Spiritual Psychology Today is a Monthly Magazine, electronic and print, devoted to publishing articles that combine insights from scientific and spiritual psychologies. The premise is that human beings are both spiritual and physical beings, and that to fully understand them and help them manage their thinking and behaviors, we must pay attention to the two sides to them. It is not a question of either or but both. Any attempt to understand human beings from a strictly secular perspective without factoring in their spiritual dimension would not offer a complete picture of them, and probably would not change their thinking and behaviors. Change in thinking and behavior in human beings seems feasible only when all aspects of them are addressed, and that means both their material and spiritual aspects. Writers can submit articles (not exceeding thirty pages long) for consideration. Each article must show thorough understanding of scientific psychology, as taught at universities, as well as, thorough understanding of the religions of mankind, such as Hinduism, Buddhism, Gnosticism, Christian and Islamic mysticism. (Please see already published articles for guide as to the types of articles accepted by the editors).
SYNOPSIS OF SPIRITUAL PSYCHOLOGY
Submit all articles for consideration and review as Microsoft Word document attachment and email to the Editor : editor@spirtualpsychologytoday.com
Spiritual psychology grew out of regular secular (scientific) psychology. Scientific psychology studies human beings: their thinking and behavior and posits what it finds in such a manner that such findings can be verified by any one who wishes to do so. The enterprise of science is not to make assertions that are not verifiable but to posit ideas that are rooted in empirical reality, ideas that any one following the scientific method could independently verify. Scientific conclusions are not mere opinions but objective facts. The individual’s beliefs are not relevant to science, facts are.
Scientists do not appeal to authority and the supposed credibility of the postulators of ideas to make them acceptable but ask that self evidently true propositions be accepted. Ideas that cannot be verified as true are discarded. The scientific method has liberated human beings from superstition and ought to be embraced by all those seeking knowledge.
However, in observing human beings what becomes self evident is that they are the observer as well as the observed. We cannot approach people as if they are objects, such as stones, and study them without what they are thinking affecting our conclusions about them. Human beings are thinking and behaving agents. Their thoughts affect their behaviors.
On first blush, it would seem that thinking is a product of biochemistry and biophysics, the dance of particles, atoms and elements in human beings nervous systems. Neuroscience studies brain behavior and tells us a lot about the transmission of messages from one neuron to another. It has learnt a lot about the neurotransmitters and electrical ions involved in message transmission from one synapse to another. However, it would be making a big leap to say that understanding how neurons communicate to one another is the same thing as understanding thinking. How are complex concepts formulated in the human brain? Are they the product of physics or are they metaphysical in origin? This is a heuristic subject.
Spiritual psychology postulates that human beings are more than their bodies. People are, for lack of a better word, spirits having physical and social experiences.
While paying attention to scientific psychology, spiritual psychology studies the spiritual aspect of human beings. Its premise is that we cannot really understand human beings unless we also appreciate their spiritual aspects.
In approaching psychotherapy, spiritual psychology posits that while we must do what secular psychotherapy teaches that we must also address the spiritual aspect of the individual. It teaches that only a judicious combination of scientific and spiritual psychologies can heal mentally disturbed human beings.
Spiritual psychology combines scientific and spiritual understanding of people in trying to help them cope with the exigencies of their daily living.
THESIS
The world is a dream. Each of us is the dreamer of the world’s dream. This is a literal, not figurative, statement.
There is only one person in the universe, you. That you, however, are simultaneously you and infinite in numbers.
You are you and all of us, as each of us are you and all of us. There is only one self in the universe. That one self has no name but for convenience we shall call him God.
God is creative and created another self that is exactly like him. Again, for convenience, we shall call that new self God’s Son. God’s Son is like his father and creates his own sons. This way the infinite sons of God are created.
God is in his Son and his Son is in him and in his other sons. God is in each of us and each of us is in him, and in each other. If you like, God is himself and also his Son. God’s Son is himself and also his father.
What is being said is that there is only one self in the universe. One self is simultaneously himself and infinite other selves; as far as that self is concerned, there is only one self, since he is all of them.
God extended himself into his Son and his son extended himself into his own sons. There are infinite sons of God.
God and his sons are in each other and are each other. There is no space or gap between the infinite selves of God. They are literally one self. If you like, they share one self and one mind.
God is a unified self; he is a whole (contracted as holy). God is complete and perfect, that is, he is all things; one thing is all things, one self is all selves.
Perfection is the union of all selves and things as one self and thing; completion is the union of all selves and things as one self and thing.
God and his infinite selves are in eternal union.
Only the non-material can unite. God and his infinite selves are not material in nature. For convenience, we shall say that they are spirit.
God is everywhere and everywhere is in God. Since all the children of God are in him, all the children of God are everywhere God is. You, a child of God, are in God hence are everywhere. You are in God and in all of us. Where you see other people, you are, and where other people are, you are.
There is one self in the universe and that one self is you, a you that are simultaneously all of us.
God and his infinite children are the same and coequal. The only difference between God and his children is that he created his children and his children did not create him or create each other.
The children of God, however, were given God’s creative power and do create their own children, but they do not do so alone but with the power of God in them.
The one self, God and his son, remain eternal, as they have always been. They are changeless, permanent and in union. Change cannot enter the world of God and his sons.
THE ILLUSION OF UNION’S OPPOSITE, SEPARATION
While still in eternal union, the opposite of who they are, separation, entered the minds of God’s infinite children.
It is impossible for the children of God to separate from God and from each other, for they are God and each other. Separation is literally impossible for God cannot separate from himself and the son of God, who is God, cannot separate from God. Yet, the sons of God wished to separate from God and from themselves.
The motivation for the wish for separation is the desire to create their father, themselves and each other. The children of God wished to create their father, create themselves and create each other. This wish is impossible of satisfaction, for creation has already been made by God.
A child may wish to create his father but he cannot succeed, although he can create his own children. If you like, the children of God resented the fact that they were created beings and want to become the creator of beings. We were authored by God and want to author God, author ourselves, author each other and author the universe. As it were, we, the children of God, wanted to drive God out of his creatorship throne, usurp it and become God the creator.
(Please note that all these statements are metaphors, they are attempts to represent in words what cannot be expressed in words. God and his children are unified; there is no I and no non- I in eternity, no self and no non-self; no seer and seen, no subject and object; there is literally one self that is at the same time infinite selves. There is no time in eternity; we are employing the concept of time to make sense to those who live in time. Because God and his son are one self, they do not have to talk to each other; they commune with each other. They know each other as each other. There is no speech in heaven. Speech can only exist in a world of separation and multiplicity, our world. Language, like self consciousness, is a post separation phenomenon. In heaven there is a “we consciousness”; on earth there is an “I consciousness”. The “I consciousness,” separated consciousness, cannot understand the “we consciousness”, unified consciousness. You cannot use your current separated mind to understand unified mind.)
THE DREAM
What the children of God could not accomplish in eternity, in reality, separate from God and from each other, they seem to accomplish in a dream state, in an unreal state.
As it were, they closed their non-existent eyes (shut down unified consciousness) and went to sleep. In their sleep, they dream that they are separated (separated consciousness) from their father and from each other.
The dream of the children of God is our physical universe. The world of space, time and matter is the world of the opposite of union, the opposite of heaven.
(If you want to give sequential order to this phenomenon, first, we desired to create God. This is the wish for specialness. Second, we went to sleep and dream. In the dream, we appeared separated from God and from each other. Separation is the same as space. We now see space between us and God, and between each of us. Space immediately produced time, for it now takes time to reach from one point in space to another. Space and time produced particles, then those combined into atoms, and atoms eventually formed the various elements. Over time, the elements combined to form the various biological and other physical forms. In our earthly categories, this process took billions of years to produce what we now call our bodily selves. But in God’s categories, it took only one moment, one literal instant. In fact, it has not even taken place, for it occurred only in a dream setting. Reality remains as God created it and will always be. God and his children remain unified as one self, with one mind, while the children of God dream that they are separated selves, with separated minds. In God, reality, there is no past, present and future. All is now, the eternal present of God. There is no space, time and matter in God.)
In the dream, in the world, each of the infinite children of God sees himself as separated from other children of God and from God. But this is an illusion for he is not separated from God and from other people. He remains as God created him at all times.
God’s will is that he and his children remain unified. No one can disobey the will of God, union (which is love). Thus, each of us is still unified with God and with each other.
What we do is like what a dreamer does at night. Each of us, while still unified with all of us, while still in God and in each of us, as it were, seem asleep (that is, shut down unified consciousness). We dream that we are separated (entered separated consciousness) from God and all of us.
As happens in our nightly sleep and dreams, we project out a world that seems a world of separated selves and things and see ourselves in it, as well as see other people in it. We houses the infinite children of God in separated bodies; we make some of the separated things our fellow human beings, others animals, trees, mountains, stars etc.
One self projects out the physical universe he sees. In that seeming external world, he takes on the personality; ego, body, of one separated self, and sees other seeming separated selves and things. What one child of God did, other children of God did.
Thus, each of them now sees themselves as separated from each other and from God. Each sees himself as here and others as over there. They see space and time between them. They see each other housed in houses of flesh.
The whole thing seems real to them, just as the dream world we see at night seems real to us.
But the dream and its world are not real at all. The children of God remain as God created them: spirit and unified with him and with each other; they remain literally one self.
(Non-duality is literal, for God is his children and his children are him; we employ earthly terms like God and his children to explain what cannot be explained. Actually, with a little thinking, the whole thing is understandable. Try to see it thus: if God extended himself to his sons, he is the extender and his sons are the extended; the extender and the extended are the same self. God is his sons and his sons are God.)
THE DREAMER (GOD’S SON) AND HIS DREAM SELVES (EGOS)
The dreamer of the world is not the self we see in the world. The self we see in the world, the you and I housed in bodies are dream selves, are figures in a dream. We can call the dream selves separated selves or egos or human personalities.
The self I call me, the self you call you, the thing I call animals, trees, mountains, and stars etc are the projection of another self. The unified son of God projected these selves and things out.
It is very important that you grasp this point, lest you think that a dream self is the dreamer himself. The you that is reading this material, the me that is writing this material, is not the dreaming self. The dreaming self is the real son of God, if you like, God the son.
