BOOK OF TRUTH 9

“Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. (Gospel according to  Matthew 7:7

Ask and you will realize you already know; seek and you shall be found; knock and you will know the door has always been open. (the gospel according to Gerry)

In these texts by Paul and the guides, the prayers and affirmations that are usually indented in the books take on a different form than what we might be used to.

Our previous sense of affirmations where that we would say something over and over and over again; we would fiercely think about it with the hope that it would eventually be manifest in the material world. Now I do not deny at times that this kind of manifestation works. One of the difficulties, however, that was pointed out by a wise teacher was that by the time we have manifested something in the material world we no longer want it or it has lost its importance.

More powerfully stated in our books of study is what we are calling an affirmation is not manifesting anything in the material or in the spiritual realms but is claiming that it already exists. That is one side of the picture.

Our discussion this evening began with speaking of manifestations for ourselves and others that seem to be our desire for the best outcome. The difficulty arises that none of us know another Soul's purpose. In fact it is difficult enough for us to realize our own.

In my own life our granddaughter who has a genetic illness that deteriorates her nervous system. At this time she has never quite recovered from a bout with the flu last year which left her without speech and with very little or any muscular control.

As painful as it might be to see her in this condition, I do not know what her Soul's purpose is. So when I pray for her healing I often realize that some of my prayer is my desire to be released from some of the painfulness that I am experience. Perhaps her illness and her taking that on is part of my learning. Try that on for size. I do not know.

So my prayer for her is for her souls highest good even though I do not know what that is. And even in the midst of that kind of prayer I do not pretend my human feelings simply disappear. They are all still there, but how foolish of me to think I am in control of someone else's destiny. Sometimes do even think I know what is best for me. Unity teaches us that often are prayer can be a reflection of what we desire on a human level, but then we also add "May this manifestation be for my soul or your soul's highest good, and may I receive what it is I am asking for or something better.

You assuage yourself of the guilt you have of being personally accountable to historical choices by trying to be better people. We will tell you this. You don’t get to be better people. You get to be what you are. And what we mean by forgiveness is that you no longer need to decide that you were wrong, because if you decide you are wrong and claim that in identity, you misalign and you move beyond truth.

It’s like taking this little statue of your personality self taking it off the mantle and dusting it off and polishing it up a little bit.  Whatever you are asking for by doing this does not change anything because the personality self is not who you are. Polishing up your image will simply do that it will polish up your image, but it will not touch the essence of Who You Are.

I found this next section to be rather difficult to understand but as I sat with it what became clear to me was that we are being asked to accept responsibility for our actions in the past even though they might have been performed from a very limited consciousness. It was still me that did it. Even what I did in limitation, I am still responsible for. Secondly, realizing that responsibility does not mean being guilty but realizing that when I embrace or take responsibility for an action to raise its vibration to a higher level. In fact, it is only then when I have accepted responsibility that I can move from a lower vibration to a Higher One.

Let us suppose that I said something mean to you and even as the words were being spoken I recognize that what I was saying was a reflection of my own fear and unlovableness. I apologize to you; I ask for your forgiveness and in the process begin to forgive myself, but there is something more for me to learn from this. When I am in a state of fearfulness and unlovableness, I have a tendency to project that out in words to essentially push people away. I can continually learn from that behavioral response that I have created for myself, but I can only learn if I am both willing to take responsibility for my actions and to let go of any guilt or shame I might have connected with them.

“On this day I claim that any remorse I may hold at contributing, for contributing, to structures in fear will be released in this claim. I am free of the choices I have made and the recrimination that I hold against the self or justifications for behavior or misidentification throughout time. In this claim, I align myself only to what is, to what is in truth, and as I make this claim, I respect the choices made at all times, honor the need I felt at the time they were made, and reclaim myself as worthy of the new choice to re-create and be in accord as the Divine Self in truth. I know who I am in truth. I know what I am in truth. I know how I serve in truth. I am here. I am here. I am here.”

We all begin to realize how painful and sometimes how difficult this transformation in thought can be. All of us would like to be able to do it once and be done with it, but the process we find ourselves in is releasing, surrendering, forgiving, opening ourselves to unconditional love again and again and again.

Hopefully we are not beating a dead (skin) horse here, but as we closed our discussion for the evening I could not help but think of that wonderful Passage from The Velveteen Rabbit:

"What is REAL?" asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying side by side near the nursery fender, before Nana came to tidy the room. "Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?"

