reflected back to me via the scenes of my life – that is the sum total of all that upsets and frightens me.

I need judge no longer but accept that Heaven is real and intact, and my only Home. My Brother waits for me just the other side of my insistence on my problem. I need only be wrong about this difficulty, and it shall disappear. How joyful then and how easy it is to walk this path. I need but be wrong! What could be simpler? And then in quietness and confidence I wait and accept the blessing of innocence and holiness that my Brother has kept for me these many long years. And I am set free, no longer a body but Mind outside this world, a holy memory of a wholly loving Father, His perfect Child just as He created Me.

Mayor’s Journal, 19th June, 2011:




My days were numbered, so I thought…

My days were numbered, so I thought, from first to last,
Repeating in cycles, too slow, too fast.
And in between a tired vigil,
Weary steps trod round and round,

The nightman’s watch, too dazed, too blind,

To even know that Time had passed.
My eyes cast down, how could I see?
Till there on stony steps a shadow fell – differently.
It seemed so sharp and clear, not dull and blank as were all things to me.
My gaze fixed taut on this clear sight,
A person’s shape I had never seen.
What kind of man cuts so clear a swath,
And rends dark from light so easily?
But though I tried I could not raise my eyes so long attuned
To night’s sick sad appeal.
Then as if at my unknown behest
For no words came that I recall
The shadow’s hand reached out,
And next a warmth blazed through my chest,
The finger of the hand, I saw, just one soft touch, point so gently.
I knew not next what hit my mind
Though heavy tears spread at my feet,
And a stone so long in-grown now lay there
And in its place a golden orb with one word writ,
“Released.”

The nonsense chains that bound my mind fell lightly down,
Bright colors swept grey’s tragedy away.
The nightwatch done,
I raise my eyes and find the stranger who visits me,
This blessed Brother I knew – had never known.
For while I dreamt of strange sorrows he was there,

He was there!
Now so clear, the Light that shone behind him,

Bright because it was so near – so near!
Had I seen? No, not at all.
Yet just as sharp, now my own shade,
For there behind me a bright sun gleamed,
No more shouldered by a weak, ill pall.

Now we two joined as one host,
Heralds of a life renewed,
Heralds of a world reborn,
In purest robes seek our friends still lost,
And I reach out, as once someone had for me.
I touch him lightly, so as not to scare him,
His aching eyes meet mine – I smile.
Come here, my friend, forgive, and be released,
Forgive, I ask, and be at peace.
Come Home…
Come Home and live with Me

(Photo credit: aksinya meditative photography)

Mayor’s Journal, 24th June, 2011:




Oh, that bad old ego!

I was talking with a Course friend the other day (okay, the inner kind), and the subject of wanting to ‘get rid of the ego’ came up again. Perhaps you know that feeling? I feel it when I sense fear in me, or some frustration, or some guilt about having neglected something, and then I think if only I could get rid of that troublesome part of me that manufactures all that, I could live much more peacefully here. How about you? Haven’t you thought that life would be more peaceful here if you could just get rid of fear and guilt?

First let me give a brief overview of some of the particularly interesting things that came up in this conversation. One of these was the lack of gray ground between the ego and the Holy Spirit, between our small self and our completely abstract Self outside of the body, time and space. There is no plane of existence that has aspects of both – no kind of place suspended between hell and heaven. Doesn’t exist. It’s always one or the other. The other thing was that wanting to lead a more peaceful life without my ego was also part of the problem. I would not be able to lead a more peaceful life as ‘me’, as the individual I had always been in the past. Calling into question fear, frustration and guilt is ultimately going to call into question the self that feels these things. That self is part of the unhappiness equation. The ‘self’ cannot feeling like a self, and not feel these negative sensations. The real answer lies entirely elsewhere. Darn it.

But on to this special conversation…

The first thought that came up was the most relieving of all: We don’t have to get rid of our ego! That was excellent news! In fact, we plain and simply can’t get rid of it, and that’s really not the goal, either. It can only be incredibly frustrating trying to make a goal out of something that is truly impossible. The only reason anyone would have for trying to get rid of the ego is that he has first judged it as something quite real to be reckoned with, and then as something terribly bad. And only the ego is capable of judging and thinking like that. In fact, to put it more plainly and simply, trying to get rid of the ego is the best sign that we are still squarely within the ego. So what are we supposed to do?

Forgiveness … merely looks, and waits, and judges not. (WII.1.4:3).

The Course teaches us that what we do with our ego is just observe it. We just look at it, but this is a special kind of looking. We observe it and learn to be less and less surprised at its desolation, and learn to judge it less and less. “…above all, be not afraid of it. ” Eventually we arrive at the point where we can observe it fully in all its evil intentions and ways, and not lose that calm center of grace and understanding. Not be upset by it, not run back to fear and guilt, and certainly not judge it. Then our new vision, guided now by the Holy Spirit, will show us something truly remarkable: the ego is not bad – it is nothing.

The ego is nothing – completely insignificant. This is precisely the information that it cannot bear to hear. This is precisely why we rarely do what the Holy Spirit within us would have us do. In fact, we will do everything possible to avoid this one clear point of understanding. We will even use the Course to try to get rid of our ego, or at least to clean it up to the point that it is not so bad, or not as bad as other’s egos! This is just our pure silliness. The ego’s intentions are purely selfish and totally carnivorous, but it, itself, is nothing. It is only our belief in this self and its needs that makes it real at all.

The ego is the ego is the ego. We will never be rid of it, period. We will all carry the viciousness and wickedness of the ego with us to the very end. But when we practice that special quiet, detached looking, from outside that miserable self, then things start to change. Over time we will be less and less surprised by it, less and less convinced by it, and we will judge it no more at all. We will just observe it, with a kind, humorous, friendly and understanding observation. But it will still be there. Only at the very end will we have observed it and forgiven ourselves to the point that it will be just the faintest blot on the horizon, a miniscule dot on our perfectly clear mind.

So, let’s do ourselves an immense favor – let’s stop trying to get rid of our ego! This does not mean that we indulge the ego, of course. Just that we do not take an active position against it in our minds when we see its behavior and thoughts coming forward again. We do not oppose it, or resist it. We accept that it is there because we understand that our minds are still split and scared of Love.

By practicing this way, we step out of the wrong mind, instead of trying to get rid of it, drawn forward by the promise of kindness and innocence offered to us by the Love in our right minds. We do not destroy or negate the wrong mind. We just leave it. We look back on it, and observe its activity from a slight distance. Of course, this unfortunately means leaving the importance of everything that lives within and through the wrong mind.

Again, this is why we find this so difficult. Everything that lives within the wrong mind is everything I think I am. It would be like leaving home, the home of all my issues, difficulties and problems. The home of my past, my relationships, my history, and my particular traits and talents. None of all this is really as pleasant as I convince myself it is, of course, but for now it feels really familiar. At least it feels like ‘something’. And it doesn’t really care if I think it’s the “home of evil, darkness and sin”. It still feels like home.

In fact, the ego loves to think that it’s bad and wicked. As Ken said in a workshop I listened to recently, the ego loves to join us in a crusade against the ‘bad old ego’. A bad ego is a good ego. Because at least it’s a bad SOMETHING. And its being bad makes that something even more important. It must be important if we judge it as evil. We only do that with important things, after all.

But maybe we think some aspects of ourselves are not really so bad. In fact, maybe we have some really pretty good sides to us. We might even think that if only we could bring forth those good aspects and leave all those nasty little bad aspects out of the picture, we’ll have made some good progress. We might even be halfway Home. But, alas, the self we are looking for is not even this nice one cleaned of its rottenness. Not even a nice ‘me’ is really going to make a big difference. We’re not really looking for a ‘me’ at all, nice or nasty.

We must now learn to ask to be more willing to simply leave all this effort to the side in order to gain that sweet inner place of comfort and peace where the truth of our real Self is held, just slightly removed from that tiny messed up self. Just the smallest distance away, and yet a world apart.

Wouldn’t that be so much easier than trying to get rid of the bad old ego, battling it, striving to eradicate it? Ahh… We can just breathe a little easier now. It’s really no big shakes to still have some ego. No big shakes. We just need to be willing to see that we’re not the ego, nor even the body-mind we have always thought ourselves to be. We’re something else entirely, utterly different.

So maybe we can stop trying to be good Course students. A good Course student is one who knows that he still contains the ego thought system 100 percent; a good Course student knows he is not an exception to this rule. He does not even want to be an exception – because this would be the wish to exclude his brother, and he knows he no longer wants to do that.

Let’s all be the same now, the same as every brother. Let’s all contain the ego 100 percent, and let’s all contain the holiness and exquisite sanctity of the Holy Spirit, 100 percent. That’s what a split mind is all about. That’s where we are still. And that’s really okay. In fact, that’s absolutely perfect.

(Photo credit: aksinya meditative photography)

Mayor’s Journal, 29th June, 2011:




Poem: The Sword Too Heavy, or The Haggard Clown

I spoke to one I thought I loved so dear,
Informed him of his faults, his sins, his errors.
It made me sad, it really did, but still
I could not seem to stop myself.

Though part of me knew all too well the wrong
I laid on him, my brother seemed to me
The cause of all my woe, my tears and hate,
The thing it seemed I had to change.

The dagger plunged, my shield was raised, and I
Looked dumbly on as blood was spilled and poured.
The more I struck, the more I wept, the more
I wished that this had not begun.

I fought my foe, the one I loved, while he
Looked back at me. Dark red his clothes, the wounds
Were deep, I would not find his eyes until
My sword was stilled, my breath full spent.

I filled my lungs once more and steeled myself.
No room for love, it was either him or me,
One or none, would survive this war and still
He looked at me, until he spoke:

“I am the thing that you believe I am – it’s true.”
My dagger stayed, I could not bear his words.
“I am what you say, my brother, I beg of you
To please forgive my sins and ways.”

“You speak the truth, I do not do as I
Should always do, I do not act as I
Would like to be, the mistakes I make weigh down
And sadden me, for I mean no harm.”

“My face is pitted with the blows that I have laid
On others, my skin is rough from armor, my hands
Calloused, tired and sore. My sword is here,
By your feet, too heavy to hold.”

I bent down and there it was, the lethal
Blade now still, no harm was there, nor ever
Was. What had I seen? What had I hated?

A light glint off the rusting tool.

The gleam came from some place above and as
I raised myself, my brother’s hand reached out
And though at first I drew away in fear
There was no harm as he had said.

I felt his touch, it was not cold, but warm
And kind. An age had passed before I raised
My eyes, and there He was. “Do you now know
With whom you fought these many years?”

My sight was blurred for tears had come, they fell
And spent my pain and hurt; my sword washed clean,
‘Twas now a Cross, a brilliant silver star
That shone upon the two of us.

I could not speak, for in that place I saw
My Self, but not the haggard soldier clown.
The patchwork clothes laid by, the light it came
From deep within the Christ we shared.

“It was not me with whom you waged your war;
It was not I who caused you pain and sorrow.”
And this was true, I hated not my brother.
“Would you condemn yourself again? ”

The words came slowly from my mouth, I said:
“Yet though I tried to take your life you come
To me and bring the greatest of God’s Gifts.
My life is yours, my heart I offer.”

At this the Light began to shiver, a mirth
It seemed began to shake the air. “You do
Not see? You do not see? ” And only then
Did understanding come to me.

“We are but One, not two, not ‘you’ and ‘I’!
No hate or thought of merciless intent
May break what God has forged and sealed as One.
Come laugh with me, come take my hand.”

And we this day became as One and walked
On Heaven’s Path, through Heaven’s Lawns, and though
Our brothers spoke to us of two, we heard
But One, one Voice that sought Itself.

Take heart, my friends, for we are not alone.
Though haggard clowns we find ourselves to be,
There is no sin, God wills that we be Home,
’Tis our Brother’s Love that sets us free.

Mayor’s Journal, 6th April, 2011:




Flowing with Resistance

Note: Due to a problem with the site, I was not able to post this article on the home page during the month of March even though it did appear in my blog. Here it is, in case any of you missed the reference to it in the discussion forum.

I was awake at 4 am and the following thoughts were running around my mind. So in order to feel like there was actually some usefulness in this sleepless state, I’m writing down these ideas that occurred to me.

This recent work we’ve been doing at the Village has really been on my mind (even in my dreams!). There’s something about this whole idea of learning that Love embraces our most difficult thoughts and feelings that seems to be changing my perspective on things pretty radically. I’ve been looking at the connection to Forgiveness, and I think the idea is quite the same. And we can even bring in aspects of Byron Katie’s The Work as well as the Sedona Method that has Nina introduced us to. For me it all comes back to the Meaning of Judgment (MOJ) workshop we were going through. Something that really stuck with me in those notes is the emphasis Ken puts on the importance of not judging our ego thoughts when they occur to us: not judging our judging.