The spirit son of God is the one dreaming that he is you and I in bodies. To know this fact you have to transcend your dream self, your earthly self. You have to shut down the thinking of your earthly self, the ego. This is what meditation attempts to accomplish. In meditation, you stop thinking and remain silent and tell yourself that whatever you think with your ego separated mind is not true. Neti, neti, not this, not this, the truth is not any thing that we can conceptualize with our conceptual, that is, separated ego minds, Hinduism says. You say: I am not my present self housed in body, other people aren’t the personalities housed in bodies that I see them as; the things I see around me, animals, trees, the world are not what they are. Firmly tell yourself that: in my present ego mind, I cannot and do not know who you are, who other people are and what anything is and means. You ask God to tell you who you are, who other people are, who your dog is, who animals and trees are etc. If you genuinely say these things and mean them, you temporarily negate your ego self and body and the physical world, and escape to a different world. First, you escape to a world that still looks like our world, still a perceptual world except that everything in it is made of light (light bodies). If you persist and tell yourself that even this much improved world is not the real world of God, ultimately, you reach a formless world, a world of pure light. In that world is one light that begins nowhere and ends nowhere. This experience of light is called enlightenment and illumination by Oriental religions…Samadhi, Nirvana, Satori; called Holy Instant by A Course in Miracles; Mystical union by Christians. It has no name, but call it whatever you like. What is true about it is that it is ineffable and cannot be described in words. However, in it you know yourself as a self and simultaneously all selves; you know that you are a part of a whole, yet that whole; you know that you are spirit, are permanent, changeless and all knowing; you know that you are one with all being; you feel peaceful and happy; blissful.)
For our present purposes, a different you is the dreamer of the world you currently find yourself in.
One self, who is simultaneously infinite selves, is the dreamer of the world. That one Son of God dreams through you, through me, and through everything you see in our world. That one self is you and me, men and women, blacks and whites, and animals and trees. Actually, he is none of those people and things. Those seeming people and things are in his mind, they are ideas in his mind, and ideas he projected out and made to seem like what he calls them on earth. (Ideas do not leave their source, the mind that thinks them into being; the seeming external world is still in the mind of the dreamer.)
If the dreamer withdraws his projections, he awakens from the dream and knows himself to not be a separated self in a body.
Nothing exists in our world. Where we see the physical universe is nothing of that sort.
What exists in a dream state does not exist in a wake state. What you see in our world are ideas in your mind that you projected out and seen as real things.
Only you, the dreamer, dream the world you see. Your dream is not real.
Everything you see in your world is literally in you but you projected them out. You are the dreamer of the world you see, literally, not figuratively; you are me, you, animals, trees etc; as I am you and everything I see in the world.
(The dreamer actually is not in his dream figures, so you are not your world, for the world, which is ideas given form, is different from the producer of those ideas.)
The dreamer does everything he sees done in his dream. He is all the dream people, animals and trees. He does what every person and thing he sees done in the world.
In the dream, he assigns roles to the other dream selves he projected out. These seeming different people do seeming different things in his world. He sees medical doctors, lawyers, engineers, bus drivers etc. He assigns a role to himself in his dream. Each of the dream figures do what they are assigned to do.
(Please pay attention here: the dreamer assigns a role to the dream self he calls himself on earth; that dream self must do what he assigned to him to do. The dreamer is the sleeping-dreaming son of God, spirit. He makes the assignment of roles in heaven, where he is and sleeps and dreams. The assignments are not made in the dream, on earth. The dream self cannot do something else that was not assigned to him, for it is not the one making the role assignment. It is the sleeping-dreaming son of God, the spirit self that assigns roles. If your role is to be a medical doctor, so will you be. If your role is to be a teacher of union, so will you be. People in the dream, on earth, cannot change their roles, unless they die and come back with different role assignments. You are doing what your role assignment is. You cannot not do what your role assignment is. Indeed, if you tried to do what is not your role, you would not succeed at it.)
You are everybody in the world (but not in truth for you are not in the world). When you are talking to another person, you are literally talking to yourself. In your dream, you see seeming different selves and interact with them, but the dreamer projected the many selves out. If you are teaching students, you are teaching yourself, for the students are you; the teacher and the student are the same person, literally.
What you do to other people, you literally do to your self. However, in the dream, the dreamer projects his one self into many selves and identifies with only one dream self and sees the other dream selves as not him.
The dreamer thinks that what his dream self does to other dream people that he did not do to himself. This is part of the delusion of the world. Each of us has the delusion that we are not other people and that what we do to other people we did not do to ourselves. Thus, we abuse other people and think that we are not abusing ourselves. But we are abusing ourselves in abusing others. If you punish other people, since they are you, you punish you.
People do exchange dream roles; today’s abusers are tomorrow’s abused. But do remember that the abuser and the abused are one self; it is just a trick of the mind. You are the abuser and the abused; you are man and woman.
When you are having sex with your wife, you are literally having sex with yourself. Of course, in the dream it seems to you that there is a man and a woman and that two different people are having sex.
For now, assume that you and your wife are different persons but do remember to love each other, for in doing so, you love you. If you love your wife/husband, both of you have a happy dream pretending to be two separated persons.
If you love your partner you love yourself and have a happy dream; if you abuse your partner you abuse yourself and have a nightmarish dream.
REINCARNATION AND KARMA
If you abuse other persons, you will come back to the dream, to the world, to be abused by other persons, to be abused by you.
It is in the nature of the game that what you do to others must be done to you, for you are others doing things to you (in seeming separated persons and at seeming different times; there is only one self and only one time, now).
FORGIVENESS RELEASES US FROM KARMA
You can be released from the law of cause and effect, karma, if the person you abused decides to forgive you.
If you attack me and I decide to forgive you, I release you from taking the consequences of your action (for one thing, in the here and now world, I will not counter attack you, hence prevent you from taking the logical consequences of attacking others, their attacking you in self defense).
In forgiving you, I forgive me my own attack and abuse of other people. One must forgive others to have ones own wrongs forgiven by others. This is how the game is set up. You cannot change the nature of the game.
Do you want to be forgiven your attacks on others? If yes, then forgive others attack on you. There is no other way known for eradicating the effect of karma (sansara) than forgiveness.
If you fear other people you fear yourself. If you are angry at other people, you are angry at you. Whatever you do to other people, you do to you and whatever other people do to you, they do to themselves.
What you are doing, other people are doing; what other people are doing, you are doing.
What other people are talking about you, you are talking about you. If you kill other people, you kill yourself (other people will kill you).
You are Hitler, you are mother Teresa. You are Nazis and you are Jews. You, a Nazi, killed you, the Jews, and you, Jews were killed by you, Nazis.
If you love others, you love you. If you hate others, you hate you. If you are a white person, you are a black person.
If you enslave other persons, you enslave yourself. White persons’ enslaved black persons means that they enslaved themselves; it also means that blacks enslaved themselves.
If you are afraid of other people, you are afraid of yourself. In paranoia, the individual plays the ultimate trick on himself. He attacks other people and fears their counter attack on him. He runs from them to avoid been attacked and now believes that other people are out to attack him, to get him, to kill him. He sees himself as a victim of others’ attacks on him. He sees himself as living in a hostile world and hides from other people. He defends himself from others anticipated attacks. What he is really doing is pretending to have a separated self from other people. He imagines that he has superior self and that other people have inferior selves. He operates under the delusion of superiority and inferiority. Unknown to him is the fact that the superior and the inferior person, the attacker and the attacked are one person; he is playing a game of separation from his one self.
ALL LOVE IS SELF LOVE; ALL HATE IS SELF HATE
You are the people you see in your world. Therefore, love every person in your world to love you. If you hate other people, you hate you, for you are other people.
You are the schizophrenic, the Bipolar affectively disordered person, the depressed person, the anxious person, the personality disordered person and the homeless alcoholic and drug addicted person you see in your world. You are all the patients you see in a psychiatric hospital. You projected your one self into all the mentally ill persons you see. You see them as mentally ill and pretend to be mentally healthy. Actually, their mental illness is your own mental illness which you projected to them, gave to them to avoid recognizing that you are mentally ill.
It is mental illness to be in this world. It is psychosis to separate from your true self and pretend to be who you are not. You are a unified self and now pretend to be a separated self. To be in this world is to be deluded and to hallucinate; you believe what is not true as true, that you are an ego housed in body; you see things that are not there and hear voices that are not there.
You cannot heal the so-called mentally ill person out there. They are for you to study and understand the nature of mental illness and then heal your own mental illness. To heal your mental illness, you have to let go of your sense of separation, your ego and return to unified spirit.
You cannot heal others for others do not exist; only you exist. The only person you can heal is you. You are healed when you let go of separation and return to union.
If you become healed, you become a light (union is light) in the dream of darkness (separation is darkness) and others can learn from your peaceful and calm life as the way to go.
(A healed son of God is always peaceful and happy; he is totally loving and forgiving; his presence gives other people peace; his physical appearance is totally peaceful. There is no anxiety, fear, depression, paranoia, etc in him, to excite his ego and body.)
This does not mean that we should not treat the mentally ill. We must treat them. We must study the nature of mental illness, as we must study everything we see in our world. All that we need to know is that when we study other people, we are really studying aspects our selves. Indeed, when we study animals, trees and inanimate objects, we are studying ourselves, for we are the world.
In this world, we believe that there are other people, so, by all means study other people. But do remember that other people are you and that whatever other people are doing, you are doing. You are doing what your wife or husband is doing. You are doing what your children are doing; you are doing what animals, trees, and everything are doing.
You are the hurricane that killed people around you; you are also the love that helped some people survive the hurricane. You are doing what all people are doing. If other people are talking about you negatively, you are talking about you negatively.
When you understand what is described here, you become hilarious, laughing at yourself for doing all the things you see done in your world.
(The people who believe in separation will see you as insane for believing that you are all the world; they are insane for believing that they are separated from the world. The ego (separation) calls Christ (union) insane but the Christ knows that it is the ego that is insane.)
If you are helping other people, you are helping you. If you are oppressing other people you are oppressing you.
People are in truth unified, but in the dream dissociated from one another. Now they see themselves as separated from one another and believe that they can hurt other people and not hurt themselves.
