Posted by Roberta Grimes • December 26, 2020 • 46 Comments
Jesus, The Source, The Teachings of Jesus
Joy to the world! The Lord is come.
Let earth receive her King!
Let every heart prepare Him room,
And heaven and nature sing!
And heaven and nature sing!
And heaven, and heaven and nature sing!
– Isaac Watts (1674-1748), from “Joy to the World” (1719)
It pains me to admit that I seem to have been blowing an essential task. My beloved Thomas has shown me that the primary purpose of these posts has been to help you learn the objective truth about a great many things, with one main goal: he wants you to come to know and perfectly love and trust the genuine Godhead. But it is clear from many emails and blog comments that I have long been missing that mark! So today we are going to take a stab at helping you finally understand how you can learn to love as God wants you to love, as Jesus came to teach you to love, and as you will need to learn how to love if you want to make this your last earth-lifetime.
My spirit guide is my lodestar. If he is happy with whatever we write, I consider it to be a success! And as you likely know, for more than a decade Thomas has been using me to demonstrate how the Lord’s Gospel teachings on forgiveness and love are meant to work. Our problem is that Thomas hasn’t been in a body for more than a century. Perfect divine love is where he lives, while we who are in bodies are immersed in a depth of negativity that he can no longer imagine. So it is only now that he is noticing and pointing out to me that some of what we have written has been too vague and mild for an earthly audience. Today we will try again.
After mulling it over, I have come to suspect that the reason why it can be hard for many to learn the perfect love that Jesus taught is that we see emotion as something private that flares and sparks for our own amusement. But the love that Jesus taught is not something that we feel. Rather, it is something that we become. In fact, we begin to internalize God’s divine love fairly early in the process. It then provides a basis for what can be fairly rapid spiritual growth. We need a new word for the love that Jesus taught, and our wonderful friend Father Richard Rohr has suggested one. He says, “The Kingdom of Heaven is really a metaphor for a state of consciousness . . . it is not a place you go to, but a place you come from. It is a whole new way of looking at the world, a transformed awareness that literally turns this world into a different place. . . The hallmark of this awareness is that it sees no separation—not between God and humans, not between humans and other humans. . . . When Jesus talks about this Oneness . . . . what he more has in mind is a complete, mutual indwelling.” So Fr. Rohr calls the divine love that Jesus taught “Oneness,” which is a reasonable description of how it feels as it grows in you. For today, let’s experiment with using “Oneness” to refer to the divine love that Jesus taught.
Here is what the Oneness that Jesus taught IS NOT:
Personal. If you feel love for some people but not for others, then you are lacking in Oneness. A Course in Miracles calls the love you have for friends and family – the love that differentiates some people from other people – “special loves.” And the Course says that special loves are as counterproductive spiritually as are special hates. If there is anyone on earth you have trouble loving, you are being too personal. It’s time for a reset.
Please re-read and internalize these points. It will help you to recognize your progress toward Oneness if you know not only what you should be looking for, but also which feelings are going to be dead-ends. The divine love that Jesus taught is technically “love” because it is the highest consciousness vibration that we can experience while on earth. But emphatically, it does not feel like what we usually think of as love! Oneness is instead much more like what the Apostle Paul described as “the peace of God, which transcends all understanding” (see Phil 4:7).
The love that Jesus taught is already your essential nature. Your mind is inextricably part of the one Mind which at its highest aspect encompasses the Godhead, so your spiritual growth can be a remarkably self-perpetuating process. And because Oneness is your essential nature, the transformation starts to happen naturally once you have accomplished these three things:
Oneness sounds like something hard to achieve, but in fact it is astoundingly easy. After your many excursions into bodies that were followed by periods of afterlife bliss, Oneness already is who you are. Then as you stripped down to your earth-mind again to enter your present body, you put away your active awareness of your glorious eternal nature, and you added a little gremlin ego whose only purpose is to make you self-protective. As you vanquish your ego and strip away what is not-Oneness, your true and already glorious nature begins to be revealed.