We’re all pretty good at identifying our ego aspects; that’s not too much of a challenge. In fact, I heard Ken say the other day that the ego pretty quickly learns to co-opt us once we’ve decided to make a firm commitment to A Course In Miracles. As he said, it has no problem with your decision to uncover the ego. It replies, “You’re right, let’s go out and get that wily ego fellow, we’ll show him. We’ll really go in the there, uncover him and get rid of him.” That is language the ego just loves; it’s all about doing something about the ego, which, of course, makes it even more real and substantial. In particular, this attitude just leads us into more opposition, more fighting, into hammering ourselves over the head every time we discover another hateful, judgmental thought within our minds.

What MOJ was showing me is the great difficulty we have in doing the last forgiveness step, which is turning toward Jesus and seeing what he has to say about our bad old ego. We are promised that doing so will release our hold on the egoic thought/experience. We just need to accept his acceptance of our ego. And yet a number of us (okay, me) have often had the experience of the negative feeling remaining, despite doing what we believe is opening our minds to Jesus and his love. Are you maybe one of these people? (please, say yes!) We think we’re practicing forgiveness, and yet the pain, fear and anger remain. It is in this last step that the entire transformational experience of forgiveness occurs. This is where all the action is, no matter which non-dual discipline we study. Without this last crucial step, of accepting kindness in place of our judgments, there is no real change and the problem remains. So, what prevents us so systematically from taking this last step?

Resistance.

Resistance is the only problem; that sums it all up. Our experience of life seems to be our untamable anger, our persistent fear, our deep sadness, or mortifying guilt and depression; yet the essential motivation behind all of these experiences is resistance – not accepting ‘what is’. We fight with reality. We insist that reality be different from the way it actually is. And I don’t just mean the reality of our life situations. A number of current non-dual disciplines focus on accepting ‘what is’, which means letting go the objections we might have to the way our lives look. This is definitely right on the mark and very useful. But I think the notion goes much deeper. The fight with and the resistance to what is is actually about Love, the deeper reality of ‘what is’.

Our existence and experience as individual minds has at its foundation a statement that in one word says, ‘No!’ That’s the sum of everything our minds are constantly saying: No! Our minds said no to Oneness/God in the beginning (read: now), they said ‘I don’t want this, I want something else.’ Whatever Oneness/God/Abstraction offered, our minds constantly responded with, No. Over and over: no, no, and no. And that’s what they are still doing today. That’s why the Course says our problem is our judgments and grievances, the vehicles by which our minds are constantly excluding and refusing to accept with kindness and understanding the world and people around us. A judgment against another says, No, I don’t find you acceptable or included within my understanding, within Love. A memory of a difficult time says, No, Love was not available, no, I was hurt and you can’t tell me otherwise. Fear of a future problem says, No, I am vulnerable and in danger, and Love will not be there to nourish and support me in that problem.

Casting our vision a little further a field, we easily see that everyone we meet in the streets as well, in the supermarket, in our offices, is going around saying No: No, I am not what God says I am; no, I have no access to Love; no, I am an individual locked in this prison-body; no, I am vulnerable and weak; no, you will not include me in love and so I shall attack; no, you will not give me what I need and so I must take it. We share precisely the same experience with everyone around us in this respect, this foundational suffering of fighting with reality. Not just the reality of our lives as they are presented to us, but the larger, deeper Reality of our source within the abstract Love that gives us our Life.

It is a very useful step to begin to sense the resistance that our entire psychological lives are based upon. This resistance is not one of a calm, perfect knowledge that says I know I’m alone and abandoned. That might actually be peaceful, this kind of knowledge. Rather, it is the rabid resistance of one who knows he is wrong, who is fighting an un-winnable battle against an immense enemy – Truth. And so it is very fatiguing and very disheartening. Even when we have decided unequivocally that we are hopelessly unworthy and forever separated from Love, we cannot win. We cannot feel the peace of having found the truth about ourselves. We are wrong. And worst of all, we know it. We desperately try to pretend that we are right, that we have finally found out the dreadful truth about ourselves, and we insist time and time again, increasing our pain exponentially to prove our point. But it is destined to fail. This is resistance.

The solution? We need to learn what it means to simply say yes.

We cannot fight against our resistance, although the ego would love to think it could. The only way to begin to work with this resistance is to learn to say yes. Not a huge resounding, earth-shattering YES! Just a quiet little whisper, gentle as a cool breeze that says, “I can learn to say yes even to all my statements of no”. That’s where these other non-dual techniques have been making a particular contribution. They help us find a way of being kinder with our resistance. Whichever technique we use, the idea is simply to learn to become aware of all our statements of ‘no’ such as our painful memories, criticisms, hates, and exclusions, and learn that we can begin to be gentler with our insistence and resistance. We learn to say as softly as we can, “This is all okay. Love is here no matter what I am thinking and feeling. Love does not oppose. ”

Is it really that easy? Well, no.

Since our entire psychological existence is based on opposition, our tendency will be systematically to oppose our egoic thoughts of hate, criticism, and anger. Opposition is the blood running through our individuality’s veins. It requires us always to fight, to battle and strive. Opposing is as natural and automatic as taking our next breath. Hence, our initial thought will always be, “I shouldn’t think or feel this. This is bad. I’m such a failure. I must stop right now. Let me replace this thought with a nice, loving, accepting thought. Let me get Jesus in here to fix this – where is he?” What we have to stop is this kind of thinking – right now! We cannot unthink something we are thinking, because we are thinking it for what we believe is a valid reason – the survival of our sense of individuality.

So what do we do? We can only try to shift our motivation, our intention, not the direction of our thoughts. And this is where we come back to the need to embrace Love in even the smallest way. We do so not by opposing the direction of our thoughts, but by going with them, bending with them, flowing with them, saying, “This is okay, there is nothing wrong with this thought. Of course it comes from confusion and separation, but there is nothing wrong with that. Love embraces even this anger, hatred, terror and depression. I do not need to oppose or be afraid of these feelings. Love embraces even my opposition to It.” Can you do that?

There are going to be times when even this level of acceptance of Love is just not going to come easily. When we sense resistance to the idea of flowing with an ego thought without judging it, then we flow again, asking ourselves, “Would I be willing to allow just a little of this thought/feeling to be there without opposing it?” Or, “Could I determine that I would like to allow just a bit of this thought/feeling to be there without judging it? Can I be with this thought/feeling/conviction in a loving way, even just a little? I see Jesus peeping through a crack in the door, do I want to open it just an inch more? Do I really have to continue to fight and push against this feeling, to judge it, to not want it? Is that really an obligation, or can I be willing to admit that I might have a small choice in the matter?”

Some of these non-dual techniques encourage us to work on our motivation for allowing the acceptance of Love to join us in our minds, pointing out the cost to not doing so, and the gains to finally letting go: “How am I going to feel if I continue pushing? What would it be like if suddenly I stopped pushing and just allowed this all to flow through me freely without opposing it? What if none of this was wrong anymore, how would I possibly feel? What if I could eventually let go my hold on all these thoughts, how would that feel?”

All these thoughts get us going back in the right direction by putting us in a place of non-opposition. Opposing always feels stressful because we have set up an obstacle, a challenge, an enemy to overcome, a wall to knock down. Yet there is no real obstacle there. In his workshop, No Man Is An Island, Ken uses the wonderful metaphor of a fist to describe resistance and opposition. Our ego’s mindset is like a fist made from our tightly clenched fingers. We clench so hard to protect what is in our hand that our muscles ache and our knuckles turn white, yet still we do not question the fundamental premise, asking ourselves what is really being held there. Jesus has told us that our hand is empty (there is no sin or separation), but we don’t believe him and clench all the harder. Eventually the pain of our cramped fingers is so painful that we become willing to lift our little finger just enough to see that in fact there is nothing there. We were protecting nothing – the pain was purely the defense against letting go the thought that there was something there. We are battling with a mistaken thought, and nothing else.

It is only our resistance that makes the wall appear before us. The wall is our resistance, and not the hate, anger or judgmentalness we might find in ourselves. It is simply our fear of saying yes to our existence as Love, to our non-existence as separated beings. Any imaginary obstacle will do as a wall, anything we can turn into a problem – as long as it serves our purpose of resisting the acceptance of Love. And our minds will be extremely imaginative in finding many, many different things that can appear to us as a problem. There in the background of our minds’ activity runs a litany of potential candidates, whispering: Something is wrong here, can’t you feel it? There’s something here that is just not adequate, that must be improved upon. All is not well and sufficient, I can feel it. In fact, when we practice these methods we quickly find that there is a river of obstacles that flow across the screen of our minds, occupying our attention with what we believe are real reasons to believe that Love, freedom and happiness do not exist. It quickly becomes obvious that the mind’s real objective in any situation is simply to prove that Love is not present, or even existent. “No” is the only word being spoken in our minds, no matter what we are looking at. No, Love is not here.

Over time this way of looking can help us become aware of the true activity of the mind. The mind is not really engaged with the outside world at all, despite our years of ‘experience’ to the contrary. We always thought we were having a problem with politicians, business leaders, family members, the economy, local legislation, our bodies, our finances, household insects, the lawn, the lawnmower, the traffic, other drivers, the red light, the deadline, the poor coffee, the cold food, the poor service, or the rain. In fact, the mind has been engaged totally and completely within itself all this time, busily imagining problems and obstacles one after the other to occupy our attention and prove its point. Its point is always that there is a valid reason for saying, No. An endless series of scenes and images that we attach the label of ‘problem’ to, purely to feed our need to say, “No, love is not here!”

But ours is a path of non-resistance. It is the path of allowing, of embracing, of accepting. We allow our minds to say Love is not here. We just allow the awareness to come to us that this is what we are thinking; we allow the words to role slowly around in our mind… “I am thinking, ‘Love is not here’.” This is the current delusion that fills our minds, this is its life statement – and that is quite okay. We do not fight it, contradict it, or oppose it in any way. We step back, allow kindness to enter our minds in the form of acceptance. We look to the ultimate goal that our hearts are set on, and we allow Love to enter our lives, as Jesus or in any other form in which Love appears to us. We allow Love to embrace all our aspects, to enter in and make itself at home in the space of our most intimate thoughts, reassuring ourselves that there is nothing we really want to withhold from this gentle kindness now. We make Love a home in our minds by saying there is nothing that Love would take away from me, there is nothing Love does not include and embrace. “Even this…” Even this does Love embrace.

When we practice this way we find that over time the obsession of our minds to find problems begins to weaken. Its agitation, constantly finding fault, danger and unworthiness, starts to slow; the difficulties and reasons for hate become less pointed and sharp. Love’s gentle non-resistance appeals to us more and more, taking the place of our earnest need for reality to show us danger and hate. Where we thought there was only opposition within us, we find there is also a willingness to flow gently with the movement of our minds, a coming into awareness of opposition, a sensing of the fear, pain or anger this brings, then a swinging with the feeling, allowing it to be there as a feeling (not as a ‘truth’), determining to want to be able to accept it kindly, even just a little. Even just the tiniest amount, and this re-opens the door.

Thus we are taught the true nature of acceptance. Within this acceptance we learn that our reality has already been perfectly accepted by Love, by God. We learn to accept Acceptance. We no longer deny what is, our perfect acceptance unto our holy Father.

(Photo credit: http://aksinya.wordpress.com/)

Mayor’s Journal, 21st April, 2011:




Forgiveness – the Quiet Revolution

There is something very special about forgiveness that I think is rather unsuspected. We have all been practicing forgiveness for some time now, perhaps even for several, or many, years. We have gained many benefits, our lives have become more peaceful in some ways, and we insist less when a conflict arises or we are attacked or belittled. Yet this special ‘something’ can nevertheless go quite unannounced. I believe that forgiveness is leading us toward something quite unique – a state of mind quite unlike anything we have been able to conceive of. But I’m going to change subjects for a moment in order to prepare you for my thoughts…

Last night I attended a rather remarkable event. A local cinema is the home of an association that promotes films on new ways of thinking and being in this world. The subjects range from the environment to health, but many have to do with consciousness and our relationship to each other, or the planet or our bodies. The event I attended yesterday was a film on ‘breatharians’. These are a rather extraordinary group of people who have managed to alter their relationship with physical food in such a way that they no longer need to eat but are ‘fed’ directly by another source, called alternatively ‘prana’, ‘chi’, or simply divine Love. Many of these people have not eaten solid food for many years. One Indian sage has ostensibly not eaten since the age of seven when he had a vision of being visited by three angels. Some of these people can even go without water.