People believe that they can be rich and others be poor. Poor things, they do not recognize that they are other people and that they are the rich and the poor, in different stages of the dream.
You cannot separate from other people; you hurt you when you hurt other people. In reality, you do not hurt any one, for what you do is done in dreams and what is done in a dream has not been done. Nevertheless, as long as you believe in separation and hurt other people, people who believe in separation will hurt you. Those who live by the sword die by the sword, by their own choice.
You must recognize that if other people attacked you that you attacked you, that if other people slapped you that you slapped you; that if other people abused you that you abused you, if other people killed you that you killed you (in the dream that death is possible…no one is actually killed).
You are doing what all the people in the world are doing, and all the people in the world are doing what you are doing.
Therefore, do not complain if other people do bad things to you, for you did bad things to you (as payment for the bad things that you did to other people).
You must forgive the bad things you see other people do to you to forgive the bad things you have done to others in the past, present and future (all time is an illusion, all time is now, the past, present and future are all taking place in the now; you are sleeping and project out a world of time, see a past, present and future that do not exist, a world of space, time and matter that do not exist).
On earth, forgiveness is a law of God. In heaven the law of God is love, but on earth where we seem separated from each other, and do bad things to each other, God, through his Holy Spirit, requires us to forgive one another, to overlook the evils we do to one another, so as to experience the underlying love we always live in. Forgiveness is a path to Love, but love is all that exists in the world of God.
You selected your parents, to march their genes so as to provide you with the body you want to have to enable you dream that you are separated and different from other people (your parents, in turn, selected you, for you are them and they are you).
In reality, you have not selected your parents and have not been born in body. The world is an illusion, a dream. You are not in this world, you are merely dreaming that you are in this world, that you are in this particular body, family, race, society etc.
The world is your dream; make it a happy dream by loving and forgiving all people in it. Love is all there is in life. Forgiveness is indirect love; forgiveness overlooks what was done to you, so as to enable you see the love that is behind it. The only thing that is real is love.
Love is real but forgiveness is an illusion used to remove the illusion of the world, so that you experience the love of God that is always there. Attack denies love, masks love, pulls a veil over love, but forgiveness removes the veil and lets you know that only love is.
Forgiveness is healing. When you forgive you heal, that is, you overlook separation and see the joined selves always there. To heal is to see union where hitherto you had seen separation and behaved as if you had separated selves and different interests.
You heal your relationships with other people by forgiving them; when you forgive you know that all people were always unified, joined as the children of God, while you saw them as separated selves.
When you forgive, heal separation, you experience union, and in union experience peace, joy and bliss.
Those who love are always in peace and happiness. It is those who separated from union, who see different interests, who are at war with each other and do not forgive each other that live in hate and conflict. The world is a war we declared on our one self, a war against our selves; an insane war. A sane person does not declare war on himself hence experience unnecessary pain.
You are where you need to be; you are seeing those you have to see, now, you are doing exactly what you have to be doing, now.
There are no accidents in this world. The world is your dream and you project yourself to where you are in your dream, to doing what you see yourself do in your dream.
In my dream I project me to writing this essay, now. That is what I have to do now. I am a teacher of love, teacher of union, teacher of forgiveness, teacher of God and cannot not be doing the work for which I came to this world to do. I selected genes to give me the type of body I needed to have to experience free floating pain, so as to reject my body and first seek ego compensatory idealism, and then recognize its fantasy nature, and reject it and finally seek God, our truth. I am living the life I came to the world to live, so are you.
None of us is doing something that is better than other people’s works, for whatever we are doing, we are doing for each other; we do what we do for the salvation of God’s one unified son.
THE EGOS PLAN FOR SALVATION
Imagine eternity to be a circle that encompasses everything. That circle begins nowhere and ends nowhere. That circle is God. That circle of light has infinite points in it, all of whom are parts of it. There is no space or gap between the points in the circle.
If you insist on anthropomorphizing the circle and its points, each point in the circle is a son of God. However, this is not a physical point, for there is no space between the whole circle (God) and a point in it (Son of God) and between points in it (sons of God). The circle is one. There is no space and gap anywhere in it.
God is the entire circle, for only God exists. The circle is all the infinite points in it. God is every son of his. There is one self with infinite selves in him, all of whom are one self.
This circle is made of pure light. This light is not physical light that is composed of photons (particles, atoms, elements) and cannot be seen with our physical eyes. This circle of light is actually all there is. It is everywhere, right now. We are all in it.
While in the light of God, we desired specialness and separation. It is impossible to gratify our desire. As it were, we went to sleep, that is, we tuned out the circle’s light and its “we consciousness” and used our thinking, mind, to invent a tiny break, crack in the circle. We visualized a tiny space between each point in the circle.
The break, crack, space, gap is less than one percent of the circle. The break in the circle has not, in fact, occurred, for no power in the universe can break the will of God, the stipulation that he and his children are unified.
If it were possible for separation to take place, God and his children would cease in being, they would die. It is absolutely impossible that there be space in eternity. God and his children are still unified as one self and one mind, one light.
While in eternal unity, the children of God, who are one child of God, visualized a crack, space, gap between each other and between them and God. Into that tiny little space they projected all the dreams they have; they projected the temporal, perceptual universe. In that non-existent space they saw the world our scientists talk about.
The Big Bang seemed to shatter the circle of light into bits of light.
Consider the Big Bang as a mutual attack on each other by all the children of God, to make them seem separated from each other. We attacked each other and, as it were, pushed each other away from us. Now, we seem alone.
Hitherto, there was no perception for all shared one self and one mind. With the mutual attack, Big Bang, folks seem separated from each other and now seem to live in darkness and grope to see each other, hence the beginning of the world of perception, the world of seeing, rather than knowing.
The Big bang invented space, time and matter, all done simultaneously, for each presupposes the other and cannot exist without the other. Actually, space preceded time by a nanosecond and time preceded matter by a nanosecond.
Suddenly, there was space in the light circle. Light, as it were, was covered up and we saw its opposite, darkness. We saw ourselves in space, in darkness. But we are made of light, the light of God. Each of us is a point of light in God and that point of light is still within him; he brought it to the world of darkness he now lives. With the light of God in us, we began seeing each other in space, in darkness. Thus, in the world, sleep, in darkness, we have some glimmer of light (the light of God we brought with us, though now clouded) with which we see. We now live in a perceptual universe.
In the darkness, we began evolving all the stuff scientists talk about. Particles formed, particles joined to form atoms. Atoms differentiated to become elements. In time, elements joined into molecules to form biological life forms. Biological life forms eventually produced trees, animals and the human body. We now seem to live in these bodies.
In our earthly time frame, this process has taken billions of years, but in actual fact, it has not taken place at all. All that seemed to happen is that momentarily we seemed to fall asleep (sleep is metaphor for using our wishes for specialness and separation to make us forget unity and experience separation). What seemed to have occurred is a dream and it did not last more than a second before it was over and we woke up to our always “we consciousness”.
But the momentary specialness and separation seemed fascinating that we kept it in memory and replay it over and over, again. Thus, right now, while awake in heaven, we momentarily close our eyes, forget union, and dream separation. We seem lost in that dream.
SPECIAL RELATIONSHIP
The dream world has an objective: specialness. Each person came here to seem like he created himself, created other people and created God. He invented a self concept that says: I am separated from all other persons, I am a very important person, treat me as such. He has a separated ego, a self he invented as a replacement self; a self that replaces his natural unified self. Each human being has a special, separated self (as opposed to his true self, which is unified self).
He relates to other people from the perspective of his specialness. Others relate to him from their specialness. Thus, on earth we have special relationships. Here, folks collude with one another and tell each other that they are the separated ego selves they claim to be. They affirm each others delusion, their belief in what is not true as true. In truth, they are unified, not separated self.
People who deny themselves cannot live in peace; they are generally living in fear, anxiety, anger, depression, paranoia and other mental upsets. Special relationships are characterized by these mental and emotional upsets, for how can folks be happy in a relationship where the basis of it is their self denial, their self attack?
Where two collude and validate each others specialness, they claim to have fallen in love, ego-body based love. “Oh, how beautiful you are, how handsome you are” the two egos tell each other and are in ego heaven. Two special persons experience special love, a love that is exclusive and not inclusive of all children of God. In it, each retains his individuation but uses it to make bargains. As long as they serve their mutual interests, the special love relationship is maintained. When they no longer serve each others interest, it ends.
There are special hate relationships where the masked hatred in special love comes to the fore, immediately.
HOLY RELATIONSHIP
When folks are no longer able to satisfy their specialness in special love, their substitute union, they separate from each other and go seek and, hopefully, form other special loves.
This process continues for however long folks identify with the ego and its specialness. The few of them that have learned to truly love and forgive one another transform their special love to holy relationships. Here, they see the divinity in each other while still worshipping the idol of the ego and body. They see their new relationship as serving a higher purpose, love; they are now in a union where folks do not feel that they have the freedom to get up and leave whenever they want to; that is, they have relinquished their wish for separated selves, somewhat. This type of love gives some peace and joy. It approximates, but is not heaven’s, relationship.
In heaven, there are no you and I, all are one person and commune as if the seeming other is themselves. We cannot explain the nature of communion except to say that in it there are infinite persons but they all know themselves as one person; that they do not live in body but in spirit and do not communicate through speech; they simply know what is in each other’s mind and respond to it.
THE HOLY SPIRIT’S FUNCTION
In heaven there is God and there is his Son. If you like, there is God the father and God the son. The same God is God the father and God the son. God is himself, and is in you, and me, as God the Son.
God extend his one self to you and me and gave us all of him self. You seem to have a separated identity but you are really an extension of God, hence Hinduism correctly teaches that Brahman, God, and Atman, part of God, son of God, are one self.
As it were, God the Son (there are infinite sons of God but to God they are one son) seemed to have tuned out God the father and went to sleep of self forgetfulness. He now imagines himself his own creator, the creator of his other sons of God and the creator of God.
God could not commune with his son as they normally communicated. He therefore created another aspect of himself, the Holy Spirit, and through it entered the mind of his sleeping Son.
God the Holy Spirit provided an alternative thinking to the thinking of separation. The Holy Spirit (whole Spirit) is now in our seeming separated minds.
