Choose Again

in a state of grace forever

The purpose of all true spiritual teachings, no matter their methodology, is to lead you to a point of recognizing your own nature. That nature is always here, whether or not you recognize it. The sun continues to shine, even if you close your eyes.

The experience of feeling separate (feeling, not being separate, which is impossible) from your own true, divine nature is traumatic. It's frightening. Sometimes I think all of us here in this dream of life on planet earth are suffering from post traumatic stress disorder.

Can you imagine how traumatic it would be to be caught in one of your nighttime dreams and feel as though you had no hope of awakening? What if you felt that the only way you could get out of the dream would be to die within it? What if you began to believe that you had originated within that dream and you completely lost all memory of the self you had been—safe at home asleep.

That's the situation we are in here.

We have completely forgotten who we are and have become totally identified with the characters we are playing in this dream-drama of life on earth. And this is as it should be, until the fear and suffering begin to become counterproductive.

The purpose of all true spiritual teachings is not to actually teach you anything. You do not need to learn anything. But you need to remember—to see, to notice—that your attention has become trapped by a projection and you've gotten temporarily lost and identified with that projection. All spiritual teachings do is help you free your trapped attention so you can remember.

When your attention is trapped you make assumptions according to that level of entrapment. You believe that the projection is real and this creates a platform from which you begin to judge. As you judge according to the perceptions of the dream, you solidify your place within the dream. Your judgments contribute to the solidity of the dream experience and the seeming reality of your dream self.

So the process of awakening to the state of grace that is your true nature, is a process of suspending judgment. It's a process of not-doing. Of stopping doing. It's a process of realizing that anything you do (in your desire to awaken) on the basis of the perceived projection has to be a deepening of that projection. There's really nothing you can do to help yourself. But there are many habitual reactions that you can stop doing, which allow the help that is always there to arise within you.

This is what ACIM calls forgiveness—the realization that you cannot judge and act from that judgment without deepening the entrapment of your attention and intensifying your feelings of isolation and separateness.

It is what you stop doing that frees you, not what you do.

more about the wanter

There is nothing wrong with desire. It's an inevitable part of being in a human body. When someone clamps a hand over your nose and mouth, you want to breath. If you are out enjoying a bonfire and a spark lands in your hair, setting it on fire, you want to put it out. Desire is the human experience of contrast—of lack.

If you are miserable, of course you want to be happy. If you cannot feed your children because you have no means of income, of course you want to feed your children.

If you are hungry and someone sets a plate of food in front of you, chances are, you'll happily give up your hunger and eat. Hunger is not seen as a terrible thing in this situation, but as an inevitable part of life.

All of these things involve manipulations of physical matter. Transportation, really, of one thing to another thing. We all know how to do this, by and large. It's all about "getting."

Where we go wrong is when the wanter—the part of you that is in charge of "getting"—becomes involved in the spiritual search or in any kind of emotional transaction involving ephemeral non-physical qualities.

The wanter works by getting you to focus on what you do not have and through that focus, arrive at an idea of what needs to be obtained. If you are hungry on your way home from work, you begin to imagine the type of food you are going to cook when you get home. Desire leads you to this visualization. If you are reading this blog, chances are good that you do not struggle overly much with access to sustenance.

But chances are also good that you do struggle with access to God, or to peace of mind, or to enlightenment. The reason for that struggle is that you have put the wanter in charge of the process. The wanter looks outside of itself and tries to find. This is what humans do. Humans believe they are separate and apart from each other, and that things are finite and must be amassed. It's part of the game.

What we who are in human form often do not realize is that these intangibles—peace of mind, enlightenment, God—are not additive. They cannot be added to you. They are already a part of you, already within you, integrated into and one with (not separate from) your being. You, as you are, right now. Plain old you.

The reason we cannot experience this is that we have put the wanter in charge and it's looking outside of your experience right now. It's looking outside, as though these were physical quantities, rather than already existing vibrational ranges.

When you want these things—like peace of mind, or enlightenment, or God—you begin to vibrate with the lack of them. You vibrate in such a way as to say "I do not have these experiences in my repertoire." That which is like unto itself is drawn. As you vibrate with the lack of enlightenment you attract more of lack of enlightenment. As you vibrate with a lack of love you begin to attract to yourself more lack-of-love—more of a sense of poverty, scarcity, aloneness, separation.

This is why we place an emphasis on the present moment. On this, right here, right now. On just this. On stopping. It's because you need to stop vibrating with what you believe you do not have in order to see that you have never lost it. You need to put the cart firmly before the horse and behave in a way that confounds the wanter. You need to be a haver. A plain old ordinary, appreciative haver in whatever little ways you can, to experience the deep and incredible richness of this, right here, right now.

Plain and simple, it is the experience of being the wanter that makes you feel as though you are separate, as though you do not have. When, in this intangible search, you act from what you want for yourself, you lock yourself into a closed system in which there is no solution. You cannot get what you already are.

appreciation

Appreciation is a fantastic tool you can use to help yourself if you are suffering. Even when the mind is caught up in circular, tormenting thought patterns, you can use appreciation to slow down and shift your focus, little by little. But you have to be willing to do it—to go through the process.

Even if you are in pain, try to notice something right here and now in your experience that you are glad about. Maybe it's the bed you are lying on. Imagine if you couldn't lie in a bed and had to lie on the floor. Feel how the bed is supporting you.

If you are lying on the floor, and the floor is dry, feel how wonderful it is that the floor is dry and not wet. Just being dry is a great thing. Notice how you resist doing this and how deeply you want to cling to your suffering. Then do it anyway.

You get the idea. Find something. The most mundane thing. Be happy that you can brush your teeth, or that you don't have a headache. Be happy that at least you can walk or that you can see the color blue, or that you just heard a bird sing. Listen and look. Find something you'd miss if it disappeared right this instant. Just notice.

It doesn't have to be any big splashy feeling. Just some small sense of appreciation is what you're after. This isn't something meant to make you feel guilty. It's not a way of achieving anything. It's a way of extracting your attention from the trap it's in. You may even find yourself capable of appreciating pain.

Freeing your attention from where it gets trapped is a continual moment-to-moment necessity in this life. It's constantly getting snagged and trapped by one mental story or another.

Appreciation is one way to bring yourself back here. Bring yourself back out of thought, out of the seeming problem, to the homely, humorous and completely mysterious comforts of the present moment.