Get comfortable, because this post is lengthy, but also chock-a-block full of insightful information – as will be most of my future postings about Spiritual Truth. Originally, I published this as a four-part series called “What is God?,” which made it less daunting to read, but looked awkward in the browser. So, here we are with one long post rebranded as “A Crash Course on Spiritual Truth.”
Let’s begin our quick-and-dirty primer by defining what God is — and what He’s not. God is NOT a bearded old man looking down on the world from a big shiny throne up in Heaven. God is not, in fact, a person at all, nor is Heaven an actual place.
God is spirit. God is mind. Verily, verily, God is the Supreme Creative Mind and/or Causeless Cause, which — “in the beginning” — extended the Force of His Divine Creative Will to bring into “being” all that is, has ever been, or ever will be.
All that is, has ever been, or ever will be is, therefore, the EFFECT of God’s first CAUSAL thought or idea. And, as Course-Jesus impresses upon us repeatedly, thoughts never leave their source. So, the Causal Thought, Idea, Creation, Effect, or Logos (choose your preferred term) that IS the Son of God or Sonship will remain in God’s Mind forever and ever. Being in and of that Holy Mind, the Son of God will forever remain just as Holy, Whole, Perfect, and Innocent as its Creator.
And because the Sonship encompasses the WHOLE of Holy Creation, its membership extends to ALL Living Beings, not just humans — and certainly NOT only Jesus Christ.
So, yes. Your dog has a Soul. And so do trees.
More to the point, the arrival of Jesus on earth did not mark “the first coming of Christ,” as most traditional Christians suppose. As Course-Jesus explains, the first coming of Christ marked God’s “creation” of the one, all-inclusive Son of God.
As Course-Jesus further explains:
The Second Coming of Christ means nothing more than the end of the ego’s rule and the healing of the mind. I was created like you in the First, and I have called you to join with me in the Second. I am in charge of the Second Coming, and my judgment, which is used only for protection, cannot be wrong because it never attacks. Yours may be so distorted that you believe I was mistaken in choosing you. I assure you this is a mistake of your ego. Do not mistake it for humility. Your ego is trying to convince you that it is real and I am not, because if I am real, I am no more real than you are. That knowledge, and I assure you that it IS knowledge, means that Christ has come into your mind and healed it. (ACIM, T-4.IV.10:1-9)
As the harbinger of the Second Coming, Jesus demonstrated what we all must become to awaken from the dream of earthly existence. When he said (in John 14:6), “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life,” he meant he came to show us the way back to God and to tell us the TRUTH about the world and our Divine Identity, so we could free ourselves from Satan’s deceptive influence and return to our Divine and Immortal Reality as the ONE Son of God.
(In case you skipped my first post, “Satan” is a Sanskrit word meaning “not Sat” or “not part of Divine Reality.”)
Many times in the Course, Jesus explains exactly what we are in the sight of God and the Holy Spirit. What follows is one particularly poignant description from Workbook Lesson 95: I am one Self, united with my Creator:
You are one Self, in perfect harmony with all there is, and all that there will be. You are one Self, the holy Son of God, united with your brothers in that Self; united with your Father in His Will. Feel this one Self in you, and let It shine away all your illusions and your doubts. This is your Self, the Son of God Himself, sinless as Its Creator, with His strength within you and His Love forever yours. You are one Self, and it is given you to feel this Self within you, and to cast all your illusions out of the one Mind that is this Self, the holy truth in you. (ACIM, W-95.13:1-5)
Now that we’re clearer on what the Sonship is and includes, let’s return to God. The God Mind in which the whole Sonship dwells eternally is a Superconscious Sphere of Knowledge or Omniscience. The part the Sonship occupies is called “Heaven” or “the Kingdom of Heaven.”
Contrary to what many religious doctrines espouse, we do NOT “go” to Heaven when we drop the illusion-perceiving instruments our physical bodies actually are.
Heaven is not, therefore, a reward Souls receive for repenting or being pious; it’s the All-Knowing State of Being to which we return by awakening to what we really are, where we really are, and how we really think and will. Rightly perceived, Heaven is the natural state of Omniscience or Knowledge the whole Christ Mind shares with its Creator.
WHAT we are is God’s ONE Holy Son; WHERE we are is inside the God-Mind, safe, sound, and impervious to anything Satan can dream up to deceive us into believing otherwise; and HOW we think and will is the same way God thinks and wills.
WHAT we are is God’s ONE Holy Son; WHERE we are is inside the God-Mind, safe, sound, and impervious to anything Satan can dream up to deceive us into believing otherwise; and HOW we think and will is the same way God thinks and wills.
Or, to quote Course-Jesus again:
You think with the Mind of God. Therefore you share your thoughts with Him, as He shares His with you. They are the same thoughts, because they are thought by the same Mind. To share is to make alike, or to make one. Nor do the thoughts you think with the Mind of God leave your mind, because thoughts do not leave their source. Therefore, your thoughts are in the Mind of God, as you are. They are in your mind as well, where He is. As you are part of His Mind, so are your thoughts part of His Mind.