HOLY TRINITY
Thus, there now seem three Gods: God the father (transcendent God), God the Son (you and I) and God the Holy Spirit (the immanent God, God in the temporal universe). These three Gods are the Holy Trinity.
God the Son is now sleeping and dreaming that he is separated from his father and from his own children. God the Son identifies with each part of him, each of us, animals, trees etc.
In the temporal universe, each of us is God the son but we now see ourselves as separated from each other and as living in space, time and body.
God the Holy Spirit provides us with the knowledge that what we seem to have is imaginary separation, that, in fact, we are still unified. The Holy Spirit teaches the mind of the sleeping son of God that he remains as his father created him, whole, Holy, unified with God and all his brothers. Despite appearances of separation, we remain unified. Space and gap cannot enter eternity.
FORGIVENESS
To show that eternity remains as God created it, the Holy Spirit has only one instrument for doing so, forgiveness. He asks us to forgive each other what we do to each other in the dream of separation. If we forgive each other our seeming attacks on each other, we experience the underlying unity that is still there.
Forgiveness is like a light that shines away the darkness of separation and what is done in the separated space that has not been done. Forgiveness enables us to experience the union that is always there.
God is union. We always live in union while imagining ourselves outside it. Union is light. We always live in the light of God while imagining that we are outside it, in darkness. Union is love. We always live in the love of God, while dreaming that we are outside it.
To know that we always live in the presence of love, union, God, we have to remove the veil that hides the light of love and union. Forgiveness is the only means for removing the cloud that prevents the awareness of union and love. Forgive and then know that you are always in unified state.
Until you forgive all God’s children, you included, their errors, you would not return to the experience of eternal love.
EGO VERSUS HOLY SPIRIT, GRIEVANCE VERSUS FORGIVENESS
The egos plan is for us to separate from each other and seem special (self created, as witnessed to by the invention of our separated self concepts, self images and human personalities).
The Holy Spirit’s plan, on the other hand, is that we become aware of our union with each other. The ego teaches separation and the Holy Spirit teaches union; the ego teaches specialness (makes you feel that you are superior or inferior to other people, both illusions) and the Holy Spirit teaches you that you are the same and equal with all your brothers, with all creation. The ego teaches attack, the Holy Spirit teaches forgiveness.
We are currently living in ego states, in separated selves. We listen to the ego’s plan for salvation. (Please do remember that the ego is not a separate person, it is the symbol of the Son of God’s wish for specialness and separation; we made the ego and ask it to guide us, as we live on earth; he is not our master, for we made it.)
The ego shows you other egos attacking you and bids you to defend yourself. In the world, in the dream, the attack seems very real. You see other people attacking you, abusing you, oppressing you, and in so far that you identify with ego and its house, body, their attacks on your body causes you physical pain. Other people’s attacks on us seem very real to us. The ego then asks us to defend ourselves from them. Thus, everywhere in the world, we defend ourselves from each others attacks.
Everything we do on earth is motivated by self defense. Be it eating food, taking medications, wearing clothes, living in shelters, forming governments, hiring police, military, courts and judges, prisons and wardens, all are motivated by desire to protect ourselves from our perceived others’ attack on us. To the ego, attack is real. The ego, the mind of the dreaming son of God, sees himself as separated from other children of God and believes that he could be killed.
(Separation made the awareness of death possible, for in union there is only the awareness of eternal life. If you feel separated from God and other people, you must feel that you will die; if you know that you are unified with God and all creation you know that you are eternal.)
The ego tells us that other people could harm and even kill us. It urges us to protect ourselves and to anticipate attacks on us. Once attacked, the ego teaches us to bear grievances, grudges and to seek vengeance and revenge.
To be an ego is to feel that other people did something wrong to one and to want to get back at them, to punish them. I, as an ego, you, as an ego, bear grievances against every living thing on earth. I, you bear grudges against our parents for not loving me/you enough, for loving my/your brothers more than me/you. Each of us bears grievances against every body, for what we see them do to us on earth.
To be human is to bear grievances and to defend ones self. We establish courts and appoint judges to punish those who wronged us; we hire police to protect us and we build prisons to house those who wronged us; we hire military to protect us from other groups of egos, nations. Simply stated, to be a human being is to bear grievances and punish other people.
But who are the other people we are punishing? Other people are us. God has only one son, you. That one son extended himself into infinite children. The infinite children of God are his one son, literally, not figuratively.
You are all of us; I am all of us. If I punish you, and since you are me, I punish me. But in the dream, I trick me into seeing you as separated from me, and you trick yourself into seeing you as separated from me. We believe that others are separated from us and that what we do to them we did not do to us. But there is only one self. One self in two and more places. What you do to the seeming other self you have done to you.
How this works is that since you now seem two (and more selves) and the one you do bad things to the other you, the other you take turns and do bad things to you. This could be in this life time or in future life times.
The abuser today is the abused tomorrow. Both the abuser and the abused are the same person, so the same person is doing the same abusing thing to himself in two seeming different places and life times.
Thomas Jefferson in one life time enslaved blacks, and in other life times was enslaved by blacks (who are now whites and vice verse). One son of God appears as white, black, man and woman.
The alternation of roles goes on for billions of years. But if one son of God chooses to listen to the gospel of the Holy Spirit and forgive those who attacked him, abused him, oppressed him etc, he is forgiven his own attack, abuse and oppression of others. As you do to others is done to you, by you, for others are you.
On earth, forgiveness is the law of God. Most people think that forgiveness is a luxury and option, and they choose to practice it only when they want to. Every body knows that if you forgive you feel like a weight is lifted from your head and you feel relaxed. Forgiveness gives peace and happiness. But we tend to think that there are crimes that are too egregious that we cannot forgive them.
Forgiveness removes all crimes; there is no degree of crime that forgiveness does not remove, for there are no orders of difficulties that the miracle, forgiveness, does not heal.
It is not up to us to disobey the law of God. We can diddle but eventually we must forgive all people. When we choose to forgive is up to us. But as long as we do not forgive, we must live in pain and keep on recycling through this world.
On September 11, 2001, Arab Muslim terrorists attacked America. The twin towers of the world trade center at New York City were brought down by two planes smashing into them. The Pentagon was also smashed into. Another plane, supposedly, heading towards the White House, was prevented from reaching its target.
Americans felt shocked that other people could come to their country and inflict such injury on them. The entire country was in shock, anger and depression (grieving cycle). Normal Americans, that is, those adapted to the ego’s world, itched to pay back in kind those who violated their homes, sanctity.
As these things always happen, for there are no accidents in the universe, America had in the White House a man who believed in grievances and punishment. As the governor of Texas, he used to hang criminals. So, when the Moslem Arabs attacked America, President George Walker Bush did not have qualms about counter attacking them.
America has the military ability to defeat the entire Muslim world; indeed, if she chooses, she could wipe out all Muslims with her nuclear weapons. But that is going too far, so Mr. Bush went to an old fashioned war, and quickly disposed the Talibans, the egotistic maniacs ruling Afghanistan. He went to Iraq, apparently, to finish what his father started but did not complete, remove Saddam Hussein from office. (It is difficult to understand the logic of the preemptive war against Iraq since Saddam was a survivor, and knew enough not to harbor terrorists for he knows that if he did so that he would incur the rage of the West, who could remove him from office in a week, as they eventually did. It was stupid to go to war in Iraq.)
For our present purposes, Americans sought vengeance and got it. But now that they have attacked Muslims, the later see themselves as innocent egos that the big bad Americans unfairly attacked. They are counter attacking America, in their own small ways.
The war between Muslims and Christians has been going on from the 700s and is still going on. As long as Muslims and Christians identify with the ego, they will attack and defend themselves, they will seek revenge on each other. This is the nature of the ego’s plan for our salvation.
The ego gives the children of God nothing but attack, war and conflict, be it at the national, interpersonal and personal levels. We are in a war against ourselves.
Now, suppose that both nations and individuals choose to listen to the gospel of the Holy Spirit and forgive each other their past wrongs, what would happen? Peace would reign in the land. If Americans had forgiven the Muslim Arabs and begin structuring international systems to transform the world into a federation with a real world government, then there would be peace. But, instead, the Americans were in the grip of the ego and felt attacked and humiliated by Lilliputian Arabs and went out there to teach them a lesson. That lesson is still being taught as I write, five years later, and will continue for as long as human beings live as egos.
It is when we listen to the message of the Holy Spirit and learn to forgive each other that we would behave differently and know peace.
Jesus Christ was the first ego, the first son of God in the dream state that awakened to his Christ state, to the awareness that he is always unified with his father and all his brothers. He did so by listening to the gospel of the Holy Spirit and forgave all those who attacked him, to forgive his own attacks on others.
THE HOLY SPIRIT’S PLAN FOR SALVATION
We have seen that the ego’s plan is for us to attack those who attacked us, to defend ourselves and to bear grievances. The ego wants us to punish those we see do bad things to us. We attack those who attack us; subsequently, they see us as attacking them and counter attack us, and we do the same to them and that way the conflict continues unabated. This is pretty much our world, a place of attack and defense and offense.
The Holy Spirit’s plan for our salvation is that we should forgive those we see do bad things to us. Look at a person you see do what the world calls bad things to you and forgive him. This could be physical or psychological attacks, abuse, oppressions, slavery, rape, murder, everything. Look the mugger, who steals your money, in the face and say: I forgive you and mean it. You must not bear grievances or defend yourself when you are attacked, even when your body is destroyed.
You can choose when to listen to the voice for God but eventually you must listen to him, for no one can disobey the will of God forever and ever. You may wish to disobey God and dream on earth but when you want to return to God, you must obey his will, which on earth means that you forgive all the persons who did bad things to you.
On earth where we attack each other, forgiveness is the approximation of true love. Love exists in heaven, but on earth forgiveness brings us near that eternal love. Forgiveness brings us to the gate of heaven. Forgiveness gives us happy dreams, while we still wish for separation. Forgiveness brings us to the borderland between heaven and earth. Forgiveness gives us some peace and joy.
Considering all that forgiveness gives us, so why don’t we forgive one another? We do not forgive one another because we do not want to give up our specialness and separation, yet. We still want to think that we created ourselves, created each other and created God (as symbolized by our invention of self concepts for ourselves and for each other and for God…we conceptualize God to be this or that, so it is now up to us to create God, to say what he is or is not, what petulant power).
