Choose Again

the healing paradox: a key to remembering who you are

Some of you may have heard of EFT, a healing technique based on tapping certain acupuncture points on the body while saying phrases related to the particular physical or emotional problem being addressed. There's a touching movie about this technique, if you are interested, available here.

I'm not writing this to promote EFT, but to emphasize that EFT is effective because it is aware of the human mind's resistance to paradox, and it takes this resistance into account first and foremost. This is the exact same process as A Course in Miracle's idea of true forgiveness.

In terms of physical or emotional pain or trauma, EFT utilizes what it calls a set-up phrase, while tapping on certain points in the body. Say the problem is a headache. The set-up phrase might be, "Even though I have this beastly headache, I deeply and completely love, accept and forgive myself."  If the problem is cancer, a set-up phrase (I'm over-simplifying here) might be, "Even though I have cancer, I deeply and completely love, accept and forgive myself."

The first thing that is taken into account is the human mind's tendency towards resistance. When anything unpleasant occurs, the human mind does not accept—it resists. And it is this resistance that keeps the object of resistance (the problem) in place—the way a steady wind might pin a fallen leaf to a wall.

To the human mind, to accept a painful situation as totally fine and worthy of love, is unconscionable. This is the paradox. This is also why it's so difficult to forgive people, places and situations—to see them from the safe-whole-and-healed point of view of the higher self, spirit, holy spirit, all-that-is. When we forgive and accept things, even though they seem to be impaired or injured or causing pain, we are viewing the situation from the point of view of that which is completely whole—that which knows it is not subject to this virtual dream scenario we are calling human life. This Self feels as safe and snug in relation to our human aches and pains as we do on the couch when watching a movie in which a character seems to be harmed.

Furthermore, it knows that the only way to heal what is not real is to see it as such, which is the meaning of forgiveness. Hence the "even though."

In terms of non-duality, the even though puts an end to seeking behavior. It allows the frantic, seeking, searching human mind to feel acknowledged and forgiven. Resistance to paradox is resistance to healing. As humans, in response to the feelings of separation and pain and loneliness and darkness, we are always, always, always heading in the wrong direction because to us the right direction feels wrong.

When we stop moving away from what we fear "is not it," something magical happens. We begin to see that it is the act of rejecting that creates the sense of not-okayness which characterizes our lives. In ACIM terms this is "making the dream real."

For the human mind it is very difficult to stop this knee-jerk resistance to what is. Fortunately we have those two magic words, "even though." For example: "Even though I am not enlightened and have indigestion, and am just a fucked-up human being, I deeply and completely, love, accept and forgive myself."

second life... another helpful analogy

We all understand, just by being alive right now and on the internet, what it means to create a virtual world. If you haven't had the experience of creating an avatar and identifying with it, you can at least imagine what that might be like. Some people enter into business or emotional relationships in Second Life, or they go to school in Second Life. Big corporations have branches in Second Life. I suppose you could even get married in Second Life, if you wanted to.

Working and interacting within a virtual world means adhering to a set of rules established by the world itself. It means accepting the limitations of the paradigm by which the avatar is created.

Into this virtual world we call human life, or physical universe, we project a small part of ourselves. We identify with a body and we accept the limitations it, by its very nature, imposes. We squeeze ourselves into a mind that identifies with the body-appearance—a temporary mind which feels separate from everything around itself.

And most of us, for most of our lives, identify with this mind as though it were the real "me"—as though it were actually the totality of our being. There is nothing really mystical about this, although from the point of view of the human mind it is certainly mysterious. Yet there is always, within the identification with the human mind, a sense of being incomplete, in the dark, and alone. Imagine what the existence of a thought-form—a temporary configuration of energy, like a cloud in the sky, would feel like.

You know that quote from de Chardin: "We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience." To me this seems like a literal truth.

We are not human. We are having a human experience. This is what ACIM means when it says, "I am not a body, I am free, for I am still as God created me." There is great freedom in understanding this. Fear and worry belong to the virtual body—to its sense of impending doom—to its sense that it is a temporary appearance and dissolving from the moment it is born. It is not who we are.

When you first become aware of the ego—the human mind—it is always as a force for suffering, clinging, resistance, competition. And yet when you begin to see that the human mind, the ego, is the sound of a temporary thought-form struggling to make itself heard, it evokes compassion within the greater "you."

This thought-form is the idea that there can be anything separate—anything not lovingly cradled within the whole—anything not a part of God, of What Is. It's an echo from the flip side of love. Here in this virtual experience, there is the possibility of feeling separate from All That Is—of thinking that you are an actual separate being. This is the experience of fear.

When we identify with the body we fight for our existence because we feel temporary. We compete for resources because we believe they are finite. We try to awaken or become enlightened because we believe that this is somehow a way to make our existence permanent or at least end our pain. We feel tremendous guilt because we somehow get the sense that we are forgetting something—we somehow believe that what we are doing is wrong—that our transgressions in the name of the poor separate-feeling thought-forms are real.

What we have forgotten is that our existence is permanent. We are not human. We are that within which this human experience is occurring.The desire to nail it down and figure it out is a human mind-trait—a spin-off of fear. There is nothing to fear. Any thought that resonates with fear is a human mind-thought. All you need to do is to be aware of this. Just notice it.

In terms of the Second Life analogy, we have gotten so engrossed in the game that we have actually entered into the virtual world and forgotten the 'me' who is sitting at the computer. In terms of this virtual life we call planet earth, we have entered so completely into it that we have come to believe we will cease to exist when this body dies—we have completely forgotten that we are not temporary. We have done this for reasons of our own. Those reasons belong to our one Self and cannot be understood by the human mind within whose limitations we find ourselves.

