The Changing Landscape

"Truth cannot be contaminated by error. The statement that Truth is real necessarily includes the correlated statement, that error, Truth's unlikeness, is unreal. The suppositional warfare between truth and error is only the mental conflict between the evidence of the spiritual senses and the testimony of the material senses, and this warfare between the Spirit and flesh will settle all questions through faith in and the understanding of Divine Love." -- Mary Baker Eddy

"The belief in sin is an adjustment. And an adjustment is a change; a shift in perception, or a belief that what was so before has been made different. Every adjustment is therefore a distortion, and calls upon defenses to uphold it against reality. Knowledge requires no adjustments, and in fact is lost if any shift or change is undertaken. For this reduces it at once to mere perception; a way of looking in which certainty is lost and doubt has entered. To this impaired condition are adjustments necessary, because it is not true. Who needs to adjust to Truth, which calls on only what he is, to understand? Adjustments of any kind are of the ego." -- A Course in Miracles

As I look out over the snowy, icy landscape, I know that it is changing before my eyes. Only Saturday it was warm and sunny, with tulips popping up in the garden. Today it is an icy tundra, sparkling in sunlight that does not warm, but merely reflects. Tomorrow it will melt and be a sea of mud for the dogs to track into the house. The landscape is constantly changing, and I accept it in all of its garments and take joy in its variety of forms.

My changing inner landscape is much the same. Thoughts come and go, and the forms they take in my mind and imagination are legion. For many years I was lost in this infinite landscape of thought, and so I did not enjoy it for the movie it is. By not having clear awareness and understanding, I was always conditioning my thoughts and images to those of my parents and friends and the world around me. I was aware of being only what the world around me told me I was, and I fell into roles and identities to adjust to this external feedback. Of course, what appeared to be external was not outside at all... the feedback I received was and is always first and only a reflection of my awareness of being. Whatever I am aware of being, so is my experience, within and without. But only God is real. There is no world as we imagine it.

This is the hard truth that no one wants to know. Even New Age and New Thought thinking still imagines an objective world that we somehow help create, but that is the creation of God. And would God, the Allness of Divine Love in every tradition, create a world unlike HerSelf? We have created an imaginary, insane, nonsensical god in our own insane image. Like Neo in the Matrix, the sane part of our mind, the part that is always awake in God, calls us to wake up. Like Neo in the Matrix, once we take the red pill that is awareness of being, there is no going back to pretending we don't know or that we are the effect of our own dream world.

The Truth of Our Being is so infinitely beautiful and loving that it is unimaginable to the conditioned self. A Course in Miracles describes the conditioned, false self in this way: "Do you like what you have made?-- a world of murder and attack, through which you thread your timid way through constant dangers, alone and frightened, hoping at most that death will wait a little longer before it overtakes you and you disappear. You made this up. It is a picture of what you think you are; of how you see yourself. Have you not wondered what the world is really like; how it would look through happy eyes? The world you see is but a judgment on yourself. It is not there at all. To this world you must adjust as long as you believe this picture is outside and has you at its mercy. Yet it was you who made it merciless, and now if mercilessness seems to look back at you, it can be corrected. Seek not to make the Son of God adjust to his insanity."

We are the Sons of God. We live and move and have our Being in God, and She is Infinite, Unconditioned and Unconditional Love and Light and Truth and Peace and Joy. There is nothing else. And until we return to our True Senses, Our Spiritual Senses, we can never be happy or at peace. The changing landscape of the conditioned world serves only one True Purpose... Awakening to Who We Really Are.

"Beloved, now are we the Sons of God." -- The Bible (I John 3:2)