Question 1: I do not want to exist. Why didn’t God give me a choice in this?
Your question presupposes that your existence is as some separate "I" that was created. Nonetheless, this "I" that you identify with is an ego illusion; you only appear to exist independently in the post-separation condition. Since the ego is a product of erroneous thought, it wholeheartedly believes that it is autonomous and separate. However, the entire myth of its reality is generated out of the distortionary state of ignorance. A mind that can comprehend totality sees the ridiculousness of all ego questions and it knows reality is entirely formless and contains no differentiation or partitions. All Creations of God exist timelessly and are inseparable from His Mind. You cannot think of your Creation as some event happening in time. All your confusion arises from this misunderstanding.
Question 2: Since God is All-Powerful. Why can’t He Uncreate me?
Your reality is inseparable from God’s. So asking Him to uncreate you is like asking Him to relegate into non-existence part of Himself. But He cannot uncreate Himself any more than you can create yourself. Yes God is all-powerful, but He does not possess the power to destroy Himself because Unconditional Love cannot be destroyed. If Love could be destroyed, it would mean Love could be made fearful. True and Absolute power cannot invalidate itself, or it would cease to be a power forever unopposed. Its self-destructive capacities would prove it was never Real in the first place. If God could uncreate Himself, then Truth could be destroyed, and therefore Truth would be no different from illusion. It would possess a conditional and transient existence and be at prey to destructive forces. Likewise, reality would be fearful were any of God’s Creations vulnerable and capable of being rendered non-existent on a whim. Similarly, if God had the power to uncreate any aspect of His Creation, you would also possess this power and be capable of destroying your Reality. Be grateful that it is only illusions that can be relinquished and this you accomplish by dispelling the seeds of ignorance within. Your illusory miscreations can be vaporized because they were never real in the first place. Truth being incapable of self-destruction is what guarantees your invulnerability.
Question 3: How come there is so much Sickness and Suffering in the World?
The Relative World is an illusion born out of miscreative thought, and it represents your decision to remain apart from God. None of the paths of the world offer any hope. Sooner or later everyone finds this out either by intellectual means or through feeling it in their heart. Despair is the natural outcome of all who witness their dreams and most cherished idols fail one after another. You become weary and disenchanted and do not know what to do. You are afraid of Truth because you believe God to be vengeful. After all, you think he placed you in this wicked, unstable world where fear, brutality and hopelessness reign. Being fearful of Truth you make a conscious decision to be sick. Since your mind is all-powerful sickness soon manifests into the body in some form. Sickness then binds you to the body, and you come to believe that your true reality is pitiful and weak because your mind thinks it is held hostage inside the body. You begin to identify with all the frailties and vulnerabilities that the body feels. You forget that you chose to be sick because of your underlying fear of Truth. You expect vengeance and retribution for your guilt and for the many sins and senseless attacks you have committed. Being fearful of your Divine Power you then appeal to various magical beliefs to heal yourself. Hence all the pills, potions, medical cures, healing therapies, etc. that proliferate in the world. They are nothing but proxies in which your mind projects its power to external forms and continues to believe that power lies outside itself. In the final analysis, you do not want to acknowledge the responsibility that comes from recognizing your divine creative potential.
The body cannot be cured because the body is an illusion. Only the mind can be cured. However, the mind that believes it is imprisoned in the body must become sick. Unless you are healed at the source, sickness will transmogrify from one form to another. Spiritual healing depends on you recognizing your underlying guilt and eliminating this guilt at its roots by practicing Quantum Forgiveness. You have projected your personal sins to others so that you can retain innocence for yourself alone. Now it has been so long that you have become unconscious of this. By forgiving others their "sins" you finally become capable of forgiving yourself. Then you recognize that your perceived guilt was causeless and only arose from your self-confusion in regards to your One True Identity.
A mind that has relinquished all its guilt through forgiveness cannot be sick or suffer in any way. Suffering and sickness arise from the decision to retain guilt and sin and so it avoids Truth at all costs. Once one tastes even a sample of unconditional love, then all attraction to guilt and to the world of sin disappears.
Question 4: From Where Does Evil Arise?