Any self-tormenting voices within your head are the voices of the dissolving human thought-form trying to make itself eternal. Go silent, turn your attention towards the silence within you. Observe this virtual world. Enjoy it if you can. Know that it's also okay if it's not your cup of tea. The best way to disentangle yourself from the fear reactions of the human mind, if they are getting to you, is to turn your attention to the present moment—the silent awareness within you. It's always there.

Also of importance is to understand that we are not to blame for the coarser aspects of virtual human reactions. Certain types of emotions are simply a product of the environment. By disassociating with the human tendency to judge—by loving and accepting ourselves and others even though we have forgotten who we are and have been jealous or angry or violent or selfish... by loving ourselves "even though"—we release fear. By completely accepting this situation, with all its ambiguity and imperfection, just as it is, we release fear. When fear is released, the focus automatically defaults to love—the memory of who we are.

the lucid emissary

If you have ever become lucid in a dream, stop to think, now, about what actually was happening. The dream character—a body of sorts—is suddenly or gradually inhabited by your waking style of awareness (the onset of lucidity).

This waking awareness then exists side by side with the dream character's mind (which is entirely convinced of the reality of the dream and which has no other reference points) within the dream character's so-called body.

It is NOT that the dream character "wakes up" or achieves some kind of new awareness. The dream character does not change in any way. But it is infused or inhabited by your waking state of awareness. There are still two of you there in the dream, so to speak, and when attention becomes lax, the dream character's more limited awareness takes over and you revert from lucidity back to dreaming.

As you then awaken from the nighttime dream, with its varying degrees of lucidity, into this waking dream, you can see through recollection that there was the projected dream body, which had its own very narrow circumscribed consciousness with which you were identified, and the lucid mind, which, through your waking intention and discipline you inserted into that narrow dream-body self, in order to expand the experience of both the waking "you" and the sleeping "you."

Again, the dream self did not awaken. What happened was that a greater awareness, which was always there (since of course dreams take place within your mind) came to the foreground. What ensues is a vivid exploration of the dream environment—an exhilarating experiment in the manipulation of consciousness and an expansion of experience.

All of these selves... the dreaming body-self, the lucid awareness experiencing the dream environment, and the so-called waking self who opens her eyes in bed in the morning... all of these selves are within one mind. Yet none of them are experiencing the whole or native state of that mind because they are all more or less identified with the state of being within a human body.

The you who is identified with the human body cannot awaken and never will awaken. This "you" is a temporary phenomenon. It is only when you begin to see that you have allowed your attention to be trapped by the idea of actually being that body which you inhabit that you begin to sense that there is another "you" and that, in fact, the phenomenon of "you" is not limited in any way. It is multiple and single at the same time. It is completely shared and yet inviolately individual. It is eternal. It expands in ever increasing gestalts of awareness that are existing simultaneously with this very limited experience of the dream of human life.

Looked at in another way, the dream character (you in a non-lucid dream) is completely convinced of the reality of the dream drama. It feels more or less victimized—by the environment, by the other characters in the dream and by the changeable nature of the dream. Even in a so-called happy dream, there is an undertone of fear, because nothing is stable long enough to be relied upon, and there is a sense of being isolated within a body (fictional though it may be).

When lucidity enters the dream, the dream character is suddenly freed from this limited sense of powerless victimhood by the lucid awareness's understanding that none of this is real, and more importantly that its identity is completely independent from the dream body and its environment. So the fearful awareness of the dream character is replaced by the fearless awareness of the lucid emissary.

Within this waking dream we call life, there is also a lucid emissary. That lucid emissary is also you—infinitely more you than the part that has mistakenly identified itself with the body. The part that identifies with the body is called the ego. It truly believes that it is this body, and that it will not survive the dissolution of the body-formation any more than a character in a video game survives the shutting down of the computer. Its consciousness is just like that of the dream figure in a non-lucid dream.

The main characteristic of the lucid emissary is fearless love and indiscriminate, nonjudgmental appreciation, of this, just as it is, right here and right now.

The main characteristic of the dream-figure (human) identity is competitive, discriminating judgment, a refusal to be satisfied with "this" here and now (because it senses its inherent lack of reality and its own temporary nature) and the resulting fear of dissolution, which it interprets as punishment. It actually has no independent self other than these very characteristics, which it maintains through a constant communal stream of non-stop self-referencing mental chatter.

You are not the human. You are the lucid emissary. You are also the mind within which all of this is occurring. When you find your attention trapped by worry, fear and anxiety about tomorrow, or resentment over today, you have forgotten, temporarily, who you are. You've allowed your mind to become distracted by the concept-production mechanism of the human mind. This happens. It's part of the dream-territory. If you are in distress over it, just go silent. Withdraw your attention from it. Shift your attention to that which is not the incessant internal dialogue. Just come back out of thought, out of concept, to this present moment. Relax into the silent, loving lucidity of your eternal identity.

the important thing

It seems to me that on the so-called spiritual path, people get terribly caught up in ideas of better or worse, accomplishment vs. failure. People feel inferior for not having realizations. People feel that others are better than they are, or vice versa.

The most important thing to understand is that there is nothing wrong with you. Any idea of better-or-worse, any idea of success-or-failure that contains within it even a grain of self-hatred, that contains within it even an iota of the feeling that you are not good enough—is simply incorrect. It's just an incorrect thought-form that you've mistakenly identified with.

Yes, there are understandings to be remembered, but they have nothing to do with your inherent worth. Oneness does not mean loss of the sense of self. It means a remembering that all is given—that you exist and yet you are never separate, never unsupported, never without connection to your source.

