FEELINGS HAVE NO VALIDITY

Feelings

You talk about your feelings a lot. You confront others with them, as though they were responsible for them, or interested.

Feelings neither have, nor confer, validity.

Just because you have feelings, does not mean that anything exists.

Your feelings are your creations, the results of decisions of yours. For example, if you feel slighted by some instance of lack of attention your way, you can take on jealousy, anger, or spite. These feelings get very strong quickly and distract you from anything else. From what could they proceed but your previous decision as to how much attention you deserve? You decided you should be worthy of a certain amount of attention first.

All negative feelings come from some decision made by the ego. All negative emotions are tools of the ego. Jealousy, hatred, anxiety, unease, insecurity: these are all its beloved terrain. Ego wants nothing more than for you to be endlessly embroiled. When you are taken over by feelings, you lose your capacity to ask questions, and so you remain unawakened, unconscious.

Do not get involved in the rights and wrongs of any situation. To do so is an attempt to assign blame. Assigning blame is a useless endeavor because it prevents you from seeing your own part in any situation that you are experiencing. Refuse to pick up blame. It is one of ego’s most seductive tools. You can waste a lifetime in blame.

If you feel uncomfortable in a situation, ill-used and undervalued, take steps to immediately get out of it. Why have you set yourself as a being who deserves all this unhappiness? Why have you chosen this? What is your idea of yourself? Who do you think you are? Are you some composite of past perceived mistakes and successes? Must you be always working on yourself?

Or are you an infinite, already created being?

All negative feelings are the ego’s work. They proceed from a small self-image, the perspective of a creature who feels threatened. Only the threatened can experience fear, pain and rejection.

If you choose the perspective of an infinite, already created being, you know your existence is guaranteed forever, in a place where time has no meaning. There would be no need to create yourself. Without threats, you could only be calm, unafraid and endlessly present.

When negative feelings gnaw at your insides, it is ego wielding them to get your attention. If an uneasy situation recurs, say the conduit prayer over it, dismiss it. After a while, it will cease to be a problem.

Remember who you are

PARTIAL VISION: THE BODY’S EYES

Your vision is partial

You, who always think you know enough about a situation to judge of it, would save yourself much grief if you would remember that your vision is partial.

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How many times have you been surprised by new developments in any situation? Each time this happens, it should remind you that your vision is partial. There is always more to any situation than you perceive.

How many times have you judged a situation? How many times have you blamed someone? How many times have you been moved to anger by the actions of other people? Have you ever let go of judgments after they have been proved wrong or lacking in scope? Do you find it hard to give up judgments? Judgments bring grief and distress. Wouldn’t it be easier to withhold judgment, pleading ignorance of all the facts?

You see only what you have words for. You see only what you believe already exists. Do you think there could exist concepts that you yet have no words for? Of course there must, just as today there exist concepts that you did not have words for twenty years ago. Everything exists forever, but your vision is entirely dependent on your perspective.

How many of your beliefs come from the time, place, or gender in which you live?

Would you have advocated for gay marriage in the 1920s? Would you have been the plantation owner who freed his slaves in 1820? Plato and Aristotle, both great teachers of mankind, justified the existence of slaves. Most people are typical products of their time and place, accepting more beliefs than they examine.

May I be freed of the typical beliefs of my time, place, and gender. May I give up all judgments. May I be open to knowledge instead.

Many of your beliefs are held at the unconscious level, but they entirely dictate what you will be able to see. If you think all members of a political group are idiots, that another race is lazy, or ignorant, that one sex is controlling, or irresponsible, or unreliable, you will see examples everywhere you look. But what are you seeing but your own creations? Out of infinity, you are choosing to see only what accords with your beliefs.

Why would you do this?

There is no possibility you could see everything that exists in a situation: the motives, pasts, and fears of everyone involved, or what is going to happen next, and how this is going to affect everyone. It is not possible for you to know all of this. You may think you do know everything about a situation, and so this allows you to judge of it, and tell others what they should do, and why they are wrong.

