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| www.douglasmckee.com November 2, 2008 |
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A NEW MYTH |
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Love is easy. Joy is simple. Peace takes no effort at all.
Why then have we complicated the process of living in these states so much that very few of us have ever been able to reach them? Our current myths, call them religions, philosophies or simply ways of life, are so complicated that our access to the Divine or Collective Consciousness is accepted as being extremely difficult, impossible for most. The journey is held out to be one of great difficulty and suffering and only the most dedicated have a chance to make it. The steps on the different paths are clearly and rigidly defined. We must pray this way and meditate that way. Certain foods are forbidden and the rituals, oh the rituals, they are vitally important and obviously the only way to demonstrate our progress and understanding to our teachers and others who we believe are on the same path. Do we really get more points for becoming a vegetarian rather than being omnivorous as we have been for the past five million years? We can believe we are a follower of one of the Masters such as Buddha, Jesus, Mohammed, Confucius or Lao Tzu. Looking at the Masters as Pioneers and taking the emotion out of looking at their Paths teaches us when we follow someone, or an idealized notion of a someone, we always fall short of going as far as they did. In the case of the Masters above they all said we have, as our inherent nature, everything they had. Since we revere them and believe they had the ability to speak truths that transcend ours, we should believe them and be able to do what they did. Why can't we then? In a very real sense, just having the concept of the achievement level of a Master becomes a limit to our progress that we cannot pass. At that point our goal is to try to reach their same lofty level. The attempt has become the goal. In order to really express our spiritual actualization, we each eventually must "boldly go where no one has gone before;" we must create and establish our own unique and direct connection with our Divine self. We must each express our divinity in our own unique way. What we must realize is that Enlightenment is a real Possibility for all of us, Right Here and Right Now. Every second of every moment of every day is an opportunity for the Divine Being within you to make Its Reality known through you. We must open our hearts and minds to the point we can understand that everything exists within, is supported by, and is an expression of an Infinite Consciousness always expanding, always sharing, and always seeking to know and to be known in the reflection of our own Awareness of Itself as Us. We need a new myth, a new understanding of the True Nature of Consciousness and our purpose for being here. We must understand we don t need to be Thin, Zen or Religious to reach Enlightenment. Since we are expressions of the Infinite, by definition we all have that Nature as our Essence. Because the Infinite is our Source, we are like our Source and we have those very same attributes as our innate Capacity. The ultimate truth about our identity is: WE ARE DIVINITY. We are capable of expressing an infinite potential that exists within each of us when we come into being in this physical world. Our purpose in physicality is to expand Consciousness in new and different ways and to experience infinite potential choices and experiences not available to our nature as Pure Spirit. The infinite potentials that exist for expression are not a distraction, they are our Prime Directive. The prize is becoming fully aware of our spiritual nature while in physical form so we can experience the marvelous and infinite possibilities already being expressed and create our own with Love and Joy. We aren't here to transcend our Consciousness, because the one we have is the only one we have. Our Consciousness is actually an Infinite Consciousness but we have forgotten how to use it in that way. We have been taught to ask our brain what we want to know instead of our Christ Consciousness, Buddha Nature or Higher Self. Learning to release our Infinite Consciousness from its attachment to, and dependence on, our database of personal of relative experiences so it can "know" from its Infinite Experience is the only Path any of us need to tread. One of the major stumbling blocks to this realization lies in our understanding of transcendence. The current concept of transcendence leads us to believe Enlightenment is only possible when we slay the ego and return to our original state. The problem this presents is that transcendence then obviates the whole purpose of physical experience. How can we experience or express our Infinite Nature if we can t learn to express it here? Supposedly the goal is to be "n this world but not of it." How can we learn the lessons and face the challenges of the world so we can choose to opt out of them if we choose to not experience them in the first place? Our Infinite Consciousness is marvelous. IT is always and forever experiencing everything happening in physicality through everything and every one of us as it is happening. Infinite Consciousness also gives US the infinite energy and opportunity to create. Consciousness is expanding outward, not backward; it's making an advance, not a retreat. Physicality, far from being a quagmire from which we must somehow extricate ourselves, is an incredible opportunity to experience, both physically and spiritually, the awesome Nature and Power of our Being. Physicality is the leading and bleeding edge of the ever- expanding growth of Consciousness because Physicality, the physical Universe, IS Consciousness. The correct understanding of the process of transcendence will help us a lot to start moving in a direction that can eventually get us to where we want to be. It has been stated many times by many Messengers that the ego must be overcome and we all have the innate capacity to express our Spiritual Reality because Spirit is our real nature. At a unique point in each of their "famous" lives, Jesus, Buddha and the other Masters attained the ability to express their Spiritual Reality/Christhood/Buddhahood while embodied as human beings. They had pierced the veil between the experiences of human existence and re-connected to their spiritual actuality. On one side of the veil they had infinite awareness and the other side, infinite