"Real isn't how you are made," said the Skin Horse. "It's a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real."

"Does it hurt?" asked the Rabbit.

"Sometimes," said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. "When you are Real you don't mind being hurt."

"Does it happen all at once, like being wound up," he asked, "or bit by bit?"

"It doesn't happen all at once," said the Skin Horse. "You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand."

"I suppose you are real?" said the Rabbit. And then he wished he had not said it, for he thought the Skin Horse might be sensitive. But the Skin Horse only smiled.

The Skin Horse Tells His Story

"The Boy's Uncle made me Real," he said. "That was a great many years ago; but once you are Real you can't become unreal again. It lasts for always."

The Rabbit sighed. He thought it would be a long time before this magic called Real happened to him. He longed to become Real, to know what it felt like; and yet the idea of growing shabby and losing his eyes and whiskers was rather sad. He wished that he could become it without these uncomfortable things happening to him.

BOOK OF TRUTH 8

p.22-230

An agreement to be afraid— this is a new concept. But you have done it and continue to do it. And we would like you now to make a decision that the one who agrees to anything new will be the Divine Self or the aspect of you who is risen and who knows— who knows, who knows, who knows— that all agreements entered into will now be in truth.

In some ways this fear goes back to the myth of the Garden. An aspect of the story goes that if you ate from the tree of life you would become like God. Of course, what happened was that Adam and Eve were punished for this attempt. Not only were they punished individually but we were universally punished as a race.

The message became quite clear, “Do not attempt to embrace your divine nature, the punishment will be awful.”

Most of us also inherited a fearful sense related to our religious beliefs. It was such a universal and overpowering message that we simply accepted it blindly as being the truth. Now here we are being led to proclaim a totally different truth. Along with that, we are being told that what we thought it was the truth in the past was never really true at all. Perhaps there was a time when we were deliberately deceived by those in power, and yet by the time we get to our present incarnation we are so immersed in messages of fear guilt and shame that we have accepted them as being true.

Here is the affirmation/prayer for the healing of our thinking:

“On this day I choose to agree only to those things that are in alignment to truth, and I will be shown in every instance the truth of each situation that I encounter. As I make this claim, I rejoice that I have surrendered and released all of my ties that were made in fear. And all agreements, all contracts made in fear, will now be unbound and released from my life and my field. I know who I am in truth. I know what I am in truth. I know how I serve in truth.”

The thinking mind still wants to interfere and one of the simplest directives we are given through the voice of Jesus to quell some of the confusion is render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's and to God the things that are God's. obviously we need to work on this one a bit to be able to listen to the voice and the directors of our higher consciousness and yet I believe we are already beginning to do this work. it is not one of judgment so much but other weirdness and discernment. I still have a body I live in a physical world’

“On this day I journey forward to the new life that will unfold before me. And as I give permission, my consent, to agree to truth in all commitments and choices, I sing a song of freedom. I know who I am. I know what I am. I am free. I am free. I am free.”

How’s that for creating something new?

I shared this piece with the Sunday morning group, and I also thought it fit in well with our work last night. 

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DAY FIFTEEN

This is a passage from another book I read recently. It describes an extremely important part of the process. 

“I found that the chief difficulty for most people was to realize that they had really heard “new things” that is the things that they have never heard before.

They did not formulate it for themselves, but in fact they always try to contradict this in their minds and translate what they heard into their habitual language whatever happened to be.

I know that it is not an easy thing to realize that one is hearing new things. We are so accustomed to the old tunes, and the old motives, that long ago we ceased to hope and ceased to believe that there might be anything new.

And then we hear new things, we take them for old, or think that they can be explained and interpreted by the old. It is true that it is a difficult task to realize the possibility and necessity quite new ideas, and it needs, with time, a revaluation of all usual values.

I cannot guarantee that you will have new ideas, that is, ideas you have never heard before, from the store, but if you are patient, you will very soon begin to notice them. And then I wish you not to miss them and to try not to interpret them in the old way.”

As I was reminded in class, what is spoken here is very similar to Jesus analogy of putting “new wine in old wine skins.” Without realizing it, we find ourselves attempting to fit a new piece of information into our old system of knowing. This is a reflection the compulsivity of the mind. It not only wants to understand and control, it also wants to categorize, to pigeon hole everything, to create its own internal Dewey decimal system which everything must align to. It was also mentioned the mind can only create an image or belief that is really created from past information. It is very clever in disguising past ideas as new ones.

