“God said: You have the freedom to embrace all that life gives. Freedom doesn’t pick and choose. That is limited freedom, and freedom limited is not freedom. So long as you think your life has to go a certain way, you have abandoned freedom.” HL 276
“God said: This is the human condition. Involvement. Entrainment. You work at resolving the human condition. Through your being in a physical form, you come to freedom.
The Being of yourself is already free. From the physical basis, you discern the Truth of you. You discern and ennoble. Although there is truly no distance to travel, you travel it. And who greets you when you arrive? Why, you do. You meet yourself.” HL 4478” I said before that you must learn to think with God. To think with Him is to think like Him. This engenders joy, not guilt, because it is natural. Guilt is a sure sign that your thinking is unnatural. Unnatural thinking will always be attended with guilt, because it is the belief in sin. The ego does not perceive sin as a lack of love, but as a positive act of assault. This is necessary to the ego’s survival because, as soon as you regard sin as a lack, you will automatically attempt to remedy the situation. And you will succeed. The ego regards this as doom, but you must learn to regard it as freedom.” ACIM V-5
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Who has never felt that he or she was imprisoned in some way, physically, emotionally, mentally, even spiritually? If we assume that this feeling of imprisonment is a result of our own free will, then we have to admit that our will is not free and if it is not free it cannot lead us to freedom. And if we think that the outside world or even God is the cause of our imprisonment, then free will is powerless, hence chimeric. We are caught in a vicious circle, in a circular reasoning.
We also associate freedom with the will to make choices. Yet, it is only in a world of division that choice is possible. Choice exists only between things that are separate. We could not choose between things if we could not distinguish them apart and select one of them. If we associate freedom or free will with the power to choose, then we must acknowledge that, in order to choose, part of our mind has to believe in division. The division we perceive in the outside world is just a projection or a reflection within our mind that what we see or perceive as divided is real. This can obviously be applied to persons. The world of choice is a world of specialness, of conditionality, hence it must rest upon judgment. Isn’t the force of gravity itself a form of judgment originating from the divided mind?
Separation was a thought and it manifested itself through the apparent concreteness of the body. Living bodies are the results of division, namely cellular division. They are the reflection of the will of the mind to divide to make real what it has divided. Sex itself is originally a thought conceived by the divided mind. Sex means to sever, to cut or to separate, to look different (Latin secare, sectum ‘to cut’ or secus ‘otherwise, differently’). And obviously, sex is the fundamental way taken by nature to produce the apparent reality of its multiple forms.
But there is something in the thought of separation that is rarely talked about. This something is called pleasure. Would the idea of separation have come to the mind of certain angels if they anticipated to experience pain and turmoil instead of joy (that would eventually become pleasure) in the actualized thought of separation?
Pleasure and pain as the binary image of love or joy
Since earth is a binary image of heaven, everything on earth is a digital copy of heaven. It is not an original. Hence it has to be dual, made of opposites, made of 0 and 1. Yet duality is an illusion since only indivisible oneness is.
The separated world had to look like a new haven or a new heaven. This haven/heaven was the projected body. In twoness, everything that was projected or copied and pasted from the Limitless had to be expressed binarily by limits or boundaries. Eternity was binarily projected as time through the life cycle, infinity as space through territoriality (like a cellular membrane), omnipresent universal and unconditional love, or joy as momentary conditional pleasure and momentary conditional pain resulting from the choice of specialness.
The cycle of life itself through cellular division exhausts itself to death. What makes the organisms grow by cell division (multiplication) is what kills them. Oxygen sustains breathing and, at the same time, it oxidizes and kills the bodies. Through division, life reproduces itself seemingly by destroying itself. It is perpetuity or continuity through the pulsation of affirmation and negation. Negation is the affirmation of multiplicity in the relative world.