It is only once you banish fear, learn to forgive, and also give the boot to your ego that your genuine spiritual growth can begin. Once you have effectively managed all three of the steps listed above, you will already have fought more than half the battle! And you will find that once this process is well along, it seems to maintain itself with little need for further effort beyond your awareness and enjoyment of the process. I think my biggest failing has been that I haven’t helped you understand how growing into Oneness actually feels. In fact, it soon starts to feel delicious! Here are a few of the changes you should be seeing in yourself within months:
I know a few people who are so far advanced spiritually that to find them still living on earth is surprising. All the people I know who have best achieved Oneness are mild, kindly, self-effacing, and dedicated to whatever work they do for others. They also are steadily and relentlessly cheerful. Even joyous! And they never get angry, but rather if someone confronts them or disturbs their peace, they withdraw. They make you want whatever it is that they have!
Jesus is still saying to us today, “Come to Me, all who are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest. Take My yoke upon you and learn from Me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For My yoke is easy and My burden is light” (MT 11:28-30). Learning to love as Jesus taught us to love does require that we surrender and allow our minds to open completely to the love of God. But everything about this process is joyous! And best of all, when you become the love of God, for the first time you will understand just how completely the Godhead loves you. And you will know only joy forevermore.
Joy to the world! The Savior reigns.
Let men their songs employ.
While fields and floods,
Rocks, hills and plains
Repeat the sounding joy!
Repeat the sounding joy!
Repeat, repeat the sounding joy!
– Isaac Watts (1674-1748), from “Joy to the World” (1719)
Dear Roberta, the problem I have with ‘oneness’ is trying to find love and forgiveness for those who perpetrate cruelty and suffering to children and animals. How on earth does one do this? Even Jesus displayed righteous indignation when throwing the money-lenders out of the temple. Does oneness preclude speaking out against cruelty, and calling the perpetrators to book? I simply can’t reconcile the two.
Thank you for your most interesting articles and radio programmes. I’ve followed you for a few years, and find much of your work quite inspirational.
Dear Angela, of course you can speak calmly against evil, so long as you don’t lower your own vibration to a pointless rage! Your Oneness must first be with God. That is the love that Jesus taught, and it is the only way to empower yourself to do some important good in the world. From your place in God, you can do wonderful things! I know of no one who seems to be very advanced spiritually who isn’t immersed in some great work, and probably was called to that work. None of them are indignantly fighting people who perpetrate evils, but rather they are showing by their calmness, by their goodness and kindness in bringing balm to those who have been harmed, how all of us should best address evil. Personally, I am confident that Jesus regretted losing His temper with the money-changers, since what good did it do? But we all have our limits!
No, at our stage of spiritual growth, our whole close connection is with God and we cannot yet really have a way to relate to evil-doers. But as we grow spiritually, we will find that our calmness and power of the Godhead gives us the strength to do amazing things for others!
Quote from above: “Oneness already is who you are. Then as you stripped down to your earth-mind … to enter your present body, you put away your active awareness of your glorious eternal nature…”
Hi Roberta, hi everybody!
The above revelation is a major challenge for we Western Judeo-Christians to comprehend—that we are One with the divine and always are One. We learn that Creator and Creation are separate, and after enough recitations, we come to think of our own free will in our decision to push for spiritual growth to be somehow blasphemy. “God has a plan for us” is so fundamentally different from “We have a plan for God” that we have our mission here completely twisted around.
It is important for Christians to grasp what it truly means to be a “spiritual being having an earthly experience.” It is not just a Sunday sermon title for the church marquis.
Oh dear Mike, you are perfectly right! It is so difficult for us to get ourselves free of the materialist illusions and the Christian fear-based beliefs. I had to do it, too. What helped was studying and internalizing how completely wrong and dangerous old-style Christian beliefs are, how contrary they are to what Jesus actually taught; and also studying the objective facts about our illusory reality that materialists ignore. And oddly, Saint Paul helped me as well! He didn’t understand Who Jesus had been and What He had come to do, but Paul did channel some of his writings (I Cor 13 was channeled for example). I would read some of Paul’s letters and cheer him on! From Paul I took the mantra, “I can do all things through Him who strengthens me” (Phil 4:13) as my own theme. Without God, we can do nothing! With God, we can do God’s work. And what more can we ask of being alive?
