The Truth About You

"Can Truth have exceptions? If you have the gift of everything, can loss be real? Can pain be part of Peace, or grief of Joy? Can fear and sickness enter in a mind where Love and perfect Holiness abide? Truth must be all-inclusive if it be Truth at all. Accept no opposites and no exceptions, for to do so is to contradict the Truth entirely. Truth cannot have an opposite!" -- A Course in Miracles, Workbook 152:2:2-7, and 3:5

"As God created you, you must remain unchangeable, with transitory states by definition false. And that includes all shifts in feeling, alterations in conditions of the body and the mind; in all awareness and in all response. This is the all-inclusiveness which sets the Truth apart from falsehood." -- A Course in Miracles, Workbook 152:5:1-3

When working with a personal challenge recently, I realized that the words I used to describe the problem were all reflections of who I think I am. And it brought to mind the story of the Prodigal Son.

Jeshua ben Joseph told the parable of the Prodigal Son, and it has been used in Christian theology to justify evangelizing... that God wants his lost children to return to Him. Well, first of all, how could the Allness of God, in which everything is One, lose anything? So there must be another meaning... because every story Jeshua told was eminently practical and pragmatic. He was always giving us the means to sanity and peace.

In the parable, the son takes his inheritance and runs away, spending it all on the pleasures of life until there is nothing left. Finally, finding himself starving and living in squalor, he decides to return home, thinking that if nothing else, he can live as a servant and eat the crumbs from the table. He says, "I will return to my Father's house." To his surprise, on returning home, his Father greets him with open arms and heart, "for what was lost has been found."

It seems to me that what was lost was true identity. The young man in the story wanted to create a new 'self,' a worldly identity of pleasure and pain. Only when the suffering became unbearable did he remember that this was not his true home. "I will return to my Father's house." And though he went with fear and desperation, he found only the consistent outpouring of Love that had always been there, awaiting only his return.

The return of the Prodigal is simply the return to Awareness of Self, as God created Us. We are the Sons of God, and we remain as God created us, eternally. Only our wandering minds tempt us with exciting new stories and keep us preoccupied, miscreating illusory experiences, projections and relationships as we try to live on our own, far from our Father's House. Returning to the Kingdom of Perfect Oneness, we find we never really left.

So what is the Truth about me? What is the Truth about you? A Course in Miracles tells us to "wait in silence, giving up all self-deceptions, as we humbly ask our Self that He reveal Himself to us. And He Who never left will come again to our awareness, grateful to restore His home to God, as it was meant to be... He will substitute the Peace of God for all your frantic thoughts, the Truth of God for self-deceptions, and God's Son for your illusions of yourself."

The Truth about me is also the Truth about You. Our Truth is so glorious, so all-enveloping in its Love and Joy, that there is nothing more to say.

"The power of decision is our own. And we accept of Him that which we are, and humbly recognize the Son of God. To recognize God's Son implies as well that all self-concepts have been laid aside, and recognized as false. Their arrogance has been perceived. And in humility the radiance of God's Son, His right to Heaven and release from hell, are joyously accepted as our own." -- A Course in Miracles, Workbook 152:10:1-5