Ending our Spiritual Identity Crisis

In The Voice that Precedes Thought Tara Singh writes that we either “avoid the crisis or we act.”

The crisis is spiritual; it is the crisis of identity; we do not know what we are in truth, and so continually project illusions of identity, which brings us to grief, and the world too. All thought is projection, and we are unwilling to become responsible for it. We are “much too tolerant of mind-wandering” (T-2.VI.4:6).

To become responsible for thought – to end projection, and to stop insisting on the illusion of separation – requires attention and commitment. It must be intentional. It must be active. If we do not come to it in that spirit, then we will not remember how little is actually asked of us (T-18.V.2:5). We will be overwhelmed and distracted. We will give up.

To become responsible is to see the crisis of mistaken identity clearly, resolve to become responsible for ending it, and then act accordingly.

The only way to have peace is to teach peace. By teaching peace you must learn it yourself, because you cannot teach what you still dissociate. Only thus can you win back the knowledge you threw away . . . Everything you teach you are learning. Teach only love, and learn that love is yours and you are love (T-6.III.4:3-5, 8-9).

The alternative to responsibility is avoidance. Avoidance means we refuse to give attention to the crisis; we step around it; we look away. We do this by projecting and believing in our projections. We tell ourselves there is no crisis, we already know what we are and how to live – just look at our house/marriage/job/body, we’ve got it all under control, we’re right and they’re wrong, et cetera.

These lies may allow us to avoid the challenge and consequences of actively facing our spiritual identity crisis, but they do not end the crisis.

And until the crisis is ended, we cannot actually know peace and happiness. We cannot remember that we are love (T-6.III.4:9).

There is only one mind and it does not have parts. Thus, there is only one Will and it does not will multiple or conflicting outcomes. This can be easily perceived yet most of us go our whole lives without even a glimpse of it. We go on and on as if there are billions of separate minds, each governed by a separate will, each driving a separate body to war and death. We refuse to see the one mind and the one will, the one life beyond all appearances.

And so the crisis of identity goes on, and we remain unhappy and destructive, forever exploring with one another the many forms of fear, hate and conflict. Don’t kid yourself: whales choking on plastic, kids starving in Sudan, and ice melting in the arctic is you and me and we are not well.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

The one life is easily seen, if we will simply stop insisting that life is equivalent to the form in which we perceive it.

Life is an expression of God. If you see only what is limited by a form bracketed in time – a whale, kids kicking a soccer ball in the dust, polar bears adrift on shrinking ice floes – then you are not yet looking at the one life.

The one life is the ground from which all appearances arise and into which they return. It is kin to a void, an emptiness, yet it is also generative. It is feminine more than masculine, more fecund Goddess than semen-spurting God. It is more earth than rain. It created us as love, and so love is what we are, when we are not confused about what we are.

To give attention to the one life restores to mind the knowledge of one life, and in this way our spiritual crisis ends, and healing restores to mind the conditions of both infinite and eternal peace.

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