Ergo, only the thoughts we share with the God Mind are REAL and TRUE. They are “Sat.” Everything else is “Satan” — i.e., smoke and mirrors manufactured by the unreal Ego Mind to imprison us in the nightmare of earthly existence. That “satan” forms a Dark Veil, Etheric Web, Auric Shell, Black Cloud of Guilt, Dark Glass, or Ring of Fear around our Higher Minds to block our memories of God, Heaven, and our True Identities.
Or, as Course-Jesus explains:
In the strange world that you have made the Son of God HAS sinned. How could you see him, then? By making him invisible, the world of retribution rose in the black cloud of guilt that you accepted, and you hold it dear. For the blamelessness of Christ is the proof that the ego never was, and can never be. Without guilt the ego has no life, and God’s Son IS without guilt. (ACIM, T-13.I.2:1-5)
In Heaven, all thought is shared (telepathically) between Father and Son. Everybody knows everything there is to know, so there’s no need for words or language. Behind the Ego Mind’s barricade, we can’t hear God’s direct thought-transmissions, but we ARE nevertheless still connected to His Mind. And, because Jesus penetrated Satan’s barricade of guilt, we CAN now hear the Holy Spirit, who communicates with us on God’s behalf.
Or, to again quote Course-Jesus:
Existence as well as being rests on communication. Existence, however, is specific in how, what and with whom communication is judged to be worth undertaking. Being is completely without these distinctions. It is a state in which the mind is in communication with everything that is real. To whatever extent you permit this state to be curtailed you are limiting your sense of your own reality, which becomes total only by recognizing all reality in the glorious context of its real relationship to you. This is your reality. Do not desecrate it or recoil from it. It is your real home, your real temple and your real Self. (ACIM, T-4.VII.4:1-8)
Note his distinction between “existence” and “being,” which I will attempt to preserve. Both “modes of self-conception” depend on communication. In “existence” (worldly ego-body self-perception) we pick and choose our vehicles at the level of separate embodied selves, whereas in “being” (spiritual self-perception) we’re in constant communication with the Whole of Creation.
Technically speaking, Heaven isn’t just the Holy Home of the Christ Mind. Being the nonspatial sphere the Christ Mind occupies within the God Mind, the Kingdom of Heaven IS the Christ Mind. We don’t just live there, in other words; we ARE that shared Superconscious Kingdom, Sphere, or Realm. This is the Great Truth Jesus attempted to impart when he said things like: “You are the Kingdom of Heaven” (Matthew 5:3) and “The Kingdom of Heaven is spread out upon the earth, but men do not see it” (implied in Mark 4:26 and stated in Thomas 111).
The Kingdom of Heaven is spread out on the earth as a “matrix,” “web,” or “net” connecting the Souls — the scattered “seeds” mentioned in Mark — within all embodied lifeforms.
The Kingdom of Heaven is spread out on the earth as a “matrix,” “web,” or “net” connecting the Souls — the scattered “seeds” mentioned in Mark — within all embodied lifeforms. That scattered network of Divine Sparks (the “seeds” of the True Vine) is the only part of this world touched by God. It is, therefore, the only part of earthly “existence” that’s “Sat.”
All the rest is “Sat-an” or “not of God.”
To perceive the Kingdom of Heaven on earth, we must “go within” in search of the “storage container” housing the Soul’s Higher Mind memories. We see into that unconscious memory “Cistern of Love” through the Spiritual Eye. That “single-eye,” “eye of the heart,” or “nous” enables what Course-Jesus variously calls “Christ’s Vision,” “Holy Vision,” “Spiritual Sight,” “True Perception,” and “Miraculous Perception.” To restore that elevated level of self-conception we have to lift the seven “veils of illusion” the Ego Mind put in place to block our memories of Heaven.
Those “dark veils” cover the seven eyes of the Lamb of God, the Archangel of the Atonement who preserves and restores to our ego-infected minds awareness of the unblemished holiness and innocence of our Souls. Those seven eyes are (I’m reasonably certain) the chakras — the windows or “wheels” through which we regain, layer by layer, our Higher Mind memories.
Until we invite that Holy Power to show us the way back to Heaven, we “exist” at the level of “nothingness,” with all seven windows blocked completely by upside-down ego-driven thinking; unholy thinking that engenders grievances against the other fragments of our own True Self.
Or, to quote Course-Jesus:
You who were created by love like itself can hold no grievances and know your Self. To hold a grievance is to forget who you are. To hold a grievance is to see yourself as a body. To hold a grievance is to let the ego rule your mind and to condemn the body to death. Perhaps you do not yet fully realize just what holding grievances does to your mind. It seems to split you off from your Source and make you unlike Him. It makes you believe that He is like what you think you have become, for no one can conceive of his Creator as unlike himself. (ACIM, W-68.1:1-7)
To erase those light-blocking grievances, we must forgive ourselves and everybody else for being duped into believing the Evil One’s lies.