No so-called spiritual achievement that does not resonate with this light of warmth and compassion—this absolute sense of love and belonging—is of any true or lasting worth.

This is not a contest or a competition. This is all about remembering love.

back to basics

Most of you probably understand what I mean when I say that you are not your thoughts. You probably have experienced standing back and noticing, becoming cognizant of, the thoughts that are passing like clouds through your mind, and getting a distinct sense that they actually have no more to do with you than the traffic on the street, or the sounds on the radio, or whatever seems to be playing on network television.

Thoughts happen. They range from the sublime to the truly frightening. The entire arena of thought is really very much like the whole internet, or like YouTube. It's largely junk with some interesting observations thrown in. However, every conceivable thought, no matter how lofty, has something in common with every other thought, no matter how base—and that common denominator is the nature of its origin. All thought begins with the delusional yet very real-seeming experience of the separate self. Thought arises simultaneously, is co-emergent with, the experience of separation.

So the very origin of thought is on shaky ground to begin with. It's a lot like thought in a dream. In a dream, thought is arising based on the dream drama, as though the dream drama were actually real. When you awaken from the dream you see that not only wasn't the dream drama real, but any and all thoughts or emotions associated with it were completely meaningless because they were based on the belief that what was not happening in reality, was.

The thought-stream, the internal dialogue, the storyline, is sometimes called the ego, or the mechanism of ego. When listened to as though it were real, it creates a sensation of solidity. It creates a feeling of stable identity that can stand as separate from the identities of other people, objects and occurrences.

All thoughts, when identified with, when given that injection of energy that comes when you hop on and follow along with them, create form on some level. Whatever you include in your attention creates form on some level—so powerful is the force of your attention.

When you watch a little YouTube video, sometimes it amuses you and for the next few minutes the world seems brighter. When you stumble upon one of those "God, I wish I hadn't seen that." type of YouTube experiences, you may find that for the next few minutes your world seems darker.

In exactly the same way as you choose what you expose yourself to on the internet or YouTube, you can choose to be aware of the quality of the thoughts you choose to inject with the powerful creative force of your own identifying attention.

All of this presupposes that you are actually noticing that there is thought, and then there is no-thought, sometimes called "the space between thoughts." To me it feels like space, period, in which all that seems to appear, occurs. A living, cognizant, shimmering silent aliveness, the love and grace of which can inform your choices.

In order to even become aware of this situation, it's necessary to spend some time turning inward and noticing what is happening in your mind. Imagine if you had no idea how to change the channel on a TV, or stop a nasty looping YouTube video, or even turn off a computer or a radio. It's the same thing. It's necessary to use the blessed power of your attention to turn inward and notice the workings of your own mind, on a regular basis. It requires a little bit of effort, similar to the effort required when you learned to brush your teeth every day, or eat right, or get some exercise. Same type of effort.

If you are suffering, and if your world seems dark, you have been (justifiably so, it may seem) identifying with dark, unhappy thoughts and they have attracted more thoughts like them. This has done nothing to harm or change that shimmering essence within you, but your access to it (or its healing access to you) is limited by the fact that your attention is trapped. Learning to shift those atrophied muscles of attention—to understand that you are not a victim of circumstances—can be difficult at first. It's a lot like learning to use a once paralyzed limb, or learning to overcome an addiction.

Eventually you begin to understand that whatever you give your attention to, grows. Your attention is like the sun, rain and nourishment all rolled into one. And as you withdraw your attention from something, it begins to wither. So as you turn your attention away from the thought stream, to the space between thoughts (also called the now, or the present moment, just as it is) your experience of that space grows, and the thought stream in your proximal experience quiets down and becomes less and less obtrusive. These things happen on their own, the way muscle grows when you exercise. It's just the way it is. Nothing about you has changed. You have just freed your attention from its entrapment in thought. It will drift back again and again and again, but each time you notice it, the freeing happens more and more easily until eventually it is automatic.

the freeing of attention vs. the trap of achievement

A few weeks ago it was really windy here and my husband and I went down to the lake to watch the waves. The light was such that the water was a particular malachite green that occurs on Lake Superior, and as the waves broke they were marbled with areas of aeration created by air trapped in the cold—shades of lighter green that appeared and dissolved. My husband called these lighter patches "footprints." Each wave was different in how it broke on the rocks—leaving a unique pattern of footprints and then subsiding into the whole.

We (we in usual terms) are the wave. A seemingly separate, frothy expression of the big "is-ness." This expression that we are is not something degraded or inferior. The wave is not something that does not exist. But it is something that, like all appearances, is temporary and does not in itself have the ability to create and sustain an identity.

Thought is a product of our experience as wave (body). All of our concepts and perceptions are the interpreting of experience from the point of view of wave. There is nothing wrong with this, but it leads to the experience of suffering when we mistakenly believe that it is somehow the body that is generating our sense of identity.

Thought belongs to the body dream—the dreaming of wave. Thoughts are a product of our attention being trapped momentarily by the wave. Believing and experiencing itself to be separate creates the sense of two-ness from which thought as an effect emerges, the way mist sprays from a breaking wave. It's a shattering and fragmenting—a spray of droplets, each a pattern in itself. Without this sense of two-ness, thought, as we experience it, does not exist.

If you believe yourself to be wave, and believe that your identity is being generated by the body, then the droplet sprays of your thoughts are tinged with the color of fear. If you understand yourself to be the lake or the ocean from which the wave emerges, your thought-spray is more an experience of temporary exultation. If you understand yourself to be the whole of being from which all ideas of ocean and wave emerge—commentary ceases.

