Inside Out

It’s not what you pray for, it’s where you pray from. It’s not what you work towards, wish for or dream of that holds the power. It’s who and what you identify with and think you are as you pray, work, wish and dream, that holds the power. “Of myself I can do nothing,” the famous rabbi said. “It is my father who doeth the work.”

 

It’s inside-out. When I identify with myself instead of mySelf, I can work hard, struggle and do everything right and still not get the results I seek. But when I identify with mySelf, instead of myself, I can be free of struggle and hard work, do almost nothing and have the results fall into my life like a ripe fruit falling from a tree.

 

It’s inside-out. It’s inside-out first. It’s not like it’s either inside or outside. It’s both inside and outside. Results can be achieved either way, but inside out first gets the most accomplished with the least amount of effort. Inside out first is the most effective and efficient way to be. It’s about being a human being, instead of a human doing.

 

It’s accepting my oneness with the Source of all, in all and through all – including myself as mySelf, and allowing It to flow through me. It’s about removing the blocks to this flow; about getting my bloated nothingness out of the way of the divine circuits. It’s about intuition, gut, hope, wishes dreams and passion - the inside stuff - first, then rationality, analysis, planning, structure and organization for support. It’s inside-out first. Not either inside or outside, but both inside and outside.

Forgiveness Works! 2

As I forgive, I am aware that I am dreaming and have a choice to awake; and being aware and having a choice means I am with the decision maker, outside the dream. As I forgive I am able to see that you and I are the same, not in appearance, not in form, but in content—as either an expression of love or a call for love. And who among us, in our right minds, would not respond to a call for love with love?

 

The daily, hourly, moment to moment practice of forgiveness frees me from the heavy burdens of being responsible for the whole world and having to take things so seriously all the time.  Forgiveness allows me to become less involved with world as an ego, and more involved in the world as a mind. I am able to transcend the world as it seems to be and act in it as I would have it be, as a reflection of spirit. By forgiving and withdrawing my projections, I see the innocence of my brothers and sisters and thus my own innocence. By forgiving you and changing my mind about you, I learn to change my mind about me. The world does not change. But how I look at it has changed. “Seek not to change the world,” The Course says, “but choose to change your mind about the world.”

 

Forgiving makes sin unreal. Forgiving says nothing has happened. If there is sin, there must be a sinner and a sinned against. If you are the sinner, I am the sinless. Sin reflects separation, and expresses the ego’s principle of one or the other.  But when I see only spirit’s sinless in me, I cannot see sin in another because projection makes perception. Thus, perceiving innocence, peace, joy, fearlessness and creativity in myself, I perceive it all around me. Together, forgiven, we will not be annihilated but gently disappear into spirit, “not to be lost but found.”

Why Forgiveness Works

Forgiveness shows me that I am aware of the contrast and have chosen spirit instead of ego. Forgiveness says ‘no harm, no foul,’ it says since I am aware of mySelf, and mySelf is spirit, I know I’m only dreaming that I’m an ego that can be hurt or damaged, but in fact that is not so. Nothing has or ever can happen to mySelf so there is nothing to forgive. But often you and I forgot ourSelves, think something has happened and have done something that caused harm. We take things too seriously. My forgiveness says ‘no, mySelf is fine, nothing has happened’ and allows you to also see that mySelf is unharmed and wake from the ego’s nightmare, to choose again and become aware of yourSelf.

 

Forgiveness corrects the belief in separation and shows that the separation never happened. Forgiveness is unlearning the ego’s lessons. It is using the world as a classroom to learn that the world is an illusion. Forgiveness is a way of taking things less seriously here. Forgiveness is another illusion in an illusory world. But, unlike other illusions, forgiveness’ purpose is to lead me away from the decision for the ego and not deeper into it. Unlike the things of the world that keep us believing in what the ego made up, forgiveness leads me beyond itself to what spirit made.

 

Forgiveness helps me bridge the gap between where I think I am—here with ego, and where I really am—asleep with God, dreaming I’m here. The ego tells me that in spirit’s presence, myself will be annihilated. That’s true as far as it goes, but the whole truth is in spirit’s presence, the fearsome illusion the ego has made of myself, would gently melt back into mySelf. It warms and encourages me to think about my at-one-ment with spirit that way—gently melting back….

 

But my fear of annihilation keeps me from letting go. I need little steps, happy dreams, that will heal my misperceptions. Forgiveness--constantly forgiving myself and others, is first among the little steps and is ongoing. As I forgive and experience the peace and compassion and joy that comes from that, I am able to gradually, with each experience, step by step, transcend the ego’s fear of annihilation and move closer to mySelf.

Are You Sure? 3

“We cannot really make a definition for what the ego is,” The Course says, “but we can say what it is not. And this is shown with perfect clarity. Look at its opposite [the miracle] and see the only answer that is meaningful.” As the ego is the heart of the decision maker’s mistaken choice to believe that it is a self separated from spirit, so the miracle is the heart of the choice to be mySelf and identify with spirit. As the ego’s thought system of separation, division, and exclusion takes me from the mind—the place where the original choice was made and the only place it can be unmade, the miracle returns me to the mind where my correct choice allows everything to be different, and lets the truth set me free!

 

The world we seem to live in is the effect, the ego thought system the cause: ideas leave not their source. The belief in my identity as a separated self, remains in my mind where it first arose. So the physical world has never left its source—the decision maker’s choice for separation, though it seems to have. Cause and effect are one, as are source and idea. The content of hate and separation is one with the form of hate and separation. The miracle—the experience of returning to the mind, choosing again and experiencing the happy dream, helps me understand this causal connection.

