A Holy Encounter
“My Holiness shines bright and clear today.” Lesson 285 ACIM
Today I was thinking, “How is Healing accomplished? When are we whole? What path do we take to the Kingdom of God (Love, Peace, Happiness, Truth)?”
In a Course In Miracles, it says that “Healing is accomplished the instant you see no value in pain. When you are still for an instant the world recedes from you,” including that pain in the body caused by a mind in a state of suffering.
I’ve noticed this a lot - how easy it is to enjoy this life until something comes along that rocks the boat or pops my bubble - when something comes along that I don’t want to be real.
And, so, we begin to understand the Buddhist perspective carried within the Four Noble Truths - that suffering happens and is caused by the quality of thoughts that pulse between clinging and aversion - I want, I don’t want.
The way we respond to the feeling - attacking, criticizing, judging or believing - only feeds the feeling, and the reasons we ascribe to the feeling, either connects or condemns us to our current circumstance.
These thoughts do not mean anything until we ascribe a meaning.
If you are abducted by a thought that's causing tremendous suffering and discomfort (even if it's proving something and that should make you feel right and good) by placing your attention and actioning yourself upon that suffering, you are in essence saying that you value being in suffering.
Here’s what it looks like:
I’m struggling deeply with a developer that has altered my father’s ability to exit and enter his driveway safely. No one is taking responsibility, including the town. It has been months of pushing and nothing has budged. I am so very angry. This anger is pointing toward the injustice and the feeling of injustice has pinged me right back to the past during my mother’s death, when I was unable to control the environment that would offer her safety and comfort during her decline and death. Every time I think about the injustice I am unhinged, migraines erupt, and my stomach is churned.
I am trapped in the past, sick in the present and unable to see freedom for the future.
Suffering is experienced by the mind in the thought “about” what you do or don’t want - and pain is inevitably experienced by the body.
Everything is connected - your words, your thoughts, your emotions play an integral part in your story. And, beneath that story is something that we can’t escape - cause and effect … the resonance of our words, thoughts and actions, and the vibration through the alive organismos (οργανισμός/ organism) — through our cells, through our organs, through our blood - because the outside and the inside are One, whole.
We can't escape this predicament until we recognize how all these drops of grievances are overflowing and overwhelming - how they have become a wall keeping us from what we truly are and so deeply desire, from our True Nature.
Which inspired me ask, What do I really want?
You too! Ask your heart, “What do I really want?” And before you answer, remember that “want” means willing agency. So, as we ask, we acknowledge that, “I am able to action my attention and willingly (freely) put loving thoughts of agency upon X (Truth) or Y (Consciousness) or Z (Bliss).
Write your answer(s) down.
Now, Look around.
Look around the room, look around your life - wherever you are, recognize that you have given everything you see the meaning that it has -- all of it!
… this world outside my window, this computer screen in front of me, this bell that I'm holding in my hand, this altar, these Tarot cards, this body, these feet, these words that I speak.
It takes much courage and curiosity to turn away - to turn like the lion unwilling to chase the stick - to turn and look directly at your grievances and your thoughts and recognize their quality – and when they are fearful or not loving, to notice how small they keep you, and how they keep you trapped in emotion.
We are busy building a mouse trap (just like the board game) and in the end, we can't escape the peril of getting trapped in a cage of your own making.
We’re just rolling the dice, hoping that someone get’s caught before us. It doesn't look the way we think it's going to look, and no one is immune. It's happening all the time, on different levels, frequencies, for different durations and reasons.
Like New Year's Eve, I had my friends and my family over, and found out last minute that my son invited a friend, and I was highly agitated.
It was apparent. I know my friends noticed because I noticed them noticing me. But, when I noticed them noticing me, they met me with love; no one was judging me but me! There was this irritation below the surface because I had a model that I wanted the table to look a certain way, and there was no room for another plate without adding a leaf to the table.
And that’s how these identities and models work. When we take so many on and dish so many out, there’s no room for any other version without disrupting the entire table.
In verbalizing this irritation out loud, I wasn't graceful. I noticed and played it back in my head, apologized to my friends, and then started chastising myself - was taking on the identity of a victim. Again, the temptation - we're just playing this game.
It's playing out all the time!
Sickness is a lot like suffering.
When we over identify with the body and shut ourselves off from Being (Spirit), we put a tremendous amount of stress on the body that it was never meant to carry, and that, according to ACIM is the source of illness.
Just think about it! The number one root of all illness, as we know, is stress. Sickness is the stress of the mind trying to override the spirit - the stress of a mind unable to accept reality. It is initiated through the thought, has nothing to do initially with the body, though the body as a soldier will loyally serve the mind.