experience. We also have exactly the same set up. Our Consciousness is infinite and our brain has stored everything we have experienced since being born into this physical Universe. Our ego is limited to sound bite summaries from our total experience of what it imagines or thinks it can remember it has experienced in this lifetime. When we first became part of the Created Realm we had no awareness because there was nothing of which to be aware so we had no experience. As we progressed through all the stages and lives before this one, our Infinite Consciousness grew in awareness and continues to grow. What could better a way to understand the process of Creation and our role as Co-Creators than to be part of the process? Evolving from unawareness to the point of Absolute Awareness is the best possible school for understanding the process of creation within a Perfect framework. We have mistakenly and imaginarily contracted our awareness down to our brain or ego, but through meditation and other spiritual or mental practices we can certainly demonstrate our capacity to be greater than we can currently express. Another way to look at is might be that our awareness has evolved from zero to that of Co-Creators. How did our Infinite Awareness became so contracted? How did it, and how does it continue, to see itself as existing separately from our Eternal and Infinite experience? That is a question that has occupied entirely too much time and energy down through the ages. The important task is to reunite our Infinite Awareness with our Infinite Experience while embodied. This connection activates the process of Enlightenment. Once that process begins, we will begin to find the answers to our questions and our level of understand will rise significantly. The Buddha tells us everything is an illusion, but when I am frightened or angry it sure seems real. When I hurt, the pain seems real. When there is sickness or death, there is attendant sadness. At the level where we live it's all very real because our brain tells us it IS real. The lesson of the Buddha is that all things physical are a projection of the Eternal Mind so their physical actuality is illusory. To grasp this we must remember, or at least imagine, that we are Beings of energy, Spirits whose current actuality is the Realm of the Created and, beyond and before that, whose origin is the Realm of the Uncreated. As part of the Created Realm, there are four parts to our ethereal bodies, Identity, Thoughts, Emotions and Manifestations. Only our manifestations, or as the Buddha would say, "our deeds", are visible or even discernible in any of us or to our scientific investigators. What, or who, creates our thoughts or emotions? What is the source of our sense of identity? What is the activating entity driving everything we are or sense? It is our Consciousness, our Awareness, and our Consciousness is the same whether we are accessing our ego, our "whole brain" in which all memories from this individual life stream are stored, or the Infinite Consciousness that is the record of everything that has ever happened. Our usual choice is to access our ego which is limited to relative experiences from this lifetime only. Our ego also is the repository of the names and descriptions of every "thing" we know. Our ego is entirely based upon past events so our actuality as Spirit, which is in the Eternal Now, cannot even be accessed. The Buddha sought to find the cause of suffering and in understanding the cause, to find the cure. He did, indeed, find the cause of suffering and became Enlightened. The root cause of all suffering is our human need and habit to name and define whatever it is that we are experiencing at the moment as a way to understand it and react correctly in this, or in a future, supposedly present moment. To name or define something we must access the name and definition storage system, otherwise called the ego. Once we do that
we are stuck in the relative value system built into our individual
egos and we make choices based on the definitions found there. Jesus
tells us, "Judge not, lest ye be judged." When we use the
ego, judging is the outcome for we ascribe very concrete attributes
and we are forced to experience the consequences, or reflection, of
our co-creation by doing so. From the Higher perspective of a Christed Being or a Buddha, all happenings are part of a process of outpicturing the qualification of energy as part of an infinite sea of potentials, all created according to the Perfect Law, which we call Love, and all having their being in the "now". None have greater or lesser value than another having because they were created in accordance with the Perfect Law. In our ego the process is all about different values and different levels of importance. The process of reunion begins with a thought in our ego that there is something greater than the self. Imagination is a very important step and powerful tool in the process. Before we can achieve something we must imagine the possibility, then the process and finally the completion. Most science began as imagination. From imagination can come a plan and the determination to complete the plan. There are no impossible goals if there are no impossible steps. We have two very well known examples of humans who made it. If they could, so can we. Our ego teaches us that the end is separate and different than the means. On the Path of Christ, Love is the end AND Love is also the means. In the physical universe, or the Created Realm, the Perfect Means will yield the Perfect end or outpicturing. Love is the underlying Law within which Consciousness functions. When we act in accord with the Law of Love, Perfect manifestation follows. On the Path of Buddha, the realization that the Source of our Eternal Self, the I AM Presence, resides in the Realm of the Uncreated, leads us to see everything in the Created Realm is the result of how we apply our meanings to energy within this physical framework. This awareness allows us to understand this Physical Universe and our presence in it as only one of an infinite number of potential realities. "All" we suffering humans need to do to free ourselves to express our Divinity is learn how to choose. We simply need to learn to access our Universal Self instead of our brain for guidance. It's not magic and it's not rocket science. We are making good choices every day. We already know almost everything we need to know. We are each much closer than we realize. |
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Copyright © 2008 |