And that is what Course-Jesus means by True Forgiveness. To truly forgive the other parts of our Self – all of which reflect our own thoughts – we have to wholly perceive that the world is a dream in which nothing that happens has real consequences.
The world is a dream without real consequences because God did NOT create it.
The world is a dream without real consequences because God did NOT create it. Everything we see, hear, taste, touch, and smell is “Satan” or “not of God.” It’s ego-conjured maya, my dreaming brother, pure and simple.
Or, as Course-Jesus explains:
The world is false perception. It is born of error, and it has not left its source. It will remain no longer than the thought that gave it birth is cherished. When the thought of separation has been changed to one of true forgiveness, will the world be seen in quite another light; and one which leads to truth, where all the world must disappear and all its errors vanish. Now its source has gone, and its effects are gone as well.
The world was made as an attack on God. It symbolizes fear. And what is fear except love’s absence? Thus the world was meant to be a place where God could enter not, and where His Son could be apart from Him. Here was perception born, for knowledge could not cause such insane thoughts. But eyes deceive, and ears hear falsely. Now mistakes become quite possible, for certainty has gone.
The mechanisms of illusion have been born instead. And now they go to find what has been given them to seek. Their aim is to fulfill the purpose which the world was made to witness and make real. They see in its illusions but a solid base where truth exists, upheld apart from lies. Yet everything that they report is but illusion which is kept apart from truth.
If this is news to you, take a moment to consider the broader implications. If God did NOT create anything with physical form (which He absolutely didn’t), He did NOT create trees, flowers, grass, rivers, oceans, mountains, or anything else in nature; He did NOT create the bodies we appear to inhabit; and He did NOT create planets, stars, solar systems, galaxies, or universes.
All of these things are, in fact, elaborate hoaxes the Great Deceiver of humankind devised to replace God as the “creator” we deludedly worship. All of these presumed “miracles of creation” are, in fact, no more than deceitful palls dreamed up by the Devil to hide God’s ONE True Creation: the eternal and perfect Divine Idea shining UNDERNEATH the projected illusion of matter.
In Hinduism, that ONE True Creation shining underneath the maya is called Purusha, which means, more or less, “the purifying red light” in ancient Sanskrit. So, the Great Purusha in the Hindu lore is the Logos — the ONE Holy Son the Father willed into being “in the beginning” (a reference to “the first coming of Christ,” not the beginning of time). As also explained, that ONE Holy Son IS Creation — and also God, as Course-Jesus attempts to explain in the passage below from Workbook Lesson 169 (By grace I live. By grace I am released.):
Oneness is simply the idea God is. And in His Being, He encompasses all things. No mind holds anything but Him. We say “God is,” and then we cease to speak, for in that knowledge words are meaningless. There are no lips to speak them and no part of the mind sufficiently distinct to feel that it is now aware of something not itself. It has united with its Source, and like its Source Itself, it merely is.
Are you getting the idea? I hope so, because this isn’t easy stuff to wrap our heads around, let alone explain. It might help to imagine God as an intelligent and invisible balloon or bubble encompassing the sum total of ALL THAT IS (in a space smaller than a subatomic particle). Physicists call what I’ve just described a “singularity.” They also hypothesize that it was from such a singularity that the visible universe explosively emerged. And that postulation has merit.
What Big Bang theorists don’t apprehend is that the space outside this singularity is the “dark void of nothingness” described in the first few lines of the Holy Bible. But let’s not get on our holy high horses just yet, because what the first chapter of Genesis really describes isn’t what most of us have been duped into believing by those pesky false prophets.
I’ll speak more about what Genesis actually reports in future discussions. In the meantime, let’s return to the Bubble, outside of which nothing real or divinely created exists — apart from the Spirit of Grace, of course, which God projected into the void to end – gently and gradually – the perceived separation.
But that, too, is a conversation for another time.
For now, let’s stick with the God-Mind Bubble, inside which there is no division or sense of “other.” Nothing begins or ends. There is only pure, perfect, joyful, all-inclusive, never-ending Perfect Love and Oneness. There is only ecstatic interconnectedness and cooperation. There is only Perfect Love, surrounding, enveloping, filling, sustaining, and harmonizing everything “God is.”
Inside the God-Mind Bubble, the Sonship creates like the Father, by extending the Creative Force of Perfect Love or Agape. Being the Creative Force of Divine Will, Perfect Love has no form or substance, nor does anything else inside the Bubble. God, being the Supreme Causal Mind, has no form; nor, as we’ve established, does He create form of any kind. God creates ONLY Perfect and Eternal Thoughts and Ideas, fully and perfectly accomplished to COMPLETION the moment He thinks, “Let it be.”
Our concrete human intellects can’t fully fathom how God could create anew what has always been, with no beginning and no end.
