In this edition I will refer to Truth/God as the idea of the one consciousness that ultimately exists. Use either term, which ever works best for you. It’s not ultimately about religion or semantics, but getting to the truth about ourselves, so use whatever word is the most meaningful and the least laden with negative connotations for you.
This week I will look at the statement “I am who I truly am and there is nothing else.” This is a statement about our existing beyond the manifest and perception, beyond time and in a state of perfection with one another, in perfect love, with access to all possible experiences merely by an act of will.
First of all, you are rooted in what you have always been, perfect and indivisible by words or thoughts, beyond any kind of scrutiny or examination, a very sophisticated consciousness without the need for a body, senses or even the limitations of emotion. Truth/God is within us and so are all other beings (because we are all within Truth/God.)
Although we seem to have a “physical” identity, we are simply focusing on an idea of that identity and turning our attention away from who we really are. We actually consciously and purposefully hide our true identity from ourselves for the purpose of generating this illusion of physical body and life. We want to explore the “what if” scenario that the concept of physicality creates. What if we could be separate and from and in conflict from others? It is impossible in Reality, but we are experiencing what the mind imagines it would be like if it could exist.
In our true identity, we are much like an idea. We enclose not only the idea of Truth/God and other people, but they in turn envelop us. In this way true reality is completely internal. Others exist within us rather than outside of us. In this world we are always at one with others, in terms of our being completely loving and cooperative with them, and them to ourselves.
There is no conflict of will or interests between people and Truth/God. This is possible because we are ultimately one being, one idea, (Truth/God) and that idea in its fractured form (as our individual selves in Truth) is still part of that one being. This is the one true underlying mechanism, if you will.
In your identity in truth, you know exactly what you are because you are awareness and your knowing is the same thing as being who you are. But, you also know everyone else including Truth/God because you encompass the idea of them as well. You encompass them because you are, in a mathematical sense, a subset of Truth/God, as is everyone else, but the portion of yourself that encompasses Truth/God IS Truth/God, and it therefore encompasses all other subsets of Truth/God, in other words, everyone else..
Time is meaningless in your true identity in the sense that it is an idea created to encompass the idea of a place where there are events that involve a “time stream” and are enacted sequentially. In the Truth there is no time stream, but simply the space that encompasses everything you do. You have a sequential flow of experiences but there is no “time stream” that binds each one of you to it. There is just an eternal space of “nowness.” We are getting into barriers that language can’t cross in trying to explain this.
When you gain awareness of your identity as it is at the Truth/God level, which is possible even in this “physical” life, you will reevaluate your physical life as a new kind of artificial construct. You won’t totally withdraw from that life all at once. Rather you will naturally be drawn back into the Truth/God level of awareness by degrees as you simultaneously release your attachment to physical experience. As you have experiences that fulfill your “physical” desires (that involve your having a physical identity), you will release the physical and increasingly embrace your original self that has always been there and has never really left.
The gradual incline into becoming your identity in Truth starts at a very abstract level and then as your “physical” identity begins to give way, there is gradually more space in your mind to experience your identity in truth. Physicality is actually a mental construct, and as it was purposefully constructed, it has to be patiently deconstructed in gradual steps, as to not excessively shake up your psyche and create fear in you.
The issue of how to go back to Truth is really an issue of knowing what you want. You wonder if your life in Truth/God is what you really want. If you are honest with yourself you have to admit that you are not really ready to go back to it, but you know that you will be soon.
Rather than seeing your life as a series of events, you allow your “lack of knowledge” of your false identity to form a kind of piece of food that you are chewing. You taste and appreciate the food then digest it when you have finished appreciating it. One experience after another fulfills your remaining desires for physical experience. You are not a victim; your entire experience comes out of your own (Truth level identity) desires.
You don’t have a real past or future in physicality. But, you have all possible experiences at your disposal (including every experience that every other being has ever had), because you are fundamentally made of consciousness that is tied into every other consciousness. So, all your desires can be fulfilled, even ones you haven’t conceived of yet. Don’t be alarmed by experiences that have been painful, because your Truth identity has its own reasons for creating these experiences.