Again, what we are attempting to work with is not to destroy or devalue the intellect. It is obviously an extremely important and necessary aspect of our being, however, when we begin to deal with aspects of spirituality we must begin realize that there are many facets to our learning that cannot be completely understood by the thinking or the immortal mind.

When using the term “mystery” we do not necessarily mean the unknowable. We can know through our Spirit, through our intuition, through our imagination. We can  know an idea or belief that might not be known through thinking mind. In someways this is the stretch we are making. It is not a blind leap, but it is a leap beyond knowing with the tangible proof seeking intellect. It is the deeper realization that we can know on various levels of our being beyond our thinking mind.

The image that came to my mind was from the story of Cinderella. You might recall that her sisters would go to any lengths to try and make the shoe fit, even cutting off a toe or the back of their heel. This is what the mind does with new ideas, to try and make some fit within the old framework. No judgment here, simply be aware that this subversive process of the intellect can happen to any of us without our even realizing it.

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Now a small self, you see, who has been in charge of a world only sees things through the prescriptions that she has utilized to decide what things mean. She cannot do other. She has done her best, at times under very challenging circumstances. But the time has come to release the feather duster from her hand so she can stop fixing things and tidying a life that has never been real and align to what she is in her majesty as the Divine Self.

Backtracking a bit, one of the necessary steps in claiming our divine nature is forgiveness. For the sake of simplicity or seeming simplicity, we tend to divide forgiveness up into applying to ourselves and then applying to others. In a very real sense it is only one ball game. It is not by chance that in the Lord's Prayer we pray that we might be forgiven as we forgive. This is not judgment, it is simply the expression of a universal law. In other words, the degree to which you forgive is the degree in which you are forgiven. 

It can get a little sticky here, mentally, because sometimes when I say, “I forgive my brother,” I can do that out of a sense of superiority. What I am truly seeking for is the awareness that my judgment of my brother has been misplaced. I have judged him both according to my own standards and also from my own limited perception. I have no idea what the essence of his journey is about. And so, as we have mentioned before, that all judgement is ultimately self-judgement then we might also say that all forgiveness is self-forgiveness.

You don’t get to be better people. You get to be what you are. And what we mean by forgiveness is that you no longer need to decide that you were wrong, because if you decide you are wrong and claim that in identity, you misalign and you move beyond truth. Here is what we would do with this. The claim is made for you, for each of you who attends to these words, that anything claimed or justified in fear in any time will now be made known to the vibration of truth so it may be reclaimed in this octave. Now, the personality self is the one who seeks forgiveness, not the Divine Self, and we do not make the personality self wrong for asking for this. “Tell me I am not at fault for a life poorly lived. Tell me I am not to blame for gifts unused. Tell me I am not the one who contributed to structures of fear.” Well, you were. You could not do other because you’ve been acclimated to the density of this plane, which is fraught with structure in fear. And we will do this with you now: “On this day I claim that any remorse I may hold at contributing, for contributing, to structures in fear will be released in this claim. I am free of the choices I have made and the recrimination that I hold against the self or justifications for behavior or misidentification throughout time. In this claim, I align myself only to what is, to what is in truth, and as I make this claim, I respect the choices made at all times, honor the need I felt at the time they were made, and reclaim myself as worthy of the new choice to re-create and be in accord as the Divine Self in truth. I know who I am in truth. I know what I am in truth. I know how I serve in truth. I am here. I am here. I am here.”

Peace.

BOOK OF TRUTH 7

page 215 - 222.

It took me awhile to get the gist of this lesson.

The most important sentence is:

The only thing you need to know about what you become in alignment to truth is that what you are is what you have always been without knowing it.

We are talking about the complications that we create in our material world that had an original rather simple purpose. Bartering is one simple example. How in the beginning stages it was a simple exchange of goods and services. You have what I need; I have what you need we will exchange. then we have built an entire system of commerce, banking, money, all of which are an elaborate system of bartering that in some sense is completely unnecessary.

We get so lost in the system we have created that we forget what it's for and we also forget that we created this complicated system. Created structures of organization, no matter what form they might take, hospitals, churches, governments, all usually began with a positive intent. Then something happens and the original intent becomes lost or misplaced.