The film (called ‘Lumière’ in French, produced by Allegro Productions) was beautifully produced and was a fascinating account of an extraordinary and incredible process that apparently all human beings are hardwired to do. But that was just the beginning of the surprises. The organisers of the event had been able to invite a real, living and breathing ‘breatharian’ – Henri Montfort – whose presence we had the pleasure of sharing for two hours of question and answer following the film. This man has not eaten solid, physical food for the past eight years. His body weight is stable (he is not thin or emaciated in any way), his eyes sparkle tremendously and his energy level is very high, just under ‘electric’. He is in every way what I would call a picture of perfect health. He says he has not been sick or ill during this time, and has not had to visit the drugstore once for any medications. He spoke to us of the difference between fasting and pranic nourishment, but more than this I was fascinated by his insistence that this bodily state can only be accompanied by a mental state outside of duality – at least when it comes to the biological functioning of the body. He told us that the mind is capable of understanding its inherent non-separated state from the rest of ‘reality’ (he told us that nothing here was ‘real’). It is this awareness that helps us understand why the body can live outside the constraints imposed upon it by our mental conditioning.

I am not writing this to promote ‘breatharianism’ – my goal is not to help you save on your food bill! In fact, if we are not vigilant, such ideas can easily turn into just another party trick of the ego, to get us to do something so extraordinary that we end up making duality real again in our minds. If we place too much importance on freedom from the body’s constraints, we make the body real again in our minds as a prison. The goal is not to give up on food anymore than it is to give up on breathing or any physical attribute of our world. No, my purpose has nothing in fact to do with this specific application of the mind’s ability.

This experience demonstrated something to me perfectly clearly. The mind is outside the body; the body is no more, no less, than an image within the mind. These ‘breatharians’ have simply been able to re-program the mind-outside-the-body in such a way that the body itself has a different biological relationship to its surroundings. Bringing this back to our work, we can use this to remind ourselves that what we are aiming for is to develop a radically new relationship not with food, but with the entire outside world: all the various inputs our senses communicate to us every day. More precisely, all our thoughts, perceptions, interpretations, feelings and experiences. That is the food which is truly of interest to us (not just fries and carrots), and we can learn to draw on another Source of understanding with which to process all of these.

Now, as we have all been learning from our many years of ACIM and Ken study, absolutely nothing here is useful if it does not lead to greater peace of mind. The only purpose of anything is defined by our question, “What is it for? ” And we have been told time and time again that our only goal is peace, the extraordinary peace of God that knows no barriers or limits, that is so thoroughly all-inclusive that nothing remains outside its magnificent embrace. Peace, the true gift of God. Not just saving on our food bill.

This peace is also located in a mind-outside-the-body. These breatharians access this mind for bodily purposes, using a different modus operandi that enables something normally considered impossible to occur. And I am proposing here that forgiveness is the new modus operandi of our minds offered to us by Jesus that will enable us eventually to access something normally also considered impossible – a true and on-going experience of the Love of God.

There is a way of living in this world that is completely different. We appear to be here, but we realize that our minds are actually elsewhere. They are not located within our physical bodies, but in a place outside of time and space that encloses the totality of existence. That is where we are ultimately being led, and forgiveness is the unique process given to us to achieve this.

Each and every day that we bring into awareness just another tiny thought of separation, a grievance, an upset, a sadness, an instant of superiority or inferiority, and question its origin and usefulness for us, we make one giant change in our minds. We remember that its only purpose in our minds is to make it appear that a separation has occurred between ourselves and Love, and that this separation offers us more than Love. We shift the location of our minds, just for an instant, back into a place of timelessness and freedom. Each time we do this we clear away a little more of the mental shell that is preventing us from living fully in this ‘other place’ outside our normal, earthly minds.

Breatharians access ‘pranic’ nourishment through their application of the mind; students of A Course In Miracles ultimately learn to access God’s Love for their experience and nourishment. That Love is represented here by forgiveness. Day by day we learn to fill our minds with the practice and purpose of forgiveness, and it becomes our nourishment, our complete source of peace and fulfilment. We look at the mental food we have been feeding ourselves all our lives, believing so vital to our existence. And we choose once again. Nothing can be so fulfilling and utterly nourishing as learning to release our judgments and the hold on our painful, separating thoughts. Practicing in this way, we may now begin to call ourselves Forgivarians, learning to replace all our harmful mental processes with that one special, divine food: the message that nothing happened which would ever justify condemnation in any form.

We feed ourselves, but now it is holiness that nourishes us. Every day we allow to rise into our awareness those sensations that whisper, this isn’t good, this isn’t right, I’m not good enough, this is unwanted, that hurts, he shouldn’t, I can’t believe, when will it stop. And we allow ourselves to be wrong. I must be wrong, this isn’t the real problem. I have sought my nourishment in the empty wasteland of separation again. Opposition is not the answer. And we remember that It is there, the divine Food we have been ignoring. We breathe it in, and let our position on our issue go. We do not need it, we do not want it. It cannot nourish us. We breathe, and fill our hearts with a peacefulness and quiet relief that we have been wrong. We did not want to be right; we did not really want this person to be the fault and error in our lives. No, we want him to be free, just like we want to be free. Both of us released, both of us fed and provided for by the Banquet offered us just beyond the veil of physical perception.

The more we practice forgiveness, keeping in our hearts the Love with which it has been given us, the Love to which it is leading us, the more peaceful we become. The more we become impartial observers of life here, the less the problems of the world will grate upon us and draw us into their chaos. We begin to create a real shift, a positive separation between the workings of the limited ego mind and ourselves. A lightness returns to our minds, a light, joyful happiness in which we realize that this special place outside of the tumult of this world has always been there, just waiting for us to return.

Forgive.

Let us forgive, and release our minds from the binds we have placed upon them and that make us sad, that make us wonder where we are, and why. We have a Home, and it is outside of the chaos of the tiny mind of our agitated thoughts and feelings. Let us take a step back with our great Companion today. Let Him be our partner as He guides us back to a place of comfort and warmth, right there in the midst of our busy day. He is there, and that special place to which He leads us all is real and present. Join me today as we travel just a few steps further toward that extraordinary place above all needs and demands of this crazy world that floats in our joint imagination. And we are Home once more.

(Photo credit: http://aksinya.wordpress.com/)

Mayor’s Journal, 10th March, 2011:


Flowing with Resistance

I was awake at 4 am and the following thoughts were running around my mind. So in order to feel like there was actually some usefulness in this sleepless state, I’m writing down these ideas that occurred to me.

This recent work we’ve been doing at the Village has really been on my mind (even in my dreams!). There’s something about this whole idea of learning that Love embraces our most difficult thoughts and feelings that seems to be changing my perspective on things pretty radically. I’ve been looking at the connection to Forgiveness, and I think the idea is quite the same. And we can even bring in aspects of Byron Katie’s The Work as well as the Sedona Method that has Nina introduced us to. For me it all comes back to the Meaning of Judgment (MOJ) workshop we were going through. Something that really stuck with me in those notes is the emphasis Ken puts on the importance of not judging our ego thoughts when they occur to us: not judging our judging.

We’re all pretty good at identifying our ego aspects; that’s not too much of a challenge. In fact, I heard Ken say the other day that the ego pretty quickly learns to co-opt us once we’ve decided to make a firm commitment to A Course In Miracles. As he said, it has no problem with your decision to uncover the ego. It replies, “You’re right, let’s go out and get that wily ego fellow, we’ll show him. We’ll really go in the there, uncover him and get rid of him.” That is language the ego just loves; it’s all about doing something about the ego, which, of course, makes it even more real and substantial. In particular, this attitude just leads us into more opposition, more fighting, into hammering ourselves over the head every time we discover another hateful, judgmental thought within our minds.

What MOJ was showing me is the great difficulty we have in doing the last forgiveness step, which is turning toward Jesus and seeing what he has to say about our bad old ego. We are promised that doing so will release our hold on the egoic thought/experience. We just need to accept his acceptance of our ego. And yet a number of us (okay, me) have often had the experience of the negative feeling remaining, despite doing what we believe is opening our minds to Jesus and his love. Are you maybe one of these people? (please, say yes!) We think we’re practicing forgiveness, and yet the pain, fear and anger remain. It is in this last step that the entire transformational experience of forgiveness occurs. This is where all the action is, no matter which non-dual discipline we study. Without this last crucial step, of accepting kindness in place of our judgments, there is no real change and the problem remains.

Resistance.

Resistance is the only problem; that sums it all up. Our experience of life seems to be our untamable anger, our persistent fear, our deep sadness, or mortifying guilt and depression; yet the essential motivation behind all of these experiences is resistance – not accepting ‘what is’. We fight with reality. We insist that reality be different from the way it actually is. And I don’t just mean the reality of our life situations. A number of current non-dual disciplines focus on accepting ‘what is’, which means letting go the objections we might have to the way our lives look. This is definitely right on the mark and very useful. But I think the notion goes much deeper. The fight with and the resistance to what is is actually about Love, the deeper reality of ‘what is’.

Our existence and experience as individual minds has at its foundation a statement that in one word says, ‘No!’ That’s the sum of everything our minds are constantly saying: No! Our minds said no to Oneness/God in the beginning (read: now), they said ‘I don’t want this, I want something else.’ Whatever Oneness/God/Abstraction offered, our minds constantly responded with, No. Over and over: no, no, and no. And that’s what they are still doing today. That’s why the Course says our problem is our judgments and grievances, the vehicles by which our minds are constantly excluding and refusing to accept with kindness and understanding the world and people around us. A judgment against another says, No, I don’t find you acceptable or included within my understanding, within Love. A memory of a difficult time says, No, Love was not available, no, I was hurt and you can’t tell me otherwise. Fear of a future problem says, No, I am vulnerable and in danger, and Love will not be there to nourish and support me in that problem.

Casting our vision a little further a field, we easily see that everyone we meet in the streets as well, in the supermarket, in our offices, is going around saying No: No, I am not what God says I am; no, I have no access to Love; no, I am an individual locked in this prison-body; no, I am vulnerable and weak; no, you will not include me in love and so I shall attack; no, you will not give me what I need and so I must take it. We share precisely the same experience with everyone around us in this respect, this foundational suffering of fighting with reality. Not just the reality of our lives as they are presented to us, but the larger, deeper Reality of our source within the abstract Love that gives us our Life.

It is a very useful step to begin to sense the resistance that our entire psychological lives are based upon. This resistance is not one of a calm, perfect knowledge that says I know I’m alone and abandoned. That might actually be peaceful, this kind of knowledge. Rather, it is the rabid resistance of one who knows he is wrong, who is fighting an un-winnable battle against an immense enemy – Truth. And so it is very fatiguing and very disheartening. Even when we have decided unequivocally that we are hopelessly unworthy and forever separated from Love, we cannot win. We cannot feel the peace of having found the truth about ourselves. We are wrong. And worst of all, we know it. We desperately try to pretend that we are right, that we have finally found out the dreadful truth about ourselves, and we insist time and time again, increasing our pain exponentially to prove our point. But it is destined to fail. This is resistance.

The solution? We need to learn what it means to simply say yes.

We cannot fight against our resistance, although the ego would love to think it could. The only way to begin to work with this resistance is to learn to say yes. Not a huge resounding, earth-shattering YES! Just a quiet little whisper, gentle as a cool breeze that says, “I can learn to say yes even to all my statements of no”. That’s where these other non-dual techniques have been making a particular contribution. They help us find a way of being kinder with our resistance. Whichever technique we use, the idea is simply to learn to become aware of all our statements of ‘no’ such as our painful memories, criticisms, hates, and exclusions, and learn that we can begin to be gentler with our insistence and resistance. We learn to say as softly as we can, “This is all okay. Love is here no matter what I am thinking and feeling. Love does not oppose. ”

Is it really that easy? Well, no.

Since our entire psychological existence is based on opposition, our tendency will be systematically to oppose our egoic thoughts of hate, criticism, and anger. Opposition is the blood running through our individuality’s veins. It requires us always to fight, to battle and strive. Opposing is as natural and automatic as taking our next breath. Hence, our initial thought will always be, “I shouldn’t think or feel this. This is bad. I’m such a failure. I must stop right now. Let me replace this thought with a nice, loving, accepting thought. Let me get Jesus in here to fix this – where is he?” What we have to stop is this kind of thinking – right now! We cannot unthink something we are thinking, because we are thinking it for what we believe is a valid reason – the survival of our sense of individuality.