Yes, Roberta, and I might add that indeed we really can’t do anything WITHOUT (caps for emphasis not shouting) God, as we are all One with All There is. Some folks do stray from the plans they formulate with their guides, and maybe they even throw their plans away altogether and become quite lost, but the guides then shift into rescue mode. No one is ever without the Oneness of spirit because there is only the Oneness of Spirit. It is important to begin to grasp that reality. Then the answers to all these other predicaments, conundrums and conflicts will appear to be quite different from the answers we think we have right now.
Dear Mike, this is quite wonderfully said! Yes, we are already One with the Godhead. Others have talked about our spiritual growth as mostly a process of remembering, and the more I think about this and live the process myself the more profoundly true that seems to be!
Christmas Greetings Roberta,
This post has indeed helped to clarify things for me. I must constantly remind myself not to be judgmental. I have found that I have indeed experienced many of the points you bring up, but I go in and out. I want less possessions, true, and give away things that I no longer need and try not to buy what I do not need. I have had moments of joy that seem to radiate from the center of my being, but they do not last. I do find contentment in creating my own quiet and simplified existence. As one poster before me noted, Christ was outraged with indignity and cruelty and I must admit that I feel the same way at times. Is acknowledging what is felt to be correct actions and behaviors on earth wrong?
Again, judgment afflicts me. Thank you for your writings. Merry Christmas!
Dear Jennifer, if you will learn prevenient forgiveness you will find that it very much helps to get you past judging others! No, acknowledging behaviors that seem to you to be “correct actions and behaviors” is not wrong, but it’s risky since the next step of course is to judge people who aren’t living up to your standards. How do you create a right/wrong dichotomy in your mind without making personal judgment of others the next step? Jesus lived His life as a near-perfect example of someone living in Oneness… but then just once He noticed the Temple money-changers, He thought that what they were doing was wrong, and He lost it. He judged and attacked them. And I am told that He would have preferred to stay calm and teach them instead.
Dear Jennifer, we are all beginners here! We don’t have Jesus’s wisdom, so it really is more productive of us to live strictly by the Master’s teachings.
Somehow there is a major contradiction. To achieve oneness is to basicly detach ourselves from eathly life, so, why do we come here in the first place then. It’s like everything we do and believe down here is a big waste of time. If we do not judge anyone, then nothing we do really matters. We should all basicly live like monks, one garment is enough, one room is enough and one meal a day is more than enough. What is life on earth really usefull for if you remove 90% of it ? Something doesn’t add up. I thought physical life is the gym of our mind. This is how we grow, through pain and suffering, trials and errors, failures and achievements. We strive to learn about this physical world, to better use it to our advantage. It’s a violent world, full of obstacles and challenges, and humans are part of those challenges bcoz most humans brains are far from beings perfect (a multitude of various level of intelligence and defects like mental disorders)
Dear Francois, please read my answer to Angela above.
There are a number of ways to achieve Oneness, most of which were developed in Eastern religions, but the simplest and quickest way does appear to be to strictly follow the Gospel teachings of Jesus. Of course, it is impossible to detach yourself from earthly life! You can, however, better regulate your interactions with your present daily life and thereby give yourself a space in which to vanquish your fear of death, learn prevenient forgiveness, and mostly vanquish your ego (it is nearly impossible to get rid of the little bugger altogether). Meanwhile, you can help the poor, save sick animals, or whatever else you feel is your calling, but without judging anyone in the process! Judging others is frankly evil, Francois. It doesn’t help the victims, but rather it puts you into pointless conflict with evildoers. What on earth is the point of that? Once you are part of God’s Oneness, fully able to control yourself and living in a much larger frame, you will be able to be of use to victims. But not before that. This world is a vastly evil place.
