September 28, 2009

  • Not What It's Cracked Up To Be

    Logion 80 is a mind bender, unless you understand the frame of reference of the teachings of Jesus in a comprehensive way, which means from the point of view of the whole thought system. For without that, individual statements can seem odd or strange, contradictory or plain idiotic. I also view that, just like Zen koans, as intended in the exact same spirit of inviting the reader to let go of their habitual judgments and views, but rather to accept a new challenge that can get us off of our old dead-end, and on to a new track, the Jesus track (or Krishna, or Buddha, or Quan Yin, or the Holy Spirit), but in any case the track out of the labyrinth and home to Heaven with our Father, where nice kids go to play.

    The dead-end is the world of the body, the world of time and space, of limitations, of locality, of specificity, and the world of our false self, or the ego. In the words of Albert Einstein we (as would-be individuals) are non-local beings, having a local experience. We are eternal spirit, having an experience in time and space in which death seems very real and inevitable, but just like playing a role on stage, while it is helpful to really identify with the character, it becomes a bit of a problem if you end up thinking that you are the character. Shakespeare obviously grasped this in his "All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players," etc.  Another favorite expression of it comes from the famous lines from The Tempest:

    Prospero:
    Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
    As I foretold you, were all spirits, and
    Are melted into air, into thin air:
    And like the baseless fabric of this vision,
    The cloud-capp'd tow'rs, the gorgeous palaces,
    The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
    Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
    And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
    Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
    As dreams are made on; and our little life
    Is rounded with a sleep.
    (Shakespeare: The Tempest Act 4, scene 1, 148–158)

    Such are the dead-end dream lives we seem to live in this world, and if that is who we think we are, there is no hope. We live "On borrowed time" (Never sounded so heart-rending as in the classical rendition of the J. Geils Band), for death is invariably the end, sooner or later. On the other hand, if we really come to understand the illusory nature of the body, that it is merely a perception problem and a role we play, not a reality we are, then we immediately see through the whole world as well, and the "world is not worthy of us" at that point, because this world really is not our home, and becomes irrelevant, so that it fades into the mist, once the memory of our true home in Heaven is restored to us. In all then, I think Jesus speaks tongue-in-cheek in this logion, when he uses the phrase "...of that one the world is not worthy," and he was a punster in several of the Thomas logia, as he was also experienced by Helen Schucman and Bill Thetford during the time when they took down A Course In Miracles. What he means is not only that the world is beneath us at that point, but:

    Until forgiveness is complete, the world does have a purpose. It becomes the home in which forgiveness is born, and where it grows and becomes stronger and more all-embracing. Here is it nourished, for here it is needed. A gentle Savior, born where sin was made and guilt seemed real. Here is His home, for here there is need of Him indeed. He brings the ending of the world with Him. It is His Call God's teachers answer, turning to Him in silence to receive His Word. The world will end when all things in it have been rightly judged by His judgment. The world will end with the benediction of holiness upon it. When not one thought of sin remains, the world is over. It will not be destroyed nor attacked nor even touched. It will merely cease to seem to be. (ACIM:M-12:2)

September 27, 2009

  • This World Is Not Our Home

    Come home. You have not found your happiness in foreign places and in alien forms that have no meaning to you, though you sought to make them meaningful. This world is not where you belong. You are a stranger here. But it is given you to find the means whereby the world no longer seems to be a prison house or jail for anyone. (ACIM:W-200.4)


    And then there's the saying in Logion 86, another "prequel" to the New Testament (Mt. 8:20, Lk 9:58, and with apparent roots in the Q sayings collection also), which reads:

    J said, "Foxes have their dens and birds have their nests, but human beings have no place to lay down and rest."

    The whole point then is that waking up, as Jesus in essence calls up on us to do, with his exhortations to "follow him" to a "Kingdom not of this world," means waking up first to the fact that this world is not our home, and that there must be "another way" to live. Simply put, as long as we think that our lives work, and are tolerable, we are not motivated to go look for an alternative, so Jesus always addresses the dissatisfaction with the ways of the earth in us with the assurance that there is indeed another way. He is not a new age guru who is interested in helping to make the world a better place. Once we commit to following him, the world does serve a purpose again:

    Until forgiveness is complete, the world does have a purpose. It becomes the home in which forgiveness is born, and where it grows and becomes stronger and more all-embracing. Here is it nourished, for here it is needed. A gentle Savior, born where sin was made and guilt seemed real. Here is His home, for here there is need of Him indeed. He brings the ending of the world with Him. It is His Call God's teachers answer, turning to Him in silence to receive His Word. The world will end when all things in it have been rightly judged by His judgment. The world will end with the benediction of holiness upon it. When not one thought of sin remains, the world is over. It will not be destroyed nor attacked nor even touched. It will merely cease to seem to be. (ACIM:M-14.2)


