Monthly Archives: January 2019

AGREE TO CHANGE

Angel statue

 

Teacher, you must agree to change. The more you agree to change beforehand, the more you are enabling yourself to teach.

 

Who would not want this?

 

You must agree to change because your own ideas are not worth going to bat for. If you would be a teacher, by all means be a teacher of the truth; why be anything less?  You can embody this message of possibility and change, in any walk of life. This is the only lesson you would teach now. Goodness, possibility, change. The way you teach is by example. It does not require your words, what you might deem to be a powerful, persuasive, or emotional speech.

 

Intent is everything

 

 

Intent is the power of a thousand suns harnessed to your chariot, carrying you far above all travails you ever thought you knew. Intent is the calm knowing that comes from within, chasing away your stress symptoms like heavenly balm, replacing them, making them nothing.

 

 

If you are to be a teacher, be a teacher of God. Be willing to be changed. This increases your effectiveness. Things will seem to happen by and of themselves, fabricated out of the nothingness, the primordial soup of infinite possibilities, summoned by your imagination, your focus, your attention.

 

Releasing hands

 

Let go your preconceived ideas; they were based on insufficient knowledge. You obviously know more now than you did then. No judgment born out of anything less than complete and perfect knowledge can be valid.

Your past judgment is now found invalid. Declare it to be so, summon it and dismiss it, no more useful now than a rusty padlock or a blown out tire.

If your past judgments are declared null and void because you didn’t have all the facts, then wouldn’t your present judgments  appear laughably uninformed and naïve to a future you?

 

 

Laughing boy

 

 

Be innocent of judgment

 

A QUOTE OF NEVILLE

 

Neville Goddard

“If you see this from above, everything here is like, well, something that is dead. You can’t change it from above, strangely enough. I have tried to, change it from above. Look at the body, it’s on the bed, and it looks like something like a carcass, that’s dead. Well you know exactly the wisdom is from above, if you could only do with it now, while you’re there, with the clarity of vision. But you can’t do it. You’ve got to come down, and occupy it. And then you forget. This is the world of the dead.”

 

When Neville starts speaking directly from Spirit, without his prepared speech getting in the way, his words become poetic; they have meter and rhyme.

“Look at the body. It’s on the bed

and it looks like something like a carcass, that’s dead”

 

 

How we recoil from that image of death!

The body on the bed seems like the ultimate defeat to us. You can’t escape it. Dusty death is the lord of all.

This drives paroxysms of revulsion, depression, and fear within us.

 

 

Of course. This makes perfect sense. As long as you believe you are a body, you will experience revulsion, depression, and fear at the idea of death.

In fact, here is the test of how much you identify with the body, your fear of pain and death. The more fear you have, the more you identify with the body, and its owner and animator, the ego.  When you fear bad outcomes for the body, it is because you believe that you are a body.

 

I am not a body. I am free. I hear the Voice God has given me, and it is only this my mind obeys

A Course in Miracles, Lesson 199

Workbook for Students

 

What if

 

I could imagine that I am disembodied, a consciousness who is observing, from above, this dead world below, this dead body laid out on a table. Now of course I can observe a certain toxicity which led to failures, shutdowns, miscommunications, shoddiness and poverty of spirit. Just sin, and sin means only “missing the mark”. I can observe plenty of missing the mark.

I look down at the body which was my life, and of course see all the blindness, all the mistakes that caused me pain, as just an unnecessary, crying waste of time. Unnecessary misery. And, from above, I vow and declare to hew to the clarity I now have, to have no other will than His,  and no other desire than to do good.

 

 

Let me have no other desire

than to do good

 

 

IMAGINATION AUTHORS ALL

 

More and more, reality seems fluid, shifting and the stuff of imagination. I mean that literally: the stuff, the fabric, the raw material, the realization, the birthing of it.

 

That trip we just did to California, now it is over: was it real, or stuff of the imagination?  Yes, it happened as surely as I know how to judge anything happened. But it was created in the imagination first, and then issued forth into the medium of what we might call reality, which is whatever you can apprehend with your five physical senses. What begins as an idea, held to with constant focus, is borne outwards like a drop of darkest indigo ink, issuing endlessly, billowing.

 

 

The author of all of your experiences is your imagination. If it is unfocused, scattered, and shifting, so will your experience be unfocused, scattered, and shifting. You will try hard to make meaning out of the seemingly random things that happen to you. This is as futile as gathering up water to make it into the wave it issued from.

 

 

 

You dismiss your imagination as though it were a useless plaything. “Oh, that’s only imaginary”‘, you say.

 

Nothing exists but that someone imagined it first

 

If you disrespect it, think it worthless and not suited to the real world, of course you cannot be using it as it was intended to be used.

 

 

Imagination is more important than knowledge

 

 

Think of it as the most precious, powerful tool you could be given. There is none other. Your imagination has the capacity to determine your entire existence, your feelings, your moods, your circumstances, all those things that you currently think determine you, that you are the victim of, and that you allow to rule your life.

 

 

 

Remember Who you are.  Everything you see around you is your own creation. Everything you see around you: the table, the rug, every person around you, every situation, everything was thought first.

 

Thought precedes all

 

Be conscious of where you place attention. This is a precious resource. Experience indeed is the product of imagination. The sooner you realize this, and begin using this powerful tool in a focused, directed way, the better it is for everyone.

