Being Perfect

"The children of God are entitled to the perfect comfort that comes from perfect trust.  God and His creations are completely dependent on Each Other.  He depends on them because He created them perfect." -- A Course in Miracles; Chapter 2, Section III, 5:1, 6-7

"Be ye therefore perfect, as your Father in Heaven is perfect." -- The Bible; Matthew 5:48

Definition of the word perfect:  

• being entirely without fault or defect 
• absolute; unequivocal
• faithfully reproducing the original
• lacking in no essential detail; complete 
  

Wow.  I can feel myself relaxing.  Relaxing in perfect trust.  Resting in perfection.  An unshakeable certainty of inseparable Oneness with the Love Intelligence and Infinite Goodness that is God. Completeness and fulfillment that never changes.  Wow.

Who are we, that we should be entitled to all this, and more?

"See what great love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are! The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know him. Beloved, NOW we are children of God, and what we will be has not yet been made known. But we know that when Christ appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is." -- The Bible; 1 John 3:1-2  

How many times a day do our thoughts about ourselves and others shift and change?  From liking to not-liking, from kindness and acceptance to judging and blaming, from grandiose aspirations to morose regrets, we are like mental yo-yo's in the ever-shifting concept of self and other. These images are not who we are!  They are mental constructs, projections with no substance.   

The good news is that Being Perfect has nothing to do with who and what we imagine ourselves to be as bodies and personalities.  Being and Perfection are the Reality of God, which is Principle.  Like an axiom in mathematics, it is a given, an unchanging Principle.  This is our Spiritual Reality!  Our Reality is forever perfect and unchanging in the Mind of God, radiant with Love and Light and Life.  Unchanging.  Joyous.  Free of all limits.  Pure Love.  Encompassing all with our Love and Light and Life.  Being Perfect is our natural state. 

"The Thought God holds of you is like a star, unchangeable in an eternal sky." -- A Course in Miracles; Chapter 30, Section III, 8:4 

Real Freedom...

"There is no death.  The Son of God is free.  Death is a thought that takes on many forms, often unrecognized.  It may appear as sadness, fear, anxiety or doubt; as anger, faithlessness, and lack of trust; concern for bodies, envy, and all forms in which the wish to be as you are not may come to tempt you. All such thoughts are reflections of the worshipping of death as savior and as giver of release." -- A Course in Miracles; Workbook Lesson 163, 1:1-3

It takes some quiet reflection to really take in the truth of this passage from ACIM.  "Death takes many forms, often unrecognized."  And it's all in the mind... the mind that imagines itself separate and vulnerable and at effect with the world around it.  The mind that imagines that it would be somehow better off if someone or something were different.  We want to delete whole parts of our lives and replace them with others.  We want to delete some people, and acquire others.  All of these things are the out-picturing of the idea of death, because they involve the coming and going of the transitory and inevitably unfulfilled.  They all involve the serial adventures of a separate body that doesn't have a lot of time here on earth, so hey, we better make the most of it.

"There is no death.  The Son of God is free."  We are already the Son of God.  We don't need to change the world around us for that to be true, or to escape from someone or some situation in order to realize it.  The world is just the out-picturing of the belief we're not free.  That we're imprisoned in a body, at the mercy of a separate world and a capricious God.  There is no such world, except in our tortured minds and perceptions.  Because as long as we cling to the notion of separateness and separate interests, we believe in death.  We believe and experience as true that someone or something has to die so that someone or something else can live.  Eat or be eaten.  Stand up for yourself.  You and me against the world.  There are many versions of the story of me.

The Course tells us that "It's impossible to worship death in any form and still select a few you would not cherish and would yet avoid, while still believing in the rest.  For death is total.  Either all things die, or else they live and cannot die.  No compromise is possible." What this means is that we are either aware of ourselves as One Mind and Spirit, the Sons of God, or we are believing that we're separate bodies in a dog eat dog world.  We can't have it both ways. 