All religious philosophies ask this same question! They wonder how it is possible for God to be all-powerful, loving, and omnipresent and for evil to creep into existence? Most religions and spiritual teachers, mystics, prophets, and self-help gurus begin by according evil a reality. They then urge you to purify yourself of evil deeds and sins and to take up the fight against evil. Even a religion as advanced as Gnosticism, which embraces non-Dualism and Oneness views the material universe as inherently imperfect and evil. The Gnostics acclaimed that the higher realm of the Absolute was perfect, changeless and non-physical and beyond any hint of evil. Still, they affirmed the presence of evil in the lower world of space-time, flesh, and matter and this they referred to as the demiurge. Once one takes evil to be real, then one is left facing some inescapable and frightening possibilities. (a) God does not exist (b)God is not omnipotent or (c) God does not care, and he is as vengeful as he is Loving. So they introduce the concept of Satan or the Anti-Christ as a dark force which continuously fights with God and denies His omnipotence.
Buddhism teaches that the Samsara and Nirvana are the same reality perceived differently. Experienced through an impure state of mind, we experience samsara, while only through a pure mind, can the reality of Nirvana become known. They, therefore, advocate various purification methods such as non-attachment, impartiality, presence, and self-remembrance to release our minds from the hells of anger, greed, and delusion and to gain entry to the Nirvanic mind-state. However, they never refer to evil directly. At most they teach that imperfection and pseudo-bondage to hellish realms is only seen and experienced because of the defilement of ignorance.
Once one accords evil with real power and attempts to fight against it, one falls into a dark hole where there is no longer any hope of escape. The Course is the only Spiritual teaching I am aware of that comprehensively answers the question of evil at its root. It states that evil has no real cause or presence and therefore no reality. Its appearance anywhere is a product of ignorance and the separation mind-state. This mind-state thinks it is apart from God and believes it can rule in its own private luniverse. In the Course’s View evil and the ego are synonymous and the consequence of miscreative and erroneous thought patterns of the lower mind that need to be resolved and healed. The Course does not deny the apparent presence of evil in the world of our sense perceptions, but it teaches that this world of sensation is an illusory landscape. There has never been any world of things, space-time, and bodies. It has no true Reality, just an apparent one and it will disappear when we undo all our confusion about ourselves and choose the Atonement instead. So it represents a hallucination and is a mere byproduct of our split-mind. This hallucination came into pseudo-existence with our apparent separation from God. Ridding ourselves of egoic thought, the relative world where evil appears to rule begins to disappear back into the nothingness from which it came. Then Reality alone is known. Atonement retraces our path in the unreal landscape and undoes all imaginary effects of the ego. Finally, the whole illusion of the ego itself is dispelled.
"By steadily and consistently canceling out all its effects, everywhere and in all respects, He teaches that the ego does not exist and proves it" [T-9.IV.5.6]
So evil and the ego are illusory appearances that call for correction, not for war. Evil represents the imperfection of possessing those disordered and fallacious thoughts that arose after the apparent separation. The ego is incapable of Knowledge, and it only appeared when knowledge became lost from our awareness. It is therefore naturally disordered and divisive, and it places our minds in a perpetual state of chaos and confusion. The many symptoms of disordered thought include hell, illusions, the ego, evil, the material universe, space-time, guilt, sickness, split-mind, etc. You are not held accountable for your evil thoughts and their numerous effects because they are only present in that part of your mind ruled by the ego, which itself is unreal. All products of evil disappear once you choose the Atonement.
"You would be responsible for the effects of all your wrong thinking if it could not be undone." [T-5.V.7.10]
Atonement is the remedy that restores order to our thoughts while removing all vestiges of the ego. Thus our minds become radiant and a perfect receptacle for the Thoughts of God.
"The purpose of the Atonement is to save the past in purified form only. If you accept the remedy of disordered thought, a remedy whose efficacy is beyond doubt, how can it symptoms remain?" [T-5.V.7.11-12]
So all the evil we see in the world is very much like the hallucinations perceived by someone who is delusional or suffering from schizophrenia. To accord reality to hallucinations is meaningless. They possess only a pseudo-reality and are no different from a mirage. They are mind-generated phantoms of an unhealed mind and instantly disappear into non-existence once healing occurs.