For someone who wants to do good in the world from the added strength and power that the Oneness with God provides, the bit of time and space that it takes to carry out these important preliminary steps is something like the wind-up before throwing the ball: it empowers you. Without it, you flail without much effect.
Thank you for this reassessment for what it feels like to love like Jesus. It was very helpful for me! Merry Christmas!
Dear Natalie, I am so glad you found it helpful! Wishing you a very happy 2021 and sending you a great big hug!
Comment on your words: “We don’t worry-removed from all earthly concerns”. This is not what Jesus did. He was so concerned and pained by the injustices and pains of others that his teachings led to his death because they involved politics. How does a mother or father do his or her part in raising children, without concern or “worry “? And in this pandemic, how do we not worry about the pain of our hunger and others? And another example. How does a black parent not worry about their son’s safety in the racial strife we see every day?. And how do those of us who are in movements for social justice, do so if we were to remove ourselves from all earthly concerns?. How do we fulfill our mission of love if we disconnect with the life our present bodies are living in and raise our vibrations?
Oh dear Barbara, you and I are not Jesus! And we don’t have the Lord’s powers. He came to us from the highest aspect of the Godhead, as literally God on earth, so He had both the wisdom and the strength to wade right in and help others, with profoundly positive results.
It is pretty clear just by looking at the mess that we have made of this world that we need a lot more of what Jesus had in abundance. We can’t fight a war against evil until we have some fuel in our tanks! It isn’t necessary to withdraw altogether to begin our journey toward absolute Oneness, and the very active part of the process should take mere months; that’s what it took for me. Yes, parents will still be concerned about their children, but they won’t worry anymore. How does worrying help anyone? As you grow spiritually, you do what you can to help your children, parents, friends, and anyone else you feel responsible for or just want to help, but you do it from the added power of Oneness with a perfectly loving God. I cannot begin to tell you what a positive difference that makes, no matter what sort of good you are trying to do in the world!
I can easily see how you explanation can and will help people move off their dead stuck center. I have for the last decade started equating love to Allowing. No matter how someone acts out I allow them to show their feeling and act out. I am generally able to allow rather then comment. I do whatever that I have to too move on either to another discussion or out of the area. Along with Allowing always dropping Judgement as you say must stop. There are other aspects that must also be learned. Meditation helps being able to really listen to the individual and refrain from shooting out you personal opinion. Different words with same meaning it’s basically whatever works for each individual…
Skip
Dear Skip, you have mentioned “allowing” before, and I have thought about it. I do think that “allowing” is another word for what became my mantra when I first began to work at this seriously: the Beatles song, “Let it Be.” What you are doing makes sense to me!
In order to embrace the Oneness that Jesus taught, we have got to create the possibility of a little distance, and a space of safety for ourselves in which we can work on those three basic steps, and then a way to interact with the world and the work that preserves for us a place of safety. If we don’t do that, we can never master the negative emotions that are the greatest obstacle to our own true empowerment!
Thank you, Roberta (and Thomas)! This is such a beautiful post! I love the idea of redefining “love” as “complete, mutual indwelling,” a definition that springs from Richard Rohr’s view that the Kingdom of Heaven is a metaphor for a state of consciousness. It helps define the first commandment, to love God with all our heart, mind, and spirit. This love resonates with the overwhelming sense of acceptance and belonging that near-death experiencers describe (and with their loss of the fear of death.) It resonates with the teachings of A Course in Miracles that we are all one identity as children “Sons” of God and that it is in forgiving each other that we find forgiveness. It is the truth that all great scholars and philosophers through the ages have sought – and only now is being revealed in clarity. We will all need to live and grow into oneness over the course of our lives. Your extension of these essential truths to what oneness is not (personal, stressful, enjoyable, variable, fickle) is helpful to me, as is how “banishing fear, learning forgiveness, and booting the ego” lead to simplicity, equanimity, freedom from worry, and universal love. I printed out your post and will make it part of my spiritual journey and strive to embody it in my life. You bring joy in stating these foundational truths so clearly. May God bless you for your teaching. And thank you again for being such a blessing!