For example, let us take a police department that is set up in a town or village in order to protect all the people as well as keep the peace. Now what happens is, let us suppose the police department is very successful in keeping the peace in preventing crime and solving mysteries, etc. Now what happens is that it must find some ways to protect this organization that it as built. Without a conscious awareness of the mind’s ability to complicate the most simplest things, now most of the energy, instead of going into law enforcement, goes into attempts to preserve the organization itself. So what we are all faced with is an organization that began with a very positive purpose which somehow has become lost in its attempts to preserve itself.

The Buddhists would say, “That all suffering comes from attachment.”  What is described in the book as attachment leads to a deeper sense of separateness which is essentially reinforced by a sense of scarcity and fear. We have actually created a world that feeds on this fear. Although we have said this a number of times in the past it deserves repeating— whatever you are attached to is essentially an illusion.

First you expect your attachment to this object or thing to produce some desired results for you whether that be happiness or safety or security or something else; none of those results occur, nor can they. Also the object or the thing or the idea or the belief that you are attached to is always something from the past. It does not exist in the Here and Now. For example, you get a new car and you become attached to it; you become attached to your new car. But your new car no longer exists; it only exists in your mind and even that is not a true representation of the car itself. So I am attached to something that no longer exists. My suffering comes from many different angles here and if I am overly identified with a material world and my personality self, I will seek more of these things material objects beliefs or ideas that will seem to support whatever it is that I am after. it is not difficult to see how this endless search will continue to lead to unhappiness and suffering.

There is a saying in Unity that, “God is my source” not money, not gold, but God. Here again is something we lose sight with when we become more and more involved in the material world and the complications and structures it has created in its attempt to preserve itself.

I am reminded of that often misquoted line from scripture that “money is the root of all evil.” The way it truly reads is “the Love of Money is the root of all evil.” In other words forgetting what the source truly is leads to suffering and pain.

It is also very easy to become condemning of the world and material things. This is not what we are about. The abundance of God in the universe is here to be both used and enjoyed.

When we are free, everything flows to us and with us and also flows freely to our brothers and sisters. I am often reminded of that wonderful one liner from Kristofferson “Freedom's just another word for Nothing Left to Lose.” Perhaps it was not his original intent or meaning and yet what he is describing is that ultimate form of detachment where nothing is the way in the way between me and the Source.

I was working on thinking of a practical example and lesson we could also draw from this work because it seems to me one of the things we are about is learning how to not only transform our thinking, but also to raise the vibration of those people places and things around us.

So I was thinking of our Healthcare System which is a great example of how to complicate the simplest of things. The original intent was to aid in the healing of others and yet now we have layer upon layer upon layer of paperwork, insurance, lawsuits, malpractice, and even hospitals which seem to be more toxic than the outside world.

When I am being asked to raise the vibration, I am not raising the vibration of a hospital or even the healthcare system as we see it today. I am raising the vibration of the original intent; I am raising the vibration of the healing energy that we are desiring to send and to share with one another. I do not know what form might evolve from that raising of vibration, nor am I about to tear down the old forms, but I do know that by raising the vibration of the healing energy within the world and within you and me that I create an atmosphere for transformation for positive transformation.

“I witness the world before me as something made manifest, something created by mankind to fill a need. And what I will now do is claim that I am witnessing these things with new eyes in truth, so that I may be brought to witness the essence of their creation. And as I do this, I say these words. ‘I claim this thing in truth. I claim this manifestation in alignment to Divine truth so that it may be witnessed in its highest form outside of what’s been prescribed or decided upon by others throughout time.’ As I lift this thing to higher vision, I claim these words. ‘I see you in your truth, and you will be made new in the field of truth. I am here. I am here. I am here.’”

But if you can imagine that there is nothing to lose by rising in vibration, and that all you need from any of those things to support you in truth will align with you in a new way. All that doesn’t get carried is what was claimed in fear and enjoined with others in an agreement to be afraid. An agreement to be afraid— this is a new concept. But you have done it and continue to do it. And we would like you now to make a decision that the one who agrees to anything new will be the Divine Self or the aspect of you who is risen and who knows— who knows, who knows, who knows— that all agreements entered into will now be in truth. And this is the claim we support you in:

“On this day I choose to agree only to those things that are in alignment to truth, and I will be shown in every instance the truth of each situation that I encounter. As I make this claim, I rejoice that I have surrendered and released all of my ties that were made in fear. And all agreements, all contracts made in fear, will now be unbound and released from my life and my field. I know who I am in truth. I know what I am in truth. I know how I serve in truth.”