Everything and Everywhere and Always

"Do you not realize a war against yourself would be a war on God? Is victory conceivable? And if it were, is this a victory that you would want?" -- A Course in Miracles; Chapter 23, Section I, 2:1-3

"The memory of God comes to the quiet mind. It cannot come where there is conflict, for a mind at war against itself remembers not eternal gentleness. The means of war are not the means of peace, and what the warlike would remember is not love." -- A Course in Miracles; Chapter 23, Section I, 1:1-3

"The pains of sense quickly inform us that the pleasures of sense are mortal and that joy is spiritual." -- Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy; Page 265, Lines 28-30

Everyone who walks the planet is engaged in a personal war. This war consists of seeing their own person or some other person as not enough. Even those who temporarily like who they think they are stay engaged in this war, because they are fighting to keep an illusion intact. Impossible! Yet all our time and all our resources go to this war, so that we have spiritually impoverished ourselves. I suspect the Iraq War is simply a huge projection of this internal warfare, so that we can pretend it's out there. It's not.

The good news is that sooner or later we tire of the struggle. And if we're lucky, if we're ready, we stop for a moment. We simply stop the stories, stop the struggle, stop the external searching. And what is revealed in that Holy Instant is Real Joy, the Joy of Being. Who would have thought that simply Being, just Being is the Source of Everything we've ever wanted, and it's always right here! Ha! As Mary Baker Eddy said, this Joy is pure Spirit. It's our True Being and our True Home.

It's hard to see that self-blame, self-hatred, self-abnegation, self-glorification, and self-consciousness are all the same mistake. It's hard to see that fear and guilt and shame and anger and praise and blame are all the same. It's hard to see that all of them are a war against yourself and therefore against God... against your very Being. All of them are some version of singling out aspects of Self as acceptable and making war against other aspects. And it's only in the acceptance of our Wholeness that we can know Joy and Peace and Real Love. Only the Reality of Being will ever satisfy us. Only this is Real.

We can never know Wholeness and Joy through the story we're living. The body and sense perception are fictions of a separate self and part of the story line. "Material man is shut out from the presence of God. The five corporeal senses cannot take cognizance of Spirit. They cannot come into His Presence, and must dwell in dreamland, until mortals arrive at the understanding that material life, with all its sin, sickness, and death, is an illusion." (Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy; Page 543, Lines 8-14) So the war against oneself is truly the attempt to keep and hold an illusion of a separate self, with all its dreamings and projections of grandiosity and failure.

The real irony, and the very good joke to all of this, is that none of it has ever had any effect on Who We Are! Just as a child having a nightmare remains safe in his bed at home until he awakens, we remain safe and Beloved in the Mind of God until we decide to wake up. And in our Awakening, the Radiance of Our True Being illuminates even the dream. When Jeshua ben Joseph showed us how to pray, he said, "Thy Kingdom Come, Thy Will be done, on earth as it is in Heaven." We are destined to Radiate the Love and Joy of God in our earthly dream, just as we eternally Shine in the Kingdom of Heaven, the Mind of God that is Everything and Everywhere and Always.

"There can never be a difference in what you really are and what Love is. There is no Love but God's, and what He is, is Everything there IS." -- A Course in Miracles; Workbook 127, 4:1,4