Oh my dear Chuck, as you know, all of this is Thomas’s work. He is pleased to have hit the mark with you, since he is nervous about trusting his instincts about how to help people in bodies when he has been so long out of one! So, thank you – you have made my cherished friend happy.
You are right that this is all universal wisdom: Eastern religions, ACIM, and so on. But what is wonderful to me, and really flat-out amazing, is how a traditional Catholic friar like our beautiful Fr. Rohr has been able to step outside the religion so completely as to have understood and said what he is quoted as saying above!
I truly believe we are spiritual beings having earthly experiences. I also believe that the creator and creation are not separate. Since these earthly experiences are almost never always nice and fluffy, and if it is true that we need pain, suffering and “bad” things happening in order for us to grow, then someone has to perpetuate these things. So could it be that when we plan our lives. some of us agree to take on the role of a “villain” and that their role as a “bad” person is just as important as the role of a victim? If we are all part of the Divine. then every role we play would have equal significance. Maybe Shakesphere was right when he said we are all on a stage and everyone must play a part.
Dear Lola, this is an interesting question. Do some people plan to be villains? I used to wonder about this, but there is evidence that when this (rarely) has happened, it has turned out badly for the villain (someone who had reluctantly agreed to murder a friend reportedly set himself back by eons). There also is evidence (Hitler and others) that the real villains had planned a very different life and then “gone rogue” on their guides. So here is what I now suspect:
When we plan lifetimes on earth, we plan them with the spiritual growth of ourselves and those we love who will be sharing this lifetime always foremost in our minds. So we will plan for bad things to happen TO us so we can surmount them; and occasionally we might plan to have some personal characteristics that we will need to surmount, and that by the by will give adverse experiences to others. But the councils that must approve the more challenging life plans are generally unwilling to approve real villainy! Frankly, there is enough negativity on earth, and so many people will be undone by their more challenging planned events, that there are plenty of villains even without anyone’s needing to plan to be one!
Unfortunately, that’s true. History shows that villains are so common that looking for someone to play that role is completely unnecessary I suppose, With so many people exploiting the downtrodden and vulnerable, there is no need to entice anyone to play a villain-type role. People like Martin Luther King, Ghandi, Oskar Schindler and Harriet Tubman are quite rare
Dear Lola, every form of villainy is ego-based. It’s all a form of “I’ll get the bastards before they get me.” All the people you mention were very advanced spiritually, far above the petty demands of ego. King and Tubman, especially, were living examples of the love that Jesus taught.
I think, too, that for most people a certainty about the fact that life continues and is eternal makes a huge difference! I heard myself say yesterday to my guest as I did a Seek Reality interview that the reason I work so hard at this effort is that once most people know for certain that they never will die, the entire world will change!
This is true. The people I mentioned (except for Harriet Tubman) could all read and write and were educated. Tubman never let one day go by without helping someone. When the underground railroad became unnecessary, she set up homes for the elderly and indigent. cooking and cleaning for those who could no longer do it themselves – all this without being able to read or write, as the penalty for teaching slaves to read and write was death. All these people had one thing in common – they all had little or no ego and all had a belief in the Divine for lack of a better word.
Roberta mentions 2 or 3 times in this blog about “A Course in Miracles” which was a second attempt by Jesus in the 1960’s to help us try and get it right. The course is offered today in alot of the “Unity Churches”. I think alot what Roberta is conveying today, comes from that course. It just so happens that you can find out what “A Course in Miracles ” is about by listening to her “Seek Reality” podcast from December 11, 2017 with Joyce Stewart. It’s my opinion, that that podcast will answer alot of the concerns already mention. Here is a really cool thing. I listened to that podcast yesterday and woke up to Roberta ‘s blog today, and that podcast piggybacks on today’s subject. Is that a synchronicity or what?!!!
Oh my goodness, David, thank you for making this reference! Indeed I did weekly attend an A Course in Miracles study group at a local Unity Church for several years something over a decade ago. But I had forgotten about that Seek Reality podcast! I suspect that your wonderful synchronicity may have been meant so you could share your experience here. And that is perfectly lovely!