Question 5: Why did God create the world? When we are vexed and frustrated, and life is not working out as we hoped, we ask this question. We feel surrounded by the armies of the sick and dying and those perennially caught in various poverty traps. Then there are all those opportunistic leaches and mean, cold-hearted souls looking to take us for everything we’ve got. It is easy to fall into a deep state of depression and despair and meekly ask "What loving God could ever create such a Hell?" Then God gets our stamp of disapproval, and we project vengeance and cruel intentions to Him; alternatively, we may contemptuously dismiss His existence altogether. Either way, we go on our way feeling very fearful or empty. All who come here must ask this question for it is the universal question of the world. It is also the ego’s most prized card for gaining your allegiance and having you heed its counsel. The ego is powerless to answer this question. Its whole aim is to make God culpable for the insane world you see so that it can empower itself in your thought. Believing this world to be a reality and interpreting the laws that govern it to be outside your direct control, you begin to feel victimized, weak and vulnerable and listen more attentively to the ego. There are no answers to be found in the world itself because your lost awareness of Truth is what caused the world’s appearance. The same mind-state of ignorance that asks this question is the same mind-state that generates the world of perception. The question assumes that the relative world is real, and therefore God must have created it and be fully responsible for it. Having made two incorrect assumptions, no further progress is possible because even one false assumption is enough to preclude any meaningful answer. Even during the middle ages, many Theologians and Alchemists, etc. did not make the mistake of assuming God created the world. They held the belief that it was the work of Satan yet they remained powerless to make genuine progress because they had made the world and Satan real. Their association of this world’s creation with Satan would have been meaningful if they had correctly identified Satan with the ego. For then they would have understood that the relative world of our sense perceptions was a pseudo-existence and not apart from egoic thought.
All we see in this relative world are various manifestations arising from our ego beliefs. These beliefs include suffering, separation, lack, evil and death and the efficacy of judgment, condemnation, and attack. The source of all our fears arises wholly from our ego misunderstandings and confusion. The ego, on the other hand, would have us believe that God is the Source of fear and that we have no responsibility for the world we perceive. It would not have us recognize that all the meaningless and often terrifying images we see in the world are the consequence of our own mistaken beliefs. Our lack of awareness and fallacious understandings, enables these symptoms to persist and they function powerfully in providing a classic demonstration of the reversal of the law of cause and effect. Thus we see effects and cause and cause as an effect. So there is no worldly means for answering this question. Neither can it be answered through intellectual discourse and analysis. An unworldly and deeply spiritual solution, does exist, and it involves harnessing the power of ‘The Holy Instant.’ Within its soft embrace, we come to recognize the immense power of our mind, thought and decisions to change our world and redirect our future. As right-minded thought processes pervade our mind, the world of illusions becomes dispelled, and it is vaporized of all untrue elements and appearances. Then the world of our perception becomes luminous as our minds are healed and harmonized with Truth. The Holy Instant restores our sanity, and it helps us identify correct Cause-and-Effect relationships. Then one day, we are Enlightened and come to perceive that the world is not. Then all fear is vanquished from our minds, and the Eternal Paradise reemerges from behind the veil and cobwebs of our distortions. It was always present waiting for us to return to our right mind.
Question 6: How can we be Creators if our Creations are Timeless and therefore have always Existed? Creation is not a process in time but one whose power unfolds out of time. It is an Abstract Realm encompassing endless potentialities. It explores new possibilities in novel ways and shares these ideas with the One-Mind. For example, suppose you are given ten thousand pieces of lego. The variety of toys and models you can create from this lego seem innumerable, and yet the number of bits of lego has not changed in any way. One could say all the toys created were already immanent in the lego but remained as unrealized potentialities until directed by your intelligent, ingenious thought to be configured in a certain way. Your creative joy is not in changing the underlying lego pieces but in exploring their limitless possibilities. Likewise in Creation, you are not changing its inherent perfection but only increasing its grand scope by eliciting new and exciting prospects and conceptions to life.
Question 7: How long does it take to reach Salvation? Reaching salvation is not about time, it is about initiating well-directed effort and gaining true understanding. If you follow the ideologies of the ego, Salvation will seem to take forever. Still, if you embrace the Holy Spirit as your guide, Salvation can be almost immediate.Sometimes, more progress can be made in an hour than in a lifetime. A few right-minded thoughts can save you centuries compared to eons of misdirected effort working poor behavioral approaches aimed at your purification. Time itself is an illusion, so it is how you use time that makes a difference. Fundamentally Salvation is not a question of doing but one of undoing. It is one of removing the unwanted and redundant bits of marble from the statue so that the splendor of a majestic David can be revealed. If your possess the right attitude and intentions you can undo alot of the garbage in your mind. When Salvation comes, at last, it is always with the astounding realization that "I need do nothing."