Each day, minute to minute, we are wave, droplet, ocean, universe, nothing. Identity appears in infinite ways, always the same but always different. There is no need to try to limit the sense of "me" to one or another state. No need to try to be always one way as opposed to another way. The whole ball of wax is fine. If you find yourself suffering and wish to change that, do some inner housekeeping and look at how you are attaching to thought, and from which state of being that thought is emerging. When the dishes are dirty, we wash them. If your thoughts are giving you problems, look at them.

The looking itself is freeing. That's the miracle of attention. This is about intention, yes, the way lifting your hand to your mouth to drink some water is intention. It's about imagination the way imagining that the sensation of thirst can be quenched is about imagination.

What it is not about is any kind of permanent achievement. The idea of achievement is purely a wave-thought. You can identify wave thoughts by the fact that they have opposites. Achievement is about the wave (1.) desiring to be loved by the ocean because it has forgotten that it is the ocean, and (2.) struggling to make itself permanent (and therefore safe) as a wave (a permanent wave!), which is our sad little human adventure.

self-respect

When you bring your attention fully into the present moment, your present environment, motley though it may be with all its seeming chaos and smells and uncertainty, the crumbs in your keyboard and fact that you need a haircut, the kids and all their problems and the whole money thing... when you bring yourself fully here and just allow the litany of thought to quiet down, slow way down... it becomes possible to see that what you have been chasing, be it awakening or enlightenment or wealth or love, is illusory, and that the chase itself is not only the suffering you have been experiencing, but the very thing that has been keeping these qualities from your life.

Stopping—turning one's mental back on the chase, the seeking, the hoping for something other than this—requires a certain kind of self-respect. We are mortally afraid to say "this is good enough, this is it" because we fear that by saying so, by resting right here and appreciating this, we will cut off our chances of ever getting anything else—and ultimately, at our core, of ever being reunited with what Is, with God, with Truth, or however you wish to put it.

The secret is that the entire problem lies in our resistance to this "is." We want some other "is." Truth is never found anywhere other than right here and right now. And it is this we refuse to accept. Yet without this fundamental acceptance, this fundamental relinquishing of judgment—right now, and only right now—there is no hope of noticing that wherever you put your foot is sacred ground.

It is the resistance that blocks the awareness. Yet even saying that, it seems like I'm talking about something special that you need to do, in order to get something special that is other than this, right here and right now. That's an unavoidable consequence of language.

The chase, the resistance, the argument, the judgment, the concept, the idea—it's all occurring at one level—all occurring in thought. It's all thought. There is no solution at the level of thought.

When you face this conundrum, you notice that all seeking is a function of the thought-self, and its continual, unreliable, self-contradictory concepts. That's where the self-respect comes it. That's when your grasping hands begin to open and their emptiness is felt to be the essential gift that it is.

it's a matching game

In response to my last post, a reader asked: "Is 'turning away' from pervasive feelings or thoughts of lack the same as non-resistance to 'what is'? It feels as though acceptance or non-resistance might work easier for me than trying to trick this mind into thinking that there is no lack or no suffering."

•    •    •

Yes. This is kind of a key point and although it is utterly simple, it seems to be a difficult one for us to see, in love as we are with complexity. It's actually almost too simple. Once you see it, it seems nearly hilarious, how simple it is. But we have eons of complex thought-habits in place, so the simple is not easy to see.

To communicate simply is not easy either, so bear with me!

Let's use the hot stove analogy. You put your hand on a hot stove, and it's burning. In terms of our ordinary lives this can be a situation in which, for whatever reason, there is pain and the temporary appearance of lack.

Here's the thing: we understand what it means, physically, to take our burning hand off a hot stove. That happens automatically unless there is some kind of paralysis occurring.

In our minds, however, there is such atrophy of the power of attention, that there actually is a kind of paralysis occurring. The paralysis has to do with what we think we are, as opposed to what life is. We are not different from what we are experiencing as life. Life is not outside of us. There is nothing, actually, outside of us. What we are experiencing as form is an accurate projection of our own mental states. It's not necessary, or even possible to "get" this, but it can be known by the effects this understanding produces in relation to the amount of suffering we experience.

When we are in pain or experiencing lack we focus immediately upon the pain or lack and we begin an internal litany of complaint and fear in relation to it. This litany produces an illusory yet strong sense of self that is dependent upon suffering as its source. This is our habitual response. This is the mental equivalent of keeping your hand on the hot stove. Continued burning happens.

As A Course in Miracles and just about everyone else out there says, "There are no idle thoughts. All thinking produces form at some level. T-2.VI.9.13-14 

The simplest way to put it is this: As you focus your attention upon lack or suffering, you create more lack and suffering. So it is not necessary to pretend that your hand doesn't hurt when you place it on a hot stove—the pain automatically does its job and the hand flies off the stove. That's the purpose of pain.

But it is necessary, if you would like to stop suffering, to take your mind, your attention, off the hot stove of your life when it is burning you. The grievance, the complaint, the thought of judgment, the resentment, the resistance, IS the suffering. There is no other suffering.

Be willing to let go of the sense of self you are getting from the pain. Be willing to stop. You can do this by becoming aware. Become aware. See the grievance, the complaint, the pain and just feel it. Just be with it. Watch it. See that you can watch it without having to identify with it.

We think that unless we focus on and identify with what seems to be lacking, we'll never experience completion. This idea has tremendous momentum. It is the main stream of human thought. The truth is exactly the opposite. 

It isn't even necessary to replace what seems to be a negative thought with what seems to be a positive one. What is necessary is that you take your attention off the hot stove if you want to stop burning. Just stop. Drop the storyline of lack and suffering right now, again and again.

