The End of Sacrifice

As they were walking along the road, a man said to him, “I will follow you wherever you go.” Jesus replied, “Foxes have dens and birds have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head.”  Jesus said to another man, “Follow me.”  But the man replied, “Lord, first let me go and bury my father.”  Jesus said to him, “Let the dead bury their own dead, but you go and proclaim the kingdom of God.”  Still another said, “I will follow you, Lord; but first let me go back and say goodbye to my family."  Jesus replied, “No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for service in the kingdom of God.” -- The Bible; Luke 9: 57-62
 
The ego reads this Biblical passage as a call to 'sacrifice' the pleasures of the world.  But only a mind that is lost in its own images and judgements could fear letting images go.  Images have no substance.  The Reality of everything we think we see is One, and all the separate images ultimately meaningless.  All meaning is given by simply Being.  All we are ever letting go of are the mental constructs.  Reality, Goodness, Love... these are eternal and ever-present, right where those images seem to be.  Learn to let your judgements go, and Love the Reality of all things. Let the images come and go.  This is no sacrifice... it is pure Joy!

Learning to recognize everything we see around us as mental constructs, projected images with no real substance, is one of the most challenging aspects of the curriculum of Jesus' teachings in both Biblical scriptures and A Course in Miracles.  Why?  Because we have a vested interest in seeing our images as real and substantial, with a cast of characters that make up our projection.  Our entire assumed identity depends upon the images we project as 'real.'  And the mental constructs or beliefs that our mind accepts and then projects are the only proof we have that we are separate bodies with individual identities. A real house of cards.  Begin to question these constructs one by one, and watch what happens.  Begin to Love the Reality of all things.  Let the judgements, the mental constructs, fall away.  What remains is pure Joy!  Nothing will look different to anyone else.  But you will know the Joy of Being.

"It is because the thoughts you think you think appear as images that you do not recognize them as nothing.  You think you think them, and so you think you see them.  This is how your 'seeing' was made.  This is the function you have given your body's eyes.  It is not seeing.  It is image making.  It takes the place of seeing, replacing vision with illusions." -- A Course in Miracles; Workbook Lesson 13, 1:1-7

All of the images the mind makes concern a body.  "Power, fame, money, physical pleasure: who is the 'hero' to whom all these things belong?  Could they mean anything except to a body?  Yet a body cannot evaluate.  By seeking after such things the mind associates itself with the body, obscuring its Identity and losing sight of what it really is." (ACIM Manual for Teachers 13, 2:6-9)  

Does the Infinite Mind that is our true Self need a house, a car, a new dress, a good meal?  These things are judgements, images, and will come and go accordingly.  Over 2000 years ago the Christ Mind, our true Self, began reminding us that we are not bodies, that we are lost in our own mental images and judgements, and that we can let it all go and return to the Awareness of Self that he called the Father, and the Kingdom of Heaven.  "Heaven is not a place nor a condition.  It is merely an Awareness of perfect Oneness, and the knowledge that there is nothing else; nothing outside this Oneness, and nothing else within." (ACIM Chapter 18; VI, 1:5-6) Pure Joy!

Many have called these passages 'hard sayings.'  Many ignore these passages, and their obvious message, and use parts of both the Bible and the Course to bring some semblance of truth to their projections and illusions of self and world.  But Truth cannot be brought to illusions.  We can only lift all our illusions, all our mental constructs, the entire house of cards to the Light of Truth.  In this Light of Love and Clarity, the illusion of separation dissolves, and images are no longer seen as substantial.  Seen as nothing, there is no longer a compulsion to 'sacrifice' one's life to illusions.  Seen as nothing, the belief in sacrifice is seen as just another construct... it's all made up!  God is All, and there is nothing else.  Pure Joy!

"That they may know from the rising of the sun, and from the west, that there is none beside me. I am the Lord, and there is none else." -- Isaiah 45:6