"Save time for me by only this one preparation, and practice doing nothing else. “I need do nothing” is a statement of allegiance, a truly undivided loyalty. Believe it for just one instant, and you will accomplish more than is given to a century of contemplation, or of struggle against temptation." [T-18.VII.6-8]
One pure thought given faith and practiced devotedly can vanquish the complete thought system of the ego. It will function to purify all your thoughts, and it will bless your eyes with vision.Then you are Home.
The world asks silly questions like "Is it better to save an army, rather than a single soldier?" This is because the world always thinks in terms of magnitudes and so it tries to quantify Compassion, Love, and Truth, etc. In the Course, I implore you merely to see one brother truly, in his original purity and without any trace of judgment and condemnation. Then the purity of your thought and perception will quickly transfer to heal the entire Sonship and light will pervade your Holy mind. There are definite steps of progress to be made before you can be healed. Once you make progress at a fundamental level, many of these individual steps can be bypassed as they are no longer necessary.
Question 8: How did the Separation come into Being? The separation is an illusion, and its continued existence depends only on our commitment to the ego. Once we purify our minds and rid it of all incorrect understandings, all appearances of separation will quickly disappear. The Buddha once taught that the Path and the Traveler on the Path are not separate in any way. Each co-creates the false notion of the other. The transcendent understanding is realizing that there is no path and no traveler on the path. Still, your mind deeply ensnared in ignorance, and bound to illusions appears to be a traveler on a trail. So you reinforce unrealities and continue to perpetuate that illusion of your false identity and that of a fictitious and deceitful world.
It is just like Schrodinger’s cat. Does the cat exist or not or is its existence contingent on your decision and wishfulness? It is a reality potentiality which quantumly collapses into appearance or not based merely on your choice? What becomes manifest in your world is observer dependent! It is only our continued belief in Separation that maintains it. We have learned from the ego and learned our lessons well. So the relative world and its multiplicity of illusory effects seem self-evident to our senses. We must now reverse all our steps into chaos and form and step back up the ladder. With your Enlightenment, you will penetrate far beyond all dualities and transcend the world of space-time and form and also this world of so many things. Then the undifferentiated and Radiant Reality of Nirvana alone will be known.
Question 9: Are there Dark Forces, and Evil Spirits and Entities? Dark forces, demonic spirits and murderous entities do exist; but they only inhabit the Relative Realm. Their power and strength dissipate as you come closer to Truth. Your only concern should be for the dark energy of the ego that resides deep inside your mind because this malicious entity is hellbent on your destruction. Once you no longer decide with the ego, you will feel perfectly safe, joyous and at peace. There is nothing outside your mind that has the power to hurt you in any way. All dark forces, evil spirits, and entities are just shadows of choosing with the ego. They have no substance and reality apart from the beliefs you invest in them. Deciding with the ego, you invite the whole world of darkness to come into your thoughts and perception. And what you see, you will believe even though they are hallucinations born out of distortionary ideas. What can be known, will be known! But that remains your choice. Once you invite Love back into your mind, all these distortions and hallucinations will disappear, and the radiant and true existence will reappear into your perception.
Question 10: Since all our needs were met in Eternity and we experienced ourselves as Perfect and Abundant Beings. Then why did we decide to leave? You have never left Eternity. The most important part of your mind remains there to this day experiencing Peace, Bliss, and Abundance and it knows itself as perfect and complete. You have the illusion that you exist in Time. The Tiny Mad Idea (TMI) forced a split in your mind so that part of it now hallucinates the space-time existence. A portion of your thought is insane since it asks for the impossible and believes possessing everything is not enough. It wants to be the "The Creator of Perfection" instead of "A Creator of Perfection." But it is impossible for God to give you anything more. Creating yourself is impossible because what part of you is there to do the Creation if you remain uncreated. Your vain search for self-authorship and specialness in various forms led to your apparent fall. Still, all that has changed is your awareness of what you Are! You have not lost your perfection, nor the Knowledge of the Kingdom but you have lost sight of it because of the torment induced by your split-mind. You are forever an effect of God and an extension of the Divine and Unconditional Love. That is your Reality.
