The Two Selves

In working with clients and with prayer requests (and with my own life) I have observed a persistent phenomenon that I will call the two selves.  This seems to be the delusion that all who walk the earth share.  We believe (and have a lot of sensory evidence to validate this belief) that we are human, weak, lacking, and subject to suffering.  At the same time, we believe we have infinite potential, that we are created in the image of the Divine.  So we all have a kind of split personality... there's the imaginary historical self that thinks we're a product of heredity and hierarchy and environment, that sees flaws in ourselves and every other living thing, that judges, criticizes, and condemns.  And there's the quiet true Self that loves and blesses, that takes joy in life, that gives of itself naturally and freely, that knows wholeness and freedom and love are all words for the same thing.

If you were suffering from multiple personalities, a good therapist would find a way to help you become unified again... because a house divided against itself cannot stand.  So spiritually, our task in healing and awakening is always a return to unified consciousness, to Oneness.  This is enlightenment... the realization that we are not two selves. 

To say we're created in the image of God is to perpetuate this split.  To say that we're a shadow, an image, a mere potential, is to put our becoming into the future, into perpetual process.  And where's the peace in that?  Where is the being?  If we are endlessly processing and becoming, we must still be incomplete, lacking in some way, still subject to suffering and failure.  This is the set-up we're born into.  It's a lose/lose proposition, and always has been.

There is good news.  We are not created in the image of a god... a mere shadowy image of some nebulous force that all are subject to.  We are living and moving and having our being in God, reflecting God, and nothing else.  Not a nebulous force that bosses us around, but the very Ground of our Being, and Source and Substance of Self.  There isn't anything but God. 

And what is God, my skeptical readers will ask?  GOD IS AN IDEA we share about the Source of all that is.  We can have false thoughts about this Source, but Source ItSelf can't be false.  We can have incorrect understanding of multiplication.  We might think that we can multiply ten thousand times a zero and still have ten thousand.  But the principle, the idea of multiplying anything with zero remains the same... it's always zero, no matter how you try to make it something else.  And anything multiplied by one always remains the same, remains itself.  Ideas are principles, and they are unchanging and true.  Thoughts are stories about ideas, they involve judgment, and can often be false, or at least only relative (two-sided, not unified).

Webster defines idea as "a transcendent entity that is a real pattern, of which existing things are imperfect representations."  Thought is defined as "the action or process of thinking, or something that is thought."  So we can say, as did Mary Baker Eddy, that GOD IS PRINCIPLE... the Idea that is the Ground of All Being, in Truth and in Love.  A Course in Miracles tells us that "God is Idea" and "Ideas leave not their Source." When we allow this transcendent Idea to take root, we realize that we cannot and have never left our Source.  We remain rooted and grounded in God.  And then our thoughts, our judgments and stories about the world begin to reflect the Truth of Being, rather than the weak and imperfect (and insubstantial!) image of self our stories have perpetuated up until now.   

We are not two selves.  This is the root of all our struggles.  No matter how we attempt to prove that our weak and human image of self is real, it's still multiplying by zero.  So take some time listen to the Real, the True, the God-Self that we all share.  It is very quiet, because It doesn't need to defend ItSelf, being wholly true and forever our Reality.  Thank God!