 

“Where there was darkness,” The Course says, “now we see the light. What is the ego? What the darkness was. Where is the ego? Where the darkness was. What is it now and where can it be found? Nothing and nowhere.” Ken Wapnick says, “These words make perfect sense when read with the heart and not the brain, where they infuriate because they seem not to say anything. Yet they are not supposed to, because there is nothing meaningful to say about the ego itself. Once you have an experience of truth, you will understand the ego’s nothingness.”

 

It is the contrast between my experience of the ego and the miracle that reveals the ego’s true nature, not studying, analyzing or explaining it. Understanding and change come only when I let the ego go and step beyond it. So the miracle leads me back to the decision maker in my mind who can observe the results of its mistaken choice and gently without blame, guilt or shame, not take that original choice so seriously, not make a sin out of it but simply choose again and gently smile the darkness away.

 

Dreams remain - both the ego’s nightmare and spirit’s happy dream, because I alternate between a sense of myself and mySelf. The more I choose mySelf, the more I will experience that and the less I will experience myself. With practice and help from spirit my decision maker can be aware of the contrast, and choose spirit more often than ego.

Are You Sure? 2

I move away from the ego by understanding, forgiving, being kind, patient, generous and grateful—with myself first. When I accept the reality of my at-one-ment with spirit first, I can then act from that place with others—Self to Self.  Each time I indulge a thought of my specialness, have a pain, become angry or feel unfairly treated, I give life and power to the ego nightmare, reinforcing my identity as an ego, separate from mySelf. The stark truth here is that I suffer to prove I am alive; that ‘I’ don’t exist here because ‘here’ is a dream, a nightmare, the ego created to preserve itself.

 

“There is no definition for a lie,” The Course says, that serves to make it true. Nor, can there be a truth that lies conceal effectively.” The light will penetrate the ego’s darkness; we will have moments when we know our true identities as spiritual beings having an earthly experience. “The ego’s unreality is not denied by words nor is its meaning clear because its nature seems to have a form. Who can define the indefinable? And yet there is an answer even here.”

 

No matter how much I seek to study, describe, explain, analyze or define something, I can’t make it what it is not. Yet I arrogantly insist—everything the ego thinks and does is arrogantly insistent and urgent, that by defining the ego I can in fact change illusion into truth, to make myself mySelf. So there is an answer to the ego but not to the question of what the ego is and how it arose. The answer to the ego is the miracle for which The Course was named.

Are You Sure?

It is the experience of the contrast between ego and spirit that motivates and guides me to shift. It is the experience of spirit’s unconditional love, abundance forgiveness, grace, fearlessness and creativity that teaches me I don’t want the ego’s fear, hate, blame, lack and punishment. I’m seeking only the experience of spirit and can’t let theology delay me.  “Who asks you to define the ego,” The Course says, “and explain how it arose can be but he who thinks it real, and seeks by definition to ensure that its illusive nature is concealed behind the words that seem to make it so.”

 

Engaging in such discussions ensures that the ego’s illusory nature and the fact that it is only a thought, an option, an experience we choose to have that arises from that thought, an experience we project from the inside out, is hidden behind words and theories. Thus the ego loves theology, philosophy and all the speculative disciplines, because the study the original error—the decision maker’s choice to identify with the ego instead of spirit, as if it were actually there to study. But it is not actually there. It’s a dream arising from a mistaken choice. What’s really there and the truth is we’re with spirit dreaming we’re there/here.

 

By allowing myself to experience the contrast, the difference between the ego’s nightmare and spirit’s happy dream, by realizing I can make another choice, that I am not only myself but also mySelf and experiencing the contrast between what comes of my inner choices, what I project out, I can learn to choose differently and have more of what my soul yearns for and less of what my ego wants.

Our Only Real Protection

There were gun safety laws in Newtown, yet in spite of them what happened, happened. Clearly we need gun safety laws and more regulation of military style weapons and clips, but these are not enough. At the core it was the relationship between the shooter and his mother, the relationship between the mother and the so-called safety net/support network, and the mother’s attitude about weapons that led to the crime.

 

External actions and things like more cops in schools, more laws and better enforcement will never substitute for healthy, supportive and nurturing relationships between people. Such relationships are inside-out things, arising from an individual’s and community’s natural sense of compassion, inclusion and beliefs—their sense of spiritual connection. Spiritual connection is an individual thing, clearly supported or not by communities of individuals. Choosing to connect with spirit and live from the inside-out, compassionately and inclusively, is an individual thing. But it can be as contagious as fear mongering——fearing, hating and blaming--choosing to live from the outside-in.

 

 “What happened in Newtown reminds us of just how much our survival depends on unspoken social contracts and strong communities [inside-out stuff],” Courtney Martin, author of Do It anyway: The New Generation of Activists, wrote. “People feel safer externalizing ‘evil’ and pathologizing individuals [the outside-in stuff]. But the large scale social inequality [that breeds this ‘evil,’ and the anger, fear and poverty that goes with it] is never labeled the ‘monster.’”

 

In, The Culture of Fear, Barry Glassner wrote that the “media is fun-house mirror on reality—‘a distorted view [pathologizing individuals and externalizing ‘evil’]making the community, the nation and the world appear much more dangerous than is actually the case.’”

 

Let’s take responsibility as individuals and do the inner work of connecting with spirit first. From there, “let’s create [healthy, nurturing] places and relationships where difficult truths can be spoken before they curdle and endanger. Children are watching us to see what monsters we have made up - and what communities [and relationships] we have created as the real safeguard against what threatens them.”

 

We can go up to the movie screen (the external) to fix the out of focus picture (with more police and laws) or we can go to the projection booth (the inner source) to fix it by getting our bloated nothingness out of the way of the divine circuits and allowing our natural compassion and desire for healthy relationships, inclusion and sense of community to flow. Until more of us are able to do the inner work and build the nurturing relationships and communities that are our only real protection, we will need the laws and regulations to shield us.