Are you going to remain a Don Quixote perpetually chasing shadows and running madly about in the relative existence or are you going to accept the Atonement? Do you want to linger as a disconnected self or do you want to embrace your connection with your Source? For here is all vitality and Life and the repository of Knowledge that can never be assailed. Here is your Safety and your Peace. Here the Sea of calm and the sanctuary of irreversible logic and the irreversibility of Truth. This bleak world that you perceive will be laughed away when you acknowledge a nugget of what is Real. Your Real Thoughts await you seeking to set you free. Escape this bumbling world whose laws of Cause and Effect are all reversed. Escape all disastrous consequences of misdirected thought. Heaven Awaits You this Day!
Your Creations depend on you. Do not deny them their Reality by denying yours. To disavow them does not cause them to disappear but it does hide them from view. Relegating Reality into obsolescence is not your Divine function. So have you established an isolated kingdom of nothingness? One built on soap bubbles where nothing seen is real or can ever be appreciated. Each bubble in your perception is a hallucination and has nothing to show for itself. It does not give witness to your Reality – Only your Creations can do that! Cut-off from our Source, all our effects have no real existence and no witnesses. What we fashion is limited to the imaginary. Our Creative Power remains silently waiting for us to return to our right mind. Wandering in dreams cannot produce anything meaningful or of consequence.
Question 11: What is there to prevent the Tiny Mad Idea (TMI) from ever happening again? The TMI was an unreal thought from the very beginning, because it was a thought unshared with God. All its effects are therefore illusions. The non-existent world it manufactured is powerless and inconsequential from the perspective of Eternity. A mind that is truly healed is awakened and its light shines for all to see. It is radiant because it reflects Truth and is Truth. All insanity has disappeared from the mind of the Son. The real question you should ask is why does a Mind that has been given everything, accept so little?
The ridiculous idea of the TMI could only arise because God gave us complete freedom to think and do as we wish. He said in our Creation "Let thy will be Done!" and with this declaration we were given everything except the power to be First Cause. There cannot be multiple primary Causes, or the very notion of First Cause becomes redundant. Light Rays do not confuse themselves with the light bulb from which they emanate. They are content and blissful to retain the power of their Source and to radiate it outwards. God created the Holy Spirit to restore sanity to the Son. The Voice of the Holy Spirit will guide and restore you. He will restore you to Knowledge and return you to the Kingdom. He will release you from the hell you have created by thinking apart from God. So will all your private worlds gently disappear into the nothingness from which they came and the Eternal Paradise be yours in your full awareness.
Question 12: Why do so few recognize their true Value and Inheritance? Sleeping minds cannot recognize themselves. The world becomes a fearful dream, and they cannot see that they are generating the without from within. This world of fear teaches vulnerability. So they lose all respect for themselves and all value for others. The screen of existence depicts their arbitrary wishes and fearful thoughts. They are busy building defenses against their fearful dream. Love has been forgotten, and the body has been raised to prominence and is idolized. Spirit seems an improbable and unverifiable hypothesis. All fall prey to the ego and its tawdry offerings and soon sink into the quicksand of its belief system. They begin to think they are at the mercy to the laws of littleness.
Our tarnished self-image did not happen overnight. It took millions of years of careful grooming. One day we are a stuffy creature of conceit, a prince ruling our own little fiefdom and the next we are a beggar groveling at your feet. Our lives are petty and just a series of increased humiliations. We psychologically implode because we find no beautiful image worthy of our minds. So we accept our work in toxic environments and die each day physically, psychologically, emotionally, and spiritually. Not listened to, appreciated or understood, we feel humiliated. And in the end, it all takes its toll. Our confidence and self-esteem start to break down and erode. We accept a lower self-image and roam as subdued creatures that reflect caricatures of our former majesty. Each life is a series of small deaths. Each besieges our psychic self-evaluation and destroys our self-belief.
Being alive is not Life. One can be alive and have little life to offer. When the American soldiers came to liberate the death camps in Germany and Poland after the war, they saw this for themselves. Many, if not most of the "living" had become thoroughly zombified by the faceless brutality of the Nazi regime. The continuous dehumanization had eradicated all connection to their former identities. Their sense of self had been stripped away after many years of torture.They no longer possessed any will, or spark and zest for life. All had been extinguished. They were now alive in name only. Their story is everyone’s story.