We are afraid to give up the ego self and its world we made; we are afraid to awaken to the self and world that God created. The self and world we made are now our idols, we are proud of our handiworks and we worship them.
We made the ego separated self, make it an idol, a craven calf, and worship it. We made the world we see and want to live in it. We do not want to give up the selves we made in substitution for the self that God created us as.
FEAR, GUILT AND PUNISHMENT
As long as we prefer to be special and separate from God and from each other, we shall feel like we did something wrong, feel guilty and fear punishment from God and from each other. There is a deep sense of guilt in all of us separated ones. That guilt makes us fear God’s punishment and we run from him. Guilt leads to fear. If you have any kind of guilt, even a tiny bit, you must live in fear of God’s punishment.
If you feel fearful you feel guilty, you feel like you separated from God and all his children. If you retain your ego separated self you must experience fear and guilt.
INNOCENCE
The only way to not feel guilty, to feel sinless and innocent is to give up the wish for separation and specialness. Since, in fact, you have not separated from God and are not special, all you have to do is overlook your belief in separation, let go of the ego self concept and you feel guiltless.
Let us spend a bit more time on the concept of guilt and punishment for it is critical that you understand it and let it go for you to be saved.
SEPARATION, GUILT, FEAR AND PUNSIHMENT
To forgive means that one has hitherto condemned the forgiven person. We must understand what one did to make one condemned.
According to spiritual psychology, reality is unified. All is one. All is one spirit self. There is one God. God extended His One self into His one Son, who is now like God and has the creative power that God gave him and he extended his own self into other sons. (These are metaphoric representation in words of what cannot be represented in words, God.)
Creation emanates from God, to God’s son and from his Son to other sons. There is no beginning and end to creation. God and his children have always been there and are always creating.
God and his creation are one. They all share one self and one mind, the self of God and the mind of God.
Where God ends and his children begin is nowhere, and where one child of God ends and another begins is nowhere.
God is in his children and they are in him and in each other. There is no space and gap between God and his children, and between one child of God and another.
In God’s world, eternity, heaven, all is unified. Only the spiritual can unify. God’s world is spiritual.
Matter separates; there is no matter in eternity. There is no space, time and matter in heaven.
In heaven, there is no you and I, no seer and seen, no perception, no subject and object, all are unified as one self and one mind.
(Heaven’s consciousness is unified consciousness, which is different from our earthly separated consciousness. On earth, each of us has a consciousness that he is a separated self, an I; in heaven, we have a consciousness of us, we all know ourselves to share one self and one mind; there is no other self that is not us.)
God and his children are permanent, changeless, unified, joined to one another, loving and all knowing spirit.
God and his children are the same and coequal. The only difference between them is that God created his children; they did not create him or create each other. Though the children do have their own children, they do so with the creative power of God in them; they do not create independent of God.
Where all are the same and are joined must be harmony. Heaven is unified, peaceful and happy, in a word, blissful.
In heaven, where all are one, the thought of heaven’s opposite, separation, entered and the children of God desired to pursue it.
The will of God is union; no one can disobey the will of God; no one can separate from God. The will of God, union, love, is forever done. If it were possible for any one to disobey the will of God, separate from God, all would die. Union is the condition for existence. If separation occurred, both God and his children would die, impossibility. Separation cannot occur and has not occurred.
Nevertheless, the children of God can wish differently, but wishes result in illusions, dreams and fantasies, not reality. The children of God wished to separate from their father and from each other. As it were, they went to sleep and dream, and in their dreams their wishes seem gratified for them.
Our world is the dream of the children of God. It is the dream of the opposite of God, the opposite of heaven, the opposite of reality. Heaven is unified and we dream separation.
God/Spirit/Heaven is the opposite of everything we see on earth. On earth we see mortality, change and impermanency. Spirit is immortal, changeless and permanent. On earth love is mostly talk but not actual; spirit is love itself. On earth people are separated from each other and from everything else, spirit is unified. On earth is space, time and matter, spirit is immaterial and does not have space and time in it. The universe is characterized by time, by past, present and future. Spirit is joined, is a place where everything is connected to everything else, and has no past, present and future but is always in the present. On earth, people are different and unequal from one another. Spirit is the same and equal everywhere it exists. The universe is chaotic and conflicted because opposing forces interact with one another. Spirit is composed of the same force hence is peaceful, happy and joyous. Simply stated, heaven is the opposite of earth and God is the opposite of man.
The children of God are in a dream where they seem the opposite of their true selves and their world seem the opposite of their real home. Their real self is unified spirit; in their alien world, they now have separated selves, egos. The ego is a separated self, it is a replacement self, it is a self we use to substitute for the self that God created us as.
God created us whole and holy (that is, unified with him and with each other), but we made ourselves unholy, that is, separated (to be unified is to be holy, to be separated is to be unholy). We were created as loving but we now see ourselves as hateful.
In heaven we all work for a common goal, union/love. On earth we feel individuated and each believes himself to have different interests and pursues them. Those who pursue different interests tend to clash hence our world is a world of conflict.
GUILT
To be in the world of separation one feels that one separated from ones creator and from all creation. This sense of separation makes one feel like one did something wrong. To be human is to feel guilty, for a sin one committed when one separated from ones creator (Original sin).
Feeling guilty, people feel that the person that they are separated from is angry at them and is out to punish them.
FEAR
Human beings fear that God and other people, those they separated from, are going to punish them. They run from those they separated from.
BODY, MATTER, SPACE AND TIME
We all hide from God and from each other. We invented body (the world of matter) to enable us to hide from one another and from God. In body, we forget that we are spirit and see ourselves as bodies. In fact, we forget that we are even separated from God and forget our guilt. None of us on earth remembers when he separated from God and therefore none of us feels consciously guilty and sinful.
As it were, we repressed our original sin into our ego unconscious mind. From the unconscious it exercises influence on us.
PUNISHMENT
Those who feel guilty believe that they deserve to be punished (even on earth criminals believe that they are guilty, deny it but unwittingly do what would make them caught and punished). We punish each other, for we see each other as guilty. I see you as guilty of separating from God and from me and punish you; you do the same to me.
In our dreams, we project each other out and have each other do nasty things to us. We want each other arrested and punished for our guilt.
Actually, we want each other punished for a deeper guilt we believe that we have, the sin of separating from our creator and from each other. The world is a place where we punish each other, for we think that we are sinners.
We want God to punish guilty persons. Traditional Christians, who have made their God a gigantic egotist, believe that he will punish the guilty and send them to eternal hell fire.
A little logic teaches us that God is his children. If God punishes his children he is only punishing himself. Only an insane God would punish his children to punish himself. God is sane and prefers love to pain, so he does not punish his children so as not to punish himself. God does not punish us. He merely asks us to forgive one another and in doing so return to him.
PRODIGAL SON
Each of us is like the prodigal son. The prodigal son left on a journey to go seem independent of his father. When he recognizes that he is part of his father and that nothing will work out well for him if he is separated from God that he, the son of a rich father, in separation, eats with swine acknowledges his mistakes, he returns to his father. When we take the first step towards heaven, God runs and opens heaven’s gate and welcomes us in.
(We and God are one, so what this metaphor means is that when we let go of separation we become aware of union.)
As long as we believe that we are separated from God and from each other, we will feel like we are sinners and that we ought to be punished and punish each other. We punish each other on behalf of God because we know that God is not punitive.
The ego, the mind of God’s sleeping son, knows that God is not punitive and punishes other egos on behalf of God. The ego knows that if he waits for God to come punish us that he would not do so.
Belief in sin and punishment is actually a trick we enact to make separation seem possible. We convince ourselves that a non-punitive God is out to punish us, fear his punishment, and run from him and hide in bodies, in the world of matter, space and time.
REINCARNATION
As long as we believe in guilt and punishment, we will keep on sleeping and dreaming. We will recycle through this world many times (reincarnation).
The Holy Spirit knows that we did not separate from God and that we have not sinned. He knows that we merely dream. He knows that what is done in dreams has not been done in reality.
The Holy Spirit sees what we do to each other on earth and knows that they are dream deeds. Wars, murder, rape, stealing etc are mere dream activities, they are not real. What is done in dreams has not been done in the real world of God.
The Holy Spirit, therefore, urges us to forgive what we do to each other on earth, to overlook the world and in so doing, overcome it, as Jesus did. This means overlooking separation; it means giving up our separated selves.
Alas, we want to seem separated from each other and from God. We enjoy the illusory power of seeming to have created ourselves, created God and created each other; we enjoy the illusion of separation and do not want to give it up.
Occasionally, a child of God listens to the gospel of the Holy Spirit and forgives those who did bad things to him; he overlooks the world, and in doing so, awakens from the dream of separation. He is resurrected from ego (death) and is reborn in Christ; he is delivered from the hell we call our earth and is redeemed from the sense of guilt. He reclaims his sense of innocence, and now sees himself as a child of God, who is as God created him: unified with his father and all his brothers and obeys the will of God, loves all creation and its creator.
Jesus Christ is the first son of God to relinquish his separated ego self and accept his unified self, the self God created him as; he did so by forgiving all those who did bad things to him, while he slept and dreamed that he had a separated self.
Each of us must do what Jesus did to resurrect from our dream/death and be reborn in our true self, the self God created us as, the Christ unified self.
EACH OF US MUST FORGIVE HIS PERSONAL WORLD
God is one. God has one son. The one son of God has infinite sons of God. That is, God has infinite sons, all of whom are his one Son and are him.
The one Son of God went to sleep and dreamt this world. This means that the infinite sons of God went to sleep and dreamt this dream world. Each of them is in the dream. Each of them must awaken from this dream. Each of them has his own set time when his script calls for him to awaken from the dream of self forgetfulness. Before then, each of them recycles through the dream, until he remembers his unity with all creation and awakens from the dream of separated self.
Jesus Christ awakened from the dream. He did so by forgiving, that is, overlooking, all attacks on him, personally. He forgave what was done to him by the seeming others around him. Since they are playing roles which his dream called for, he forgave himself what he used his brothers to do for him. In forgiving others what they did to him, he forgave himself what he did to them and to himself (that he has not done, since the dream is a dream and not a fact). In the process of forgiving just one person, Jesus forgave the entire world, woke up and is now part of the Holy Spirit, teaching those his brothers still sleeping to forgive one another and wake up.