    In short the world is merely a perception problem of which we suffer as long as we mistakenly take the "tiny, mad idea" of the separation seriously, and it is our own discomfort in this dream existence, which inevitably wakes us up from it to the realization that this world is not our home and that we are finally willing to deal with, and reluctantly entertain, the possibility that Jesus was right and we were wrong. Jesus' teachings sound the sound of cognitive dissonance, to the point that wakes us up through the incongruities of our seeming experience, so he can lead us out of the desert of the ego, and back to the reality of Heaven.

September 26, 2009

  • The Present Answer

    Logion 79 works with contrast to demonstrate the difference between the ego thought system and that of the Holy Spirit. Between determining meaning and value in the present from the past and living fully in the present. In a way it anticipates the theme of Logion 99, which also uses family relationships to show it is not the past that matters or determines who we are, neither what we did, nor what anyone else might have done, but the only thing that matters is "to hear the word of the father," and to keep it, right now.

    It matters not what you may or may not have done in the world, there are no merit points for that, but living the will of God is the answer. This is a really radical teaching, and one that we all have a great deal of trouble with, for the conditioning goes very deep of looking into where we came from who our parents were, etc. all of which is about building up the meaning of the ego, and never being present in the present. Doing God's Will, is all about putting him first and ourselves second, and doing so, there is no need for our interpretation (from the past), so we can just be who we are. Here is the beautiful text of Lesson 328:

        What seems to be the second place is first, for all things we perceive are upside down until we listen to the Voice for God. It seems that we will gain autonomy but by our striving to be separate, and that our independence from the rest of God's creation is the way in which salvation is obtained. Yet all we find is sickness, suffering and loss and death. This is not what our Father wills for us, nor is there any second to His Will. To join with His is but to find our own. 6 And since our will is His, it is to Him that we must go to recognize our will.

        There is no will but Yours. And I am glad that nothing I imagine contradicts what You would have me be. It is Your Will that I be wholly safe, eternally at peace. And happily I share that Will which You, my Father, gave as part of me. (ACIM:W-328.1-2)

September 25, 2009

  • All Or Nothing

    Healing and Atonement are not related; they are identical. There is no order of difficulty in miracles because there are no degrees of Atonement. It is the one complete concept possible in this world, because it is the source of a wholly unified perception. Partial Atonement is a meaningless idea, just as special areas of hell in Heaven are inconceivable. Accept Atonement and you are healed. Atonement is the Word of God. Accept His Word and what remains to make sickness possible? Accept His Word and every miracle has been accomplished. To forgive is to heal. The teacher of God has taken accepting the Atonement for himself as his only function. What is there, then, he cannot heal? What miracle can be withheld from him? (ACIM:T-22.1)

    Simply put then there's only one job to be done, and that is to accept the Atonement - which completely cancels out the ego's "tiny, mad idea" of the separation. The path of forgiveness which Jesus teaches thus is nothing more than the practice that gets us there from within our time-bound experience, and gives us experiential glimpses of our immortal reality as spirit in eternity, and it is those experiences, the miracles, which can convey more than words can ever hold, so that increasingly the very same words open up, since having had the experience the real meaning of what Jesus taught becomes readily evident. Many people throughout the ages have known that experiences, and in our own time teachers such as Eckhart Tolle and Jeff Foster have also reported this experience of suddenly understanding the words of Jesus on a whole different level, because they now understand him based on their own inner experience. So if accepting the Atonement, i.e. total and complete forgiveness, is our one function, then Logion 76 becomes understandable as a reminder of that, it says (as always in the Pursah version from chapter 7 of Gary Renard's Your Immortal Reality:

    J said, "God's Divine Rule is like a merchant who had a supply of merchandise and then found a pearl. That merchant was prudent; he sold the merchandise and bought the single pearl for himself. So also with you, see the treasure that is unfailing, that is enduring, where no moth comes to eat and no worm destroys."