Our concrete human intellects can’t fully fathom how God could create anew what has always been, with no beginning and no end. And yet, this is indeed the abstractly infinite, timeless, and nonspatial nature of God and Creation, as Jesus affirms in the excerpt below from the Course’s “URText.” Being the unedited transcript of Christ’s dictations to Helen Schucman between 1965 and 1974, the “URText” is unarguably the purest, most complete, frankest, and most reliable form of A Course in Miracles. (And don’t let anyone tell you differently.)
The Kingdom is forever extending, because it is in the Mind of God. YOU do not know your joy because you do not know your own [S]elf-fullness. Exclude ANY part of the Kingdom FROM your [S]elf, and you are NOT whole. A split mind CANNOT perceive its fullness, and needs the miracle OF its wholeness to dawn upon it and heal it. This reawakens its wholeness IN it and restores it to the Kingdom because of its ACCEPTANCE of wholeness. The full appreciation of its [S]elf-fullness makes selfishness impossible, and extension inevitable. That is why there is perfect peace in the Kingdom. Every Soul IS fulfilling its function, and ONLY complete fulfillment IS peace.
After I came up with my God-Mind Bubble concept, I went online to search for a picture to illustrate what I envisioned. To my astonishment and delight, I came across the image above showing beams of light shooting out of an invisible bubble in space. Even more astonishing, the image was created to illustrate a new “structural concept” by a team of physicists at Uppsala University in Sweden. That new structural concept was — I kid you not — that the material universe rides on an expanding bubble in another dimension.
The original paper explaining the Uppsala team’s theory was published in the December 2018 edition of Physical Review Letters (PRL). The American Physical Society’s flagship publication, PRL publishes seminal research by Nobel Prize-winning and other distinguished researchers in all fields of physics. It is, therefore, a scholarly journal for physicists, rather than a homogenized popular-science periodical aimed at the general public.
I won’t, therefore, quote directly from their original paper. Instead, let me share the following simplified report on their research, which appeared in Science Daily on December 18, 2018:
Uppsala University researchers have devised a new model for the Universe — one that may solve the enigma of dark energy. Their new article, published in Physical Review Letters, proposes a new structural concept, including dark energy, for a universe that rides on an expanding bubble in an additional dimension.
We have known for the past 20 years that the Universe is expanding at an ever accelerating rate.
The explanation is the “dark energy” that permeates it throughout, pushing it to expand.
Understanding the nature of this dark energy is one of the paramount enigmas of fundamental physics.
It has long been hoped that string theory will provide the answer.
Now, I know squat about string theory — or physics, for that matter. But I can nevertheless tell you a few things. The first is that “dark energy” is the mind-healing force of the Spirit of Grace working through the agencies of time, space, and matter to “disappear” the dream-universe. That is why “dark energy” 1) affects the universe only on the largest scales; 2) drives the accelerating expansion that will eventually pull it apart; and 3) slows the rate of structure formation.
Makes sense, right?
I can further tell you that the red “strings” or “beams” shooting out of the Bubble represent the Logos, Red Ray, and/or Spirit of Grace extending from the “Mother-ship Bubble” into the various dream-universes the Ego Mind miscreated — through multiple, overlapping “Big Bangs” — in the “dark void of nothingness” outside the Bubble.
The third thing I can tell you is that the expansion of the universe driven by “dark energy” will indeed accelerate more rapidly in the future, as predicted by the Lambda-CDM cosmological model. In metaphysical terms, that anticipated acceleration is the “celestial speed-up” Jesus speaks of in the Course.
How do I know these things? I just do. How did I come up with the God-Mind Bubble concept? It popped into my head one day while I was writing. Unlike the Swedish cosmogonists, however, I instantly understood what the “expanding bubble” represented. Typically, when I’m shown these sorts of mental pictures, an abstract understanding of their meaning accompanies the vision.
When I saw the Bubble in my mind, that is to say, I instantly knew what it represented on multiple intuitive levels.
In this particular case, I also understood why Jesus planted this “true projection” in my mind. His purpose was three-fold: Firstly, it clarified how the dream-dimension coexists with the God-Mind Bubble (which I’d asked about in prayer); secondly, it allowed me to explain the idea in simple terms to others; and thirdly, it demonstrated that our minds are, in fact, joined at a higher level than we’re aware of in perceptual “unreality.”
How else could I have pictured the exact same “structural concept” of the universe as the Swedish physicists?
Before we move on, let me introduce you to Paramahansa Yogananda, the India-born yogi who founded Self-Realization Fellowship in Los Angeles in 1920. In his best-known book, Autobiography of a Yogi, Yogananda describes a “structural concept” very similar to the one envisaged by me and the Swedes.
In the chapter titled “The Resurrection of Sri Yuktaswar,” Yogananda chronicles a visit he received from his recently deceased guru, who had since been made a “planetary savior” in another universe. Among many other fascinating facts about how Spiritual Reality actually work, Sri Yuktaswar compared the material universe to a tiny basket hanging under the giant balloon of the rest of Creation.