Stand there in the nothing. The blessed, sacred nothing. Feel that refreshing vulnerability. Drop it. Whatever you pick up, just drop it. The rest happens on its own. The help that has been there all along can now find you, as the fog of your thought-clinging disperses. It is in this gesture that the heart awakens.

addiction to suffering

In response to my last post, a reader asked, "What is the science behind the habit of holding on to what hurts us instead of simply letting our shoulders drop and the baggage fall away?"

This is a good question. I'll try to answer it here...

We have an experience of "me." It's comprised of body sensations and sensory experiences and a continual, non-stop commentary in words and pictures, going on in the region of the head. The sense of "me" is very noisy. It is this stream of constant thoughts, feelings and sensations that we stitch together and call by our name. It's really more of a swarm of sensations and noises than an actual being.

We create a sense of self from it in the same way that, when we watch a film, our minds link together all the separate frames of film and actually see motion instead of a series of still photographs. We fill in the gaps in order to have a certain type of experience.

You could call this sense of me the ego, or the false self, but I think I'll just call it "mind" for the time being. The mind is actually very simple. It survives only on the idea of there being something outside of it—of there being something other. In relation to this other (the world, the environment, the room in which you are sitting, your kids, your parents, your coffee cup) it has unceasing opinions and judgments. The other is either for me or against me and all the varying shades of grey in between.

This continual play of opinion, of pushing against the other, or trying to attract the other, is what gathers the swarm of sensations and thoughts and feelings into something that appears to be a solid being—a self. It's like watching a dense flock of birds swoop through the air as one when they are frightened by a loud noise.

If you pay attention to your emotions—really look at them—you'll notice that you feel most solid when you are truly opposed to something that is happening in the here and now. Take righteous indignation, for example. Someone done me wrong. That's about the most solid sense of self there is. I have been wronged. An injustice as been done. I'm the innocent one here! I'm the victim!

This me vs. them mentality gathers the swarm of thoughts and sensations in such a dense way that we feel, despite the pain, intensely solid—intensely right. It is at this time that we are most resoundingly, hopelessly confused. Yet it is at this time that we feel most safe and secure. It is this feeling to which we are addicted. We're addicted to it not because it is real or it is good for us, but because it makes us feel as though we exist as separate from everything else. We relish that feeling in a deliciously sick kind of way. It's almost as though we enjoy frightening ourselves. It's a habit in every sense of the word.

There is an alternative mind that does not need an other in order to sense its own being. It is the mind we experience when we stop, drop the storyline, and just let go of the need for opposition. We stop judging, stop seeking, and just greet this plain old moment, greet the "thisness," just as it is. Just as it is. We drop our complaints against now—as it is. As we are.

If you live long enough, you'll realize that in your quest to find the answer, this is the only thing you have not tried.

simplicity itself

We like to make things complicated. Who knows why. It doesn't matter. We're all just learning to let go.

But here's a simple way to look at the whole picture. We are always, in our minds, our usual minds, wanting to "get there." "There" may be freedom from pain, or it may be having more money or it may be finding a mate or it may be reaching enlightenment, awakening, oneness, heaven, whatever.

We look at our state, we look at where we are, and we say, "I want to be over there, instead of where I am."

We say, "I don't want to be here, I want to be over there."  "I don't want to feel this, I want to feel that."

"I don't want to feel that I am not awakened, I want to feel that I am awakened." The simple answer to this problem is this: Turn away from the thought that you are not awakened.

Then you say, "That doesn't help, I'm still here! I'm still not awakened." And again, the answer is, turn away from the thought that you are not awakened. Turn away from it. Just drop it.

Your request has been submitted and was fulfilled before you even asked. Reach for a feeling of trust. You are not being punished. You do not have to pay for past karma. You have done nothing wrong. You are entitled to peace and love and fulfillment as your birthright. But in order to align yourself with these things which have always been there for you, you need to stop struggling.

You need to stop focusing on what you don't have and just let go of that mind that believes it needs to struggle and fight and strive and fix. Turn away from the mind that believes it is alone and without help. Turn away from the mind that believes it will never be loved. Turn away from the mind that believes it will never find completion. It is not telling you the truth.

Be brave. You need not know what you are turning towards—that part is not your business. Just turn away from the thoughts of "not enough" and let it be. Just listen and expect and be content. It's taken care of. It's done, over. All is well. Just take your hand off the hot stove of lack-mind.

And when you hear yourself saying, "But I still don't have!," know that you are again focusing on the mind that believes it is alone and without help and without love and without awakening and again, just turn away from it. Feel the relief of turning away from it. 

That simple gesture is what it's all about. It's the gesture upon which the universe pivots.

piano tuning and the sense of yearning

I used to love to watch piano tuners when I was a kid. We had a piano at home, my father worked in a recording studio, and I went to a music high school, so it seemed like there was always a piano being tuned somewhere.

The tuner would hit each key, over and over, while manipulating the strings to get the false note to match the true one, which existed purely in his memory. With the good tuners there was no use of tuning forks or electronic devices... the notes were there, in existence, and the tuner knew when he'd matched them. Even if you aren't a piano tuner, you can probably hear the difference between a false note and a true one, even if you can't hum the true tone to yourself.

Let's, in this analogy, say that the out-of-tune piano key is the ego, the false self, the temporary, body-identified, threatened, vulnerable sense of me. And let's call the in-tune note the true self, the inner self, the Holy Spirit (in ACIM terms), the presence, what Is.

