Visualization News – August 2004
Hello and welcome back! This month I will be discussing the idea of transcending attack and defense in our relationships with others. I recently saw a movie called Big Eden, which struck me very strongly at an emotional level. It was a very atypical but effective romantic drama that was very satisfying emotionally. It hit all the right notes without gratuitous sex or violence. Watching it was, for me, a much better experience than watching many other “romantic” movies that didn’t nourish me in the same way.
In our relationships with other people, we tend to keep a diary of events that are emotionally difficult and unfulfilling. In our minds, we gather a great map of hurts and slights and hostilities and misunderstandings. With people that we get along with, we share camaraderie over how much we hate or dislike certain types of people or particular individuals. We revel in our mutual disgust and take that as a kind of love. However, no matter how many times we come together over our dislikes, the pain of conflict contaminates our experience. It is like seeing many movies that don’t satisfy us emotionally rather than that one movie that does.
We have to find a way to rise beyond both attack of others and a defensive stance against others. In order to do this we need to be able to address the one common uniting theme that ties them together, separation. How are we not separate? In order for an idea to tie us together in a meaningful way, it must encompass everything we are and everything we do like an umbrella.
The Truth, which is a philosophical absolute and an abstraction, is real. It is a real being that exists. This seems absurd when we think of the human mind as being the source and determinant of the truth. But, we can backtrack to this conclusion through a number of steps.
First of all, reality is entirely an event within consciousness. Secondly, our “physical” experience is something that we create consciously ourselves. We hide our own true identity in order to involve ourselves with this experience and our temporary false identity. And, finally, there is a level of consciousness beyond individual identity where there is only one collective being in existence, and we are part of that being, and that being’s experience is the Truth.
Truth is alive and conscious because consciousness is ultimately the only thing that really exists. Consciousness is the only thing that is really “alive.” Reality is entirely internal. Because of the lack of “things” to make up our ultimate reality, such as a universe, planets, bodies, time and so forth, we ultimately have to come back to our own true timeless identity, which is shared with all other beings and collectively constitutes the Truth.
This Truth manifests itself as beings in conflict through a process of individual beings en masse masking and hiding their own identities to allow for the experience of being multiple beings in conflict. At higher levels of reality, which are illusions that are closer to the Truth, all individuals work together in a manner of total love and cooperation with each other and the conflicts tend to be more subtle and internal.
At the level of Truth, all beings share one common goal and purpose because they have stopped masking their true identities. So, they enjoy total fulfillment in being part of the Truth. They are all expressions of this one idea, and so they are in perfect alignment.
This state has no need or desire for hostility or conflict between people, because it is impossible to hurt any other being at this level. We are awake enough here to see that our reality is entirely internal and made out of our own consciousness and desires. The fulfillment of our desires from one moment to the next is entirely made possible through the activities of other beings simultaneously fulfilling their desires as well. The fulfillment process is perfectly timed in this way because it is all part of one process, the Truth.
The unifying principle, then, is the purpose of the Truth, which overrides and contains our seeming conflicts and interactions with and against others. We see others attack and we seek to defend ourselves. We are angered and we wish to attack others. Although attack is in reality impossible, it is possible to imagine and thus experience the effects of these thoughts. And, because our beliefs are actually desires, we must actually desire conflict at some level, or we would not believe it was possible.
Our concepts of heroism, which are our ideals about who we think we should be, are based on ideas of self-preservation against others as well as saving others from threatening situations, including events where other people wish to attack them. We want to save the lives of others we identify with and care about and attack those who would attack us and/or those who we seek to protect. So, our mythology is wrapped around the necessity of attack and defense. In fact our mythology is a process of buoying and defending our attack/defense standpoint.
Attack and defense are illusions based on our thinking. The purpose of the Truth is what is happening, has happened and always will happen behind the scenes in every experience we have. Consciousness is the process of evolution that causes us to shift our identification into something closer to the Truth. This is our only ultimate purpose. We may wake up and have in our mind the idea that our purpose is to accomplish something or get something, but the overriding purpose that contains us is evolution. Evolution decides what we will get and when. It is the process behind our purpose.
The higher we go, and the closer we get to the Truth, the more evolution looks like getting exactly what we want. For example, when I write these articles I can do it because I feel obligated to keep my word, because I feel ashamed if I don’t do it, or because I feel driven to get out some particular message. However, when I am most in synch with the truth, I do it because I love to do it.