We must recognize that we are in response for this decision that is being delivered and followed.
All these personal stories that are being here - this zooming in and this zooming out - is a retelling of the process, of the realization and the understanding of the relationship of all things. Clarity required the following:
Find your voice. My voice was hidden behind guilt and shame and confusion, and a sense of less than, which caused me to exert a lot of effort into building things up around me - walls and personas. I had to come face to face with these voices and to come to understand them and know them, and to see that, like gremlins, if you feed them after midnight, they got very unruly.
Be willing. I had to be willing to understand that my power lies in this moment. Only in this moment am I connected to a higher power (to the past, present and future simultaneously) - to something greater than this thought that I have inside my head that says, “Look how you know smart you are. Look how much you're loved. Look how sick you are,” or even the voices that say, “What can I do to make you happy?” … the joyful intention that opens and unfolds when we’re available to help others help themselves.
If you don't believe in a higher source, if you're busy defending, for example, “I don't believe in God,” or “this is why I don’t believe in that God,” that's not the Source we’re talking about.
Source needs no defence.
If you believe that you're alone in this, then you're going to feel very separate and unable to tap in to what it is that enlightened people are pointing toward. The problem is many are saying, “Hey, come here. I love you. Do it my way. I speak for God’s way. And by the way, I've got this in a bottle and it’s $9.95.”
That’s not bad - there's nothing wrong with selling or buying a book or product to acquaint yourself with something that feels important. That's what you're buying - a synopsis, a synthesis, Cliff Notes. But then you have to digest it yourself and come to your own conclusions.
Be weary of anyone telling you that they, alone, know the inner space that you are.
That's the second part of the process. You can study and you can learn, but nothing means nothing until you start applying it.
What is recognized is that healing is happening.
When I turned - shifted my attention away from the thoughts that made me feel less than - when I stopped measuring my friendships and my parents' love for me, and my experiences in the job market, or when I just stopped measuring myself altogether, all of a sudden something shifted. There was a space. It’s not because I wanted all those thoughts to stop - I wasn’t “trying” to change them; it was because I had to put them down in order to understand more about myself - this process and the Source of Happiness.
I shifted my attention away from the thoughts that made me suffer, and was able to take another step forward and trust that it would land.
I could be there with that fear because it would rise not through my mind, but through my feet - and my feet were pretty firm on the ground.
I just continued and took another step. This is trust - taking a step forward returned wisdom and taking another step confirmed my trust in that wisdom - together they formed faith.
If you want to be here right now and don't want anything to change, you're not going to be able to trust, and then you will be completely disconnected from faith because mistrust (and doubt) is a grievance.
We are impelled, then, to ask, “What do I trust inside myself?”
When we are so busy defending the external wall, we ignore the internal. There are no walls in here and you have to make space for this curiosity. Ask yourself, What am I thinking about? What is going on here?
You have to play around with it too. Experiment.
Remember those experiments in like elementary school, erupting volcanoes and dissecting a frog! Or the way we lay in the sun with eyes closed and poked at our eyelids to release a kaleidoscope of colors and shapes?
Do it with curiosity and loving kindness.
If something fails, don’t self-flagellating yourself or add it to your shelf of failures. This doesn't work because what we are speaking “of” is not a product - not an object; it’s not something that works and doesn’t work.
In order to create a trusting space, you must reciprocate that trust by respecting every part of you. When we ignore the voices and the parts that are asking for help or for loving kindness, when we are unable to hear them or to listen to their message, they feel unseen and we act in ways that are obscene.
I'm not here to qualify the effects of degenerative or degrading images and behavior, only to point to the recognition that nothing is immune from cause and effect, from the frequency, resonance and vibration of our beliefs and behaviors.
Bing! Just like that, like the sound of the bell.
New Beginnings are, by their very nature, uncomfortable, like the lifecycle of a pearl; a pearl's, so beautiful, it's got a soft texture to it and is iridescent, reminds us of the luminosity of our emotions. It’s also been used by the mind to measure, to qualify value and worth (we all know Steinbeck's great work, The Pearl).
Transformation is uncomfortable - remember adolescence; it can be downright irritating, even terrifying! But you have this ability within you to respond. When you’re present, you can tap into the power that allows you to return to your True Nature.
And that's what I noticed the last couple of days - I'm irritated. I’m irritated because the work that I'm doing is actually working and I have to be very careful.
I don't want to make any assumptions nor get too caught up in “the idea of” whatever it is that I'm thinking about, but there is no longer any doubt — when you train yourself to look at your thoughts, they represent such a mixture of what is right or wrong, that they couldn’t possibly “mean" anything that could harm what I am.
And that, dear friend, includes you and all of humanity!