For each note on the scale of the piano of this dream called life, the in-tune version already exists. Its existence is not threatened by the fact that there is a temporary out-of-tune version existing simultaneously with it. It is not a future version of the false note. It exists side by side with it.

When you begin to realize that life is not delivering to you what you want from it—when the suffering and pain begin to outweigh the fun, and when everything you grasp dissolves in your hand—the yearning for an end to the discordant sense of self begins. What I want you to realize is that the true tone exists NOW. It exists already, the alignment of the temporary false note with the true tone has already happened. It's done. It's already done. But you haven't yet remembered it.

Whatever is experienced in time/space is felt as discordant as long as the false note continues to be struck. When you stop insisting upon the permanent reality of the false note, and you do this by simply withdrawing your attention from it, the piano tuner rings your doorbell and the tuning process begins.

You insist upon the permanent reality of the false note every time you cling to a grievance against anyone or anything. A Course in Miracles calls this "making the dream real." Any time you dwell mentally upon what is wrong with this you prevent the piano tuner from ringing your doorbell. If you prefer the seeking of something other than this, right here, right now, to actually being here—if you want something different and better—that's fine, that's great—but what you need to understand is that the piano of your life cannot be tuned and you cannot have a new experience, until you drop your grievances against the false notes. When you stop struggling, stop seeking, your doorbell rings and the tuning begins, automatically. But you have to DO it. You have to take responsibility for turning your attention away from the frantically seeking thought stream. It is what creates the disharmony.

When you turn your attention away from any grievances against what is, right here and now, you begin to vibrate with the pure note of your being, which is love. At each step, in each moment, you can, if not love what is, at least stop entertaining complaints about it. The alignment has already occurred. The pure note was never touched by the false. That's the atonement.

You cannot experience harmony until you vibrate harmoniously, and the harmony includes every possible note that can be played. Nothing is excluded. The harmony is that in which and from which the piano, the tuner, and the universe that contains them, appear. It is what you essentially are.

like a shark that needs to keep swimming to live

What you know of as yourself—that part of you that is conscious—believes that nothing can happen unless it does something. Unless it is moving (thinking, seeking, processing, being busy with one doing or another) it does not perceive itself as existing.

The truth is that only when this mind stops moving/thinking/seeking, or when attention is, for even a moment, taken completely off this moving mind, that that which is the source of the moving mind can come into awareness.

More accurately, it doesn't move into awareness, because it has never not been here, but it is available to knowing because the disturbances of the moving mind have momentarily ceased. It is not available to the mind we think of as "me."

Basically it comes down to trust. "I need do nothing," as ACIM maintains, is directed at the ego...the moving, seeking, shark mind. This mind will never find. But getting it through your head that there is actually something completely outside the parameters of what can be experienced, thought of and perceived by "me," which will not cause you to lose anything, is a leap of faith. And yet "I" cannot make this leap. "I" simply have to stop. The mechanics of the leap have nothing to do with "me."

You really do have to get to the point where you realize that "me" is a completely closed system. It will never come up with anything new. You can't take it along.

the news can only be good

I'm not sure it is helpful to talk about "awakened" vs. "not-awakened." If someone claims to be awakened, the reflexive response of the listener is to feel (perhaps only secretly) that they themselves are not, have not, will never have. And then they begin to vibrate in those terms and call to themselves more of the same sense of lack and despair and seeking behavior—completely overlooking the hopefulness of the message, if there is any. Awakening, as a process, means that you are noticing something that has always been happening, the workings of which were previously obscured in your attention. This noticing doesn't make you special. It makes you fully, happily, ordinary.

The message of non-dual teachings and of A Course in Miracles is that you can choose to stop focusing your mind on what you believe you do not have, in order to discover what you are. This is tricky. The best way to have more of a sense of fulfillment in your life is to come fully into the present moment and be here without complaint. This is the meaning of forgiveness. When you drop your complaint against what is, and against what you are, you learn that What Is has never had a complaint against you. This is the Atonement. Such good news.

When I speak of what is, I'm talking about this, right here, right now. Not something else. This ordinary, motley reality. This meat-puppet fixer-upper.

You cannot come fully into the present moment and also be complaining about what you think you do not have, or blaming someone for what you think they have done. And when you bring your attention into this litany of complaint that is the ego, or the false self, the wanter who lacks—you vibrate in such a way that you bring into your experience more of that. Wherever you place your attention... that's what you get more of.

When you hold a grievance against what is right here, right now—when you resist it, you literally betray yourself. You punish yourself. Your attention is directed to what is seemingly lacking. As you focus your attention, so do you experience. There's nothing mystical about it.

There is nothing you need to do, in particular, but there is something you can stop doing. You can stop focusing on the litany of complaint, the litany of fear. Just stop there and say, "okay—so be it."

You do this by just becoming aware of it. "Ah—there's the litany of complaint again, my old friend. Okay, I'll allow that to exist, but I won't give voice to it, I won't go into it. I'll just notice it, be aware of it. There it is. Fear, loathing, whatever... Okay. I won't try to fix it or do anything with it. I'll just stand here."

The spacious awareness, the silent sense of Being that was obscured from your attention by the litany of complaint and its consequences, begins to emerge into the foreground and there is relief. What flows into your life, into your ordinary day-to-day experience, then seems to flow more easily, and matches the state of "no complaint."

It is this process itself that is the goal... not some finished state of supposed awakening in the future. This place and time, this one, right here.

the concept of the soul

I received a question from a lovely reader in the Netherlands, asking about reincarnation and the idea of the soul—the concept of life as a school of sorts, and the worrying thought that after death we are in some way evaluated as to whether we have adequately seen through the falseness of separation.

