(note: this post is taken from some writings from 2005, much of which comprised part of the talks that I gave to various communities during my lecture tour in California, and is now part of an unpublished manuscript. This segment was always very well received, and I thought it might be nice to finally ‘put it out there’ )
All the pain of human living comes from the fundamental belief that we are essentially separate -not connected to each other, to our source, or to the rest of life. Everything we struggle for or aspire towards exists because we hope that it can fill the hole that this belief has made in our heart. It is the whole of our fall from grace. But it is just that: a belief. And just as all human suffering comes from the belief in separation, all joy and all healing come from acts of re-connection. This is true spiritually just as it is true physically, as when a cut is a form of separation, and its healing is a re-connection. All of life forever flows towards greater wholeness. Unity is life. Division is death.
The problem, then, is not that separation is real and that we must overcome it, but that separation is unreal and we have believed and based our whole lives on it.
Without this fundamental perception of duality, this observance of you and me, this knowledge of good and evil, we would be living heaven on Earth – we would still be in the proverbial Garden of Eden. For the garden was not a place, but a point of view, and we did not leave except in thought. As soon as we can feel again the unity of life, the perfection of every single thing, we find our very own home, our own back yard, becomes the garden once again.
Heaven can be found on Earth. Peace is possible for every person. It is just that it comes not by work, by struggle, or by learning. It comes through a shift of the fundamental beliefs we hold about the world and our place in it.
If we change those, we change our world.
We have built our lives upon the belief that we are disconnected from spirit, that we are separate and striving for God. Yet what if that were not true? What if it were only our thoughts that make it so?
Humans have been intent on making God extremely complex and out of reach. Yet this has been our downfall. God is not complex. God is not out of reach. You see, the concept of God is really an “all or nothing” principle. Either there is a God, and it is the name for the all-powerful, everywhere present, and always divine life-energy – or there is no such thing, and life is just a chaotic and disordered mess.
All the wise beings and great masters who have walked before us have told us of the absolutely real presence of this greater spiritual power. What we constantly fail to see is that if God is there, then it is also here. If spirit is in them, it is in us. If God exists, then there is nowhere that God does not exist. That includes you.
God is all. God is the name we have given to the collective spiritual essence that is alive in all things. God is in the air we breathe, and in the atoms of the chair you sit in. It is not even fair to say that God is just in you. For that statement still leaves room for separation. God Is you. God Is me.
There is only God – and there is nothing else. We only appear to be separate. We only think that we are individual. This is the great illusion.
We must therefore rise above and beyond our own sense of self. This is not easy, for we are working against our habits, our daily tendencies. It requires much more consciousness than the average life. But the reward is without comparison. The reward is eternal peace, the leaving behind of suffering of any kind. In a word, it is heaven. But let us re-define heaven.
A Course in Miracles has put it perfectly: “Heaven is not a place nor a condition. It is merely an awareness of perfect oneness, and the knowledge that nothing else exists; nothing else outside this oneness, and nothing else within.”[i] Oneness is our reality, whether we know that or not. If we choose not to remember our Oneness, then we will continue to struggle and find sorrow in the world, forever. However, when we surrender to the One, we find heaven, God, and bliss. When you see this clearly, what choice is there?
It is very nice to talk about connection. But the idea of connection is just the first step.
People say, well yes, I know that we are connected – that we are connected to the earth, to the stars, to each other. Sure. But the reality of life, the reality that frees us completely, is much more profound than that.
[i] A Course in Miracles (Foundation of Inner Peace, Glen Allen, California, 1990) Text, Ch. 18, p.359.