The fact that Jesus forgave those who attacked him does not mean that the entire dream of God’s unified son is over. The dream is still going on for the other children of God and will do so until each of us forgives those who attacked him, hence forgive his self.
Other people do seem to attack you and me (our self attacks through other people). We must individually forgive those who we see do bad things to us. Each of us must do this to wake up, to resurrect from death, to be reborn in his awareness of his real self, of being the self God created, not the self he made of himself, the ego.
In practical terms, what this means is that I must practice forgiveness and forgive all the persons I see in my dream world do bad things to me. Since I projected them out and made them do bad things to me, in forgiving them I forgive me. (They, in turn, as part of God’s one self, projected me out and made me do what I do to them, and must forgive me to forgive their selves.)
I must forgive those that attacked me to forgive me my own attack on other people, so as to awaken.
It is not for me to worry about the attacks that were not directed at me, personally. (Jesus did not concern himself with the attacks that were not directed at his personal self.)
There are billions of people on this earth and not all of them are close to me and directly attacking me. It is those who are close to me, who I see attack me, that I am to forgive, one at a time.
Other people are to do the same thing, as I do, but when they do it is their own issue. My primary responsibility is to forgive those I see attack me now, not to worry about the whole world’s attacks on each other.
Forgive those you see attack you, those you see do wrong things to you (those you projected attack behaviors to, in your dream of self attack; they, too, projected attack roles to you, in their own dreams of self attack).
If you return other people’s attacks on you with attacks on them, bear grievances, you maintain the dream and say that you are, in effect, an ego and deny your true self. But if they attack you and you forgive them, you, in effect, say that you are not an ego; you say by your action, not words, that you are Christ, the unified son of God.
If you identify with Christ, and practice forgiveness, love and union, you would occasionally experience holy instants and awaken to union, oneness.
You must, however, remember that just because you forgive others does not mean that others will stop attacking you. Many people are fast asleep and forget their true loving self and identify with the ego and, as such, will attack you, for the ego knows only attack. Just forgive those you see attack you.
The world will be around for billions of years until each son of God forgives his self (by forgiving other people). Your sole responsibility is to forgive the world, hence forgive you; it is not your responsibility to worry whether others reciprocate the favor or not, whether others practice forgiveness is not your issue. It is the Holy Spirit’s job to teach every person forgiveness. If and when you forgive the world then you join the Holy Spirit in performing that function, but until then, your sole function is to forgive the world.
THE PROBLEM IS INSIDE ME, NOT OUTSIDE ME
The problem is inside me (and you), not outside me (and you) and must be corrected, solved where it is at, inside each of us, not outside us. The problem of attack is in the mind.
It is my mind that desired separation and seem separated from others. That separation from others was an attack on them (and since they are part of me, is an attack on me and on God…we are talking about imaginary attack, of course). I attacked other people to push them away and separate from them. You attacked others to push them away and separate from them. I attacked the whole, God and all his children, me included, to seem separated from them. I then feel guilty for what I did. I fear that I would be punished by those I attacked. I run away from those I attacked, so as to prevent them from punishing me.
I invented matter, space and time to enable me to hide from God and other people, who now seem separated from me. I now live in body and in doing so forget my guilt. I make my guilt unconscious. My guilt is now in the deeper part of my mind and I am not aware of it.
Unconscious or not, my existential guilt still influences my behavior, for what is repressed into the ego unconscious is not gotten rid of. I am still feeling guilty from attacking God and all his children (as you do) and I still expect God and all people to punish me (as you do).
I project people out who seem to punish me, so that I suffer for my guilt. In suffering (such as poverty) I make the ego real.
INNOCENCE
But the ego and its world are not real. I have not attacked God and his creation. I am still as God created me, unified with him hence innocent of guilt and do not deserve to be punished. To know that I am innocent, I must overlook my dream of separation, dream of guilt, dream of self punishment, dream of fear and dream of anger.
When I forgive those I see personally do bad things to me, I recognize that what they did to me was done in a dream state and has not been done, in fact. I merely had a nightmarish dream in which I felt that I attacked my father and brothers and that they attacked me. I awaken in spirit, in God’s one self.
I am still an idea in God’s mind; ideas do not leave their source. I have not left my creator. I am still inside him, as he is inside me, and we are always one self. In this knowledge, I experience peace and happiness.
DEFENSE MAKES ATTACK REAL TO THE DEFENDER
If other people attack you and you defend yourself from their attack (could be verbal defense, physical defense, legal defense as in going to court to defend your rights) what you have, in effect, said is that the attack on you is real and that it hurt you. You have made it hurt you by making it real, by accepting their attack.
Defense makes attack real to the defender. And as you wish is done to you. What you make real seems real to you.
Your ego and body perceive attack on it (physical or psychological attack) and defend it and in so doing make attack real.
The same goes for bearing grievances, grudges, being vindictive, seeking vengeance and revenge. If you bear grievances against what you perceive other people do to you, you have, in so doing, made whatever it is they did to you real to you.
If you believe that other people can persecute you, and you see their persecution and defend yourself, they have persecuted you, by your own desire to be persecuted. (Paranoid persons want to be persecuted, provoke it, see it and believe it. In so doing, they convince themselves that they live in a hostile universe and defend themselves. That is, maintain their separated ego, a very big one, though there are no degrees in the mistake of separation and having false self and no order of difficulties in the miracle. We made one mistake, separated from our true self. It does not matter how big or small our ego self concepts are, they are equally mistaken self views and one act eliminates them, forgiveness.)
On the other hand, you can see other people’s attacks on you, physical or verbal, and overlook them. In overlooking them, that is, forgiving them, you are saying that they cannot attack you, they cannot persecute you; they cannot hurt you.
It is obvious that other persons can attack/persecute/hurt your ego and body; they can even destroy your body with their attacks. But they cannot destroy your eternal Christ self. In defenselessness, you are saying that you are not that which can be attacked/persecuted, your ego and body, but that which is eternal, Christ self. You are not identifying with the ego and body. You are denying that you are an ego and body when you forgive folk’s attacks on you, when you are defenseless to attack.
If you are not an ego and body, then, who are you? You are unified spirit, you are Christ, and you are the one son of God.
As spirit, you are eternal, immortal, and changeless and joined to all being and cannot be hurt by any one. You live in God and God lives in you; you live in all your brothers, as they live in you; you are eternally protected by God and no one can harm a son of God that is aware that his father protects him. (God protects him from the egos mad desire to kill him.)
Human beings are feeble and their attacks, though seemingly harmful in their dreams, do not harm any one in the spirit world.
Overlook what you see other people do to you and then know that God is real. But until you forgive all the wrongs you see other people do to you, you would not know that God is real.
JESUS TEACHING ON FORGIVENESS
The teachings of Jesus Christ, as gleaned from the Christian Bible, can be summarized as love and forgiveness. He taught folks to love and forgive one another. He asked: what would you like other people to do to you? You would like people to love and forgive you, so Jesus asks you to love and forgive them. Love God (love the whole) and love all people (love the parts of the whole) and forgive the wrongs you see other people do to you.
Jesus told a man going to pray (worship) to God and remembered that his neighbor did him wrong to first go home and forgive the wrong doer.
How many times should we forgive wrong doers? He said: seventy times seventy time seventy times, that is, infinitely.
Jesus said that one must forgive those who attacked one if one expects to receive the answers from God to ones prayer. He said that God has heard all ones prayers, all ones requests and already answered them, for God knows what his children want before they ask for them.
To receive the answers to our prayers, we must do one thing and one thing only: we must love and forgive all people. Until we forgive those we see do bad things to us, we shall not receive the gifts of God, which are peace, happiness and abundance.
According to Jesus, we live in a world of mutual attacks and wrong doing; each person is attacking and doing bad things to other persons, and in so doing, pushing them away from him, so as to experience his desired separation. If you want to join people and not permit them to push you away with their attacks on you, you must forgive them when they attack you.
In the only prayer Jesus taught his followers, the our father’s prayer, he told them to pray thus: “our father, who is in haven (oneness), forgive us our wrongs because we have first forgiven each others’ wrongs”.
This prayer is a contract the children of God wrote with their father before they left heaven, oneness, to come to earth, separation, to go to a journey without a distance, a journey to nowhere, for wherever they go they go in God, for God is everywhere, even in their dreams (where they see dream figures are God).
God does not make compromises. God obeys his own laws. In heaven, God’s law is love, that is, that everything is joined. On earth, where we seem separated from each other, God’s law is forgiveness.
When we forgive others, we see that we always live in the presence of love, but do not know it, that we are always joined to those who seem to have attacked us but do not know it.
On earth, forgiveness is the law of God, and if you forgive those who attacked you, you are obeying the law of God. If you do not forgive them, you are disobeying the law of God. You are obeying the law of the ego, separation and the belief that attack is possible and give you what you want.
Folks talk a great deal about being obedient to God, so, may I ask you: do you forgive those who wrong you? The question I ask you, I ask me, for you and I are one.
And they brought a sinful (adulterer) woman to Jesus and asked him what to do to her. The laws of the ego, symbolized by Mosaic laws, required the sinner to be punished. The people wanted to know whether Jesus would disobey the laws of the ego/man/society, and if he did, punish him, as the ego requires.
Jesus said: let him who has not sinned be the first to judge her a sinner and cast the first stone at her.
All have sinned by separating from God and from one another, so all left the woman. The woman, too, has sinned by separating from God and other people hence Jesus told her to go home and sin no more, to separate no more, to join God and all her brothers in spirit, not in body (sex, as she tried to do).
They arrested Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane and one of his apostles, Peter, tried to defend him by striking, with his sword, at one of the policemen that came to arrest him. Jesus said: Peter, put away your sword, for those who live by the sword die by the sword, those who attack and defend die from it; it is those who forgive that enter the kingdom of peace, oneness. I came to teach the world another way of solving problems, so that life on earth is lived more peacefully, joyfully and abundantly: forgiving those who attack one is the path to peace on earth.
Then they took him to the Roman ruler of Jerusalem, Pontus Pilate, and accused him of doing things he did not do, found him guilty and crucified him. He did not defend himself.