When we enter into a conceptual narrative such as this one—a chain of thought-stories about the existence/non existence of aspects of self or soul—we need to understand that we have effectively exited the realm of "answers."

The answer to this reader's question, which belongs to all of us, is very simple and yet it is utterly unsatisfying until it is chosen as experience, right here and now.

The answer is this: Feel the way in which the chain of questioning leads you away from "this," here and now. Feel how the chain of thought-events connected with this story takes you away from the silent grace where all is love, and all is well. That's how you can tell that the questions are hollow—they are questions arising from the dream itself, and the dream character's particular worries and fears.

This is not to say that reincarnation may not exist, or that we do not survive death. We survive death.

But be aware that to seek for answers in thought will always lead you away from the very place where answers can be non-verbally experienced, which is right here, right now, within you in this ordinary moment, which is filled to the brim with grace.

Come back out of the questioning, settle in to the silence within you. You ARE, you are safe—there is no judgment but the judgment you impose upon yourself. Realize that the focusing upon a supposed concept of events playing out in some idea of the future, whether it is an embodied future or a disembodied future, is mind-activity belonging to the dream-self. It's harmless, but it is a vehicle that leads nowhere.

Thank you very much for the question.

you are not the wanter; the wanter is not you

That wasn't a very long silence, was it? Here's a little tip that some of you may find helpful.

We try to focus our attention on the good things we want, and to eschew negative thoughts. We believe we understand the laws of attraction. If we want more money, we focus on the feeling of abundance. If we need a job, we imagine that we already have a job. If we feel unloved and desire a mate, we focus on the feeling of being just fine on our own.

This is all well and good and these mental maneuvers are steps in the right direction. But more powerful than these types of affirmations is this understanding:

The sensation of wanting something other that what you have/are right now, and identifying with it, is completely delusional. The wanter... the being within you who wants more money, more recognition, more love... that being is not real, and more importantly, that being is not you. The wanter is not who you are. Who you are, right here, right now, does not experience lack.

The wanter is a product—an effect. It's a product of a bundle of thoughts, feelings and sensations which combine to create a vibration of incompleteness and a feeling of being vulnerable, alone and in danger—sometimes known as separateness.

This wanter is the usual feeling of "me." What we normally think of as me, is not actually a me at all. It's an experience of confusion and misidentification. This happens when you are in a body and identified with the body. It's part of the territory. When you are identifying with the wanter, you are feeling as though something will eventually come along in your life that will fix your present situation. You are looking at the future, hoping it will bring you the remedy that will eliminate the want, the emptiness, the feeling of lack.

So, more effective than saying "I have plenty of abundance right now" in an effort to appease the anxieties of the wanter, is to look directly at the wanter and question not only its motivations but its very existence. It's not a matter of ceasing to desire anything but what you have (because you want inner peace)—it's more a matter of seeing that the wanter is not real. Not only is it not real, but it does not have your best interests at heart.

When you identify with the wanter and say "I" to it—when you say "I do not have enough money, enough prestige, enough health, enough love, enough enlightenment," you are engaging with a psychic liar. There is no end to what the wanter wants, because to end the cycle of wanting would mean to end its very existence. So it has no intention of leading you to relief. It only wants you to keep wanting, so it can stay alive.

When you experience yourself wanting something in the future, instead of trying not to want it, or to become present in the moment, or to come out of the thought (all of which are effective to some degree), it is even more effective to recognize what is happening.

When you experience the wanter you can just see it, just say, ah—there's my old friend, the wanter, whose very nature is to lie. Awareness is all it takes to break the spell of believing that right here, right now, is not good enough.

There are benefits to recognizing the wanter and breaking that spell, but wanting the benefits is enough to engage the wanter all over again, as it becomes the spiritual seeker. So I won't talk about the benefits. Suffice it to say that you can't have it both ways. 

So the next time you feel some grievance arising about something in your life and you feel that you want to hurry up and get to a future in which this annoying, or painful, or unenlightened state won't be occurring—see the wanter in action. Just see it. That's all that is required to realize that the pain the wanter is trying to relieve is the sensation of identifying with it in the first place. It creates the pain, and then tries to get you to run from it. There is no end to that cycle until it is seen.

to my sweet readers

As you have undoubtedly noticed, I seem to have come to a lull in posting. For the moment I feel as though I have nothing to say, or to add to what has been said by so many in so many different ways. As soon as something arises that begs to be posted, you can be sure that I'll post.

In the mean time, if anyone has a question or a subject you'd like me to write about, I'd be happy to give it a whirl. If not, we can all enjoy the silence for a while....

with love,
Marian

getting to yes

This week we had a visit from an old friend, a died-in-the-wool entrepreneur, someone very successful. The visit came at the end of a good day—one filled with activity and creativity and friendliness, openness. So being in this expansive mood we embraced our visitor, whom we hadn't seen in a long time.

In the dusk and into the darkness of the winter evening we sat in our studio and talked. We talked about the recession. And he brought into our minds a dire scenario. He brought with him evidence and food for panic, and the idea that we are all doomed—that this situation is going to be worse than the depression—that we must remake ourselves, we must DO something—we must rally our forces and fight.

At first this sensation of going along with his interpretation of events was exhilarating, but by two in the morning, as I lay awake, it became nightmarish. The next day I felt, uncharacteristically, depressed. There was, apparently, something wrong with NOW. Suddenly I had an argument with what was happening, and something to defend against. And it felt bloody awful.It took me around 24 hours to come out from under that spell.

There is nothing to fight against. As has been said a million times by a million people—now is good enough. There is nothing wrong with now. But only when you greet what is happening with this open-hearted acceptance, does it reveal to you the secret that it holds within itself. And that secret is that you are not in danger and never have been.