Hidden within this beautiful message, Roberta, was a message from my beloved “special love.” Thank you for being the messenger.
Oh dear wonderful Janelle, this makes me smile! I have read the post over again, but haven’t spotted anything that looked as if it might have been that message; and I won’t ask you if you are willing to share it with us now. Although, if you and he think that you might want to share it…?
I am intimidated by the simplicity of the message because of the wisdom of your readers and, of course, you. So I think of the words as being insignificant to anyone except me. In my struggle to find answers as I grieve for him, I have such doubts about myself and, frankly, why he would hang around such a sad sack when he has so much to learn and do in his new world, and I just don’t seem to be “getting it” because our world revolved around us. We did everything together and were so grateful every day for our love and life. When we were fighting our battle against a horrible disease and growing frustrated because we just wanted him to come home from the cold world of the hospital, he reminded me of something he had told me many times before, that he and I are what is real. All of this stuff around us is just window dressing or props, if you will, for our play. I understood him to mean our love is what is real. So in the insanity of grief, I have found myself saying that he just walked away without looking back. Yet when I pay attention to subtleties, I find gentle reminders from this beautiful spirit. This message came from you within one of your powerful bullet points: “No event has the power to upset you. As A Course in Miracles says, ‘Nothing real can be threatened. Nothing unreal exists. Herein lies the peace of God.'” It helped me understand what my beloved meant all along. It’s all about eternal love. It cannot be threatened, even in death.
I wanted you to know that what you say touches people like me and I am so grateful I “found” you.
Oh my dear, that message is not too simple at all. Indeed, it is immensely profound! Thank you so much for sharing it with us. And please consider yourself hugged, my dear, and so much loved and appreciated by this family of seekers!
Dear Janelle, Please allow me to express my condolences for your loss and to share with you and this group of commenters my similar experience. Without getting bogged in details, I too have a beloved who is still with me long after her passing; in fact, I believe she is part of my guide team. She comes to me in dream work from time to time, and the realness of her Love and the Oneness I feel when she does is astounding. Someone once suggested I ask her why she continues to visit me, and so I did, asking aloud one day. I got almost an immediate response: “Because you need me still!” Who knows why I do, or exactly why specifically I need her, when in fact my primary guide is also very involved.
Anyway, it is clear your beloved Loves you with all that is real. I hope this brings you joy even if it is still amid the pain of temporary loss.<3
Hello everyone.
What I have not yet heard is people’s experiences in attempting to live this path. I follow a more Buddhist path, and the feeling of Oneness she describes sound familiar to me as the cultivation of equanimity. In my experience, have I achieved equanimity? It goes day by day. Some days I feel a good balance, in harmony with the world, and some days I feel I am walking a thin white path between two rivers, a raging river of water and a river of fire, the path being obscured from time to time with both flame and wave.
It would be nice to hear people’s experiences, successes, difficulties.
Namu Amida Butsu
P.S. From the post a few weeks back, I had to chuckle at how Autobiographical morality can be. Just thinking of two people in particular, Gloria Steinem and myself, it would be curious what we came up with as a love-based morality. The people who write comments on here also have their own Autobiography, so coming up with a single love-based morality might not be so easy.
P.P.S. Got the first dose of the Phizer vaccine one week ago. Made me slightly sleepy for a day, and my arm ached for two days, but I feel a bit safer working with COVID-19 patients. Waiting the 17-21 days to get the second dose.
Dear Jason, to be frank, not many have yet tried the Lord’s method for achieving Oneness. I have heard from a few, especially in recent years, who have tried the plan as it is laid out in The Fun of Growing Forever, and their experiences have generally mirrored my own. It works, if you are serious about it. And it gets you on your way pretty quickly!
Your description of sometimes having to skirt water and fire simultaneously is harrowing. What the Lord’s teachings do is to first put you on a stable base and isolate you just a bit from what is going on around you, so I haven’t had anything like that experience.
And your remark that different life-experiences and points of view would produce different forms of love-based moralities really shouldn’t be true, but it probably is true… at least until enough of us are practicing the Oneness form of love that Jesus taught.