Before he died, Jesus asked his father to forgive those who just destroyed his ego- body, for they did not, in fact, destroy his spirit. His spirit is eternal and no one can destroy it. They did nothing to him and therefore ought to be forgiven. They were ignorant and had assumed that he was merely an ego-body; they did not know that he is the eternal son of God. If they had known that he is eternal and changeless spirit, they would not have believed that they could kill him. They were in a dream where they believed that killing and death is possible, so he forgave them, he overlooked their dreams, his and their dreams.
Jesus knew that he elected to be crucified and to seem to die to body and ego only to reappear in spirit (light form); to demonstrate to people that life is eternal. Nothing he did not like happened to him. He wrote the script and placed those who crucified him in the roles they played for him, as they, too, wrote the script and did what they did, except that unlike him, they did not consciously understand that they chose their actions; they saw themselves as victims of circumstances beyond their control.
Jesus had Judas betray him, had Pontius Pilate condemn him to death and had the soldiers who crucified him do what they did to him. All of them did what his script and their script called for.
Jesus seemed to die and reappeared in light body, to prove to people that death is not real. He defeated that which human beings were afraid of the most, death; he resurrected from death.
Jesus performed his own function in the atonement process. He was not angry at those who seemed to persecute him; he forgave them.
Each of us is also being attacked and persecuted by other people, but, unlike Jesus, sees himself as victims and feels angry and fearful. Our job is to understand that no one is persecuting us, that events are happening to us according to our script and the script of those doing things to us.
We are to overlook what we see others do to us. In forgiving them, we recognize that it is all a play, a drama enacted in a dream like setting.
(Each of us has a specific script that calls for things to happen to him in a certain manner. In my own script, I generally do things to help other people and they turn around and try to exploit me, to attack me. Since, like all people, I identify with the ego, I generally feel angry and attack to destroy them. When I learn to forgive, I forgive those who seem ungrateful and attack me despite my apparent good deeds for them. Please remember that I am not a victim of others’ attacks on me; it is me who set the whole drama up; it is me, who chose to behave in a social serving manner and have others seem to betray me to make my subsequent destructive attacks on them seem justified in my eyes. But the fact, according to the Holy Spirit, is that no attack or defense is ever justified. I must forgive all those I see attack me. I must forgive those I made attack me in my dream that the innocent son of God could be attacked and destroyed, he cannot.)
None of the things we see done on earth has been done, in fact. In knowing this fact, we experience the peace of God that no ego minded person can explain.
HOLY INSTANT
If the individual keeps on overlooking what happens to him on earth, practicing forgiveness, for great and small hurts, in his life, he experiences oneness with God and God’s creation. Momentarily, he escapes from the world of past, present and future and enters the world of now; he escapes from the world of space, time and matter and enters the world of unified spirit; he experiences timelessness and the world of no you and I, no seer and seen, no subject and object, just one self that is all selves. This experience is called by many names in different religious traditions. Hindus call it Samadhi, Buddhists call it Nirvana, Zen Buddhists call it Satori; collectively, Oriental religions call it enlightenment to the light that is our true nature, illumination to the luminary light we are. Christians call it mystical union. A Course in Miracles calls it Holy Instants and God’s Revelation. Call it what you like, it has no name. All I can tell you is that suddenly you experience light everywhere and you are part of that unified light, a light without beginning and end, a light with no space in it. In it, you know yourself as a part that is nevertheless the whole; you experience yourself as immortal and all knowing (not about the things of our world but spiritual matters). It is really not possible to talk about a subject that our ego intellectual categories cannot comprehend, indeed, that seems like insanity to our egos. Let us, therefore, concentrate on the world of the here and now, our separated ego world, the world of speech.
IDEALISM: EGO BIG PLANS TO SAVE THE EGOS WORLD
How is salvation obtained? It is obtained by forgiving the dream, by overlooking the world one sees with ones eyes. This means overlooking the past, present and future, the world of space, time and matter. It means seeing the perceptual world and telling your self that it is nothing and does not matter, and letting it go.
If you have no investment in the dream world, the good and bad of it, then you are ready to see the Holy Spirit’s world, a world made to replace our world, the New World, New Israel, New Jerusalem, Heaven’s Gate, Happy Dream, Borderland between heaven and earth.
The problem is that when one sees the world for what it is: worthless, valueless, purposeless and meaningless, one is motivated to improve it with ego idealism. One imagines how one could be better, how other people could be better and how the world could be better. This is pursuit of fantasies.
Pursuit of ego fantasies keeps one going for a while; it kept me going until my mid thirties. It gives one the impression that only one can improve what seems a rotten world.
The neurotic child sees through the temporary world, for what it is: nothing. But, instead of seeking the world of God, he seeks to improve the world. He does so by inventing an idealistic ego for him, for other people, and ideal social institutions that are not going to work. He then withdraws from other people and in social isolation, in hiding, dreams about his ideals, and imagines how he is going to improve the world.
In isolation he retains his fantastic ego that does whatever it wants to do in the world of fantasy, not in the real world. He is living in fantasy land.
Idealism does not solve real human problems. Realistic normal persons solve their problems through science and technology, whereas the idealistic person does not focus on empirical reality but attempts to solve problems at the imaginary level, only. He is not solving any problems; he is escaping from solving problems. He is escaping from empirical and social reality.
However, it must be noted that the neurotic idealist cannot go back to the world of normalcy, to the dream and take the dream as real. He cannot return to deeper parts of the dream. He is beginning the awakening process and could never return to deep sleep.
He could escape into some form of religious fantasy. Some religions offer alternative illusions to the world’s shattered illusions. Religious fantasies seem to reduce the pain neurotics feel and may offer them some temporary escape. In North America, many neurotics escape into Eastern religions and or new age religions.
As long as they retain their egos, people are not solving their problems.
True spirituality is whatever enables the individual to study his ego in an objective manner and come to realize that it is a jail house. That it is the cause of all his problems, the cause of his pain and anxiety and urge him to annihilate it.
When the ego is let go one surrenders to God, and permits God (Holy Spirit) to guide one, one lives in peace.
True religion gives one peace and joy while one is still in this world; it teaches one that this world is an illusion, a dream to be let go and urges one to return to our true home, unified spirit.
Idealism gives conflict and anxiety for it juxtaposes an ideal self for one to work towards a self that could never be attained in reality hence leads to frustration and unhappiness; whereas true religion gives peace by offering folks the truth of this world being a dream to be shined off with the light of God.
The individual must let go of the ego and its plans to save the world. Be it normal or idealistic plans to save the world, they all fail. The only plan that works is the Holy Spirit’s plan, love and forgiveness for all.
In the world of politics, whatever is motivated by love for all persons will work out well in the temporary universe?
As long as a human being pursues separation from his true self, seeks indivi(duality) from his one unified self, he will live in pain and agony. It is return to non-duality, to oneness, to the same and equal and unified world of God that heals.
ADDICTIONS AS EFFORTS TO MAKE A PAINFUL WORLD JOYFUL
When the individual recognizes that the world offers him nothing of lasting value, that the world is pain, that the world is worthless, valueless, meaningless and purposeless, he seeks to find joy in it. Some seek that illusive joy in sex. In sex, the individual momentarily forgets his problems. Thus he seeks sex in a compulsive manner, for sex becomes a means of altering his mood and enabling him to escape from his bored existence. Such persons become sex addicts.
The sex addict finds the world, as it is, boring, worthless, valueless, meaningless and purposeless. In the meantime, he finds that if he has sex that he tends to forget his problems. Sex is an escape from the boring realities of every day living in a meaningless world. The person who finds solace in sex addiction is caught in the merry go round of seeking sex to alter his chemical balance and give him surcease from his existential ennui. It could be addiction to pornography or to actual sex or to masturbation or to homosexuality. (Those drown their sorrows by seeking incessant orgasm, alcoholism and drugs, any thing that makes them feel that they are bodies and that body can give them joy).
The addict retains his ego and the ego’s home, body and stimulates them incessantly. It is when spiritual joy is lacking in a person’s life that he becomes addicted to self destructive addictive behaviors.
The alternative is for the individual to experience the peace that comes from letting go of his ego and identifying with the Holy Spirit. In spiritual experience of oneness, one feels so much peace that no sexual orgasm could ever approximate it. Sex is nothing compared to the bliss those who let go of their ego and let God live in them experience. No person who lives a life of God could be an addict.
Addicts feel joyless in this world and seek joy in alcohol, nicotine, caffeine, cocaine, amphetamine, heroin, food and any drug that stimulates the body and makes it feel temporary pleasure.
This is not a moralizing issue. Until a person finds joy in spirit, he is going to seek it in the bottle or in drugs, food or sex. You do not need to preach to them not to be addicts. What you need to do is show them an alternative, living a life directed by the Holy Spirit, love and forgiveness, an egoless life.
YOU ARE NOT THE WORLD
I began this essay by saying that you are the world. This is true and false. The world does not exist. But you do exist. You, as the son of God, coexist with God in eternity. The world you now find yourself in is a dream world and does not exist, in fact. You are not your dream; therefore, you are not the world.
However, it is necessary that, in so far that the world seems to exist that you recognize that you projected it out, and that the world you see represents your wishes and thinking. In that sense the world is a projection of you. You need to love the world, you projected it.
You love it by forgiving it what you see people do in it. Since all people are you, what they do, you do. When you forgive those who did what your ego mind considers evil things to you, you forgive you the evil things you seem to have done to other people.
You did what you see other people do to you, and they did what they see you do to them, for God has one son who does everything done in the world through what seems each of us. Forgive each of us to see that you are all of us.
Forgiveness is a means for removing the veil to the awareness of love. Love is all that exists, for God is love. God is one light that begins nowhere and ends nowhere and each of us is a part of that light.
Forgive and experience love. Love is all there is and that that love is God (God is union of all things in spirit).
Forgiveness is a law of God and you must forgive all; your only choice is when you choose to do so. You cannot disobey the will of God forever, for no one can disobey his will.
God’s will is his Son’s will; both will union. You can dream that you are disobedient to God, but in time you will know that you remain as God created you, unified with him. (In union/love all God’s children are innocent; you must forgive all of them to know that they are all innocent. Teach all people that despite the evils they seem to do on earth, that they are innocent.)