When we buy into the ways of the world, it always comes with a price-tag. How can we continue to pay for it? The purity of our idealism and altruism becomes tarnished and lost all too soon. Our adventurous spirit dissipates, and we become incapacitated by worldliness. Our cruel dictators see no value in these bags of sand and water. Their image projects no outward worth. No one is trustworthy. So they seek to rule through fear. They treat their dogs better than their subjects. Their subjects go around in chains and bark on all fours. After a few years of this, the mind implodes, and all human abilities and empathy become severely atrophied. How can you appreciate others when you cannot recognize your self? How can you perceive value without when you fail to see it within. Your diminished self-image projected outward destroys all appreciation for all you see.
Question 13: Is Unconditional Peace Possible? How is it that almost no one seems to have attained it? Man is restless. He has lost all inner and outer harmony. There is an ugliness about him that is worse than any animal. Animals take only what they need, but man is wasteful, voracious and even carnivorous. He eats everything, even himself. Even the insects are not safe, and cockroaches are on the run now. You have had a good journey on psycho-planet, but your time is almost up! There can be no exclusions or exceptions on the menu. No longer content to eat vegetables, fruit, and meat you want to genetically modify pure crops to meet your insane and insatiable whims. Tampering with nature is dangerous and playing God with extremely delicate mechanisms of checks and balances, is threatening entire ecosystems and placing species into extinction.
You have never known what you want. You consume everything you can lay your hands on and contemptuously destroy all you do not understand. Like Alexander being unable to unravel the Gordian Knot, you strike it with your sword. You possess no subtlety, sensitivity, delicacy, and respect. What you call subtlety is just a mask for slyness and calculated deception. You remain a master manipulator and possess all the delicacy of a bulldozer. Without ever tasting your vulnerability, all becomes a slaughterhouse. Man extracts thousands of times more than he needs, He is so callous and cold to his fellow beings even in their times of desperation. There is no mystery to how he thinks or to why he does what he does. It is the same old pleasure-pain principle that has been around since the beginning of existence.
Immediate gratification is your only goal and entire modus operandi. You extort the physical, emotional, intellectual and spiritual landscapes for everything you can take. You rarely put up with any discomfort or inconvenience even if it helps another tremendously. Your game is manipulation and extortion, and for every effort, you initiate you always want something more valuable reward. Giving in to temptations and voracious worldly appetites you are held hostage to lower centers and the temple of sense indulgence. Then one morning, you wake up and wonder why you are not Enlightened and not radiating unassailable Peace, Love and Joy. It would be far easier for a hog to be Enlightened. Enlightenment is not on the drive-thru menu like your McDonalds French fries.
You no longer can correctly evaluate what is truly valuable. You value the meaningless. Having lost all awareness, you are quick to Judge. All the time you are obsessed with the trivial and unimportant. This becomes the barometer by which you judge all around you. So your relationships are all toxic because they are based on harvesting the immaterial and frivolous. Love and Healing have never been the goal. You engage in pointless hobbies, pursuits, appetites, and obsessions. You make no room for anything new and fail to see the world in an entirely different way. All is about certain life-plans and strategies that benefit yourself alone. So you are like driftwood and drown in your work and obsessions.
A multi-life plan makes perfect sense since you are going to be around forever. Are you going to continue to be wasteful or get to work on your Spiritual Foundation? Even a few sticks of furniture can make your life a little less empty. Perhaps there is some milk waiting to nourish you back to strength. Your restlessness, anxiety, and impatience are the results of seeking that which is of no worth. It is a stingy investment strategy. There is no space left for Truth behind all your foolish obsessions! "All good things to those that wait" Still only bad things are on the horizon until you mend your ways. Or are you going to remain a stooge to be trampled on or a bully who makes demands or else evolve beyond senseless toys and mere opportunism? Seize the moment and seize this day. End all your gibberish, time management and inefficiencies. They all contribute to your sense of panic, anxiety and produce health problems and loss of life. Infinite patience extends an invitation to the miraculous to silently enter your life. It demonstrates your love and compassion and makes you perceive the world with clarity. So all becomes luminous because you have removed the distortions of your various evil appetites. All health problems disappear when your mind is no longer ambitious but becomes grateful instead. God enters that holy chamber which can appreciate this moment and does not seek to hoard for the next.