Doing what we want is the least deceitful thing we can do. It is through being satisfied by doing what we want that we get the most fulfillment. If we think that we have to hurt others to get what we want, then we don’t really understand what we want and we need to reevaluate. We need to dig deeper and find out what we are really missing in our life. A desire that involves hurting others is a mask to hide a deeper desire that doesn’t harm others. We hold onto this mask because we are convinced that we can’t have what we really truly want, but we can believe in the negative version.
The Truth’s purpose is fulfilled regardless of the form and shape of our lives. We can live in conflict with ourselves and others or we can live in harmony with them. We can raise defenses against others or feel no need to do so. Either way, the purpose of the Truth will be fulfilled. That purpose is expressed as our actions causing others to evolve and ourselves becoming more evolved through our experiences with others.
Conflict with others cannot actually exist. It is impossible because it doesn’t exist in reality. Because it doesn’t exist in reality the illusion of conflict has to be maintained by keeping our attention on one aspect of experience and off of another aspect, just as a professional magician uses distraction to keep the audience fixated on the wrong hand. Conflict is impossible and the knowledge that it is impossible is hidden in our awareness of our true purpose.
If we remain aware of our purpose, which is to cause others to evolve out of suffering and physical experience and into a better state of being, then there is no longer any basis for conflict with others. Likewise, we must acknowledge that the only real purpose that other people have is to cause us to evolve out of suffering and physical experience. So we have a shared and equally benevolent purpose.
As our false identity conveys a false purpose, which appears to be in conflict with others, it can be easy to forget that we share one true purpose. It is important for us to remember and re-remember our true purpose on a continual basis throughout the day, especially when we are in conflict with others in our mind. When we have a negative thought about someone who we think could hurt us, we can say mentally, “This person’s purpose is only to cause me to evolve out of suffering.” There is an actual future event where we will leave suffering behind and never touch it again. And, surprisingly, we will realize that it never even existed in the first place, nor do we need it anymore.
When we mentally attack someone, we can follow that thought with the thought, “My only real purpose is to cause others to evolve out of suffering.” This reminder will gradually set us on the right course. Then we can begin to have what we want as we realize that our existence is entirely benevolent towards others. We don’t need guilt and we don’t need to judge. The form of our life is irrelevant as our purpose is revealed, and we can let go of the mind that clings to a particular form.
Judgment of others is the flip side of guilt. When we feel guilt we judge ourselves against a false (and impossible) set of standards and find ourselves lacking. We imagine that we possess “free will” and that there is some alternative timeline we could have explored where we did “the right thing”. We don’t acknowledge our lack of free will and that we are something in evolution, not something meant to be “perfect” or to always do the right thing. We can’t read minds and we don’t walk around with a crystal ball. Who we are is never in conflict with our true purpose.
When we judge others we create conflict by imagining that there is a battleground of free will between ourselves and others, and we are “right” and they are “wrong.” If we can acknowledge that this person is evolving, we can see that they are not meant to be perfect but only to be who they are. There is no battleground because there is no free will that offers an alternative to reality. The mythology of free will exists to create hatred and judgment in our minds. In Truth there is nothing we can do that is “wrong” because we can’t hurt anyone and because nothing is forbidden in a reality made of consciousness.
When we take up the activity of perceiving our true purpose and the true purpose of others, we set straight what was distorted in our mind. In doing so, the very basis of conflict is undermined. We do what we want, receive satisfaction doing it and we consciously and accidentally help others in the process. Because we consciously involve ourselves in our true purpose that is totally helpful and non-harmful to others, we increasingly see in our lives the ways in which we help others.
When we receive the fulfillment of helping others, rather than the experience of helping others with no feeling of fulfillment, we find that it nourishes us so deeply that we crave only that. It is a higher order of fulfillment. It feeds our heart and mind fully.
Receiving our truth purpose is the means to this fulfillment. We don’t have to preach the truth, become a martyr or “do” things for others. We only do what we want to do and that will include activities that help others, sometimes in unanticipated ways. By doing what we want we accomplish our true purpose and find fulfillment in doing it. We see the fulfilling movie and leave feeling satisfied.