Forgiveness is the means of knowing that you are still as God created you, unified with him.
CONCLUSION
This essay points out that we projected this world out. Ideas leave not their source. The ideas that made this world are still in our minds. In that sense, the world is us. But on the other hand, we are not our ideas. The thinker is different from his ideas. The ideas of separation and specialness are insane ideas that entered our minds, and in pursuit of them we made this world. We are not those insane ideas and not this insane world. But in as much as we identify with this world, we must love it. We must forgive the world and then become aware that where we see it is always the world of unified spirit. God is where you currently see you in body and see all of us. Forgive all of us and experience that we are all the parts of God, always formless spirit.
Clearly, this essay espoused ideas not found in traditional Christian religions. It is, in many ways, similar to Hinduism and Buddhism. It is the true teaching of the gospel of the Holy Spirit, a teaching made most manifest in the life and behavior of Jesus the son of God, the Christ. You, too, are the son of God but denied it and see yourself as the son of man, a separated ego self. Forgive and know love and reclaim your Sonship, your Christhood.
Forgive and you are saved, redeemed and delivered from the ego and its world of separation, and returned to the world of God, the world of peace and happiness.
First, God created us as Christ, that is, unified with him and each other; then, Christ seemed to crucify himself and die when we seemed to separate from our father and live as a separated ego.
Christ is resurrected from ego, from death, when he lets go of the ego and returns to God.
Christ is reborn in each of us when we accept union and let go of separation. The second coming of Christ into our lives and to the world is when we declare for God and give up the ego.
We pass the last judgment on the ego and its world and declare them false and return to the world of God, the unified world. Each of us, with the aid of all of us, and with the aid of the Holy Spirit and Jesus Christ passes this last judgment on his ego and its world and returns to the self and world that God created, the self and world of continuous light, the unified self.
MEDITATION AND PRAYER
Hinduism attempted to provide a means to verify the existence of spirit. It attempted to do so through Raja Yoga, the royal yoga. (Patanjali posited five yoga(s): Jnana, Bhakti, Karma, Tantra and Raja Yoga…other yoga exists, such as Ayudi and Hatha…we have explained these in Real Self Psychology). Raja yoga is meditation and in it the individual attempts to reach his true self, atman (in Christian categories, the son of God), which is the same as Brahman (God). In prayer people talk to their creator; in meditation people listen to their creator.
In meditation, the individual consciously tells himself that what he thinks is true is not true. Neti, neti, not this, not this, one of the Upanishads said. He tells himself that he does not know who he is, does not know who other people are, does not know what any thing is and does not know what any thing means. He accepts that all information reached through ego intellect is by definition not true…is true in the world of dreams, our world, but not true in unified spirit.
In meditation the individual accepts ignorance and asks the universe, life or if you insist on humanizing it, God, to tell him what the truth is.
The critical point is acceptance that all ego derived concepts are apriori false (are only true in the dream world). The individual denies that he is his self concept, that other people are the concepts he has of them, and that any thing (animals, trees, rocks, stars etc) are what he thinks that they are or that the events he finds himself in are what he thinks that they are. He accepts that whatever he thinks that he knows is mere appearance of knowledge, shadow, not knowledge itself; he does not know what is behind those appearances.
In meditation, the individual denies his separated self and asks to be told who his real self is. (Buddhists call this no-self, void, empty mind, open mind etc). Call it what you like, the critical point is the cleaning of the intellect of all ideas that it thinks is the truth.
The individual then stays quiet, denying his ego chattering, or allowing it to come and go without identifying with it.
Thoughts will always enter into ones mind but one can choose to just observe them as smoke passing through one without saying that they are the truth. In heaven itself thoughts also enter our minds. For example, the thought of separation, the thought of heaven’s opposite, entered our minds and we pursued it hence dream this world of separation.
If the individual can remain silent for thirty minutes, and not identify with his thoughts, he would feel calm, peaceful and happy. Above all, he would learn that the thinker is different from his thoughts.
If he persists in denying that he is his ideas, at some point he would experience all ideas disappear from his mind. He would literally feel emptied of all concepts and ideas. He would experience fear, a sense of terror, really for he no longer knows who he is (he would feel like he is dying and disappearing into oblivion, at which point his ego would rally with more grandiose thoughts; the individual may experience transient psychosis, decompensation, and to reassure himself that he exists, he might invent a grandiose self concept, delusion of grandeur, and see what is not there, hallucination. Because of the danger of psychosis, it is useful to have a spiritual advisor before you do serious meditation; you need a person to let you know that you are not dying when you empty your mind of all ego based conceptual thinking and feel like you do not exist and your ego comes up with absurd thoughts etc).
If the individual has the courage to persist, he would begin to have spiritual hallucinations (our world is ego hallucinations). He would see himself, other people, dead relatives and friends, animals, trees, everything in light forms. This is what A Course in Miracles called the real world, the borderland between heaven and earth, the happy dream, and heaven’s gate. Hinduism calls it Brahmaloka. This world is still like our world except that it is in light forms. It is as true as our world is, that is, not true. Nevertheless, it is a world, just another version of our world, a blessed version of our world; if you like the Holy Spirit’s version of it.
Every body goes through the world of light forms; this world is still a world of matter, albeit refined matter, photons, and a world of space and time. It is a happy illusion. After it, the individual reaches the formless world of God.
After all the world of forms is gone through, the individual breaks through (Moksha) and enters into Samadhi, the formless world of God.
In the world of God, there is no you and I, no seer and seen, no subject and object, just one self, one life, one spirit that is itself and simultaneously all of us, infinite spirits.
In Christian categories, this world is called heaven; it is blissful: peaceful and happy; it is eternal, permanent, and changeless; it is a world of light, unified light.
We cannot explain the world of spirit in human language, for language adapts to the world of separation, our world, whereas the world of God is the world of union and there is no need for perception and language.
The salient point is that in meditation, we can verify the existence of the world of spirit. Love all people, forgive all people and then meditate and see whether you would not experience your real self, formless, unified spirit. But until you have loved and forgiven all children of God, met heaven’s condition, you would not experience heaven.
CRITICISM
A reasonable skeptic would immediately ask whether forgiveness entails not punishing any one: murderers, rapists, pedophiles, thieves etc. Should we empty our prisons of all the criminals we locked up? And where is the evidence that forgiving criminals would prevent them from engaging in further crime? If you forgive a pedophile and permit him to walk the streets would he not be abusing other children? And, if so, are we, society, not all responsible for his abuse of children?
These are good questions. Society is an ego based system. As such, it operates on the ego’s belief that punishment is necessary for sinners. I do not expect our ego based society not to punish criminals, soon. Then put criminals in jails and prisons, but while there, teach them loving and kind behaviors.
I am aware that some persons have antisocial personalities and no matter what you do, have no social conscience, and do not feel remorse and guilt for their wrongful behaviors. In fact, some of these criminal personalities enjoy hurting, even killing people and, as such, will always act destructively towards society. Clearly, these predators are not yet fully human. They therefore belong in prisons.
However, for the few persons who have decided to follow the example of Jesus and the teaching of the Holy Spirit, forgiveness is not a matter of debate but a must. If you want to return to God, you must love all people at all times and must forgive all those who personally wronged you. Do not worry about those who did not personally do bad things to you. Forgiveness is for you to exercise on those who hurt you.
Leave other people to worry whether they are going to forgive or not. It is not your business whether the governments of the world forgive or not; your business is to personally forgive those who did things to you. Salvation is for one person at a time. There is no mass awakening from the sleep yet.
Jesus forgave those who attacked and killed him. He did not say that because other people are not doing so that he was not going to forgive wrong doers.
Over ninety percent of the population is normal. That is, they are egos still fast asleep and dreaming that separation is real. They will inevitably defend themselves from attack, hold grievances and punish those who attacked them. But for the few persons who are beginning to awaken from the dream of self forgetfulness, who are ready to take the message of Jesus and the Holy Spirit seriously, they have no option but to forgive all.
You must practice forgiveness. This includes when others attack to destroy your body. Jesus allowed his body to be destroyed and you must do the same. There is no compromise here. Practice forgiveness at all times; practice forgiveness for small and big wrongs done to you. If you do so, you are a true Christian, not the compromised groups (Catholics, Protestants) that call themselves Christians and do not do what their leader asked them to do: forgive all sinners, for only in forgiveness do we find salvation, peace and happiness.
Remember that to forgive means to for-give-love to all people; when you give your love to all people, including those who harmed your ego and body, you are a Christian and are saved, redeemed and delivered from the pain of the ego. Occasionally, you will see yourself and other people in light forms and sometimes you disappear into formless oneness with all creation and its creator. Occasionally, the material universe disappears from you, that is, you awaken from the dream of separation and know that the world does not exist and all that exists is the unified, formless world of God. You live in peace and happiness, the gifts of God.
* In Real Self Psychology, our main Textbook, the principles of Spiritual Psychology are applied to specific mental health issues. All mental health issues emanate from our belief in separation. When we give up separation, give up our false self concepts, ego separated selves and its images, embrace our real self, the unified Christ self, close the gap that separate us from each other and from God, we heal our mental health issues, be they schizophrenia, mania, delusion, depression, anxiety, personality disorders and so on. Obviously, no one can force another person to close the space between and other people; only the individual can make that choice; only the individual can heal himself; all that one can do is heal oneself, that is, join other people, and become an example of a healed person and teach it. However, as long as one lives on earth, one will see space, time and matter; that is, and one will live the world of separation cannot entirely close the gap and still be on earth. At best, one knows what healing is and still retains some unhealed aspect to one; ego separated self, and uses it to teach love. If one is totally healed, closed the gap between one and other people, one would be in spirit not on matter, earth. Forgiveness, which, on earth, is the true meaning of love, heals all mental disorders, that is, joins people to their creator, God and to each other. To be separated from all is to be sick; to be joined to all is to be healed.
Further Reading
• The Christian Bible, (particularly the New Testament).
• Hindu Holy Books, (particularly the Bagavad Gita).
• Ozodi Thomas Osuji, Real Self Psychology. (2006)
• Helen Schucman, A Course in miracles. (1976)
• Gnosticism, (such as The Gospel of Thomas).
• See www.spiritualpsychologytoday.com (Articles and Archive).