"Now you must learn that only infinite patience produces immediate effects. This is the way time is exchanged for eternity. Infinite patience calls upon infinite love, and by producing results now it renders time unnecessary." [ T-5.VI.12.1-3]
Anger and anxiety punish all those who are impatient, and who demand more than they deserve. Their whole racket is an extortionist one. They get into accidents, lose friends, make bad mistakes because their decision making power is tarnished by their impure goals. So they never experience a single moment in the absence of noise, various calamities, fearful thoughts, toxic relationships, and without futile striving. No peace can come to such a mind. Peace is a condition of Truth and also its blossom. Peace has the power to release you from all fear and anxieties forever. It will bring to a Holy place of certainty where your True Being is known and you feel you are fully taken care of. You will become intimately connected with the omnipotent compassionate presence that will guide you in every aspect of your life. Attaining unconditional Peace takes baby steps at first. Soon it will transform into a picture of long-term prosperity. Knowing you possess all and are forever safe, all your ambitions and dreams will drop away.
Question 14: Is Death the Great Illusion? Death is the Great Illusion! Since the beginning of time, the mystery of what happens at the instant of death has befuddled humanity’s consciousness. Death is seen as the all-pervasive certainty in life — that which takes all beings hostage in the end. One moment, you are present and the next entirely lifeless.Those eyes that shone so brightly and which clung for life so tenaciously are now gone out. Now no one is there at all – just this blank flaccid stare. And an inescapable emptiness rivets itself into the hearts of all who witness it. Life seems so futile and pointless — a zero-sum game. All your intelligence, expertise and effort and endeavors have reaped death as your final reward. Death offers the compelling testimony that you are just a body and die along with it. Once you succumb to identification with the body, you surrender to the belief in death.
"All things but death are seen to be unsure, too quickly lost however hard to gain, uncertain in their outcome, apt to fail the hopes they once engendered, and to leave the taste of dust and ashes in their wake, in place of aspirations and of dreams. But death is counted on. For it will come with certain footsteps when the time has come for its arrival. It will never fail to take all life as hostage to itself." [WB.163.3:1-4]
Throughout his career, Freud came across many patients that he failed miserably to comprehend. He floundered in his attempts to account for their symptoms and actions. He felt sincerely puzzled and embarrassed because he was unable to explain their behaviors and responses through his pleasure principle of Eros alone. Most did not possess a survival instinct and were not that interested in pleasure and sex. They seemed hell-bent on self-destruction and self-dissolution. It did not add up, and he felt afflicted. He liked things neatly packaged. He had always taken a teleological approach to psychology. He had hoped to distill the cause of all actions and behaviors. He could no longer sell Eros to the world as the definitive answer to explain the complete range of human reactions and conditioning. There were too many outliers confronting him with such startling contrasts?
He reasoned that there was another variable in human nature, and will that he had not accounted for — some dark force, like a form of anti-matter of the psyche that alone could explain such cases. Freud began to speculate about an underlying death drive, and its energy seemed counterpoint to the libidinous life drive of Eros. Just labeling it was not enough! All the same, this death wish, and will to self-destruct completely mystified his mind. From where was it arising? It seemed generated and propagated from a dark entity within us and entirely out of line with our instinctual motivations and the Eros principle itself. He has already connected the ego with his Eros principle; so how to unify this with the Death Wish as well. He had dissected and partitioned the inner realms of man and saw all as a masterful interplay of the ego, the superego, and the id. He had emphasized and believed our essential wholeness at the internal systemic level. So what to do now? Was nature split and at war with itself? How could man be two? Two beings, two primal energies, two voices, two belief systems, two conflicting modes of behavior that were always at loggerheads to each other on everything? Two antipodal perspectives that answered completely differently on everything? He questioned the true Source of our being and identity, and it did not package well at all.
