Stopping

"You who have spent your life in bringing truth to illusion, reality to fantasy, have walked the way of dreams. For you have gone from waking to sleeping, and on and on to a yet deeper sleep. Each dream has led to other dreams, and every fantasy that seemed to bring a light into the darkness but made the darkness deeper. Your goal was darkness, in which no ray of light could enter. And you sought a blackness so complete that you could hide from truth forever, in complete insanity. What you forgot was simply that God cannot destroy HimSelf. The Light is in you. Darkness can cover it, but cannot put it out." -- A Course in Miracles; Chapter 18, Section III, 1:1-8

"The very circumstance, which your suffering sense deems wrathful and afflictive, Love can make an angel entertained unawares. Then thought gently whispers: "Come hither! Arise from your false consciousness into the true sense of Love." -- Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy; Page 574, Lines 27-30, and Page 575, Lines 1-2

In the midst of every thought, every circumstance, every problem, every action, is the Truth. Of course, it remains unnoticed and unacknowledged most of the time... it is the Ground of Being, and like the air we breathe seems invisible. But when we simply stop talking, stop thinking, stop telling stories, stop distracting ourselves, stop searching, seeking, solving, fixing... when we simply stop, we gradually become aware of the still, small Voice of God that Thunders in the Silence. This is the Presence of God, our Awareness of Being.

Mary Baker Eddy wisely said, "Man cannot love God supremely and set his whole affections on spiritual things, while loving the material or trusting in it more than in the spiritual." (Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures; Page 326, Lines 9-11) There has to be a returning of attention and allegiance to what is True, and then stopping there. Resting in God. And as we rest, we find that all things within the dream of mortal existence are illuminated and healed, their true nature revealed in the Divine Light of perfection. As A Course in Miracles puts it, "Everything God wills is not only possible, but has already happened. And that is why the past has gone. It never happened in reality. Only in your mind, which thought it did, is its undoing needful." (ACIM; Chapter 18, Section IV, 8:4-7)

Our spiritual journeys have been as full of fantasy and illusion as our more blatant material goals. And the end result of seemingly deeper darkness and ongoing disappointment should be our clue to this. When someone came to Jeshua ben Joseph and professed the desire to follow him and be his disciple, he said, "Foxes have holes and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head." (The Bible; Matthew 8:20) In other words, there is no concept, no technique, no spiritual path, no ideology, no teacher, and no material ground to stand on. This Truth that sets us free requires our willingness to be seemingly without a rudder or a material leg to stand on in order to STOP long enough to see what has always been effortlessly present.

Stopping is not difficult. It's just that it is the end of the world as we have known it. Thank Goodness.

"Prepare you now for the undoing of what never was." -- A Course in Miracles; Chapter 18, Section V, 1:1