Wow, don’t you have the sense that we are finally getting somewhere?
Hello again.
I had to smile a bit when I read your post. I decided to use imagery from a Buddhist story told in the Pure Land school, forgetting what that sounds like to people who have never heard the story. The waves of greed, fear, the flames of anger, aversion—I think a lot of people would be familiar with these two rivers. But, things with me are not as scary as they sound. Loving kindness quiets the waves and flames, although one difference is I am not trying to vanquish the ego, but more to be friends with the ego, to “turn bits of rubble into gold.” The freedom to allow myself to not be perfect, or rather not be worried about getting it completely right, paradoxically, allows me to more easily see the flames and waves as they arise and smile at them, and they lose quite a bit of their power.
I think things will get better, but not right away. I seem to be one of the first groups to get the vaccine, there are some doctors at our hospital who have not yet received the vaccine. At the same time our hospital is having quite a surge in COVID-19 hospitalizations. We are a complex of a few hospitals, and reports from one of the smaller hospitals have one out of every two rooms with a COVID-19 patient. A third hospital, who always had 1-2 patients, now is holding 10. Our hospital has to keep spaces open for trauma patients, but we still have a good amount. I don’t like doing x-rays of COVID-19 patients in the ICU who have been incubated and proned to keep them alive, like I did yesterday, because I am always worried I might dislodge something. The nurses are good at helping me out, however.
We were better in late October-early November when our hospitalizations for all three hospitals was single digits, we had zero COVID-19 patients in the ICU, and the Bay Area was in various stages of reopening businesses.
I know things will get better, but I don’t know the time frame, because I don’t know how much of a surge there will be from Christmas and New Years gatherings.
Dear Jason, thank you for being such a good soldier! California has been hit especially hard by COVID for some reason. Other large states – I’m in Texas – are getting off easier. I hope that once this emergency has passed, someone will look at all the different ways that various states have handled it, so perhaps we all can better understand what works best.
And I understand your eagerness to make friends with your ego, rather than squashing it! I didn’t realize that was what I was trying to do, too, until I really got into A Course in Miracles and actually confronted mine. To be frank, there was nothing there to befriend! My ego was selfish, scheming, conniving, and desperate to scare me away from messing with it by making me think it was actually me, so if I extinguished it I would be extinguished. But I persisted, pushed through the fears, and woke up one morning with no fears at all. It’s a fight that anyone can win. And it was more than worth it for me!
Dearest Roberta,
Like so many good people I’ve had trauma and depression in my life. I cannot have some of the very important things that others can have. I had developed an almost visceral sense of weltschmertz. (IE: world weariness; pain at the hurt and agonizing imperfection in this world.) I wanted to leave this Earth, hoping for a better place to come.
I wanted to know God so that this would be my last lifetime on earth. 🌎
Now I want to know God, just to know God. And I’m finding that it doesn’t matter if, in that knowing, I am here or there. 🌅
Yes my dear, I too have the sense that we are finally getting somewhere. 🙂🙏🏼❣️
Gee, Efrem. I feel exactly like you describe. I just hope that I can eventually pull out of it like you seemed to have done. I give you much credit and congratulate you for overcoming your former negative feelings.
Hey 👋 Lola,
I remember you saying once, that you felt as I did about life and this world.
As to being freed at last from weltschmertz it just happened somewhere between letting go and knowing.. It was kind of unexpected.
I guess it was part of an inner process that unfolds somewhere in the soul awareness. And if it can happen to me, it can happen to anyone of us.
Dear Efrem, this is so beautifully said! It’s true that when you really begin to grow spiritually, all you want to do is know God and you no longer care so much about anything else. It’s a beautiful kind of joy, this certainty that the Godhead is real and the Godhead loves you perfectly!
Dear Roberta, Hi everyone. It comes to mind, (or maybe from Mind) that we need to forgive and not judge ourselves. Wonderful blog.