 

For without Him was not made anything that was made that was made

John 1:3

 

 

ONLY YOUR SELF

A fractal, a fantastic shape produced by mathematics. This one looks like a ghostly green figure is beconing to the viewer, against a dark background. The feeling is serene.

 

You say you want to be in love, you say you want a soulmate, you say you want a fulfilling relationship. But it is only yourself that you must be in love with.

Only your self

Why?

For many reasons. First of all, your entire world and experience, everything that you think of as reality, is only the mirror of what is within you. If reality seems random, frightening and uncontrollable, it is because something within you is afraid and wants control. The more control it wants, the more is it afraid.

Not a way to live, friends.

 

A drop of water has been captured the exact moment after it hits a body of water. The surrounding water is still and calm as a mirror, refective, and the drop of water has risen up in rebound to resemble a miniature conductor of an orchestra.

 

It is only yourself you need to love because it is the Self who is loved, when you love.  The Self revels and rejoices in all ways and paths to love. When you choose attributes you yearn for and lay them upon the altar of your heart, with all the sanctity afforded by your love and intense gratitude, who but the Self is then invited in? And is this not the entire purpose of your existence here, to choose His love and care over all?

 

A beautiful pink water lily opening its petals upward to the sun.

Who but the Self?

 

It is only your self you need to love because everything in the outer is but a reflection of what is inner. If you desire love in the outer, as all do, then create the love you desire in your inner space. Use your outpicturings and intentions. You alone are in control of these.

 

It is really only your self you need to love because when you have been transformed by the attributes you have taken into your experience, you will radiate out strength, goodness, calm, compassion, and all else you have chosen. As like attracts like, other beings and entities with the same attributes will swim into your waters.  Those without will seem to slide away.

 

A girl kisses a dolphin, which has a blissful look on its face

 

As above, so below

As within, so without

As the universe, so the soul

Hermes Trismegistus, the Emerald Tablet

 

OBSTACLES MELT


A soap bubble about to be melted by the sun

 

As the sun is to ice and water, so is the sun of your clear and focused intention to any obstacles.

 

obstacles

 

Anything presenting now as an obstacle is only a projection of mind.  It is something you have decided to notice.  In the physical world, you see only those objects that stop light. If objects do not stop light, you do not see them.

 

 

Similarly with obstacles. You see them because they stop light, because you have decided to give them the light of your attention.

 

 

Why focus on an obstacle if you do not want it to be there? Do you want what appear to be obstacles? Maybe you do, since you see them. But if you knew you had chosen them yourself, wouldn’t you choose again?

 

Obstacles are illusions 

Ben Sutter

 

 

Two New Zealand tree ferns stretch out to the sun

 

 

It is just as easy to focus on what you want. It is all your choice where to focus attention.

 

 

 

The Romans had their Lares and Penates, gods and guardians of the household, to whom they prayed and made offerings every morning.

You are in charge of deciding your own household gods. Choose your own Lares and Penates. Build your mosaic. Visit the altar in the field of your heart. Do it now. This is your sun. Visit it often.

 

 

 

 

Before the power of your own sun, continually fed, continually visited, continually loved and celebrated by you, no obstacle can stand. Can you see how foolish it would be for the sun to faint and grow weary with self doubt? Does the sun see an ice crystal as any kind of obstacle?

No indeed; the sun has nothing to do but be effulgent.

And so let it be with any of your perceived obstacles. Let them melt and evaporate before the sun of your firm feeling-states.

 

Be effulgent in joy

 


Obstacles: a coiled tree fern frond ready to unfurl

YOU HAVE ONLY TO SURRENDER

 

The more you understand water, the more difficult you will find it to deny the existence of a god

Masaru Emoto


surrender; ice crystals formed on a branch

 

Ice crystals have no way to prevent their metamorphosis into water, just as water has no way to resist its evaporation into salt and minerals.

 

 

These processes cannot withstand the power of the sun, nor would they want to.  Ice crystals and water have no will of their own. What end would that serve but to stand in the way of a perfect process?  Who would do this?

 

 

As without, so within

 

In the natural world you see around you, there is no resisting the power of the sun, the giver of life. Every obstruction melts before it like ice yielding into water, which washes away to sink gratefully into earth, or evaporate into minerals and salt, be drunk by animals, used by creatures, or stored in clouds to reappear as rain.

 

 

At no point does any part of creation cry out with fear at what is coming next, or self doubt as to whether it is up to the task assigned to it. Creation is enabled in the perfection of surrender.

 

 

Surrender is knowing that only love is in charge, no one else. Surrender is knowing there can be no bad outcomes, only resplendent ones that your mind cannot yet picture. Surrender is having no will of one’s own.

 


 

An ice crystal never worries that it cannot find its rightful place in a snowflake.

 

Can you imagine the misshapen lump that would result if each ice crystal in a snowflake were free to decide what it would become?  Could the molecules of water ever imagine the wonders of the living water they would form?  Of course not. Ice crystals, water molecules, and indeed all of nature long for the sun of organizing intelligence.

You, as a part of creation, are no different. You long for the sun of your organizing intelligence.

 

Look within. Within is the fountain of good, and it will ever bubble up, if thou wilt ever dig.

Marcus Aurelius