Posted: September 30th, 2007, 4:26 pm
I get bogged down from time to time in the paradox: only what God creates is real; what man makes is not real, but illusion ... but boy, does that illusion feel real when I drop a brick on my toe. Trying to live as if what we see, feel and experience is "not real" is demonstrably a bad idea, as when the Christian Scientist denies the reality of his child's pneumonia and the child dies for lack of treatment.
Ruby Nelson has some useful words in that respect: To call the web of human sub-creation "appearances" is not to say that it is imaginary. Actually, it is real, painfully -- sometimes inhumanly -- real and active. Within this web of collective forces are included many experiences which have been accepted as the way life is -- wars, conflicts, violence, strife and troubles in any form, poverty, disease, old age, cycles of death and rebirth, the struggle of mankind to understand himself and his universe.
Since such imperfections have generally been accepted without question, very few of my lost children have tried to find perfection by coming to realize that I have already given to each and every one a mind that knows all things and has all power, and a life force which cannot age since it is the essence of eternal youth.
... The "heart" is like a vast reservoir constantly being filled with whatever you pour into it through the surface mind. ...if you have filled your reservoir with accepted human beliefs in limitation, then you are limited in all your actions. But if you are willing to empty out your heart and let me fill it with eternal truth, you will experience a transformation.
Well, easier said than done. But it makes it possible to live with the arena of experience in which we are currently operating, regardless of whether it is "real" or "illusory." We simply view it (to borrow Buddha's term) as "impermanent", and remember that we cannot transcend it from any point of beginning except where we are -- within it. According to Buddha, one does not deny the existence of the impermanent, but simply uses it as means to transcend impermanence. Like the wall that isn't there if you don't look at it, or the tree that makes no sound if it falls where no ear can hear, the transcended state becomes an awareness that the impermanent was not there in the first place until we saw it, and ceased to be there when we do not see it. But as long as we saw it, it was there. Depends, presumably, on how much we have emptied our reservoir of human thought and thus allowed divine thought to flow in and refill it.
Personally, I think the wall is still there if I am not looking at it. That is because I cannot state that my mind is the only one, or that it operates independently. The Buddha made much of "inter-being" and "inter-dependence." Nothing exists in and of itself, apart from everything else and everyone else. It is not just my mind that is perceiving the wall, but the collective mind of all God has created. If the "web of sub-creation" is an iullusion, it is a mass illusion. If you and I look at the sky, we both see a blue expanse with white clouds in it. The sky is a creation of the collective consciousness, of which we are part and parcel. So is the wall, and the tree. These things are creations of the collective consciousness, and will cease only when the collective consciousnes in its entirety ceases to observe them.
The correlary to that is the very thing that ACIM teaches, that if you or I should transcend the illusion, we bring all other minds to that level along with us. Nothing that one mind does can be done without affecting all minds. SO: we actually could bring about world peace simply by ourselves attaining nirvana. Awesome.
JMO
Namaste
Art
Ruby Nelson has some useful words in that respect: To call the web of human sub-creation "appearances" is not to say that it is imaginary. Actually, it is real, painfully -- sometimes inhumanly -- real and active. Within this web of collective forces are included many experiences which have been accepted as the way life is -- wars, conflicts, violence, strife and troubles in any form, poverty, disease, old age, cycles of death and rebirth, the struggle of mankind to understand himself and his universe.
Since such imperfections have generally been accepted without question, very few of my lost children have tried to find perfection by coming to realize that I have already given to each and every one a mind that knows all things and has all power, and a life force which cannot age since it is the essence of eternal youth.
... The "heart" is like a vast reservoir constantly being filled with whatever you pour into it through the surface mind. ...if you have filled your reservoir with accepted human beliefs in limitation, then you are limited in all your actions. But if you are willing to empty out your heart and let me fill it with eternal truth, you will experience a transformation.
Well, easier said than done. But it makes it possible to live with the arena of experience in which we are currently operating, regardless of whether it is "real" or "illusory." We simply view it (to borrow Buddha's term) as "impermanent", and remember that we cannot transcend it from any point of beginning except where we are -- within it. According to Buddha, one does not deny the existence of the impermanent, but simply uses it as means to transcend impermanence. Like the wall that isn't there if you don't look at it, or the tree that makes no sound if it falls where no ear can hear, the transcended state becomes an awareness that the impermanent was not there in the first place until we saw it, and ceased to be there when we do not see it. But as long as we saw it, it was there. Depends, presumably, on how much we have emptied our reservoir of human thought and thus allowed divine thought to flow in and refill it.
Personally, I think the wall is still there if I am not looking at it. That is because I cannot state that my mind is the only one, or that it operates independently. The Buddha made much of "inter-being" and "inter-dependence." Nothing exists in and of itself, apart from everything else and everyone else. It is not just my mind that is perceiving the wall, but the collective mind of all God has created. If the "web of sub-creation" is an iullusion, it is a mass illusion. If you and I look at the sky, we both see a blue expanse with white clouds in it. The sky is a creation of the collective consciousness, of which we are part and parcel. So is the wall, and the tree. These things are creations of the collective consciousness, and will cease only when the collective consciousnes in its entirety ceases to observe them.
The correlary to that is the very thing that ACIM teaches, that if you or I should transcend the illusion, we bring all other minds to that level along with us. Nothing that one mind does can be done without affecting all minds. SO: we actually could bring about world peace simply by ourselves attaining nirvana. Awesome.
JMO
Namaste
Art