The universe responded to the will of separation when it granted pleasure. God did not take revenge on the separated ones by condemning them to sickness and death in a prison called earth. Love, joy, peace cannot be destroyed, only forgotten and replaced by their binary counterparts. The idea behind separation is the fundamental question of authorship. The separate mind refuses or rejects to recognize that God is our creator. So it has a problem with what is perceived as God’s authority. This denial of God’s authorship initiated the need to fabricate a self-made self. Of course, this denial of authorship generated fear of retaliation, guilt, anger, sense of attack, sense of sin. The fabricated self had to go through the process of physical birth. This was possible through the negation of light by obliterating the memory that we were created by God, that we did not create ourselves.
When eternal and unconditional love or joy was seemingly lost and forgotten, it reappeared in the embodied mind through transitory pleasure. This is the life energy of reproduction through sexual orgasm. If there was not a pleasure drive to ensure the continuity of life forms on earth, there would not be any urge to reproduce. Nature sends the signal of the necessity to ensure continuity of life forms through the mating season. Belief in pleasure and the search for physical pleasure, comfort, and peace are at the root of defining ourself as a person who made the choice of living a separate existence on earth. Physical orgasm is the binary image of the joy God took in creating us. It is the bare energy of life interpreted by a separated mind that identifies with the body. God created us eternal and the living organisms on earth ensure their continuity by dividing and reproducing, by being born and dying.
Is it not through the physical orgasm, which is a scalar big bang, that we can experience the (conditional) love or pleasure of being the author of ourself, of reproducing binarily the unity of the universe? Is it not also what gives rise to the will to be in control, to make choices, and to do what we want?
What we are looking for is to feel good. The baby needs the physical contact of the mother to feel good. If he doesn’t have it, he feels abandoned. Sexual pleasure is also a life energy that makes one feel good. But this search for feeling good depends on external sources. With pleasure comes dependency and attachment in all its forms. Pleasure generates pain. They are inseparable from each other. This is the law of duality. First, there is the possibility of becoming dependent on that crude energy that makes us feel good. Second, at the same time, that love was forgotten, the sense of fear, guilt, anger, attack, and sin came bounded with the sense of pleasure.
Curing poisoning with the poison
It is inevitable then that pleasure on earth is always accompanied by its counterpart, pain. The split mind invented pain at the same time as it invented pleasure. Pain as well as pleasure pertains to the split mind, not to the body. Sexuality is associated with guilt, not because God condemned sexuality. The split mind condemned itself by rejecting God’s authorship and authority and attempting to possess the life energy, to control it and use it to its own advantage. Inevitably pleasure became associated with guilt. From guilt, two extreme reactions are possible: restriction, condemnation, or let it go without any restriction. Both are escapes, not solutions.
The torque pleasure/pain, as anything else in duality, has a purpose. It became part of the laws of the physical universe that allowed the experience of being our own creator and, at the same time, through duality itself, as a way of waking up from this dream of self-creation and restoring back the memory of Who created us. What was totally given by God to His Son and shared with him as inheritance had therefore to be re-acquired through learning in the dual-mode. That is why we call the earth a school because we have to learn what we already know but have forgotten in order to remember better and enrich the universe with this new and unique experience.
Pleasure and its counterpart, pain, are what on earth connect the physical, the emotional, the mental, and the spiritual embodiment of the mind. In that sense, there is no real difference in nature between the body, the emotions, the mental and the spiritual. Truth, knowledge, love, joy, peace are indivisible and they don’t contain degrees. But in the learning experience on earth, they are expressed in degrees or levels just like the degrees (differences in frequencies) in the musical notes of the scale. This is the process of growth in awareness of what eternally is. At each level or each note or each chakra, there is a portal or a door where we can make real choices that sum up to one choice: choose universality instead of specialness. At each level, there is an instant where eternity can meet time.
It seems that universal love is at the core of the duality pleasure/pain in the embodied mind and that it has the power to bring back the mind to its original sanity which is oneness, not twoness. What seemed to be the poison becomes the cure.
[To be continued]
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Normand, I bow down to your great synthesis of what is true.