    Forgiveness and the Atonement are also not perishable goods, they are our savings account in eternity, so while we practice forgiveness here, everything is saved up for us until our full memory of Heaven is restored to us, and we can claim our full inheritance, by waking up. Again in the words of the Course:

    All your past except its beauty is gone, and nothing is left but a blessing. I have saved all your kindnesses and every loving thought you ever had. I have purified them of the errors that hid their light, and kept them for you in their own perfect radiance. They are beyond destruction and beyond guilt. They came from the Holy Spirit within you, and we know what God creates is eternal. You can indeed depart in peace because I have loved you as I loved myself. You go with my blessing and for my blessing. Hold it and share it, that it may always be ours. I place the peace of God in your heart and in your hands, to hold and share. The heart is pure to hold it, and the hands are strong to give it. We cannot lose. My judgment is as strong as the wisdom of God, in Whose Heart and Hands we have our being. His quiet children are His blessed Sons. The Thoughts of God are with you. (ACIM:T-5.IV.82-15)

    So what he promises here, is that he issues HS Green Stamps (as opposed to S&H Green Stamps at the supermarket), and he is pasting everyone of them in your little savingsbook, until you are ready to come and claim the award. As a side note, we might notice that this logion finds a close parallel in Logion 8.


September 24, 2009

  • The Holy Relationship

        The surface traits of God's teachers are not at all alike. They do not look alike to the body's eyes, they come from vastly different backgrounds, their experiences of the world vary greatly, and their superficial "personalities" are quite distinct. Nor, at the beginning stages of their functioning as teachers of God, have they as yet acquired the deeper characteristics that will establish them as what they are. God gives special gifts to His teachers, because they have a special role in His plan for Atonement. Their specialness is, of course, only temporary; set in time as a means of leading out of time. These special gifts, born in the holy relationship toward which the teaching-learning situation is geared, become characteristic of all teachers of God who have advanced in their own learning. In this respect they are all alike. (ACIM:M-4.1)

    That's how the Course speaks of the holy relationship, which is the Holy Spirit's answer to the special relationships our ego favors. Simply put the ego's special relationships are geared to running away from home, they are the pacifiers (addictions) that help us forget our home in Heaven, and give us the temporary satisfactions and distractions which will keep us rooted in the world. The holy relationship is born to us when we put our special relationships in the hand of the Holy Spirit, so that they can serve as a classroom for our way home. So every special relationship becomes a doorway - and as in Roman mythology above every doorway symbolically is the double head of Janus, one face facing towards time, and the other facing eternity, and thus symbolizing how every situation represents a choice opportunity.

    Logion 75 has us standing at the doorway, and it refers to the fact that only those who are alone will enter "the bridal suite," which is the expression in traditional literature that corresponds to the Course's notion of the holy relationship. Those who are alone are those who no longer invest in and depend on special relationships, because they are aware now that there is only one of us, the Son of God, and they are thus learning to make the choice for eternity, for the Holy Spirit, so that every situation becomes a classroom in which the Holy Spirit can teach us to find our way home. And the way to choose the Holy Spirit is always by not choosing the ego, which is to say practicing forgiveness, and using every opportunity to let another block to "love's presence" be removed from our mind.

    The corollary to this is the notion in the Course that the world was made as an attack on God (ACIM:W-pII3.2:1), and all our special relationships are the ego's tools to deny the oneness of the sonship, and thus to give up our investment in them, and letting go of the specialness is felt by the ego as being alone, but it is really the return to the oneness of the sonship, the oneness of the mind. And the experience of seeing the face of Christ in our brother, is the restoration of this oneness to our awareness. And thus is every relationship no longer special but simply an expression of the Holy Relationship.

September 23, 2009

  • Our Natural Inheritance

    The introduction to A Course In Miracles contains the following wonderful lines:

    The course does not aim at teaching the meaning of love, for that is beyond what can be taught. It does aim, however, at removing the blocks to the awareness of love's presence, which is your natural inheritance. (ACIM:In:1:6-7)

    Logion 70 always makes me think of the above line. Removing the blocks to love's presence, will bring it out in our lives, and that will literally save us. But as long as we fail to do the forgiveness work that will remove the "blocks" and bring out the love, we are stuck in the mire of the ego thought system, and it will kill us, quite literally. Jesus, or the Holy Spirit is the only option that offers life, for all else - the whole ego thought system - is little else but death, and the ego literally wants to kill us. So this saying is short and sweet and to the point, and should sound almost familiar to anyone studying Jesus's teachings in the Course.

September 22, 2009

  • All Or Nothing?

    Logion 67 strikes the same note as the previous one, namely that the two thought systems, that of the ego and the world, the state in which we imagine ourselves separated from God, and the thought system of Jesus and the Holy Spirit, are mutually exclusive. Here the point is simply the complete emptiness of the ego thought system.