Oh yes, dear Ray, it’s very important that we learn to forgive and never judge the major person in our lives: ourselves! Jesus says it, and now we know why He says it; the only post-death judge is ourselves, and since we know what we had planned to do and how far our lives have fallen short of our hopes, we do tend to judge ourselves pretty harshly. In fact, since we are our only judge, we are the one who condemns ourselves to the pains of the outer darkness, if we cannot manage to forgive ourselves. So, yes, practicing self-forgiveness here is great practice for what is to come!
Dear Roberta. Thanks so much for this post. I felt a bit lighter and more joyful after reading it, like coming across a travel guide or treasure map to help me get to that “place.” I could recognize a few of my own experiences in what you wrote, similar to Efrem and Lola. I hope I will feel more of that swelling in my heart as I progress. I think it is important not to try too hard, but to let it unfold in it’s own time, like a flower.
Regarding Jesus scolding the money changers, I’m reminded of a story I read once, I think it was about Yogananda, in which the guru scolded some people, but it was not that he actually felt anger, rather that he knew he would need to appear that way because such a display was the only way those people would really get the point. He was immediately back to his normal self after. He never really left that place of Peace; it was just an act. I wonder if that is what Jesus was doing.
Regarding fighting evil in the world, an interview I heard recently made a good point – that a sage would say to someone taking a warrior approach to saving the world that he needs to save himself first, and it is through that self transformation that he starts to change the world. What causes most problems on this planet but the warrior attitude in the first place? The true master realizes that the master must be the servant of all because he realizes his Oneness with all. Be the change you want to see as they say. I think this is the idea that people like Gandhi, MLK, and Bonhoeffer grasped.
Dear Scott, I see your point that perhaps Jesus was just acting upset in the Temple for effect. Possibly. But Thomas says that no, He really did lose it. He regretted it later. And I guess I love thinking that Jesus was that fully human! As I review His life, I can’t think of a time when He seemed to be doing anything for effect, but rather He seemed to let it all hang out. He was in fact sometimes impatient with the human foibles of those around Him, and He expressed that feeling freely. The fact that what was so obvious to Him was something these less spiritual mortals could not see sometimes frustrated Him. I find that the most endearing thing about Him, actually! And yes, in order to change the world we first must change ourselves. That is the subtitle of The Fun of Growing Forever, and entirely the point of that book.
Thank you for your thoughts, dear Scott, lovely and germane as always!
Dearest Roberta,
I have realized that in my previous posts there was a component of ego. Usually, I signed to show you that there was an alternative to whatever your current blog was about, though it was disguised as such. Your blogs have helped me to realize what was going on with my ego, and I assume you could spot it right away,
so starting with my next post I will be toning down the ego component. Not this post though. I just realized that this ant-ego post still had a sizable dose of ego.
Thank you for your posts, they are really making a difference in my life.
Cookie
Dear Cookie, since ego is a significant portion of the package with which each of us comes to earth, it really isn’t something to be judged or condemned in someone else! I have considered some of your comments here to be exploratory, and often challenging, but I’ve seen that to be a good thing!
The battle that each of us needs to undertake to subdue the ego when we resolve to grow spiritually is personal and internal. It’s not something that others can police. Your comment has made me think about it, though: should we feel embarrassed by our demonstrations of ego? Should others perhaps have a right to push us toward battling our own egos? I can see nothing positive to come from that. And while subduing your ego could be a very good thing from your own perspective, I frankly enjoy knowing you just as you are!
Hi everybody! It is the last day in the United States of 2020 (some of our friends in Australia and other parts of the world may be reading this in 21) as I write this. We can get there! I remain optimistic.
It just this moment occurred to me that what God wants from us is simply for us to remember that the spiritual work belongs to God. It is not so much that we are born with God’s plan for us, as with our own plan for God. We have a plan for bringing God more fully into the world; we are part of All that Is and there can be no other plan. It is not possible.
We just need to remember that our growth is the creation of God put into action by each of us. Happy New Year, All.
Dear wonderful Mike and everyone, I wish you so much joy in this new year a-borning! HAPPY NEW YEAR!