Rightly understood, “dark energy” is Nataraja — the Cosmic Dancer aspect of Lord Shiva — turning the Wheel of the Soul’s Journey over time.
In that tiny basket-universe, we perceive everything upside-down. God sent the Red Ray — the Logos, Word, and/or Divine Idea driving “dark energy” — into that “basket” to help us turn our perception right-side-up again. Rightly understood, “dark energy” is Nataraja — the Cosmic Dancer aspect of Lord Shiva — turning the Wheel of the Soul’s Journey over time. That “wheel” is called “Prabha Mandala,” which means “Circle of Light” in Sanskrit.
In the image above, take note of the tongues of fire outlining the Mandala’s outer perimeter, because it is those “tongues” that ultimately turn the Wheel. Those tongues are “Agni-Magni” — the Pearls of Divine Fire in our heart-minds. And it is indeed those Pearls that power Shiva’s cosmic dance. We fuel Shiva’s dance by sharing the Living Water through the “matrix,” “web,” or “net” connecting our Souls (in “Holy Relationship”) at the level of Higher Mind.
In Hinduism, those fiery “pearls” or “jewels” rightly belong to Indra, the “king of the devas” personifying the Logos and/or Red Ray. Rightly understood, Indra’s “pearls” represent the “Divine Sparks” of the Logos within all living beings in the dream. In the Hindu lore, those symbolic pearls are strung together on the Indrajala. Contrary to popular misconstruction, that “Net” isn’t a tool used by Indra to manufacture deceptive “maya.” Rather, it’s the “Divine Matrix” connecting our dreaming Souls to each other and God.
And it is that “net,” “web,” or “matrix” through which our Souls exchange the perception-correcting “miracles of grace” that dissolve the perceived separation over time.
A minute ago, I said “dark energy” is Nataraja, the Cosmic Dancer aspect of Lord Shiva. What few Hindus understand is that Lord Shiva personifies True Forgiveness, which is indeed the transcendent power of Brahman or God. That being the case, the Circle of Light in which Shiva dances as Nataraja is, in point of fact, the Circle of Forgiveness.
Course-Jesus frequently mentions this “Circle of Light,” “Circle of Atonement,” and/or “Golden Circle.” In one place, under the subheading “The Circle of Atonement,” he says:
The only part of your mind that has reality is the part that links you still with God. Would you have all of it transformed into a radiant message of God’s Love, to share with all the lonely ones who have denied Him? GOD MAKES THIS POSSIBLE. Would you deny His yearning to be known? You yearn for Him, as He for you. This is forever changeless. Accept, then, the immutable. Leave the world of death behind, and return quietly to Heaven. There is nothing of value here, and everything of value there. ¹Listen to the Holy Spirit, and to God through Him. He speaks of you to YOU. There is no guilt in you, for God is blessed in His Son as the Son is blessed in Him. (ACIM, T-14.V.1:1-12)
That circle constitutes the Real or Forgiven World (in Course terms), wherein we experience Heaven on earth. That circle is where we exchange the “miracles of grace” that empower the Purusha’s “dark energy” to speed up the expansion facilitating the disappearance of the universe. That circle also is the Holy Meeting Place, after which I’ve named this blog.
We “meet” in that Shining Circle simply by listening to the Living Water, the vibration of grace reuniting in Oneness the “pearls” on Indra’s Net.
We “meet” in that Shining Circle simply by listening to the Living Water, the vibration of grace reuniting in Oneness the “pearls” on Indra’s Net. Rightly understood, those “pearls” are (as Jesus says above) 1) the only part of our mind that has reality and 2) the part that links us still with God.
We’ll talk more about that Shining Circle as we move forward. A lot more – because it really is the key to awakening. For now, though, let’s move on, because no Crash Course on Spiritual Truth would be complete without a section devoted to Divine Love.
We’ve all heard the expression “God is Love.” But what do those words really mean? In the Course, Jesus tells us the TRUE meaning of LOVE can’t be taught, but can and must be remembered before the dream of separation will end. We remember LOVE’s True meaning, he further explains, by removing the obstacles to our awareness of its presence within us. He explains all of this, in fact, on the Course’s very first page, which begins with this ringing declaration:
This is a course in miracles. It is a required course. Only the time you take it is voluntary. Free will does not mean that you can establish the curriculum. It means only that you can elect what you want to take at a given time. (ACIM, T-in.1:1-5)
Now, having said all that, let me say this: This blog isn’t about A Course in Miracles. Not exclusively, anyway. It’s about the universality of the Spiritual Truths found in the Course, the Judeo-Christian Bible, and the ancient scriptures and allegorical legends of Hinduism, with an emphasis on the Rig Veda (the most ancient and sacred of those foundational texts).
This blog isn’t about A Course in Miracles. Not exclusively, anyway. It’s about the universality of the Spiritual Truths found in the Course, the Judeo-Christian Bible, and the ancient scriptures and allegorical legends of Hinduism,
When illuminatedly translated and interpreted, all three of these sacred tomes do indeed teach the same Truths, often using identical symbols and phraseology. Not that we’d know this by reading the deceptive distortions of Scriptural Truth the Ego Mind has encouraged and advanced throughout human history.
