WELCOME 4

P. 37-39

We began exploring the question—-“What are we doing here? What are we getting? What do we hope to accomplish?” 

Difficult to answer because there is no answer on an intellectual plane.

Perhaps it comes down very simply to an expanded awareness of choice—acting out of my divine self—or not….

As simple as it seems, gathering together each Sunday morning, sharing our energies, being consciously aware that we have a choice as to the level of our vibration.

I realize that is a “situational” response. Our mid might think, “Well, of course, it’s way to experience my higher connection when I’m in the chapel at Unity on Sunday morning, but what about family dinner, what about work tomorrow, etc.? 

After a time it becomes part of my awareness, part of my realization that the only thing that is getting in the way of me experiencing higher consciousness in other circumstances is my thinking, my limited thinking that says, “You can’t experience yourself as a high being in this situation because….”

Obviously we are going beyond words and ideas here. We are speaking of experience. I’m reflecting that there are numerous occasions when I become so caught up in what we are exploring that I “forget” I am in a Sunday School class at Unity; I am simply in this experience — on a material level one of us is speaking and others are listening, but on a deeper level we are all experiencing a growth in Oneness together. We are not “thinking about experiencing Oneness,” we are IN the experience.  I am so grateful to you for that!!!!

We are hearing and seeing differently. We are choosing to hear and see differently.

The philosopher Ouspensky once observed, “I found that the chief difficulty for most people is to realize they really heard new things, that is things that they had never heard before. They kept translating what they heard into their habitual language. They have ceased to hope and believe that there might be anything new.“

We certainly do not do this consciously, but I believe this is a great description of how we disengage ourselves from the process. We remain intellectually involved but the Spirit is bypassed. 

I never quite thought of this before, but the mind, what Marianne Williamson calls the “mortal mind,” our intellect, loves to label and classify. It loves to put ideas and experiences into little file boxes. The mind calls this “understanding,” but it is really a form of control. 

So when a new idea comes along, the mind tries to figure out how it fits with what it already knows, “Oh, this idea is just like…” And so instead of becoming a new concept that stretches us, it just becomes another card in the catalogue.

Now the work we are doing here, almost by its very nature, will not allow us to do that. The “downside” is that as we take in or absorb these new insights, there is a period of uncomfortableness as we get used to looking at life and ourselves in a different way. Margo calls this “going through awkward.” It is a natural part of the process. Just like learning any new behavior or attitude (swimming, riding a bicycle, working with a new form of meditation) there is going to be a period of time necessary for us to become acclimated to this new expression of energy.(Like a mountain climber, going certain distance, then waiting a day or so as the body becomes acclimated to this new altitude. The difficulty here is that the ego likes to jump in and try to find a way to get out of the uncomfortableness. The ego might even attempt to convince us that there is something wrong with what we are doing because it is making us feel uncomfortable!

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The book used the example of associating one’s worth with material wealth and that is certainly a paradigm we have all been touched by, but most of us have been affected by this idea more than you might think. In the past and perhaps even into the present, having material wealth has been looked upon as a blessing (from God), and therefore, being poor, in a material way, was looked upon as “you must have done something wrong.” As untrue as that might be, our society still clings to those limited ideas as having some truth.

There are many other ways of assessing one’s worth—job, social status, athletic ability, etc. None of these are who you are. If you have them, enjoy them, make use of them, but don’t et sucked in to thinking they make you worthy.

YOU ARE WORTHY BECAUSE YOU ARE  A DIVINE CHILD OF GOD. 

You can’t do anything to earn it or achieve it; it is the truth of who you are.

When we perceive ourselves with they eyes of the Christ, we automatically see others that way as well. It is interesting if we say the words and mean them “I see you with the eyes of the Christ” our physical sight might not be changed, weight still have some judgments lurking around in our minds, but we are almost forced to look deeper then the roles a person plays, the attitudes their personality self projects or the external experience they present.

“When you attend to the worth of your fellows, you do something very simple: You know who they are. You know who they are in truth. You know what they are in this manifestation and you know how they serve at this level of consciousness that they are attending to. Now we give you this not only as an example, but as a way of knowing something in your consciousness. We do not give you these words to parrot, to recite, we give you these words to claim, to claim, “to claim. When you claim something, you call it into being. You say welcome to the new possibilities that are inherent in the claim, and the claim brings to you the transformation that you require. When you claim to a fellow, “I know who you are, I know what you are, I know how you serve,” you are not just recognizing something, you are instilling in them energetically the creation that we work with in this text.”

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“The language that we work with with you has been encoded to impress upon each energy field a system of transformation that will align you to your Christed Self. Now, this must be done in intent, yes, but you can witness the Christ in a fellow, “I know who you are,” and decide for them that this is their truth. You don’t do this over the objections of anybody, you do not do this in opposition of anything, you are simply witnessing and claiming what is eternally so.”

“We have been talking about this whole process as a transformation, an evolution of consciousness. But maybe it's less a matter of you evolving or changing then of simply acknowledging who we already are.” Ram Dass

And so as happens so often, we come full circle, but paradoxically we are at a different “place” than where we started from.

Peace