There is no death, because God is All, and there is nothing and nowhere else.  Where would death be?  Outside of All?  There is no death, because we live and move and have our being in and as this All.  There is no death because there is One Infinite Self that we share for all eternity. 

"What time but now can Truth be recognized?  The present is the only time there is.  And so today, this instant, now, we come to look upon what is forever True." -- A Course in Miracles; Workbook Lesson 164, 1:1-3

A Larger Sense of Life

"What better vocation could there be for any part of the Kingdom than to restore it to the perfect integration that can make it whole?" -- A Course in Miracles; Chapter 5, Section II, 10:9

I have had several friends pass over the last ten years.  At 61, I'm at the age where such things seem to become more common.  At the recent passing of a professional colleague, I commented to a friend, with absolute honesty, that a part of me was 'jealous.'  My friend replied, "You mean you want to die?"  I didn't reply.  What to say to a question like that?  I wanted to say, "No, I simply long for a larger sense of Life."  But I suspected my words would not make sense to those who are still identified with a body and the limitations that appear to be part of such identification.

I watch my beloved grandchildren expand in Life.  They move naturally, fairly effortlessly from a limited beginning in a body that is apparently helpless, into toddler antics, to grade school exploration, to middle school angst, to high school where one's peers are one's world.  Then on to college and a larger sense of life and self.  But as we age, we tend to over-identify with the limitations that make up each expansion.  So that it seems like dying when we move on... and on... always moving toward the remembrance of the Self that has no limits and no boundaries, no separate sense at all.

I was watching a movie about a man with Alzheimer's, and his big fear was that he could no longer remember who he had been in his life, and to him that was worse than death.  We cling to memories and achievements, and even failures, as if they somehow define us.  And we tend to diagnose people with the longing to move beyond all of that with either depression (i.e., they have no 'will to live' or 'no purpose anymore.'), or Alzheimer's (i.e., they can't remember the story anymore, and so they scare those of us who still cling to the story of who we are).  Now my mother (who passed last year), had circulatory dementia, which is very similar to Alzheimer's.  But the thing is, when she just relaxed and could just BE, she was happy.  It was only when the fear of not knowing gripped her that she struggled, got angry, and fought those who tried to help. Part of her was longing for a larger sense of Self... but the conditioned, identified mind fought desperately to maintain itself.  That is suffering... fighting to keep an illusion.  Peace is seeing that only illusions can be lost.

In India, it used to be traditional for retired men and women to renounce the world and become sannyasins.  The feeling was that they had performed their duty to the world and their families, and now the rest of their life would be dedicated to seeking the true Self.  I've always thought I would do that one day... but a friend who was reading this post just commented that I've been doing that for years.  Well.  Longing for a larger sense of Self is not new for this grandmother. :-)) 

But seriously, our culture only values growing older with the same values we had when we were younger.  More money or less money, the message is the same... pursue pleasure and the maintaining of the body.  Find hobbies or family to obsess about.  Anything to keep one safely limited to the belief that life is the body and the memories it stores.  The expansion to a larger sense of Life is feared and avoided at all costs. 

I have noticed lately that all suffering is always about clinging to some limitations (mental or physical) that I have  come to identify as 'me' or 'mine'.  And all happiness comes from allowing my Awareness to expand beyond such identifications.  Now this is nothing new.  But seeing it, really seeing it, has been liberating for me. 

As my longing for a larger sense of Life becomes the defining motivation for living, I begin to see that this longing IS the only motivation for Life.  It was only my identification with limits rather than Reality that kept me from noticing.  I see it in my grandchildren, in my children, in the political posturing and name-calling.  I see it in those who worship their bodies and obsess about exercise and diet.  I see it in those who seem to succeed and in those who seem to fail.  I see it in those who seem to be friends and in those who seem to be foes.  I see that there is One Life.  And the longing for that larger awareness of the Self that IS Life, is EVERYWHERE, ALWAYS. 

"Those who see themselves as whole make no demands." --A Course in Miracles; Workbook 37, 2:7