Life Eternal

"Do not perceive anything God did not create or you are denying Him. If you would remember eternity, you must look only on the eternal. If you allow yourself to become preoccupied with the temporal, you are living in time. As always, your choice is determined by what you value. Time and eternity cannot both be real, because they contradict each other. If you will accept only what is timeless as real, you will begin to understand eternity and make it yours." -- A Course in Miracles; Chapter 10, Section V, 13:1 & 14:5-9

"This is a spiritual universe, an eternal universe which God made and which He found Good. The discords, the inharmonies, and the injustices are not in the world; they are in our misperception of the world, in what we think we are seeing and hearing with our human senses. One of the deepest truths of the Bible is that to know God aright is life eternal." -- Joel Goldsmith

I love how our minds just shut down when we think about the word eternity. Maybe when we're star gazing at night we have glimpses, but it's too overwhelming... in no time at all we find our mind has popped on to other things, like what we're having for dinner, or who we need to call, or what he or she did or said.

Our preoccupation with the temporal, the changing, the unreal is pretty much deliberate. We obsess about the trivial and unreal because the vastness of the Truth scares us. Our own eternal reality, the limitless reality that we reflect and are, scares us. It scares us because we know we can't have it both ways. In order to even begin to perceive a reflection of limitless God as flawed and limited and small, we have to close our eyes to Reality and fall asleep and dream. We know we're making an illusory choice, over and over, but we can't seem to help ourselves. We're addicted to this dream, to our imagined limits and pain... it's like an addiction to a bad relationship... we know it's not what we're pretending it is, that it's not really love, but we can't seem to help ourselves. As a matter of fact, the relationships in the dream we call life simply reflect this relationship of denial we have with Reality.

There is no easy answer on how to start valuing the Real again; it's simple (only two choices!), but definitely not easy, since we are addicted to fantasy and illusion. We want what we want, not what is. So the first step in returning to sanity is to begin to want only the Truth in every situation, not what we want to be the truth. Valuing the Truth above all human desire and beyond imagined emotional investment is how we come to know God aright.

The long and the short of it is that we can't know Life Eternal while obsessing about the details of this temporal life. That's why Jesus told us very succinctly to 'take no thought' for the things of the world. He told us instead to 'seek first the Kingdom.' Everything that is Real exists in eternity, and has no limits and no end. By remembering our Eternal Self in God, we begin to reflect only the eternal here in the dream, 'on earth as it is in Heaven.'

So how do we see only what God created, see only what is true and real? We empty ourselves of the trivial and and the unreal. We empty our hands and hearts of the false loves we have cherished. We come with open minds and hearts to God, and ask for the miracle of healed perception, that we might see the world as God sees. This is the only miracle there is. And this is Life Eternal.

"Take no thought for your life, saying, what we shall eat? or, What shall we drink? or, Wherewithal shall we be clothed? But seek ye first the Kingdom of God, and all these things shall be added unto you." -- The Bible; Matthew 6:31 & 33