So what do we do? We can only try to shift our motivation, our intention, not the direction of our thoughts. And this is where we come back to the need to embrace Love in even the smallest way. We do so not by opposing the direction of our thoughts, but by going with them, bending with them, flowing with them, saying, “This is okay, there is nothing wrong with this thought. Of course it comes from confusion and separation, but there is nothing wrong with that. Love embraces even this anger, hatred, terror and depression. I do not need to oppose or be afraid of these feelings.” Can you do that?

There are going to be times when even this level of acceptance of Love is just not going to come easily. When we sense resistance to the idea of flowing with an ego thought without judging it, then we flow again, asking ourselves, “Would I be willing to allow just a little of this thought/feeling to be there without opposing it?” Or, “Could I determine that I would like to allow just a bit of this thought/feeling to be there without judging it? Can I be with this thought/feeling/conviction in a loving way, even just a little? I see Jesus peeping through a crack in the door, do I want to open it just an inch more? Do I really have to continue to fight and push against this feeling, to judge it, to not want it? Is that really an obligation, or can I be willing to admit that I might have a small choice in the matter?”

Some of these non-dual techniques encourage us to work on our motivation for allowing the acceptance of Love to join us in our minds, pointing out the cost to not doing so, and the gains to finally letting go: “How am I going to feel if I continue pushing? What would it be like if suddenly I stopped pushing and just allowed this all to flow through me freely without opposing it? What if none of this was wrong anymore, how would I possibly feel? What if I could eventually let go my hold on all these thoughts, how would that feel?”

All these thoughts get us going back in the right direction by putting us in a place of non-opposition. Opposing always feels stressful because we have set up an obstacle, a challenge, an enemy to overcome, a wall to knock down. Yet there is no real obstacle there. In his workshop, No Man Is An Island, Ken uses the wonderful metaphor of a fist to describe resistance and opposition. Our ego’s mindset is like a fist made from our tightly clenched fingers. We clench so hard to protect what is in our hand that our muscles ache and our knuckles turn white, yet still we do not question the fundamental premise, asking ourselves what is really being held there. Jesus has told us that our hand is empty (there is no sin or separation), but we don’t believe him and clench all the harder. Eventually the pain of our cramped fingers is so painful that we become willing to lift our little finger just enough to see that in fact there is nothing there. We were protecting nothing – the pain was purely the defense against letting go the thought that there was something there. We are battling with a mistaken thought, and nothing else.

It is only our resistance that makes the wall appear before us. The wall is our resistance, and not the hate, anger or judgmentalness we might find in ourselves. It is simply our fear of saying yes to our existence as Love, to our non-existence as separated beings. Any imaginary obstacle will do as a wall, anything we can turn into a problem – as long as it serves our purpose of resisting the acceptance of Love. And our minds will be extremely imaginative in finding many, many different things that can appear to us as a problem. There in the background of our minds’ activity runs a litany of potential candidates, whispering: Something is wrong here, can’t you feel it? There’s something here that is just not adequate, that must be improved upon. All is not well and sufficient, I can feel it. In fact, when we practice these methods we quickly find that there is a river of obstacles that flow across the screen of our minds, occupying our attention with what we believe are real reasons to believe that Love, freedom and happiness do not exist. It quickly becomes obvious that the mind’s real objective in any situation is simply to prove that Love is not present, or even existent. “No” is the only word being spoken in our minds, no matter what we are looking at. No, Love is not here.

Over time this way of looking can help us become aware of the true activity of the mind. The mind is not really engaged with the outside world at all, despite our years of ‘experience’ to the contrary. We always thought we were having a problem with politicians, business leaders, family members, the economy, local legislation, our bodies, our finances, household insects, the lawn, the lawnmower, the traffic, other drivers, the red light, the deadline, the poor coffee, the cold food, the poor service, or the rain. In fact, the mind has been engaged totally and completely within itself all this time, busily imagining problems and obstacles one after the other to occupy our attention and prove its point. Its point is always that there is a valid reason for saying, No. An endless series of scenes and images that we attach the label of ‘problem’ to, purely to feed our need to say, “No, love is not here!”

But ours is a path of non-resistance. It is the path of allowing, of embracing, of accepting. We allow our minds to say Love is not here. We just allow the awareness to come to us that this is what we are thinking; we allow the words to role slowly around in our mind… “I am thinking, ‘Love is not here’.” This is the current delusion that fills our minds, this is its life statement – and that is quite okay. We do not fight it, contradict it, or oppose it in any way. We step back, allow kindness to enter our minds in the form of acceptance. We look to the ultimate goal that our hearts are set on, and we allow Love to enter our lives, as Jesus or in any other form in which Love appears to us. We allow Love to embrace all our aspects, to enter in and make itself at home in the space of our most intimate thoughts, reassuring ourselves that there is nothing we really want to withhold from this gentle kindness now. We make Love a home in our minds by saying there is nothing that Love would take away from me, there is nothing Love does not include and embrace. “Even this…” Even this does Love embrace.

When we practice this way we find that over time the obsession of our minds to find problems begins to weaken. Its agitation, constantly finding fault, danger and unworthiness, starts to slow; the difficulties and reasons for hate become less pointed and sharp. Love’s gentle non-resistance appeals to us more and more, taking the place of our earnest need for reality to show us danger and hate. Where we thought there was only opposition within us, we find there is also a willingness to flow gently with the movement of our minds, a coming into awareness of opposition, a sensing of the fear, pain or anger this brings, then a swinging with the feeling, allowing it to be there as a feeling (not as a ‘truth’), determining to want to be able to accept it kindly, even just a little. Even just the tiniest amount, and this re-opens the door.

Thus we are taught the true nature of acceptance. Within this acceptance we learn that our reality has already been perfectly accepted by Love, by God. We learn to accept Acceptance. We no longer deny what is, our perfect acceptance unto our holy Father.

Photo credit: http://aksinya.wordpress.com/

Mayor’s Journal, 3rd February, 2011:


Soup, Surrealism, and the Right Hand of God

Part I
Keeping in the spirit of my recent hamburger revelations, I was sitting in a typical French country bistro at lunchtime the other day (a pleasant change from McDonalds) and reflecting on the people I observed around me. Not your fast-food consumers here, but the solid stuff-of-the-earth tradesmen, masons, roofers, plumbers, window-fitters. Food here is copious if not always of the highest quality: soup, starter, meal, cheese platter, dessert, wine and coffee, all for the more than reasonable price of 12 euros ($15). No tips expected (or typically given). Given what it takes to get through all that lot, you can imagine there’s plenty of time for just sitting and looking at the life that comes and goes before your eyes. And for choosing with whom you’re going to do that looking, with Mr. OG or Mr. J.

So many differences met my eyes today, so many different qualities I thought I could judge. So many distinctly separate people meeting my eyes, many with whom I could not possibly imagine sharing the exact same life. Yet of course that is precisely the vision that is being offered us.

As usual, since this is a process of undoing, and not doing as such, my purpose sitting here in the bistro (aside from getting fat) was to recognize these differences and then remind myself they do not mean anything. A part of me might wish to keep on giving them meaning and significance, but I could take a step back away from this part of me and just observe its intentional effort to pick out those differences and then to claim that these differences meant something about me, and about the other person. The craziness of this effortful work becomes apparent after a while, since at a certain point you can really get the sense that it’s all just total nonsense. I didn’t know any of these people, yet I found myself able to make very believable (to me) conclusions about each one of them.

My delicious vegetable soup came and went and I started to sense that it was being digested with a large dose of insanity. Soup and surrealism. Eating things that seemed real, seeing things that weren’t. By the time the niçoise salad arrived, I was better prepared to face my starter and the world around me with greater determination to perceive the truth as it really was. What kind of willingness was it going to take to lift the veil so I might see what was truly going on around me?

The other workmen ploughed noisily through their courses and more arrived to partake of this extraordinary lunchtime gustatory ritual. Soup was slurped, wine was quaffed, mouths were wiped with paper napkins, sleeves, and hands. All was well in this temple of sensory satisfaction and exploration. And through it all I wondered, what could possibly be joining us all as One? Where was the singular Life from which we all stemmed, far above the differences that seemed to meet my eyes and ears?

As I lifted a forkful of fresh green bean and olive, my sight stopped short at the image of my hand in front of my mouth. I stared a moment longer, the morsel of food sparkling temptingly, my hand beginning to tremble in expectation of the imminent pleasure. And that’s when revelation hit. There it was, a magnificent appendage with five separate fingers all working perfectly together in their shared purpose of feeding this body for its continued survival. All working together, and yet each one completely different. Wow. That was it. The answer to my question was right there just an arm’s length away. It all seemed so clear.

While I was looking at everyone around me and seeing differences that kept us all distinct and quite separate, it was as if I were looking out from the point of view of the fingernail on my index finger. Quoi? you exclaim. Try to follow me here… Imagine for a minute that if the tip of your index finger could look out at its ‘brothers’, it would see different fingers moving independently of itself. In addition these other fingers would look different, with slightly different shape and skin tone and maybe even a little imperfection or wrinkle or two that it, itself, didn’t contain. It would not necessarily know, in fact, that it had anything in common with these other ‘fingers’.

If for some reason or another, the middle finger didn’t quite coordinate at the right moment in lifting that morsel of food to the mouth, you could imagine the index finger rolling its eyes: “Can’t believe it, let’s us down every time. When will he get his act together?” And then when the pinkie finger is feeling a little weak and drops its end, flipping both bean and olive onto your lap, you could imagine index’s reaction: “You moron! What is it with you little-fingers, why can’t you go to keep-fit classes and build up that muscle tone?”

And if one day (God forbid) the opposing thumb decided to go on strike with a sprain, old index would absolutely hit the roof: “You think you can just stop work because you’re having an ‘off-day’? Get back here you lazy bum! You think I shirk my responsibilities like that? I put in the best effort I can, even when I’m not feeling well. That’s what you get for making someone ‘indispensable’. Evolution sucks. We’ll have to do something about that weak element. Hmm, how can I take his place – I’m sure I’d do a better job. Everyone knows we indexes are such good all-rounders. That’s why we’re used to point at everyone so much.”

Now of course this is all sounding totally crazy. And yet this is precisely, exactly and unequivocally what we do each and every single day.

I am a fingernail. Okay, more precisely, I use fingernail perspective every time I look at someone and find something in him worthy of judgment and separation. I look around me and find someone who, apparently, is quite distinct and unconnected to me and believe that this gap allows me to claim we are different and have no specific shared purpose. His life is his purpose and my life is my purpose. I try to get what I want from life and fulfil my needs whichever way necessary, and so does he. Obviously this perspective completely misses the nature of reality, as taught to us by Dr. Ken.

Every day I wake up and the very first thing that faces me is a choice –blue or brown? No, I mean I either choose to see that my purpose today is to fulfil my physical and psychological needs, or to use all events and encounters to see that we all share the same precise purpose: to become aware of the existence of our right minds where the Love of God is held intact, the same right mind we all share. We all share the same purpose in the wrong mind (fulfilling our personal needs) and we all share the same purpose in the right mind, remembering our inherent safety and completion as the non-physical Son of God.

I can either choose between fingernail-perspective, pretending that I am unjoined with my ‘finger-brothers’, or as Index finger I can start to look down, down, down to my toes only to discover…

“Holy-kabooly!” cries Index, “What gives? There’s this thing down there that I’m joined to! And right next to me are the toes of ol’ Middle finger. And then there’s the toes of Pinkie, and over there I can see Thumb. You mean… you mean, I’m not this separate finger at all? We’re all part of the one unique – Hand?”

Yes, indeed, Mr. Index, you are not alone.

In fact, there is no real finger separate from the hand. All us little fingers are just outgrowths of Hand, and there is no sense whatsoever in separating out one tiny protuberance from another. If we can just learn to practice Knuckle-Perspective, then we can begin to recognize that we may have a form that appears individual and separate from other people, but in reality we are all joined to the same living entity by an invisible thread. (This might help to give an endearing quality to the term ‘knuckle-head’!)

We advance on the road Home all together or not at all. Thumb helps Index, who helps Pinkie, and on we go. At the very least, Index does not impose a vision of separation and different interests on his brothers and sisters. He does not practice ‘living his own personal purpose’ fulfilling his needs at the expense of others. That would make absolutely no sense. A hand on which the fingers see themselves in opposition would just not function. And so if on any day Mr. Thumb is feeling a bit depressed or a bit angry, then Pinkie understands that it makes no sense to emphasize apparent differences but to remember they share the same functioning, and the same purpose. They are one. The same M.O. is in all the fingers because it is in the Hand, and the fingers are just extensions of the Hand. One finger cannot demonstrate differences to be real because it is not in any way a ‘separated individual’ finger. It has no real separated consciousness; it can only pretend to be Index or Pinkie. In reality, there is only Hand.