Death seems to be happening all the time – even in the heart of life. As you reflect now on the mad adventures of your youth, you know with certainty that many things have already ended for you. Maybe you will never ride again your motorcycle at breakneck speeds during a black-out. Maybe you given up some of the adventures you wanted to indulge in - like climbing a Himalayan peaks or sailing around the world. Or maybe given up bungee jumping, skydiving or diving with sharks.You will no longer back-flip off the bar counters or dangle from the roofs of houses. Maybe your time for having kids is over. Yes, you have flowered into a pompous, pedantic bore. All your activities are jeweled with the most cautious conservatism. You pussyfoot around the world seeking for the spring of your spontaneity to return but you have completely dried up. Having become mistrusting of everyone and everything you are afraid to fly or even to go out at all? Sentenced to your bed, you wait in silent expectation of the inevitable.
You know that if you accept, this ego’s core belief in death, you have also embraced the ego’s thought system in its entirety. The conception of death is impossible unless you have already endorsed other ego beliefs. Accepting even one ego belief makes the ego seem valid and real. So you bar all gates to transcending its thought. We have already reviewed many of the other ego beliefs, including the illusions of the body, separation, objective existence, space-time, or finding love in exclusion, etc. We have kept your faith in death purposefully at bay until last because you need strength to examine it with sincerity, clarity, and openness. Your understanding had to be increased so that you can ridicule the very question. Death is the one trump card of the ego, the one certainty it thinks it can offer you. Leveraging itself on this key ideation, it seems to prove its case to you. This crown jewel aims to establish God as a God of vengeance. If you can expose this one ego-belief, all the rest of its dominoes easily fall. Now we will review some of the evidence to determine if death is just another ego illusion.
Almost everyone has known or seen someone die. They see death as an incontrovertible fact never to be denied. Still, no one has ever seen themselves die. All you have experienced is astral projections and worlds of light. If you were dead, you could not witness this world or any world. Yet from where did this miraculous power of perception arise? Perception will always mirror your beliefs and change as your ideas evolve. Perception crystallizes out of your hardheld beliefs. Your mind is the most powerful instrument of change and of new decisions.Your death wish arises from the toxic portion of your thought that can perceive no way out.So you become disenchanted with the world and can see no way to escape your dilemma. So you see the body die from sickness or from self mutilation or suicide, but you cannot kill your mind or immortal Spirit. What is deathless must remain forever deathless!
One thing is certain; this death wish does not arise in happy folk or in a vacuum. It is prominent in minds that have become dull and disenchanted who have drunken too much from "life." All minds threaded deeply to wicked nightmares of hopelessness or ensnared in the subaqueous depths grow weary of their evil dreams and project malicious and evil intentions onto God. Sure it is God that is unmerciful and unjust and out for vengeance. Look at how he has taken all that I have cherished and loved, see how he has rendered me into a broken down and hollowed out carcass. Now as I stare out through cheerless eyes, a game of self-vengeance begins for all the dark dreams that I have experienced. The death wish gains increased traction and attraction with each disappointment. It is empowered as your mind falls fast asleep. Your God being vengeful, you tremble at the very thought of awakening. Caught in your dreams of terror and despair, it is your awakening that you genuinely fear.
"All forms of sickness, even unto death, are physical expressions of the fear of awakening." [T-8.IX.3:2]
"It is impossible to worship death in any form, and still select a few you would not cherish and would yet avoid, while still believing in the rest. For death is total. Either all things die, or else they live and cannot die. No compromise is possible." [WB.163.6:1-4]
Only in awakening will you ever find rest and release from the death illusion. Awakening is the only cure for your death wish. Truth liberates by releasing you from all belief in dreams. So does the unreal have no more power! Probing a little deeper, you must ask "What is that seems to die?" The body cannot die because it has never lived. It is an illusion and therefore is composed of nothing that lasts. It remains a mental projection. All its actions and sensations are driven from your mind. The body cannot think or feel, but it can reflect the feelings and sensations you endorse it with. The mind cannot die because your mind is spaceless, timeless, and deathless. Awareness cannot be killed. All universes and manifestation arise from your thoughts and dissipate back inside just like waves in the ocean. Your body, experiences, and perceptions are like so many videos that you download and play. So you watch one particular video that comes to its end – so what! That particular show may be over, but your mind and spirit go on. The video server remains, and it soon is time to replace that video out with another.
"When your body and your ego and your dreams are gone, you will know that you will last forever. Perhaps you think this is accomplished through death, but nothing is accomplished through death, because death is nothing. Everything is accomplished through life, and life is of the mind and in the mind." [T-6.V.A.1:1-3]