Or, to quote Course-Jesus:
Nothing the ego perceives is interpreted correctly. Not only does the ego cite Scripture for its purpose, but it even interprets Scripture as a witness for itself. The Bible is a fearful thing in the ego’s judgment. Perceiving it as frightening, it interprets it fearfully. Being afraid, you do not appeal to the Higher Court [of the Holy Spirit] because you believe its judgment would also be against you. (ACIM, T-5.VI.4:3-7)
We are all One, and so is the Truth the Holy Spirit teaches to ego-deluded humans. Helping us to remember that all-encompassing Oneness is the function God gave the Holy Spirit. And the “universal course” or “at-one-ment curriculum” is the vehicle through which that “Friend,” “Protector,” “Comforter,” and/or “Guide” executes the Father’s Supreme and Unimpeachable Will to end the dream without jeopardizing the Sonship’s free will.
Or, to again quote Course-Jesus:
“Heaven and earth shall pass away” means that they will not continue to exist as separate states. My Word, which is the resurrection and the life, shall not pass away because life is eternal. You are the work of God, and His work is wholly lovable and wholly loving. This is how a man must think of himself in his heart, because this is what he is. (ACIM, T-1.III.2:1-4)
The Course, as Jesus explains in the Manual for Teachers, is “a special curriculum, intended for teachers of a special form of the universal course. There are many thousands of other forms, all with the same outcome.”
Is one path, therefore, better than any other? Not if they all lead to the same eventual outcome of restoring the shared “at-one-ment” of the Christ and God Minds. Some paths do, however, lead their followers to the end-goal quicker than do others — IF and WHEN their root teachings are expunged of the Great Deceiver’s Truth-blocking obscurations.
Sanatan Dharma — the “mother” of Hinduism, Yoga, Sikhism, Jainism, and Buddhism — is such a path. But one much-corrupted down the ages by the Great Deceiver’s obfuscations.
It’s been said that all spiritual paths eventually lead to India, and I tend to agree. Because my inner-guide has certainly steered me in the direction of Sanatan Dharma in recent years, although not at the level of the body.
Here’s what I mean: After completing the entire Workbook for Students for the third time, I finally followed Jesus’s instructions and let the Holy Spirit lead me “the rest of the way.”
While the Course remained my “core” path, I began exploring yoga, read several books by Paramahansa Yogananda, and completed the nine-month correspondence course offered by Self-Realization Fellowship. And it was through those incredible teachings that I began to hear the ever-present echo of God’s Voice again.
I also read several books by Swami Nirmalananda Giri, the founder and director of Light of the Spirit Monastery in Cedar Crest, New Mexico. Among those books were “Jesus in India,” “Soham Yoga,” and “The Bhagavad Gita for Awakening.”
But that was only the start of my inner journey to India. By and by, I felt inexplicably compelled to set up altars to key Hindu deities, celebrate (quietly and privately) some of the Hindu holy days, watch Indian movies, listen to spiritual Indian music, shop at an Indian supermarket, and cook authentic Indian recipes. Strange as all this seemed, I never felt the compulsion to travel to India. That day may come, but I somehow doubt that it will.
Why do I doubt it? Because of what Course-Jesus explains below:
God’s Son is not a traveler through outer worlds. However holy his perception may become, no world outside himself holds his inheritance. Within himself he has no needs, for light needs nothing but to shine in peace, and from itself to let the Rays extend in quiet to infinity.
Whenever you are tempted to undertake a useless journey that would lead away from light, remember what you really want, and say:
The Holy Spirit leads me unto Christ, and where else would I go? What need have I but to awake in Him?
Then follow Him in joy, with faith that He will lead you safely through all dangers to your peace of mind this world may set before you. Kneel not before the altars to sacrifice, and seek not what you will surely lose. ³Content yourself with what you will as surely keep, and be not restless, for you undertake a quiet journey to the peace of God, where He would have you be in quietness.
The Holy Spirit took me to India in my mind — and I fell in love. And after I fell in love with Hinduism and learned what the Holy Spirit’s Voice actually was, my inner-guru gently guided me to the next phase of my teaching-learning ministry: translating and interpreting anew the timeless wisdom of the Rig Veda.
A daunting assignment, to be sure — but one I’ve undertaken joyfully.
Because the true teachings of Sanatan Dharma have been greatly corrupted over time by Vittra (the Ego Mind) and his fellow thought-demons — and the Course’s remain relatively pure — the latter is arguably the most expedient path to enlightenment present in the world today.
But, as Jesus attempts to make clear in his “universal course,” it’s not a form of the curriculum intended for everyone. Without getting too far ahead of myself, the Course is a training manual for the “Chosen Ones” — those reincarnating Souls who’ve agreed to wake up sooner than the rest to help the Holy Spirit accelerate the At-one-ment process universally. We accelerate that process by turning the Wheel of the Soul’s Circle-Journey; and we turn that Wheel by joining minds with our fellow Souls around the Golden Circle of True Forgiveness — and by teaching others to do the same.