Phew! All this thinking was giving me an enormous appetite. Fortunately my Hand actually made it to my mouth, all those fingers coordinating themselves brilliantly in their one shared and holy purpose – filling my stomach with lovely bits of green bean, lettuce, walnuts and tuna. God bless those little fingers, even that rambunctious old Index. Yet more was to come, and while I was ruminating on shared purposes, the main meal – slices of juicy garlicky leg of lamb with potato gratin – came and went. The empty plate stared back at me and I was wondering what would happen if ever my fingers decided to work in opposition to each other. I guessed I’d just eat directly from the plate.

Part II
But now onward to cheese and dessert! The table once more laden with critical victuals, I could continue my philosophising unburdened by any irritating survival needs.

Something was nagging at my brain, and despite the melt-in-your-mouth little white goat cheese (cabecou) on the crusty local bread, I just couldn’t find satisfaction. As I surveyed the other Finger-clients eating at the bistro this lunchtime, each one involved in the deeply personal contemplation of his dinner, I noticed that this Finger-I-believe-myself-to-be balked at a mental image. The television news just the previous night had been filled with the story of a young man who had killed and dismembered an adolescent girl before throwing her remains in a river. The young man had already been incarcerated for previous attacks on young women and had been released without proper control, it seems. The community in which this occurred was in every way like this innocuous country township I was visiting, and the young man whose picture we saw on the screen looked in every way like any one of these people I was eating with.

As I recalled the news story, I immediately reacted with tension, disgust, fear and anger. I was now Mr. Index again, holy, upright, justifiably outraged. How could I possibly make any sense of this that would bring understanding and peace to my mind?

My middle-finger had just committed a horrific act. I had to take a step back and look downwards again to where we were joined at the knuckle. I appeared separate from him, and yet we shared the same precise Life. Somehow we contained the exact same motivations and functioning because we were not Index and Middle: we were Hand. It was in the best interest of Hand for me to remember this. We could not be fundamentally different since we were cut from the same cloth; we shared the same mental flesh and substance. My extreme judgment of him would serve no purpose and achieve nothing. It would not magically enable me to separate myself from Hand and to cut him off so that we might be in true opposition. I would only gain if I remembered our joint identity, our common reality.

What had happened, what was this chaos? Middle had become extremely confused, thinking he was separate from Hand. In this insane state, he thought he would feel better if he attacked and violated another seemingly separate finger – Ring. Ring finger just happened to be the one he chose to hurt. Nothing could be more insane than the middle finger attacking the ring finger, and yet this is precisely what we do every day, each time we get angry at another person or wish them anything but Love and peacefulness. Do I do that? Of course I do. Every day. It’s in the genes of the ego mind, the one mind we all extend from, as fingers from one hand. While I look outward from fingernail perspective, I will think I can attack someone else and not suffer the consequences. I forget that I am not finger but Hand. The Hand knows that when Middle attacks Ring, everyone suffers. And that is why getting angry or frustrated with another person, seeing separation in any way does no one good. It is not bad or wrong; it is just painful – to everyone. We are not many, but One.

As I sat there in the noisy bistro, spooning thoughtful portions of a smooth crème brulée into my mouth, I wondered what it would be like to eat at the same table as this young murderer, or to share the same meal with Herr Hitler. At some point in their lives neither of these two people were totally insane. Both of these people were capable of sitting down and sharing a meal in a perfectly ordinary way with other people. Then something happens within our minds and we see ourselves in complete opposition to others with one sole objective – to ensure our needs at the expense of others. Their way of doing so was exceptionally barbaric and unforgivable. But it is understandable.

We are cut from the same cloth. Different servings from the same cheese. When we allow ourselves to understand where this behavior stems from, when we look down from the fingernail to the knuckle that joins us in one Hand, then we bring our minds back to our shared purpose: to remember we are one. One in the insanity of the wrong mind, and one in the magnificence and beauty of the right mind. Two seemingly distinct minds, only one of which is real. When we allow ourselves to return to the right mind over and over, practicing understanding instead of separation, then over time we begin to sense that the wrong mind is only a place of appearances. A reality dawns around us, warm, comforting, entirely unassailable, and fair to everyone. Appearances give way to truth, and the Son of God, sitting on the Right Hand of God, takes his place in Heaven.

“Waiter! Can I have my coffee please?”

When my espresso came I gazed around at my finger-brothers and thought about the strangeness of the image we had fabricated together. Can you imagine, one Hand with 6.5 billion fingers? No one left out. Space for everyone. Nothing excluded. Everything and everyone sitting on the Right Hand of God. Now that’s worth enjoying a meal over!

Mayor’s Journal, 4th January, 2011:




2011 – Let’s Get To Work! The Ego-Hangover

The New Year – already?? What happened to November and December? I know time doesn’t exist, but sheesh.

So Christmas and the New Year, not to mention Thanksgiving, have come and gone. All those amazing family celebrations. And to get things started on the right foot this year at the Village I would like you all to submit some of your juicy titbits from these wondrous moments spent in the close company of your loved ones (and of your less-loved ones). After all, if self-honesty is what this is all about, then we have to get stuck into a little personal review from this ‘magical’ end-of-year period, right?

It’s time to take stock. We’re not doing this course because we know it’s going to be peaches and cream the whole way. I mean, what’s the chance that during these past two months of celebrations there wasn’t at least one moment of impatience, of judgment, of excluding someone from your highest consideration. Was everyone you met and whom you dined with during this period included in your mind as a perfect and holy Son of God? I mean, let’s get real. This is your mayor you’re tawkin’ to. After your celebrations there was the party hangover, okay. Now we’re talking about the ego-hangover.

I know Uncle Eustace and cousin Myrtle and nephews Thaddeus and Basil were truly charming and generous as always, but what about the others. Yes, the others. You know the ones I mean. No one escapes feeling at times that they would like someone in particular to be different, to be more sensitive, more participating, more flexible. Or they’d like things to be different. There’s something happening that you don’t like, maybe you wanted things to go differently, maybe things are just not happening the way you wanted (“I can’t believe she just put the salad on the table – she knew it was for later”). Maybe it’s because of someone else, or just ‘life’. But in the back of your mind there’s always someone you’re afraid of disappointing. Someone is not going to understand, is going to get upset. You’ve got to make sure granddad feels included or eats exactly what he wants, and you know the thing you definitely better not say to Auntie Gertrude and the direction the conversation better not take.

I think the true blessing of Thanksgiving and Christmas is not the love we might share between family members. That’s nice, but that’s not it. It is more the burgeoning awareness that despite the love that is sometimes not apparently present, Love is still truly present. It just doesn’t look the way we thought it should. That’s all.

Our sensitivities and upsets, and certainly those of other people, occur only to keep our attention well away from the silent and holy presence that encompasses us all. I, for one, found it funny how I could bridle every time a certain person at my dinner table opened his mouth. It just seemed he was incapable of saying anything sensitive or intelligent. As if he should be something other than the way he was. Why? Why should it be so difficult to include him exactly as he is in my love?

Because then I would have to include myself in that Love.

Inevitably every time we are upset with someone else or the way things are going, we are holding a judgment against ourselves. We don’t really need to dig to find out specifically what it is. We can be pretty sure, however, that it is one version or another of self-condemnation, for not being good enough, for not being acceptable in our own eyes. We have replaced God as judge and executioner. Why bother the Big Kahuna and find out what He really thinks? I can do a better job. In fact, I already know how things turn out.

So when Uncle Benedict opens his mouth and I get upset, it’s because somewhere I have imagined that it’s only when we are coherent, sensitive and ‘intelligent’ that we are acceptable in Love’s eyes. And I hold that exact accusation against myself.

If I knew that no matter how stupid, incoherent and insensitive I really am, Love still accepts and embraces me wholly and completely, then I would just smile and join with my brother in our mutual silliness. It might even become a celebration of silliness, at least the silliness that we could do anything that would exclude us from God’s Love.

What can turbo charge this perception is remembering the specific purpose behind all these upsets – Granddad Hippolytus’, Auntie Gertrude’s, and mine. Now that’s when it becomes really funny. That dinner table which became the breeding ground of tension and unspoken reprimands – it had a purpose, it was designed to fulfil a function.

Love is present, but it must remain unseen. Voilà! That’s it, that’s all.

Every word uttered is focused to take the attention off of the one thing that is so amazingly obvious, and to get the attention back to the illusion, back to appearances. So, another round of “Did you hear about …” followed by a description of some newsy event, the weather, someone’s life details, even just the poor decoration in the recently opened restaurant. Anything will do. As long as the most obvious thing in the world remains unspoken and unmentioned:

LOVE.

Everything points back to Its presence. Their silliness. Our silliness. Everything.

And Love smiles on absolutely unabated.

So let’s welcome these family meetings with open arms. Though we might have been disappointed by them in the past, now we’re protected by a special understanding that there is nothing more to avoid, no troubles that can remove the most obvious Guest in our party. He has come to meet with us, and to meet us where we are. No need for things to be any different from the way they are. Everything is perfect just the way it is.

The perfect result we were seeking for our family meetings does not have a specific shape or form. It is not when everyone leaves with a smile on his or her face, when all the potential problems and pitfalls were avoided. It is when our inner smile stays fixed on the presence of Christ in our family members and sees the Love there, the Love that is simply scared of remembering Itself and makes up a few stories to pass the time together and divert our attention. Tensions and upsets are merely an indication that Love is present, not that it is absent.

If we can manage, even just a little, to see our self-judgments and forgive them when things don’t go quite right, then we bring peace back to the party. And Love has returned once more.

Let us make this year different by making it all the same: let us recognize the efforts we all make to deny Love’s presence among us through our judgments and irritations. Our Guest has come; we can only acknowledge His presence with a gentle smile. We smile at our silly upsets and self-condemnations. We are not up to our expectations – no one is. But we are up to His, no matter how things go.

Mayor’s Journal, 11th January, 2011:




The Blob of OG and My Blessed Insanity

We can learn from anything, right? Reassure me now.

Okay, I accept your agreement.

So these are the thoughts that came to me today.

It is craziness to see something that is not there.

Likewise, it is craziness not to see something that is there.

So what happens when I find I display symptoms of both conditions?

Oy veh.

When the dog refuses to stand still while I towel him dry after he comes in thoroughly muddy from a walk, and I feel myself starting to get upset,

When the vacuum cleaner systematically bumps into furniture as I guide it (gently) through the house and I feel frustration starting to rise (because I might be in a hurry),

When I pull the car out of the driveway and someone shoots past me much too fast on this tiny road missing me by a foot, and I start to feel total fear and then anger,

When I have to leave a message with someone in the administration because they never answer their phone and they say they will call back but never do, and I start to feel this sharp sense of injustice,

When I go out of my way to find nice Christmas presents for family members and receive nothing in return, not even a sincere thank you, and I start to feel a sense of being used and ingratitude,

Whenever I start to feel any of these things, I know I’m going crazy. I mean, stark raving mad.

Why? Because I’m seeing things that are not there.

I’m hallucinating. Totally.

This does not mean that these things are not happening. It means that none of the things that are happening means what I think it means, or means anything in particular. None of them really have the charge I’m giving them. They are just scenes from life, things that are happening, without any innate meaning.

If I follow Ken to the letter, then I can understand all the more how totally insane I am, because in truth I am not even here. Okay, I have a perception of being in a body, true. But that doesn’t mean I’m in the body, just that I think I am.

It helps bring a smile to my face when I start to remember this while I’m toweling the dog or calling the administration. I mean, I can make a big deal about anything. Don’t test me, I’m serious. About anything. Why? Because I can and will use anything to continue to give myself the impression that I’m in this blessed body as a blessed individual. And that includes any situation that presents itself to me. Unknowingly my little mind shall twist and turn some completely innocuous event (the vacuum cleaner bumping into furniture) into some diabolical drama demonstrating that something is there when it isn’t. But I insist it is. And my upset or excitement proves it. Just try to tell me I’m wrong!

It’s funny, I mean truly humorous watching this whole play in action. But it’s not half so funny as the flip side of this play.

It’s even more comical to watch my insane mind refuse to accept that something is there when it plainly and clearly is. Okay, I admit, I’m pretty much an expert at pretending that something is there when it isn’t, you know, the dog, the administration, etc. But I’m much, much better at pretending that something is not there when it is. What does this look like?