There is a strange kind of dance that goes on between your time-oriented and non-time-oriented identities. This dance is a two-way cooperation and is in no way hostile. One party will sometimes back off so that the other can “do its thing.” Some days you will be caught up in form, and in others you will go very deep into Truth.
In this process, you begin to wonder if you really could, if you wanted to, go back to something before time and manifestation in your current physical state. You wonder if this is even possible.
The mind that is capable of making that leap is already there, and the mind that you have learned to identify with can’t do it. Not inherently, but in believing in its own set of false ideas about what it is. So the answer is a definitive yes; you can make that shift and in fact you are already that identity in Truth. But to get there you must understand what it means to want it. And can you want what you don’t really understand?
If you are already your identity in Truth, right now, behind the illusion, then you must already understand it. So, the only explanation is that you already know that you want to return to Truth but you are simply holding off on that desire to make room for your time-bound desires. You suspend a greater pleasure for a lesser one.
In order to get back to truth, you have to experience a few things. First of all, you have to be able to conceive of the possibility of a “life” without perception, where you experience consciousness contact with others directly, without the need for bodies or an environment. Secondly, you must, by stages, begin to intellectually understand what that means.
Finally, you must reach a place where you consciously can stop performing the act of perception altogether. This is a rather odd statement at first glance, but it is completely literal. Perception is what your self is truth is imagining that it is doing. Your time-based identity has to evolve to the point where it both understands intellectually and desires to go beyond perception, and has a clear idea of how to do it.
Once you stop perceiving then your identity in Truth will be what is left over. It is the artificial conception of there being a state of “perception” that gets in the way of the pure pleasure of being in truth. But it doesn’t really “get in the way” at all. Rather, it is the means by which you engage in a certain idea of something (perception) that cannot exist in Reality. Your mind, along with the minds of others, cooperatively engages in experiencing this imaginary reality. The mind creates its own approximation of what it thinks perception WOULD feel like if it COULD exist. That is what you are experiencing now.
The fear that exists that there will be “nothing” behind the curtain of perception is common. But that is a false idea, as we all know full well what is behind the curtain as we are already behind it right now. Rather, we just don’t want to give up exploring the idea of perception quite yet. When we pull back the curtain there will be something much vaster, more expansive and beautiful than perception there to greet us. And, we will be able to return to perception when and if we wish to pursue any unfinished desires in that realm, at any time we wish.
Physical experience is like a cartoon. Everything about it is ridiculous. It is caked in so many layers of ignorance and self-absorbed nonsense that there is no clear path out. However, when we see through the various levels of absurdity of it, then we understand how ridiculous it is and always has been.
Despite any degree of detachment we may have, we can still be overwhelmed by stress and pain occasionally. Yet it is at these moments that the absurdity is the most stretched and obvious (to our identity in Truth), while for our identity in the “physical” it is the most real feeling of experience available because of its emotional intensity.
Although we want to ultimately get past perception, there are many degrees of working through it before we get to that point. The first thing we can do is to take some aspect of our perception, for example the time it took for a certain event to happen or the time we have before something else happens, and then subject that detail to Truth by means of a sort of photographic development process where by being exposed to Truth, that aspect of our perception changes into a belief that is part of Truth rather than the physical fiction.
When you think of perceptual reality as a kind of building material that breaks down in anything but a very controlled environment, you can understand how this works. Perceptual reality only constructs objects and events if we suspend our focus on Reality to a certain degree. If Reality asserts itself too much, the building material immediately falls to pieces and the rules of “perception” fall away.
So, as we discussed previously, if we subject some smaller element of a larger physical issue to this kind of process of photo-development by Reality, the consequential collapse of the physical illusion must happen as well. The other supporting elements will not be able to support the weight of the false reality and it will come tumbling down.