    So if we know it "all," all there is to know in the world, we will still be empty inside, and living in the ego's sense of scarcity and lack - the Logion says "completely lacking."  The key thing of course is that Jesus makes this statement because, as long as we consider ourselves "rich" in terms of the world, be it knowledge, relationships, possessions, etc., we will not be motivated to change our mind at all. We are then stuck, clinging to the things of the world. So the first step towards getting ready to seek "another way" which Jesus offers, is to realize the emptiness inside, and that the world really had nothing to offer. So this saying and others like it, could be the first step.

    The riches of the world are really best summed up in the old Tom Lehrer song, "Smut" when he sings "More, more, more and still not satisfied," for any amount of what the world has to offer still leaves that gaping hole of emptiness inside.

    And here is how A Course in Miracles expresses this mutual exclusivity of the world and the Kingdom:

    Son of God, be not content with nothing! What is not real cannot be seen and has no value. God could not offer His Son what has no value, nor could His Son receive it. You were redeemed the instant you thought you had deserted Him. Everything you made has never been, and is invisible because the Holy Spirit does not see it. Yet what He does see is yours to behold, and through His vision your perception is healed. You have made invisible the only truth that this world holds. Valuing nothing, you have sought nothing. By making nothing real to you, you have seen it. But it is not there. And Christ is invisible to you because of what you have made visible to yourself. (ACIM:T-12.VIII.6)

September 21, 2009

  • Changing The Purpose

    Logion 66 is another one of what Pursah called "prequels" to the NT, sayings in Thomas which were clearly later quoted by the writers of the "canonical" gospels, who wrote some twenty or more years after the Thomas gospel. The same idea comes back in several places in the NT, so we have some immediate familiarity with it.

    The whole idea running through all of this material is the central notion of changing our mind, metanoia in the Greek of the New Testament. Clearly, to follow Jesus to the Kingdom not of this world, entails a completely different mindset, thought system even, so what's useful in this world is useless in the Kingdom and vice versa. We seek the world as long as we're running away from home, all the while building defenses to keep God and Jesus away from us, and those defensive structures are of no use to us in the Kingdom. Jesus on the other hand says, give me the stone you rejected in building your castle in this world, for that is the cornerstone, once we start on the way home. In other words, the things that were of no use in building up the ego's defenses, are now extremely useful as our purpose has changed. This same underlying theme of an either/or choice and a radically different purpose is reflected in different ways in many Thomas Logia, e.g 89, 100, 107, 110, and many others. It is also a familiar theme in A Course in Miracles, as the thought systems of the Holy Spirit and the ego are mutually exclusive.

September 20, 2009

  • Taking Care of Business

    In terms of concepts from A Course In Miracles, the parable of Logion 63 is definitely speaking in terms of level two, the level of the world and duality. It addresses the ego's schemes for ensuring its own survival, ultimately ensuring that the future is a repeat of the past, and ending up missing out on being present in the eternal now.

    The cute story line of the rich man who took care of business, and most importantly, took care of tomorrow, and then died the next instant, makes the point in a very graphic way. This is certainly a very central point of Jesus's teaching as we also know it from the Course. The ego's strategy keeps an imaginary past in memory in the present (so that I'm never really present, for to be really in the present would be to be in eternity), and reacts from those past emotions to who and what we meet today, thereby setting up a future that becomes a repeat of the past in a different form, and in effect ensuring the results it is seeking to prevent. So we are shadowboxing while we think we're taking care of businesses, or fighting windmills, à la Don Quijote. The following passage from the Course highlights how the ego's sleight of hand works:

        The ego has a strange notion of time, and it is with this notion that your questioning might well begin. The ego invests heavily in the past, and in the end believes that the past is the only aspect of time that is meaningful. Remember that its emphasis on guilt enables it to ensure its continuity by making the future like the past, and thus avoiding the present. By the notion of paying for the past in the future, the past becomes the determiner of the future, making them continuous without an intervening present. For the ego regards the present only as a brief transition to the future, in which it brings the past to the future by interpreting the present in past terms.
        "Now" has no meaning to the ego. The present merely reminds it of past hurts, and it reacts to the present as if it were the past. The ego cannot tolerate release from the past, and although the past is over, the ego tries to preserve its image by responding as if it were present. It dictates your reactions to those you meet in the present from a past reference point, obscuring their present reality. In effect, if you follow the ego's dictates you will react to your brother as though he were someone else, and this will surely prevent you from recognizing him as he is. And you will receive messages from him out of your own past because, by making it real in the present, you are forbidding yourself to let it go. You thus deny yourself the message of release that every brother offers you now.
        The shadowy figures from the past are precisely what you must escape. They are not real, and have no hold over you unless you bring them with you. They carry the spots of pain in your mind, directing you to attack in the present in retaliation for a past that is no more. And this decision is one of future pain. Unless you learn that past pain is an illusion, you are choosing a future of illusions and losing the many opportunities you could find for release in the present. The ego would preserve your nightmares, and prevent you from awakening and understanding they are past. Would you recognize a holy encounter if you are merely perceiving it as a meeting with your own past? For you would be meeting no one, and the sharing of salvation, which makes the encounter holy, would be excluded from your sight. The Holy Spirit teaches that you always meet yourself, and the encounter is holy because you are. The ego teaches that you always encounter your past, and because your dreams were not holy, the future cannot be, and the present is without meaning. (ACIM:T-13.IV.4-6)