When my wife forgets to buy something for the dinner with guests tonight and I ignore the twinge of upset because ‘it’s not spiritual’,

When a family member does not thank me for an important favor I have done and I smile and continue as if nothing happened (because I’m above needing gratification) ,

When someone I’ve done a job for constantly stalls when it comes to paying me and I continue to swallow my anger and sense of disrespect because I think I’ve learned that these feelings will not get me anywhere…

When I refuse to see the upset that is really there and continue to pretend that it’s not, then I know I’m mad. Not only am I mad, thinking that something is not there that is, but I’m also masochistic, denying myself the only opportunity I have to become happy and peaceful once again.

If I follow Ken, then I pay even more attention to these moments of thinking something is not there when it is. I actively look for them, I learn to pay more attention to my thoughts and feelings during the day. And I discover more twinges of upset, disrespect, victimization and guilt than I thought. Okay, this is a good start.

But to really deal with the problem, I have to ask an important question: Why do I not want to see what’s there when it is? Why should it bother me so much to face my real feelings and reactions? And that’s when we come back to our good friend, OG. Let me present ‘OG’, or ontological guilt. OG does not want to be discovered. He likes remaining hidden and will make you think that you don’t want him to be seen and known, either. But you do. It is not shameful or sinful to realize that OG has come to take up residence in our minds. It is freeing. It is while we are afraid to admit that there’s this blob of OG sitting there that we shall truly remain stuck and in pain, and keep pretending that everything is okay when it’s not.

And so I invite all of us to throw back the covers and reveal in all his sticky, gooey inglorious truth, OG. He is much less frightening when really seen for what he is, I promise.

We are all experts in craziness, seeing things that are not there, not seeing things that are. We do this every day. But if we begin to observe our craziness with laughter and lightness, seeing there’s truly nothing wrong with insanity except that it’s a bit unhappy, then we can start to make the whole thing disappear. OG-the-Blob is uncovered for the comical thing that it is, and slowly a smile appears on our faces and replaces our grimaces and gnashing teeth.

The dog becomes just a dog once again, the vacuum cleaner a friend, the public administrator just another insane person in our insane world. Total insanity everywhere, and it makes not one bit of difference to us at all. There’s just this Smile that looks upon the play of life around us, and we smile along, happy to have discovered the secret that unlocks the great mystery of this crazy world.

My morning’s ramblings…

I’m here at McDonalds (for the internet connection, not the coffee!), looking around me and I’m fighting with myself (resisting a McFlurry? not quite!). The battle today? I’m fighting with the part of me that wants to continue seeing things not as they are but as I want them to be. Out with God, in with me!

You understand, through the eyes of the Holy Spirit, all people are the same, there is only one relationship because we are only One. Life is supposed to be simpler that way, too. But that’s not the way I’m thinking right now. No, not at all. I want to see separated, different people with whom I could have potentially separate, different relationships. These people who look interesting, those people who don’t – that’s what I see, and what I want to see. Different people provoking different feelings in me with the glorious promise of different responses, with whom I would then react differently. That’s exciting! A part of me really doesn’t want to have the same relationship with everyone! Boring, boring, boring. It just wants to believe that I could have a more interesting, satisfying, stimulating relationship with this person rather than with another. Always the hope of something else other than what seems to be this interminable, bland Oneness and singular Relationship that Jesus keeps telling me about.

But there’s a problem, and it ain’t a small one, neither. A cosmological hitch, so to speak.

(Gets up to get another coffee – oh, and they sell croissants here. Bet you don’t have that at your Mikie D’s in the US of A!)

I’m reminded by this persistent Voice in the back of my mind that my way of having relationships is based not in fulfillment, pleasure or satisfaction of any nature, but in pain (yuk), despite what appear to be its wonderful rewards, even if those appearances are very convincing. (And I can convince myself those rewards are convincing.) It is illusory, and that’s why it’s unsatisfying. Like trying to have a relationship with ghosts or dream figures. Ultimately very, very unfulfilling! (Despite rumors, Caspar is not a good conversationalist, and an even less satisfying sex partner.)

And yet it is so enticing, this idea that I could have different qualities of relationships with different people. So seductive, drawing me forward like a magnet – I bet this person has something interesting to say, and this one would like to talk to me, I’m sure. Each person would have a different way of communicating with me and recognizing me. They would put me in a special category, a special place in their minds; they would analyze me, assess me, make me real, different, and important because I people their dream, their world. I make their world real for them! And all this time I am conscious of the way I appear to them, trying to fit somewhere into their world, trying to be noticed, categorized. I want to exist to them. I don’t want to just be a dream figure! And I don’t want them to see right through appearances to the Oneness from which we stem! My uniqueness must be recognized! And I’m not really interested in reminding them they are a dream figure and their seeming existence as a separate being is nothing but a shadow, a vague appearance. I mean, that would ruin my day, not to mention my McEggMuffin.

Still, I have to be perfectly honest, the only satisfaction that such ‘relationships’ (if we could call them that) gives me at all is completely ephemeral. Arghh, says Charlie Brown. If you can hold down your McShake, then read on. My experience of others is purely what I give to the situation by my illusion, my projection, the projection of my thought into the situation. The extension, the over-laying, the imposition of my thought on the situation. Yes, I impose my images on what has no inherent quality or substance at all. Just look around you, try this now and see if it isn’t true. (So you’re not at McDs, that urban haven of spiritual research? Try it anyway even in the office or at home, but grab a donut.) That’s all my relationships are – the imposition of my thoughts and images on a completely vague, neutral and meaningless situation, meaningless groupings of shadows and images. No inherent substance or reality. Nothing really there! Gads! I make it appear to myself there’s something there by playing mind games with myself. Nothing else.

Yes, I play mind games with myself in the hope that those mind games interest other people, and that they enter into the same mind games as me in which I can play a role. I don’t even have to play a big role. They can just acknowledge me as a potential player in their mind game. I will feel that just for a milli-second I existed for them. I exist! I’m not just a dream figure – I exist for them in their dream!

But what kind of reality is that? Is that really existing if I’m just a dream figure in their dream, does that make me or this world real?

Ultimately there is nothing there. Just more silly pictures. Look at these people milling about here… just images on my screen.

No, that’s not strictly true. There is something there, but it is not in the figures or what I think they can give me. It is the coming together of two minds remembering that they are elsewhere simply sharing a dream together. There is tremendous power and experience in that. Absolutely tremendous. Believe it or not, that re-opens the gates to Heaven. There is an extraordinary experience of lightness instead of constraint, strategizing, and manipulation, a solidity and innocence instead of impressions, guilt, and insecurity, and wholeness instead of competition and weakness. And the other person doesn’t even have to be aware that I’m joining with him or her. In my recognizing our perfect sameness and union, we are joined, and peace floods my mind.

That is the true benefit of every encounter here in the mini-metropolis of my mind at McDonalds. It is the same benefit of every meeting both physical and those that are purely within my mind and memory. I get to look again at this person and say, “Man or woman, businessperson or garbage collector, philosopher or gang member, there is something beyond these appearances and beyond my imposition on this person. There is a totality which unites us and makes us all perfectly the same, extensions of One Life, the same in holiness and innocence and strength.” It gives me the opportunity to turn away from an ephemeral, illusory dream and back to something that finally feels real and truly satisfying. Changing my vision returns my mind toward true satisfaction and completion, Wholeness and Beauty.

And yet, and yet…

Even as I re-read these words I have just written, I notice that a part of me still thinks that separation and mental cannibalism can offer me more than wholeness, unity and completion. A world of differences, even one that I realize is totally make-believe, seems to offer me more than God, Heaven, Unity, Wholeness, celestial Beauty, and Magnificence. Wow… I’m looking at the two options and I find myself actually hesitating to choose sameness instead of differences, holiness instead of judgment. I think I must learn to appreciate a little more the calmness and beauty of unified vision, instead of the seductive appeal of fragmented sight.

It would be nice if I could finally offer people more than just my images and silly games.

I’m sure I can.

Village Bulletin Board, 24th December, 2010:


Christmas in our Village!

“Dashing through the fields (sunflower),
On a horse-drawn open cart,
Oh what fun it is,
Eating pie and tart!”

MEEEERRRY CHRISTMAS, EVERYONE!

As soon as you’ve finished with the hay rick ride, jump off next to the old oak because we’ve set up some swings on one of its great branches. Whoever swings highest (without getting lost in the branches, ‘o course!) gets to cut and serve the giant Christmas Cake baked by none other than our resident Australian Fairy Winnie. After the swing, you still can’t get to the dinner table until you’ve had a go bobbing apples in the big casks that farmer Anil left us from his last cider making. Finally, when you’ve done all that, meander past the walnut grove where our friendly Village squirrels (can’t remember their names) are jumpin’ and jivin’ to a mambo version of “All I want for Christmas if my two front teef”, and over to Nina’s Cottage.

As you’ll see, large old country tables have been set up outside and inside, just depending on the weather. The theme this year, well, it’s a little eclectic, but that’s normal I guess for this crazy bunch. So we have Surf ‘n Turf with a Vegetarian twist, together with Norwegian-Italian-German-Singapore influences. Now, where, I ask you, are you going to find originality like that other than in our spectacular Village? Would you forgive me, I couldn’t find the time to take and mount the photos of all the delicious things that everyone had prepared, but here’s a list of what I’ve seen on the tables so far:

Clementines and oranges with cloves (not sure if they’re for eatin’)
Bouillabesse, a delicious fish soup from Marseille
Barbecued giant prawns from Down Under (they arrived fresh this morning – come over to the barbecue area where BBQ-meister Zenbear is hard at work – someone bring him a glass of cider?)
Tenderloin, rump and filet steaks, only the best from organic farms in Nebraska and Kansas (kind, nice farms, these ones)
Slabs of thick sliced garlic bread with oodles of butter (no fat – this is a special Village)
Norwegian specialties of all sorts (yum!)
Buns filled with hot cheese, and a giant Brie just out of the oven with toasted almond slivers
Michele has brought along heaps of Fresh Dungeness Crab meat with melted sweet butter to dip it into,and whatever other dipping alternatives might be dear to your hearts, along with a crisp fuyu persimmon salad with arugula and avocado in an olive oil and fig balsamic dressing, a dash of shoyu, with lots of freshly ground black pepper. (Wow!)
A remarkable vegie ‘n chickpea casserole from Pam
Heaps of Duck Cassoulet from Castelnaudary (France) to be enjoyed with a deep Cahors ‘black’ wine
Then to finish it all off:
Gooey Tiramisu from Nina’s daughter
Scrumptious fruity Stollen from Germany
Decadent peppermint chip chocolate brownies from Michele
Brightly colored silver paper-wrapped candies from Laura

If you make your way over to the bar area you’ll find none other than your Mayor on hand to deliver you just the drink you want, be that a splendiferous fruit cocktail (all fruits in season), or something with a little more punch. Speaking of punch, there’s also an excellent variety of wines, including but not limited to: Billecart Salmon Brut Rose Champagne (thanks, Michele!), and of course some delish Cabernet and Pinot from California. The mayor brought along a few choices wines from France (mostly Burgundy’s though there is an excellent bottle or two of a Monbazillac sweet wine from the Bergerac area you should try)

And I couldn’t let this opportunity go by without remembering the real reason
for us meeting together at this time. We have marked in the western tradition
the day of the 25th December as the day we celebrate the birth of
one particular individual into this world.
With the help of the Brother Who has guided each one of us with his gentle words
now for many years,we have come to learn that the spirit this one individual contained
resides within each of us. He has made it his task to reach out to us daily,
reminding us of our perfect equality in Him, and perfect holiness with our Father.
There is no difference, and there is no separation. We are all one and the same.
May this day be a symbol for us of remembering our own birth unto our Self,
the one Self that we share intimately with all the Sonship.
And so this day we come into our own, and the blessings we would bestow
on Jesus the Christ we naturally bestow upon ourselves, and all our brothers and sisters.
We are the holy Son of God. May we be blessed with this remembrance this day.
Thank you for being part of my Family, helping me remember this magnificent Identity we all share.

Village Bulletin Board, 31st December, 2010:


HAPPY NEW YEAR!!


Let’s continue our end of year celebrations at the Village by wishing each other all the best for 2011.

May we learn that January 1st is a special day in the counting of our days,
as it marks the beginning of the time when each day shall blend into one.
One time, one day that remains forever unchanged in an eternal, heavenly Sky,
as changeless as the sea that ebbs and flows but always stays the same.
May we practice this coming year the remembrance of that special moment of ‘now’,
of Love and loveliness, such that tomorrow be not separate or different from today,
not better or worse. May we come Home this very day to Love and Innocence
such that it extends till tomorrow and the many days that follow until they all become one.