The way that we can subject some element of our “perceptual reality” to Truth is to demand that it sit in the space between the physical reality and Reality in Truth; a space that we create by imagining it. We only place the perceptual element in a position where it exists for a while in the presence of Truth, rather than immersing it in Truth. The mechanism for doing this is simple. We will go through the whole process in the form of an exercise.
An example would be that we have historically had a problem losing weight. The time we have been in the past and will be overweight in the future will be our perceptual element. It is just the time aspect of the whole problem.
The perceptual element, which we will call, “(A)” will be defined first. When it has been defined we will re-experience it in a state that is 50% in “physical reality” and 50% in Truth. You can visualize this as a darker left-hand space and a lighter right-hand space. We will call this state “Bridge Reality.”
When we experience (A) in Bridge Reality, we will not be challenged to completely cross over into something that our “physical” sense of self cannot understand. But we will specifically put that one element in the presence of Truth there. By placing (A) at the ridge between the darker physical and lighter Truth sides, it will not be able to return to physical reality in wholeness after a period of meditation on it being there. It will quickly collapse and your whole physical scenario will have to adjust itself as your understanding shifts towards Reality.
The question of what element of the situation to subject to this treatment isn’t as important. Any major element of the situation will work. All are equally useable and all will collapse the total structure. Some possible elements are an object, the period of time it took to be involved in some type of experience of a particular set of experiences involving one person. The only common element is that this perceptual element must encompass all of your past and future events with that item/type of experience/person.
Exercise: Bridge Reality
Begin by choosing a problematic situation; find one element of that situation that you can subject to Truth. Define that one element as “(A).” For simplicity sake, let’s just use the time spent (past and future) out of our life in that problematic situation.
Visualize an empty white space, with a somewhat gray side on the left and a bright white side on the right. There is a clear, visible line of demarcation down the middle. Define (A) as being a symbol that represents the time spent, past and future, dealing with that problem. Place (A) visually at the center line of demarcation between physical reality truth on the left and Truth on the right.
Now, simply relax and breathe in and out slowly for about five minutes, watching the symbol (A). At first, nothing will happen. Then, after a few minutes you will see the symbol begin do break into tiny colored bits and disintegrate before your eyes. Simultaneously, you will experience an influx of understanding.
For example, you might make (A) represent the time spent in your life, past and future, being obese. You will begin to see, as the (A) dissolves, that you don’t have a body at all, so you never were obese. Your body is an idea within your mind, and you created from the level of Truth, so obese is just an observation about the body you created for your imaginary identity in the physical.
Secondly, no event can be forced on you. You imagine that you hate being obese, but in Truth it is impossible to have what you don’t want. Therefore you must want to have the experience of imagining that you are obese and hating it.
Part of the pain of being obese is the sense of being watched and judged by others. But, no being can hurt you without your desire to imagine that you are being hurt. Beings cannot and have no desire to hurt each other in Truth. Your mind in Truth is entirely yours and you have all eternity to do whatever you desire. So no one can force judgment or even express judgment about your false identity without your wish.
The idea that food can enslave or addict you is also false from the level of Truth. Rather, your attitudes, feelings and compulsions around food are all generated by your identity in Truth to serve its own purposes.
Furthermore, food cannot lower your self-esteem because you have always known that you are a God-like being in Truth, surrounded by beings you love and always with Truth/God forever. You are even aware of that right now, although you are creating an experience away from that knowledge. Your self-esteem is essentially limitless in Truth and cannot be limited by anyone or anything.
Your negative feelings about being obese cannot exist, nor can the suffering it has caused you physically. There is simply no suffering in Reality. Suffering is entirely created by the imaginary rules imposed on the mind by our own self in Truth. While suffering seems entirely real, it is in fact a kind of sleight-of-hand of the mind. Surprisingly, we have never suffered in Truth, not even any imaginary suffering.
You might wonder at this point how all these understandings help you overcome your obesity. By doing this exercise repeatedly over a period of time, you diminish the physical illusion’s power to capture and control you. You will regain your self-esteem, freedom and willpower. The Truth is always positive and empowering. Use it to both solve your problems and get yourself out of the physical nightmare. Take me home!