But consider this, friend. Every time an event is coming up in your life, you picture to yourself how it will be and how it will look. You are always wrong in this. The reality of what comes to pass is beyond your knowledge to predict. Is the child you have anything like the child you imagined you would have?

Human vision is limited, deals in named quantities, prefers what it already knows, and is uncomfortable with not knowing.

But you do not need to rely on it.

Image by Gus Howie

DIFFERENCES: LET THEM GO

Can you imagine a world in which there was no duality, with no differences? Neither starve nor fat could exist, because everything would be perfection. Everything would blend together in beautiful, wondrous harmony, so that nothing protruded enough for you to notice it. There would be no more to do than relax, sink into and become the harmony of the spheres, with waves of peace and joy washing through you.

Without up, there can be no down. Without tardy, there is no punctual. Without the concept of difference, there can be no wrong or right, no faithless or faithful, no success and no failure, nor any other variation or degrees of any kind. No judgments. All that is, is perfect. The very existence of opposites implies the absence of balance. Think of a see-saw with one end on the ground, the other wildly in the air. This is up and down. Then think of the same see-saw at rest at a point of equilibrium, poised in harmony and balance.

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In one world, how can there be people who never have enough food, and others battling their weight? Can you imagine how the weight-battlers would be understood by those who never have enough to eat?

They could not understand it.

Could you imagine there could be any understanding in the mind of an overeater, of the depression and grimness of seeing others die of hunger?

Brothers, there cannot be. One inkling of their plight would make him rise up and say, “An end to all misery and suffering! Myself, I have enough. Let me share with the brothers who do not.”

That this kind of disparity can exist in the same world, is only understandable when we reflect that the different parts of the Self are not communicating. They are denying themselves, imagining they are different and separate from one another. You focus relentlessly on how you are different, by gender, size, shape, color, wealth, looks, all superficial things, all related to the world of form.

Photo by Michael Dziedzic on Unsplash

How many of our ills come from this horrible tunnel vision which keeps us imagining differences between our brothers and our Self! Let me not be so relentlessly focused on propping up the feeble ego. Oh God, spare me this. Enlarge my vision that I may see every brother as myself. Let me take as good and loving care of each brother, as I would take of myself, as though each brother were really me.

Imagine the world you could have

See instead the devastation that has ensued from the belief in difference.

On the one hand, rampant greed and overconsumption; on the other, hunger and starvation. There are the permanently dispossessed, and all those whose lives are ended or upended because of fighting.

This is the world in which you see yourselves as separate.

Is it not time to stop this now?

As an experiment, seeing all brothers as one could hardly be worse that the present, out-of-control system. Let us try this experiment. Since there is nothing to lose, since we can hardly make anything worse, this is not gambling. The result is assured.

You could live together in peace and harmony, all caring for all, sharing the earth’s resources and nourishing the earth.

Who would not want this?

Forgive difference

What is fighting but an extreme way of emphasizing differences? Forgive any idea of differences right now. Throw comparisons out of the window. Let there be no more black or white, rich or poor, male or female, gay or straight, married or not, real or fake, clever or stupid, all the myriad little ways of looking at brothers and seeing only differences.

You must be vigilant in this, as all your perception is primed to notice differences. Be patient in this.

Where I now find differences, let me instead perceive oneness. We are all cut from the same cloth, members of one family. Our fates are intertwined. I cannot have safety and security, if you do not. If you experience distress and fear, I cannot find peace. When I realize this, and internalize it, I will be unable to act or support any action that threatens the safety and comfort of any other brother.

Inclusion is always better than exclusion

PARADOX CONTAINS TRUTH

If you realize that you have enough, you are truly rich.

By not claiming greatness, the sage achieves greatness.

The gentle outlasts the strong. The obscure outlasts the obvious.

One gains by losing, and loses by gaining.

True words often appear paradoxical

Lao Tzu, the Tao Te Ching

A paradox is a seeming contradiction, two opposites that can never be reconciled. Another example of a paradox would be, “Life is death.” Life and death are certainly opposites in the estimation of the world.