Enjoy your celebrations, my friends!

Village Bulletin Board, 24th December, 2010:


Christmas in our Village!

“Dashing through the fields (sunflower),
On a horse-drawn open cart,
Oh what fun it is,
Eating pie and tart!”

MEEEERRRY CHRISTMAS, EVERYONE!

As soon as you’ve finished with the hay rick ride, jump off next to the old oak because we’ve set up some swings on one of its great branches. Whoever swings highest (without getting lost in the branches, ‘o course!) gets to cut and serve the giant Christmas Cake baked by none other than our resident Australian Fairy Winnie. After the swing, you still can’t get to the dinner table until you’ve had a go bobbing apples in the big casks that farmer Anil left us from his last cider making. Finally, when you’ve done all that, meander past the walnut grove where our friendly Village squirrels (can’t remember their names) are jumpin’ and jivin’ to a mambo version of “All I want for Christmas if my two front teef”, and over to Nina’s Cottage.

As you’ll see, large old country tables have been set up outside and inside, just depending on the weather. The theme this year, well, it’s a little eclectic, but that’s normal I guess for this crazy bunch. So we have Surf ‘n Turf with a Vegetarian twist, together with Norwegian-Italian-German-Singapore influences. Now, where, I ask you, are you going to find originality like that other than in our spectacular Village? Would you forgive me, I couldn’t find the time to take and mount the photos of all the delicious things that everyone had prepared, but here’s a list of what I’ve seen on the tables so far:

Clementines and oranges with cloves (not sure if they’re for eatin’)
Bouillabesse, a delicious fish soup from Marseille
Barbecued giant prawns from Down Under (they arrived fresh this morning – come over to the barbecue area where BBQ-meister Zenbear is hard at work – someone bring him a glass of cider?)
Tenderloin, rump and filet steaks, only the best from organic farms in Nebraska and Kansas (kind, nice farms, these ones)
Slabs of thick sliced garlic bread with oodles of butter (no fat – this is a special Village)
Norwegian specialties of all sorts (yum!)
Buns filled with hot cheese, and a giant Brie just out of the oven with toasted almond slivers
Michele has brought along heaps of Fresh Dungeness Crab meat with melted sweet butter to dip it into,and whatever other dipping alternatives might be dear to your hearts, along with a crisp fuyu persimmon salad with arugula and avocado in an olive oil and fig balsamic dressing, a dash of shoyu, with lots of freshly ground black pepper. (Wow!)
A remarkable vegie ‘n chickpea casserole from Pam
Heaps of Duck Cassoulet from Castelnaudary (France) to be enjoyed with a deep Cahors ‘black’ wine
Then to finish it all off:
Gooey Tiramisu from Nina’s daughter
Scrumptious fruity Stollen from Germany
Decadent peppermint chip chocolate brownies from Michele
Brightly colored silver paper-wrapped candies from Laura

If you make your way over to the bar area you’ll find none other than your Mayor on hand to deliver you just the drink you want, be that a splendiferous fruit cocktail (all fruits in season), or something with a little more punch. Speaking of punch, there’s also an excellent variety of wines, including but not limited to: Billecart Salmon Brut Rose Champagne (thanks, Michele!), and of course some delish Cabernet and Pinot from California. The mayor brought along a few choices wines from France (mostly Burgundy’s though there is an excellent bottle or two of a Monbazillac sweet wine from the Bergerac area you should try)

And I couldn’t let this opportunity go by without remembering the real reason
for us meeting together at this time. We have marked in the western tradition
the day of the 25th December as the day we celebrate the birth of
one particular individual into this world.
With the help of the Brother Who has guided each one of us with his gentle words
now for many years,we have come to learn that the spirit this one individual contained
resides within each of us. He has made it his task to reach out to us daily,
reminding us of our perfect equality in Him, and perfect holiness with our Father.
There is no difference, and there is no separation. We are all one and the same.
May this day be a symbol for us of remembering our own birth unto our Self,
the one Self that we share intimately with all the Sonship.
And so this day we come into our own, and the blessings we would bestow
on Jesus the Christ we naturally bestow upon ourselves, and all our brothers and sisters.
We are the holy Son of God. May we be blessed with this remembrance this day.
Thank you for being part of my Family, helping me remember this magnificent Identity we all share.

Village Bulletin Board, 31st December, 2010:


HAPPY NEW YEAR!!


Let’s continue our end of year celebrations at the Village by wishing each other all the best for 2011.

May we learn that January 1st is a special day in the counting of days,
as it marks the beginning of the time when each day shall blend into one.
One time, one day that remains forever unchanged in an eternal heavenly Sky,
as changeless as the sea that ebbs and flows but always stays the same.
May we practice this coming year the remembrance of that special moment of ‘now’,
of Love and loveliness, such that tomorrow be not separate or different from today,
not better or worse. May this very day we come Home to Love and Innocence
such that it extends till tomorrow and the many days that follow until they all become one.

Enjoy your celebrations, my friends!

Mayor’s Journal, 5th December, 2010:


Of Love and Picnics

I love picnics. I try to make them happen whenever I can. Not that it’s always a complicated affair, sometimes it’s nothing more than cutting up some chunks of bread and cheese with tomato, sitting under a tree somewhere green and friendly. But I just love the idea of eating outside in some carefree way, getting our fingers all smothered in juice or sauce or mustard. Who can say why?

Sometimes the picnics I organized for Pat and me were so simple, she would come home from work with an hour for lunch and I would have prepared something to eat in some plastic-ware. Then we’d go sit by the village ‘lavoir’, which is the old washing shed where the women would come in days gone by to scrub and rinse their laundry (as recently as ten years ago I still saw some women doing this). The lavoir is located on the little stream that runs through the village and we’d sit by the stream as it entered the washing shed in little cascades, skipping from one level to the other as the water made its way down from one large stone-lined pool to the next, and then out back into the stream.

At the end of our meal I would pull out from a backpack the little camping stove and an Italian coffee maker. Within minutes I had that thing spluttering away, filling the aluminium top part with a thick dark brew of coffee. Even if it were cool, we would enjoy that coffee steaming in its porcelain cup (only porcelain will do), with a lump of rough raw sugar to take edge off the bitterness.

Ahhh…

Hey, what? What’s this have to do with love? Nothing. No, everything. It has as much to do with love as anything else, of course. But for me, picnics just seem to evoke that sense of freedom, lightness and spontaneity that we associate with love. And Love has been on my mind lately.

As you know, the last couple of months or so I’ve been struggling a bit to find a durable sense of inner peace. Up till September, I could convince myself all was okay and on track in my world. Then it became harder to still maintain that belief, given the ultimatum I had given myself: “By September you will have found new work or will have decided on your next career direction.” Blahdy, blahdy… You’ve all heard that one now. And as you all know, ultimatums can never possibly lead to peace. They are purpose-built to ensure guilt raises its sword and swiftly separates the worthy from the unworthy. You know which side of the fence I thought I landed on!

So, where’s Love gone? Where’s the picnic?

Strangely enough, I thought I was doing the Course well, though I was pretty sure that fear and self-condemnation weren’t normally part of the deal. It’s just that the ego can convince itself sometimes that it is supremely wise and all-knowing. In my case, I thought that doing the Course meant focusing on the dark side of the ego, looking for the self-judgment and fear etc. What I didn’t appreciate was that the ego can actually surreptiously lead one through Ken’s process, convincing one that he is just doing the hard work of forgiveness. I should have been suspicious when I heard an inner voice saying, “This is hard work!” But I wasn’t. Discomfort can feel so natural that I didn’t even know it was there, and building.

I knew the answer was to take the entire process more and more lightly, but in the classic logic of the ego, this felt like I wasn’t doing it properly! What was the problem? Again, I was making the ego real, making condemnation real and significant. But anytime I tried to look at the entire scenario more lightly, I felt I was betraying the process, I was cheating. As if this was supposed to be difficult: if I wasn’t feeling pain – so went this logic – then I should seriously doubt I was doing the process correctly. I had so drummed into my mind that we must never underestimate the viciousness of the ego, and that we should always be aware of the hatefulness in all our thoughts, that I was temporarily incapable of finding my way back to a sense of equanimity and peaceful observation. The good news is that that’s all over now. (yay!)

I learned a big lesson.

Ken has taught us that we must be aware of our tendency to underestimate the ego, to believe that we are further along than we think. He asks us to be very observant of our thoughts in order to discover the true level of murderous and exclusion lurking there. This is the only way to make real progress with this Course. Then, as we know, we must take this to the presence of Love and kindness where it will dissolve.

I would make another qualifying statement to supplement Ken’s: “Never overestimate the ego – the ego is not more powerful than Love.” Our goal is Love, the remembrance of that remarkable state of warmth, clarity and all-knowing security that is incapable of fear or doubt. I thought that doing the Course properly meant not looking toward Love, but toward the ego. To a certain extent this is absolutely true. But only to a certain extent – not to the exclusion of Love.

I believe that those of us at the Village are pretty well devoted students of Ken’s. In that case, we all know that the focus of our work is uncovering our unloving, separating thoughts, and bringing them to the Love, to Jesus, within our minds. The method we use is not working at finding the Love within us, but finding the obstacles to Love within us. This we know pretty well. On the other hand, I would like to make sure that we remind ourselves from time to time that Love also has its symbols, that there is a real and valid reason to remind ourselves that Love is our true and only goal.

And so I propose that we begin to weave into our work at the Village some thoughts and meditations that remind us of this magical, wonderful goal…

“You are as God created you. The sounds of this world are still, the sights of this world disappear, and all the thoughts that this world ever held are wiped away forever by this one idea…

True light is strength, and strength is sinlessness. If you remain as god created you, you must be strong and light must be in you. He Who ensured your sinlessness must be the guarantee of strength and light as well. You are as God created you. Darkness cannot obscure the glory of God’s Son. You stand in light, strong in the sinlessness in which you were created, and in which you will remain throughout eternity…” (Lesson 94)

For a long time I had a reaction to this lesson that bordered on an allergy. The same with lesson 93 (Light and joy and peace abide in me). I skipped over them and focused on all the lessons that were more incisive, looking at the ego, etc. Perhaps this is an occupational hazard of those working with Ken (he is often reminding us to not skip the difficult work, thinking we could gain Heaven if we simply repeated these beautiful lessons often enough). This is a mistake we can fall into naturally. It’s certainly not because of anything to do with him, of course; it’s because it’s so easy for the ego to come along for the ACIM ride. It’s so easy to think that we’re doing what Ken wants because we’re feeling uncomfortable (in my experience). And then the ego logically might conclude that it’s about feeling uncomfortable all the time. In the ego’s language, “no pain, no gain’ becomes “because there’s pain, there’s gain.” As if that could possibly be the path Jesus wants us to walk.

I’m now convinced there’s a gentler way of coming to Jesus, and I intend to work this principle into our little Village from now on. There is ‘gain’ to be had, and it’s not always about ‘pain’. There is a peacefulness and sense of release from our damaging self-concepts that we can reach. There are some pretty magnificent rewards to be won from doing this work. Let’s make sure we don’t forget those, too. The royal picnic is there; it asks only for us to come with “wholly empty hands unto our God.”

Mayor’s Journal, 8th December, 2010:


To all the guilty caretakers out there – You cannot be a good Jesus substitute for another person!

Following a recent event in my life with an extended family member and a conversation with a Villager going through something similar, this piece came to me.

Who has not had the experience of feeling just terrible when faced with another person’s anger, sadness or pain? Maybe you even know that he or she is laying a guilt trip on you, but it doesn’t help. You free-fall into the trap, and that crushing, self-abasing sentiment of having done wrong and hurting another, or just not doing enough, fills you with a sense of ‘icy hopelessness’. What’s actually going on, why is it so hard to pull ourselves out and back into the calm fields of equanimity and wisdom?

Our mind whispers, “By my suffering this guilt and torment, this person’s suffering is reduced. So if only I could suffer enough, this person would somehow feel better. At least, if I don’t suffer because of their anger, pain and upset, they would take that really badly.” Where’s this craziness coming from? Why do we sense that this person would somehow feel better if we felt bad?