It is not something that can be explained or simulated or adopted as a philosophy. You have to say yes to what is. It's really the only way to get the vending machine of ordinary life to begin to move and shudder and release into your hungry heart this wonderful news. It will do it every time. Now is good enough. This is good enough. This is damn good.

Loyalty to what is... "Love holds no grievances. Let me not betray myself."

See the grievance. Feel how it makes you suffer. Consider just observing it. It in itself is not a problem, but as you stand back from it, and allow even it to exist, light begins to surround it, and you remember.

reincarnation, innocence and the atonement

As A Course in Miracles says, the truth is that we have only one problem, the illusory state of separation, and in truth, this problem has already been solved. This is a problem that doesn't exist, despite the experience of the body, time and space. In truth, all dreams are empty of individual selves, including this one.

Imagine standing on a street corner watching a candy wrapper floating in the breeze. It's not really a candy wrapper, if you look deeper. That's just a concept. It's some paper with ink painted on it. But it's not paper, really, that's just a concept. It's some particles of vegetable matter pressed together with particles of ink and other chemicals. But those too are concepts. If you look deeper there aren't even molecules of wood or ink, there are just electromagnetic events in various combinations. And looking even closer, there are vast reaches of space with some energy patterns that appear and disappear and are affected by the mind-state of the viewer.

The idea of the individual self is like the concept of the candy wrapper—something we accept as self-evident until we look deeper.

Recently I discovered the existence, imprinted on my own little candy-wrapper, of a habitual thought. It's a thought that floats through the screen of my mind probably ten times a day, or maybe a thousand times. I don't know. It seems to be always there in some sense. This thought is a combination of pictures and words but the gist of it is that I'm standing in the after-life, newly dead (standing, hovering, floating, whatever) and hoping that I have "passed the test" so that I can move on to a level that doesn't entail being in a body. In this imagining, I believe I was sent here to learn something I had failed to learn in the past. I feel inadequate and afraid of punishment.

I am tired of this thought. I am tired of seeing it as real. So I have been staring it down, looking to see the ink and wood of it, the puppet strings, the man-behind-the-curtain of it. And I thought I would share the process with you.

I was advised that if I would see the self as non-existent, the notion of reincarnation would lose its charge. There is a caveat to this, which is that it is a truth that can only be seen now. Only right now.

Because the ego hates "right now," loves complexity and eschews the simple, elegant solution, I have also come at it from a few other directions. Dealing with habitual thoughts is a little like trying NOT to read a word that is flashed on a screen in your native language.

VICTIMHOOD

The ego wants us to believe that we are victims of external forces, because this allows us to project our feelings of guilt upon other people and situations. You are guilty, this or that is to blame, and therefore, I am unsullied and innocent. If I am unsullied and innocent and my guilt is no longer within me, I then "pass the test" and can be reunited with the God I feared would punish me for aforementioned guilt. It is this process of projecting the delusional guilt away from the center that creates the experience of separation.

PROGRESS

The idea that we need to make progress, to improve, to achieve something, to awaken, to experience enlightenment are all ways in which the ego convinces us to stay the hell out of NOW. Awakening is then something that will happen in the future, at which time we will "pass the test" and be done with this feeling of inadequacy. The truth is that awakening can only happen right now. Not in some other now. This here now. In that sense, it is a simple choice.

THE ATONEMENT

We insist that our imperfections are real. The Atonement insists that they are not. But it stipulates that there is only one way to see this, and that is by dropping our grievances against NOW. Forgiveness, in other words. When you stop projecting blame, you stop finding fault with this, here, now. When you cease to differ with what is, you stop making the dream real, and fear comes to an end.

SEEING THIS AS A BIG DEAL

One thing the ego loves to do is to conjure up some kind of fright scenario in which some problem or other becomes a big deal. It threatens us with loss if we don't solve the problem. Right now, right here and now, you can catch the ego trying to make a big deal out of the conflicts it, itself, is creating. It creates a delusional conflict and then threatens you with loss if you can't solve it.

*   *   *

Right here and now, right in this moment, you can feel your own innocence. Have a heart. Accept the simple gift being offered you.

two quotes i'm finding helpful today

Identity in dreams is meaningless because the dreamer and the dream are one.

—T28.IV.5.4, ACIM

What makes you consider yourself as a person? Your identification with the body. Will this individual personality last? It will remain only so long as the identification with the body remains. But once there is a firm conviction that you are not the body, then that individuality is lost. It is the simplest thing, as soon as you have this conviction that you are not the body, then automatically, instantaneously, you become the total manifest. As soon as you leave your individuality, you become the manifest totality. But your true being is apart from even that which is totally manifest.

—Nisargadatta, The Ultimate Medicine

only the ego wants to awaken

This is the sad and brutal truth. And yet it is also the kindest.

It's a bitter pill to swallow and yet the greatest gift.

It is nearly impossible to understand and is probably the only thing worth understanding.

What it means is that you have done nothing wrong, which is great news, but also that you, the person who believes you have something to achieve, are not real—which is not such easy news to absorb.

This is the meaning of the Atonement. This is what "I need do nothing" means.

It is not surrender in the sense of 'I surrender because I secretly believe that this is the way to awaken, to make it, to achieve enlightenment.' It is surrender in the sense of realizing that all doing, all wanting, all trying to get away from the state in which you find yourself is utterly and completely unnecessary, because the whole thing, the whole thing, is fiction.

"Nothing employed for healing represents an effort to do anything at all. It is a recognition that you have no needs which mean that something must be done." T.28.I.3