Let us examine the paradox to see what truths it may yield. Life is death; from the moment you are born into this physical body, it is on a destination to its physical extinction. All of its life is but a journey unto death.

Turn the paradox around. Death is life. What truths could it yield? Death is life. At the death of the physical body, there is release to the life eternal, where you came from and where you have always existed. No matter who the physical body incarnated as, death is the gateway to everlasting life.

The juxtaposition of seeming opposites produces extreme contrast, yielding truths not evident before.

It is in giving we receive

These words of St Francis seem to be a paradox, because surely giving is the very opposite of receiving. By giving something, you lose it and someone else gains it.

Examine the seeming paradox to see in what sense it could be true. To give is to receive. This would make sense if you were giving to yourself, because then you would be the only recipient of all the giving you did, which would encourage you to do more and more, as there could be no penalty but only increase in giving.

So in the sense that we are all one and connected, is giving indeed the same as receiving. Every person I might possibly give to, is my Self.

How quaint the ways of paradox

At common sense she gently mocks

W.S. Gilbert, “The Pirates of Penzance”

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IT IS IN LOVING

It is in loving we are loved.

You but waste time in imagining other people can be separate from you. They cannot be. All are from the same fabric; all are One. If others seem separate, it is you making them seem so.

You use other people as agents of your own decisions. If you believe rich people have hard hearts, the rich people you notice will seem hardhearted. You are not primed to notice examples of good heartedness; they would pass unnoticed or you will say they are the exception that proves the rule. If you think a particular group is lazy, clever, treacherous, or charming, you will find plenty of examples from the people around you. Whatever you are primed to see, you will see. Thus, the people around you become puppets in your show, acting out your beliefs.

Who do you interact with? Is it another being, pristine in glory, sent here from the same Source as yourself? If it were, nothing could move you to slight or injure a brother; it would be impossible.

We must conclude that in your interactions with other beings, you are interacting with your own beliefs.

I meet someone and all I see is what happened before; all I think of them is what I have already decided. All I see is the past, and so I am living with dead forms, in a world of my own making. Oh God, may I be let out of this prison! How can I avoid living in the past? How can I avoid making other people the puppets of my beliefs and remembrances?

Be relentlessly in the present. Give your full attention to the Other, listening, observing with love, attending, helping.

This becomes very easy to do when you remember it is your Self you serve.

It is in loving that we are loved

St Francis of Assissi

BALANCE, WONDERFUL BALANCE

Image of Nik Wallenda crossing the Grand Canyon by Lance Walton

Balance is always to be desired

Imagine two tightrope walkers. One believes that he can fall; the other has no fear. Which one has balance? Only he that imagines he is always walking on secure ground, for whom the possibility of falling does not exist.

The next time you stand on a balcony, holding onto the rail and admiring the views, imagine how differently you would feel if the rail was not there. You would not go anywhere near the edge, and you would not be able to enjoy the views. The possibility of falling is introduced by the absence of a rail, and now you are ruled by fear. You may feel dizzy or even nauseous.

Balance cannot exist where there is fear. Absence of fear and balance go together. In reality they are part of something wondrous that is larger than each one of them, smaller ideas entwined into a larger Idea. The mind likes to break everything down into parts, and parts again. So everything is partial, since you train your mind this way.

What if you let your mind go back the other way, unifying, unifying, unifying? Absence of fear and unshakable calm are just features of balance, as balance itself is just a feature of something larger, into which it blends as a drop in the ocean.

All that is good must exist together. Peace cannot be separate from forgiveness. Calm cannot be separate from patience. Stillness cannot be apart from clarity. All must exist together, or each loses its meaning.

The more connections you make between parts, the more clearly do you see the whole. And thus do we attain balance unshakable in the absence of any opposite. As fears are shed, and then disappear completely, so does attachment to outcomes evaporate, and balance becomes a state so natural you will cease to need a word for it.

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