Gazing in the Mirror

April 12 - Unity is simply a Realization

Value life in what ever house
it dwells. For when it comes
time that we are all stripped
to bare bones before the divine
and facing eternity, we will
understand that the only law
we were meant to follow, was
to love ourselves and each other.
Nothing more...nothing less.
~ Carla Jo Masterson

The kingdom of heaven is not
a place, but a state of
consciousness. God is not a
person, but an essence, and
man proclaims that this essence
and atmosphere is personal, and
so it is, but in this way:
personal to us through us.
~ Ernest Holmes

We separate ourselves – me/not me. We learn to contrast truth with what isn't true for us. Enlightenment or awakening is simply understanding that we are in that state already. The "secret" words were there all along and only secret to our understandings. Unity was there all along. Spirit has been there all along. Nothing has changed but in that moment of realizing – everything seems different than it seemed before. We laugh in the delight of it. At its core Presence is unchanging. Presence manifests in form and experiences all of the ways that form changes over time. This is what embodiment is all about – something changeless that becomes a changing thing by solidifying into form. We are born, we grow and then we decline on the way to leaving form.

Ernest Holmes said – "The only thing standing between the essence and atmosphere of the Spirit and Its personification through man, and in creation, is recognition". No one can make us see and it is definitely possible to insist on never seeing. Whatever anyone has thought they understood, for whatever reason they understood it, is as close to the truth of things as is the one who is witnessing that person's expression. There is no use in arguing with anyone else about the way they see things. The way they see things is the way that things are for them. The reality is that their experience is the truth of their experience. We are each the center of our own universe. We do well to stay in our own center while at the same time recognizing that every other person we come into contact with is doing the same. We can allow their reality to be what it is because we know ours is simply our own comprehension and that there is no single ultimate reality to defend. Everything is personified to our own apprehension of it.

Therefore a person might find "the truth" expressed in the uttered thoughts of a modern day spiritual teacher like Adyashanti and truly appreciate the clarity and common language in which he expresses these and yet what they believe is their own mediation of that truth. It is actually simply the responsiveness of their own soul to the universal Perfection that is finding its answer in what is "like" unto itself. Holmes reminds us that "the mind cannot isolate itself from itself, or separate itself from itself, so it cannot inject into itself a mind which is not itself, or which is unlike itself, or which is other than itself". So that where truth appears to be is where the harmony of unity exists.

It should be clear what it is that Holmes asks – "Life cannot be separated from living and whatever the nature of God or Life is, this nature must be one with our nature, else how could we be ?" The Creator and the creation are one. Life animates the things that move through that force of being alive. It is latent within us to understand that we are surrounded by Life. The Life within us recognizes the Life within all things that live. There is a creative power and it is reflected within our imagination as that which animates. What we look with – finds what we were looking for. What we expect to see – we find is already there. All is self-affirming realization. We find that Life is a persistent urge to express and a continuous demand for the next action, the next change, the next realization. Every expression of Life is alive and living that Essence which passes through thought into action. Which comes and goes through form.

Holmes notes – "God may be a myth, but people still long for divine guidance. Immortality may be an illusion, but people still hope that the future will not be oblivion. Religion may be a mental hallucination, but people still have a mystic sense of Reality, an intuitive perception of something higher. Aspiration may have turned into the ashes of dead hopes, but the urge to go on still pushes us forward. Science may have failed to find the ultimate Cause, but people still sense an invisible Presence". Is there a God, a Presence, a Spirit or Essence of beingness ? Whether one answers yes or no, both perspectives are sincere and both are motivated by the necessity that the one responding lives and breathes and moves and has consciousness.

Holmes notes two great core desires in human beings – a desire for unity with the Spirit that animates them and a desire to realize in what manner immortality may exist. If we have failed to realize these within our own understandings, it may only be that we do not truly know what these are from our own life's experiences. The Presence is not a person, it is a creative insistence, the emotional background, the desire and the action, the one thinking and the thought itself, the cause and the effect that is produced. Life is forever "personifying" Itself and It reveals Itself in creations that come and that go. Whatever we think that we truly know it is always only as "real" as we chose to make it for ourselves. It is a humbling realization that also opens up all possibility for us.

~ perspective

We are all equally different
from one another but made of
the same materials and held to
the Earth by the same force
of gravity.
I am as much "my self" as
anyone else is "their self" and
we share much in common even
as we have different experiences
of what being a self is about.
Whatever I can claim – a book
I've read or song I've heard
or beauty I've discerned has also
been read, heard or discerned by
another person who is the same
and different – simultaneously.
It matters truly not what anyone
else believes as long as the
consideration that we have for
one another's similarities and
differences allows us to interact
with harmony and peace.
The interplay of individuality and
unity creates a wholeness by a
dynamic consensus that makes
collective our diverse originations.

#acceptance #awakening #creativity #enlightenment #harmony #imagination #separation #tolerance #truth #understanding