Choose Again

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.

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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