The rule is, don’t lie. And related to that is the understanding that I don’t always know when I’m lying.
This game we are playing – this work we are doing – is not for the faint of heart.
“Lying” is a bad word because of its moral and negative connotations. “Fantasy” is better. As in, when I write, the reader is always a fantasy, and the fantasy is always a defense against love.
That’s what I don’t want to say this morning. That’s what I don’t want to see.
People sometimes object to “fantasy,” on grounds that is can have positive connotations. It’s good to fantasize, it’s a way of seeing what we want. And anyway, who doesn’t daydream?
But I am saying something different. I am saying that when I write in and from that fantasy, I don’t see you at all. I see a process at work in me and I see its product, the sentences and lines that emerge on the page, some of which will survive the later cull named “rewriting.”
I hear you saying: so you’re focused on the writing, so what?
But no. I am focused on healing and the writing serves that focus. It has to or the writing becomes part of the problem – it becomes part of the illusion of separation.
Ihe writing serves the healing.
When writing serves healing the rule is, don’t lie, so I won’t: I don’t know you really but I do want your attention. I do want you to praise me. I do want you to argue with me. I do want you to say that you’ll be back to read tomorrow and the next day.
None of those “wants” are crimes against God or nature. But they do point at a perception of myself that is not complete without you, and that is a lie.
Believing that hurts me and you.
It hurts me because it allows me to remain in behavioral cycles that don’t make me happy. And it hurts you because it refuses to allow you to be the God-lit, God-created self that you naturally and perfectly are.
When we only see the other in relation to our own narrative, our own story, our own drama – then we are not really seeing them.
People are allowed to help of course but we are not allowed to demand their help or insist it take some specific form.
Relationship – true relationship – is when our whole existence is based on the other’s liberation from ego and all ego’s systemic effects (which are the world).
Holy relationship is when we intentionally make our relationship about that liberation.
When you are audience – when you are my audience – then I am still stuck in the very frame of self/other from which I long to escape.
What do I do?
I was thrown yesterday because reading others I saw instantly the many ways we can be in Advent, and I felt lost. What about my Advent? Will I have to give it up?
I felt like as a child, when I faced the playground at recess, and wondered who would play with me, and what would we play.
That’s fear.
And like I tried to make clear on Substack yesterday, we have to go into the fear. We have to basically deconstruct it. We have to pass through the easily identified levels in order to find ego so that we can offer ego up to the One Who Heals.
But we have to see the way we can offer ego up – that ego is a thing we made and so it’s up to us – not ego – what happens to ego.
We have to remember always that we want to heal and – at a deeper level than most of us can readily and steadily access – what we really really want is to heal the other.
I started a writing project, some folks are doing it with me, and they are already doing it differently than I’d expected.
And I am scared.
And I want you – yes, you reading – to fix this fear by acting in specific ways dictated by me, e.g., praise, respect, loyalty.
But, doing that holdis you to a standard set by judgment. I’ve decided for you that your function is to make me feel better.
And thing I want to be clear about – more than aything the thing I want to be clear about right now – is that when I decide in advance your function, and it mysteriously turns out to be about my ego drama – I am not loving you, but rather wallowing in fear.
Neither one of us truly wants that!
So I waken early – 3:30 a.m. – and I go outside with my coffee. The cold wakens me as much as the coffee. Everything is still except the sky. Polaris is right above the neighbor’s chimney but fifteen minutes later it’s a little to the right.
God is moving the Heavens.
God is moving in the Heavens.
The work is to find what obscures our remembrance of Love as our inheritance, and the Source of Love as our Identity.
Writing is a way of finding out what we think. I think I need you as a student – my student – or as a fan – my fan.
I know I’m an ACIM studet because I’m not concerned about “student” or “fan” – that shit is easy, take it or leave it – but about “my.”
It’s the “my” that locks us both into a fantasy of separation. It’s the “my” that makes it hard to notice this, let alone become still enough – dialogic enough – to undo it.
One thing that saved me was realizing the healing nature of curiosity. When I am curious about you – how you ended up on this path, why you’re into this teacher and not that one, whatever – then I quickly realize you aren’t grist for my mill. You’re something else – what?
When I am curious about something I study it. I give attention to it.
I enter into relationship with it as a student.
It’s pushing five a.m. now. The coffee is gone, the sleepers upstairs are stirring. Soon the sun will rise.
I am happy in this moment – the writing led me to happiness in the moment – because I have found my function: I am your reader. I’m here listening for the sound of you writing – pen scratching, keys tapping. I know that sound well; I’ve shared in its gift. It’s the sound of God moving in the Heavens, the deep quiet from which language arises and back into it falls. It’s a single star, high in the sky, that cannot steer us wrong.
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