Ideas, Only Ideas

Yael nodded and Devorah continued: “Have you noticed that it’s impossible to use one relationship at the expense of another and not suffer guilt? And that it’s also impossible to condemn part of a relationship and find peace within it? As long as I accept the possibility and cherish it, that I can make another human being into what they are not, because of myself I would change them and have them be different, then I will experience guilt. But if I can accept the fact that perfect love is in me as it is in you, then separation vanishes because holiness was shared.”

 “Yes,” Yael said. “I understand.”

 “Good. We don’t find it difficult to believe that when another calls on God for love, our call is undiminished - is not in competition with hers and remains as strong. Nor do we think that when God answers her call our hope of answer is diminished. On the contrary, we’re more inclined to see her success as witness to the possibility of ours, because we recognize, however dimly, that God is an idea, and so our faith in It is strengthened by sharing. What I find difficult to accept, and perhaps you do too, is the fact that, like mySelf, I too am an idea. And like Her, I can give myself completely, wholly without loss and with only gain. Here lies peace, for there is no scarcity or conflict.”

Yael was nodding and smiling. “We experience the full communication (the opposite of excommunication) of ideas with ideas, when we release the past and judgment. Without these, the fullness of love’s meaning is understood. If you and I were not ideas, and nothing but ideas, we could not be in full communication with everything that is. Yet as long as we prefer to be something other than an idea, or would attempt to be nothing else and something else together, we will not remember the language of communication which I know perfectly.”