We don’t help by touting the Course as a better path than any other, disparaging alternative forms of the curriculum, striving to save the world at the level of bodies, or by confusing others — through our incongruent words and deeds — about what the Course attempts to teach.
What the Course attempts to teach is that we must go within and LISTEN until we hear the Red Ray’s vibratory “song of love” — the unbreakable bond holding Creation together as a singular Whole.
What the Course attempts to teach is that we must go within and LISTEN until we hear the Red Ray’s vibratory “song of love” — the unbreakable bond holding Creation together as a singular Whole. Rightly understood, the Red Ray is the Word of God, Logos, or Christ Self — the “Friend on the Throne” whose “song” gradually dissolves the desire for “specialness” that spawned the Soul-imprisoning dream-universe.
That hellish little handbasket dangling underneath the God-Mind Bubble.
Or, as Course-Jesus says:
You are not special. If you think you are, and would defend your specialness against the truth of what you really are, how can you know the truth? What answer that the Holy Spirit gives can reach you, when it is your specialness to which you listen, and which asks and answers? Its tiny answer, soundless in the melody that pours from God to you eternally in loving praise of what you are, is all you listen to. And that vast song of honor and of love for what you are seems silent and unheard before its “mightiness.” You strain your ears to hear its soundless voice, and yet the Call of God Himself is soundless to you. (ACIM, T-24.II.4:1-6)
Okay, so … what’s all this got to do with God being synonymous with Love? The answer is: Everything. As explained, our Souls are the “Pearls of Divine Fire” — the eternal fire of God’s Loving Presence — strung together in the dream by the Logos, Red Ray, Christ Self, and/or Holy Spirit of Grace.
While out searching for pithy quotes about the fire of God’s Love, I came across the following from — of all places — The Daily Mining Gazette. The quote below is from a column written by Kathleen Carlton Johnson, a hospice counselor. I’ve linked back to it, in case you want to read the whole thing.
Our everyday world can be so intense that every waking moment is filled with activities or events, crises, and importance. We forget that the fire of God’s love dwells within us. We activate the fire by accepting our selfish selves and desiring a path to do His will. What happens when we bring Jesus into our lives is a new freedom, a greater hope, and the activation of the fire of love. Our lives in our current society are so stuffed with our personal issues and contentment that we forget this fire of love inside each being called into this world. Embracing that love sets our life on fire for ourselves, our families, and our community. It is why we are here on earth to find and know love. To realize the fire within each of us we are Children of a loving God.
She’s definitely got the right idea, because we are indeed the vessels for God’s Perfect Love in the world. And, being God’s vessels, we, too — as “pearls” or “seeds” of the Christ Self, Logos, or Word — embody the essence of Perfect Love. And, since “God is LOVE” and we, too, are LOVE, we are, in actuality, inseparable from God.
And this is, I daresay, the idea Bible-Jesus sought to impart when he famously said, in John 10:30, “I and the Father are one.”
Course-Jesus tells us much the same thing (sans the confusing parable about sheep and doors) in Workbook Lesson 67: Love created me like itself and, later on, in Lesson 229: Love, which created me, is what I am.
In the latter, he provides the following affirmation and prayer for us to use to imprint this critical idea upon our minds:
I seek my own Identity, and find It in these words: “Love, which created me, is what I am.” Now need I seek no more. Love has prevailed. So still It waited for my coming home, that I will turn away no longer from the holy face of Christ. And what I look upon attests the truth of the Identity I sought to lose, but which my Father has kept safe for me.
Father, my thanks to You for what I am; for keeping my Identity untouched and sinless, in the midst of all the thoughts of sin my foolish mind made up. And thanks to You for saving me from them. Amen.
Because God is the Causal Mind of Perfect Love, Christ is the Divine Thought “in the likeness” of its Source. The Greek word for Divine Idea is “Logos.” Having no English equivalent, “Logos” was changed to “Word” in the preamble to the Gospel of John by the Anglican translators responsible for the King James Bible.
Consequently, every English version of John 1:1 has read as follows ever since:
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
A more insightful translation of the original Greek would read:
In the beginning (of Holy Creation), was the Divine Idea of Perfect Love, and that Divine Idea was with God, and that Divine Idea was God.
Contrary to popular belief, this Biblical line isn’t about Jesus. Not exclusively, anyway. It’s about the “first coming of Christ” — the Holy Instant in eternity when God extended His Mind to bring into being the Christ Self, Christ Mind, or Corporate Body of Christ that constitutes the sum total of Holy Creation.
Ergo, God (the Causal Mind of Perfect Love) and Christ (the Idea of Perfect Love of that Causal Mind) are not only INSEPARABLE, but also IDENTICAL — apart from one significant difference: God, who pre-existed Christ, created Christ in His mirror-image.