    Conversely, to see "the face of Christ" in our brothers, in everyone we meet, requires that we forgive completely and accept the Atonement for ourselves, so that we finally can be present in the present, and not building special relationships based on our projections, but joining with our brothers in that eternal present, and letting the Holy Spirit direct our steps. The story of Logion 63 is a stark reminder of the total pointlessness of the ego's strategies, for as the modern saying goes, "you can't take it with you," and in the example of the rich man ensuring his riches into the future, only to die the next day, this is demonstrated rather graphically. The point is that the ego really robs us of the present, which is the only time there is, and it substitutes its illusions.

    The "other" choice is portrayed in the Course as follows:

        When you come to the place where the branch in the road is quite apparent, you cannot go ahead. You must go either one way or the other. For now if you go straight ahead, the way you went before you reached the branch, you will go nowhere. The whole purpose of coming this far was to decide which branch you will take now. The way you came no longer matters. It can no longer serve. No one who reaches this far can make the wrong decision, although he can delay. And there is no part of the journey that seems more hopeless and futile than standing where the road branches, and not deciding on which way to go.
        It is but the first few steps along the right way that seem hard, for you have chosen, although you still may think you can go back and make the other choice. This is not so. A choice made with the power of Heaven to uphold it cannot be undone. Your way is decided. There will be nothing you will not be told, if you acknowledge this.
        And so you and your brother stand, here in this holy place, before the veil of sin that hangs between you and the face of Christ. Let it be lifted! Raise it together with your brother, for it is but a veil that stands between you. Either you or your brother alone will see it as a solid block, nor realize how thin the drapery that separates you now. Yet it is almost over in your awareness, and peace has reached you even here, before the veil. Think what will happen after. The Love of Christ will light your face, and shine from it into a darkened world that needs the light. And from this holy place He will return with you, not leaving it nor you. You will become His messenger, returning Him unto Himself. (ACIM:T-22.IV.1-3)

    All of these issues are so primordial that we recognize them immediately, and the image of Logion 63 is a classic. The alternative that's posed by Jesus's teachings invites us, not by blindly accepting his authority, but by following him, in trusting the steps he shows, and validating through our own experience that it works.

September 19, 2009

  • The End Of Ambivalence

    One fundamental confusion in which the ego keeps us trapped is that the thoughts we think we think are not our real thoughts. (c.f. ACIM:W-10, W-15) They are the ripples on the surface of a mind that thinks it is now an ego, and has forgotten anything else but the surface, and has no more inkling of the vast body of water underneath the surface, which is nonetheless there. As the Course puts it, we have become mindless by choosing the ego. So we think that the deliberations of what the Buddhist calls the "monkey mind" are really thoughts, when all they are is a cover over thoughts, to distract us, and make sure we don't remember we have a mind.

    Logion 62 proposes the alternative. Here Jesus says that he discloses his "mysteries" to those who are ready for them, and adds the exhortation, not to let the left hand know what the right hand is doing. What he means is not to engage in the ego's deliberations of "on the other hand," but rather to simply follow our "right hand" and follow Jesus, who thus can disclose his mysteries, because we have given up our reliance on the duality and ambivalence of the ego mind. We follow him onto the firm ground of the certainty of spirit, where there is no further ambivalence. His "mysteries" then also turn out not to be mysterious at all, once you realize that the only problem is that they make no sense in a dualistic world, but they do make sense if we come up to Jesus's level.

    It is worthy of note that the world turns the table on Jesus with the notions of the mysteries of the faith, which are constructs that are designed to prevent us from inquiring into the true nature of things, and thus a protection of the ego thought system. The Course, and Jesus's teachings in general, work the opposite way, that by joining with him we will see through all the ego's shenanigans.