It helps if first we remember that the reason that people feel pain or suffering of any nature is because they are failing to turn within and seek the Love they need there in their own mind, in the folds of Jesus’ cloak. They sense crushing guilt in their minds, but their own decision for suffering seems too intolerable to face. They cannot bear to confront their choice to turn away from the support and love of Jesus within their own mind; consequently they believe they can magically rid themselves of this responsibility and weightiness if they place it on you. “You can do something about my pain,” so they whisper, “but because you are so horrible you’re choosing not to do it. It’s your choice for me to be in pain, not mine. You have the magical solution – just do what I want you to do. It’s so simple! And yet you refuse. How heartless!”

As we all know, that finger pointing at us accusingly seems to leap out at us as if from some metaphysical 3D horror film: “God has found me! Now I’ve had it. Repent, repent, feel guilty. I’ll torment myself, and all shall see that I truly regret my terrible acts. Oh, this terrible power of mine that I have abused yet again. Woe, woe.”

When you accept this responsibility, you claim that, indeed, you have this special magical ability to lessen this person’s suffering. You give yourself this remarkable ability to remove this person’s pain just by some act or another. Yes, you believe you are Jesus (or God) and have remarkable abilities of healing and succour. But because it is ‘one or the other’, because our wellness in this world is a question of providing the right external conditions (and not as a result of a choice to access inner peace), you must also defend the demands on your time and resources, which are limited. This person’s well-being must be sacrificed, so the logic goes, so that yours or your loved one’s might be maintained. We can easily see here how this plays into our individuality’s sense of identity and specialness. This entire drama is maintaining the myth that our life is within this outer, imperfect world as separated beings, and not within any perfect inner world.

Going one step further, we can see how a part of us might actually delight in this kind of power. I.e. we have a secret investment in the situation as it is. This person’s continued suffering at our hand actually reinforces our sense that we hold the power over life and death, happiness and unhappiness, for him or her. All we have to do is pay the occasional price of a little guilt, and we can keep this entire game going for a long, long time. We might even be able to recognize within ourselves a twisted sense that this person must deserve to be suffering. There is a certain ego logic that says that while this person suffers like this and needs my help, it must be because God has looked less favorably on him than on me. And we all know that God is never wrong. Consequently, his continued suffering is on-going proof of my innocence and deservedness of God’s favor.

The reason we feel guilty when someone suffers and points the finger at us should be clear by now. The whole game is based on keeping guilt very alive and vigorous, and the more we participate, the more we know on an unconscious level that we are reinforcing the underlying attack and condemnation. Yet we feel the only solution is to feel even guiltier, saying to ourselves that somehow if we feel bad enough God won’t really punish us. In fact, if I feel sufficiently bad, and maybe even fall sick, have a car crash or have a nervous breakdown, the guilt will fall back on the other person. ‘Look at what you’ve done to me by your emotional blackmail! I couldn’t concentrate and had an accident, I’ve been so upset, I can’t function and work anymore. Look what you’re doing to me! You’re killing me!’ Our ego’s death wish rises to the surface of our mind, and our own suffering seems to be the only solution for our inherent wickedness which this person’s suffering seems to demonstrate. But we know we are playing the exact same game and trying to send the volley-ball of guilt back over the net to the initiator of the game. And we pray, “if only God/destiny/fate would remove this person from my life, all would be well – I would be saved from my guilt.” Which is, of course, just another way of saying that if this person died, I’d feel better. Oh, what tangled webs we weave!

But let’s say that we’re willing to forgo this specialness now and seek a real solution, for their sake and ours. We must begin by learning to accept that whatever this person wants from us, whatever he claims will make him feel better, is not the ultimate solution. It might be a stopgap measure, and in some cases it might be wise and kind to do as he requests. But whatever it is, it will not remove the guilt from his mind causing him pain. The only thing that will ever really help is guiding him to turn within and choose the guiltlessness offered by Jesus, enfolding himself once more within His Love. And we do this by remembering first and foremost to do this for ourselves.

We need to learn to say (in our minds): “I cannot make you choose again, choose to draw closer to Jesus within your mind and to find the comfort there you are really looking for. You think you are looking for something from me, but that’s not going to really help you. I might think it will help, and I might think I have the power to make you feel better. But that’s no answer at all, not for you and not for me. As much as I might like to think so, I cannot replace Jesus for you and bring you the comfort you want. That would be silly for me to try to do.”

If we choose not to define the problem this way within our own minds (as an internal, not external drama), then we are naturally accepting the logic of the situation as this person is providing it. And if this is our choice, it is because we are afraid of accepting the problem as it really is, and the solution as it really is. We do not want to accept that this person retains the perfect solution in his mind to his pain, and prefer to think we have the solution to his problem, because we do not want to acknowledge that we contain the answer to all our pain within our minds. And so, yes, as usual, we find that we are doing precisely the same thing as this person we are inevitably judging. We cannot possibly judge him for not turning within, because we are committing exactly the same mistake. We must become aware when our acts actually intend to help ‘save’ this person from his fear of Jesus. You know that Jesus scares him, because Jesus scares you. You believe that by saving this person from that terrible fear within, by keeping the problem within the circumstances of his life, you will keep the problem outside of your mind, too.

I think it is also wise to keep in mind that if this guilt is circulating around in our minds, that is because we are deeply attracted to it. Yes! (how strange, you say) We must always remember that guilt is the feeling we associate with our body’s life, with our individuality. I feel the most alive, the most ‘me’ in my private, particular life, whenever I feel really guilty. No one else is facing these unique set of circumstances with all the different characters, events and dramas. This is my life! I would not recognize my life if this situation suddenly evaporated, leaving no trace behind but just a calm even peacefulness. This situation has perhaps been part of my story for a long, long time. And so we need to appreciate the depth of our attachment to this story, which of course keeps it rotating in our thoughts, being turned over and upside down and inside out – perpetually. And so at some point we will need to say, “Enough already! I’d rather let go of the story of my life the way I’ve made it up till now. There must be another way!” And, voilà, a perfect invitation is born.

On another note, I might hear myself saying in my mind, but if I accept the presence of Love and guiltlessness in my own mind and feel much better, that will upset this person even more! He will take this as an affront, as arrogance and true heartlessness on my part. And then he will say: “How can you be peaceful and happy when I’m in such pain? I was right, you really don’t love me or care about me! This is proof! How evil you are!” I’m no longer playing the game we agreed to play (and have perhaps been playing for thirty or forty years); I’m no longer accepting my part in this terrible dance. There’s no doubt that this would be very unsettling for a partner with whom we have been dancing for a long time. But perhaps this person will learn to feel that the peacefulness we are now feeling is actually what he really wants to join in on, the new dance he wants to join, and not just some simplistic solution that will almost immediately lose effect.

If we truly love our brother (or colleague, parent, partner, sibling, child, or client), then we would remember for him what the true solution is to his problem. We would not continue to insist on our power to remove his pain, and we would try to find a way to communicate to him that he contains inner resources he was perhaps unaware of. This is not to say that we might not do what we need to do in this world to help someone materially (and perhaps we will see that it’s time to stop). But we would change our inner focus, and free ourselves from our feelings of guilt, power and specialness. This is the path we have chosen, to remember peace in the place of fear. To demonstrate guiltlessness and strength by giving them life within our own minds.

Now, just before you start feeling all guilty about any of this craziness, go out and rent a good Abbot and Costello film! Whatever you do, don’t take any of this too seriously! Fold Jesus’ cloak around you, and sit on the couch with a bowl of popcorn and have a good laugh!

The death wish is a powerful underlying force in our thoughts and lives. The subject for me personally has come up many, many times. I have wanted to write a little note about it for a while, and now seems like a good moment. My goal for this Village: that we learn to undo all our secret, guilty thoughts, bringing them out into the open where we can see the hidden, devastating – but completely ridiculous – logic behind them. Read, enjoy (?), and remember to always keep the Three Stooges close at hand!

Everything here is a death wish. Coming here is a death wish, since it is the wish for something other than Life. Coming here is the wish to experience something other than Life, so everything here is about constantly choosing what is not Life (i.e. turning away from Love). That’s the real wish that underlies every decision here. We will make thousands and thousands of decisions here, and avoid the one and only decision that will undo all the others: the decision to open the door again back to Love. To allow ourselves back through this magical door, to be enfolded once more in Jesus’ warm embrace.

Fortunately, the death-wish thing, it’s only a wish, a whim. There is no opposite to Life. We cannot kill ourselves – that’s impossible. All is Life, everywhere and always, despite appearances. Everything that seems to die or change is an appearance. We cannot take our life away, no matter what we may try. It was given to us, and can never be removed. And so it is with our guiltlessness as well. So, thinking of killing ourselves is not a sin. Jesus knows this is what we’re thinking each and every single moment of the day we are not turning towards him. It is no surprise to him. No biggie. As he says, “So, what’s new? Come home, already.”

The death wish is based on the idea of change. It assumes that we have changed ourselves from our original condition of sinlessness and wholeness, and have now become guilty and individualized (with a private, sinful life). Our lives here are about change: “If only I can finally make the right changes, and make other people make the right changes, then all will be well.” The death wish is about the ultimate, final change: “If only I change this last one final thing, then all my problems will be solved.”

The death wish is a way of insisting that I did indeed manage to pull off the impossible and make a separate life for myself by killing God; I did indeed manage to give myself this incredible power over life and death, just like God. No, better than God. “I’ll show him and everyone else how I have this amazing power to create myself, and then destroy myself.” In order to turn back toward Love, we must see the silly arrogance of thinking we have the power over life and death. And we must learn to be grateful that we could never give ourselves this real power. God is not dead. We did not kill Him. We don’t have that kind of power.

The only meaningful change is to change our minds. There is only one change we made – to leave our sane, right minds. And the only change we can make is to return back towards the Love that is there still in our minds. All these other questions of change are designed to disguise this one simple choice we have. The Life Wish we have.

The death wish occurs to us when we are in pain or guilt. It says, “The answer to the dilemma of my life is to end it. That will end all problems and questions.” The words that are unspoken: 1. “I’m too horrible to keep on living, there’s nothing I can do to change this terrible condition. There’s only one solution, and that’s to end the horrible thing I am.” (For those who have Paulo, re-read “Love and a Kitchen Spoon”) 2. “And this will show God how much pain I have been in, and then he will look for the people who have caused my suffering. He will not punish me because it’s clear I will already have suffered too much, and he’ll find those who are really guilty!” 3. “I’m not powerful enough to change these circumstances of my life, but I’ll show everyone how powerful I am by taking away my own life – no one can take that power of mine away; I’ll show them. I still hold the trump card. My death will be my final victory.”

The death wish underlies everything here. Everyone’s dearest wish is to die, and that’s why he does indeed have the experience of dying. He does not really die, but has what he considers to be the experience of dying. So it’s absolutely no surprise that this thought comes up from time to time, and maybe even often. Ultimately, when we attain the goal of this Course, we become aware of ourselves as the dreamers of the dream of this life. We begin to perceive that our ‘self’ is a dream figure and not a fixed reality, and we are outside the dream figure (not ‘in’ the dream figure). Then ‘dying’ becomes simply the experience of observing the passage of a dream. So, no experience of death.

In fact, if we really pay attention, we will find the death wish amongst our thoughts pretty much everywhere. It is the thought that says I don’t deserve Love, and it takes multiple different forms. It is the underlying expectation that negative things will happen to me. It takes the form of any negative experience or feeling, which is always a way of insisting that, “Love is not here because Love has been destroyed (because I did it!). Now I must be punished and ultimately destroyed for this terrible act.” A painful stubbed toe can be whispering, “this hurts because I have done something horribly wrong.” Yes, a stubbed toe = I have killed God. Even a cold sore says the same thing: this sore proves Love is dead – I have shattered Heaven with this sore. It’ll be nice when we can learn to smile at all this!

The death wish is an attempt to negate the presence and existence of Love. To undo it, all we need do is recognize that we do not really have the power to negate Love. (That is good news!) And we can recognize within our death wish ultimately our dearest wish which is to return to Love. We exercise our Life Wish when we become willing to look honestly at our death wish, and remember our love of Love.

Understanding the ‘logic’ behind all these self-negating thoughts can already help to take off the acuteness of our self-condemnation. There is a logical progression of arguments in favor of killing oneself, but only when we begin with the fundamental idea that we have, and have successfully used, our power to destroy Love. When we finally are willing to see that we were not successful in this effort, then the whole argument in favor of taking one’s life falls apart like a house of cards.

Turn back towards Love. Nothing can destroy Life; nothing can remove Love from your mind. From that possibility we are forever safe.

Oh, yeah, and give yerself a good tickle, too!

Patience, folks. I’m trying to catch up! Please refer to the articles on the home page for the moment.

Patience, folks. I’m trying to catch up! Please refer to the articles on the home page for the moment.