Christ is … a reflection of God, just as our Souls are reflections of Christ.
Christ is, therefore, a reflection of God, just as our Souls are reflections of Christ. On Indra’s Net, as in Creation, everything reflects everything else.
Is that what the Bible means when it says, “God created man in his image?” The answer is: “Yes and No.” “Yes,” if we understand that by “image,” the scribe meant “alike in essence,” rather than physical appearance — because, as we’ve established, God a) has no physical appearance and b) did not create the body.
And “No” because the KJV translation of Genesis 1:27 is skewed by the Anglican understanding of God circa 1600. In the KJV Bible, the verse under discussion reads as follows:
So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.
When illuminatedly translated, the original Hebrew actually reads more along these lines:
Elohim formed the Soul in his likeness to become like Elohim, to create with Him remembrance of the one established Creation of God.
Contrary to popular belief, “Elohim” is NOT an ancient Hebrew designation for God the Father, because God the Father plays no direct role here in ending the dream of separation. In actuality, Elohim is the Old Testament name for the Red Ray, Logos, or Word of God, which the Father projected out of the Bubble into the various dream universes to restore the memories of Creation’s Oneness among the split off fragments of the Christ Mind.
As God’s chief executive officer in the dream-dimension(s), Elohim occupies the symbolic “throne” on the seventh plane of perception — the highest plane we can reach in the dream-realm. So, it is the Logos the prophets saw in their visions, rather than God, the Causal Creator. And it is indeed the Logos who made our individual Souls in HIS likeness, to restore our forgotten memories of the Oneness we share with All That Is (as Genesis 1:27 reports in the original Hebrew).
In Hinduism, Elohim is “Indra,” a Sanskrit word meaning “the supreme eternal radiance within all living beings.”
In Hinduism, Elohim is “Indra,” a Sanskrit word meaning “the supreme eternal radiance within all living beings.” So, Indra’s “Pearls of Divine Fire” (our Souls) and Indra’s Net (the divine matrix connecting our Souls to each other and God) also belong to his Judeo-Christian counterpart.
In the Course, Jesus never uses the name “Elohim.” He did, however, show the name to Dr. Schucman (his scribe for the Course) in a vision. In that vision, she saw the name emblazoned on an altar, above the word “Evoe” — a pagan cry associated with Bacchus, the Roman god of wine and drunkenness. As she beheld the altar, a lightning bolt shot through the window and obliterated the Bacchanalian word. Jesus then told Dr. Schucman the altar was inside her.
From all of this, we can ascertain that the altar Jesus showed Dr. Schucman is what various scriptural texts call the Inner-Altar, God’s Altar, the Holy of Holies, the Tabernacle, Al Arsh (the Throne of Allah), the Chariot Throne, the Ruby Throne, and the Throne of Christ.
In the Course, Jesus mentions the same “throne” numerous times. In various places, he calls it “the throne of God,” “the ancient throne,” “the Father’s throne,” and “the throne of Love.” He also explains that we knocked God and Christ off that “throne” or “altar” when we insanely chose the Ego Mind as our “god,” “creator,” and “guiding force.”
To free our minds from the Evil One’s thrall, we have to restore God and Christ to their rightful place on that “throne” or “altar” in our heart of hearts — the Heart-Cave or Gupa in Hindu philosophy.
To free our minds from the Evil One’s thrall, we have to restore God and Christ to their rightful place on the “throne” or “altar” in our heart of hearts — the Heart-Cave or Gupa in Hindu philosophy. We must, in other words, fully accept that we are the One Holy Son of God, not individual minds within separate bodies.
Or, as Course-Jesus explains:
At God’s altar Christ waits for the restoration of Himself in you. God knows His Son as wholly blameless as Himself, and He is approached through the appreciation of His Son. Christ waits for your acceptance of Him as yourself, and of His Wholeness as yours. For Christ is the Son of God, Who lives in His Creator and shines with His glory. Christ is the extension of the Love and the loveliness of God, as perfect as His Creator and at peace with Him.
Blessed is the Son of God whose radiance is of his Father, and whose glory he wills to share as his Father shares it with him. There is no condemnation in the Son, for there is no condemnation in the Father. Sharing the perfect Love of the Father the Son must share what belongs to Him, for otherwise he will not know the Father or the Son. Peace be unto you who rest in God, and in whom the whole Sonship rests.
Being the Divine Idea the Father willed into being “in the beginning,” the Logos, Sonship, or Christ must and will remain forever in the Mind of its Creator. Being a thought-extension of God’s Mind, the Logos also shares the Father’s creative powers. The unified Christ Self can, therefore, expand Creation by extending the Thought of Perfect Love — the created EFFECT of God’s first “creative” extension. But, being EFFECT, the Son can only create through extension by 1) sharing the Causal Father’s Will and 2) obeying the laws the Causal Father established for Perfect Creation.
We’ll talk more about the laws governing Perfect Creation in my next post. Until then, Om Hari Om.
The Holy Meeting Place 
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