“God said: …You tend to think that where you have been is safe. You don’t even know what safe means. With Me is safety. The Unknown is your haven. But, in truth, there is no Unknown. There is just your fear of stepping forward.” HL 4
“God said: …Behind this curtain you pull is a Great Soul. Be not frightened of your Greatness. You fear that you cannot live up to the role of Greatness. You fear that this is the one role you cannot play, and so you prefer to stay unconvinced of it. Even knowing that this is not a role, even knowing that this is the full Truth of you, you prefer to pull the curtain. You hesitate to look. That which you cannot fail in, you fear. You’d just as soon be cast in another role. You’d just as soon play the waif, or the naïf, or the good guy or bad guy. You are used to it. Besides, you tell yourself there is safety in numbers.” HL 3204
“God’s meaning waits in the Kingdom because that is where He placed it. It does not wait in time. It merely rests in the Kingdom because it belongs there, as you do. How can you who are God’s meaning perceive yourself as absent from it? You can see yourself as separated from your meaning only by experiencing yourself as unreal. This is why the ego is insane; it teaches that you are not what you are.” ACIM VII-3
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“In the Beginning was the Verb”. This was before the appearance of language because the Verb is beyond any potential language. It was the Will who wanted to express Itself. It was not a beginning in time but the beginning of the active Will in the now, emerging from silence and from the potential state. If it was the beginning of a language, it was the language or the Verb of One where the subject, the verb and the complement were a tri-unity of oneness or sameness without any time sequence or linearity. The causality of One has no consequences: consequences are not effects of the cause but eternally growing extensions of the cause itself in the now. There were no I, you, we, or they which are only symbols or representations or signs of oneness but not its intrinsic reality. Being and having were one because in Oneness, having everything is equal to being everything. Having everything was also giving or sharing everything. Being and doing were also one because there was no need for anything else than being to create sameness in Oneness. Creation did not require any time, space, work, plans, models, or any external components. The Will and the love to create and share the power of creation was all that was needed. How could One have any components, any building material outside itself? One referring only to itself and to nothing outside itself, It could only create free beings that were in its own image and capable of creating because they shared their oneness with their source. That is how the sonship was created. We were created altogether as one undivided son, one undivided mind, and one undivided heart in Oneness’s image. This is what is called “Heaven” or the “Kingdom”.
In heaven, there was an eternal home for the Father and for the One Son where everything was shared. There was an eternal mutual nurturing without any dependency like the child towards his nurturers, the parents. Being, which is everything, was totally shared in total transparency, clarity, light, and love. There couldn’t have been any room for lack, pain, hunger, frustration, sadness, solitude because One was fullness. There was no search for identity since there was only One possible identity.
We could say that with separation language arose as if everything that had been separated from the Verb had lost its meaning and needed a device to restore this meaning that had been fragmented into infinitesimal particles of heteroclite and mutually exclusive meanings. The only son had become multiple isolated sons, the mind had become multiple split minds and the heart had become multiple broken hearts. This fragmentation was enough to obliterate the memory of meaning and the pain attached to it. Since Oneness cannot be separated in reality or in truth, it had to be separated virtually according to the free will of the divided sonship. So, in the dream of separation, heaven was reflected into a binary image that became the relative world of multiplicity according to the son’s new will: to be its own creator or author, to escape from the authorship of his creator and do his own creations. His will for discontinuity, isolation, unshared power was answered and a corresponding universe was deployed in the mirror of himself: eternity became time, vastness became space and identity became for the son a matter of localizing himself in space and time by delimiting territories. The new universe revolved around gravity instead of light.
The relative world only mirrors heaven because in separation there are only images, perceptions, degrees, contrasts, intervals, perspectives, points of view, hence interpretations otherwise called judgments. Perception is the dualistic binary image of knowledge. That is why eternity projected knowledge or truth in the form of illusion through the binary simulation of time, space, and localization. The God-created self-projected itself into a self-made self. What was an eternal home in heaven had to be expressed as oneself building a home in time and space with outside materials and energy. What was immortality or perfect continuity of life in heaven became the discontinuous life/death cycle in the relative world. Life in the relative world could not maintain itself without the necessity of feeding and reproducing.
So the living bodies had to feed on each other and, at the same time, copulate to maintain the continuity of life. What was mutual nurturing through sharing in heaven became the external energy dependence through child nurturing and the general maintenance of life. What was eternal joy and peace in heaven became alternation of pain and pleasure on earth. What was eternally acquired equanimity in heaven became the search of intensity of satisfaction on earth: intensity of pleasure, intensity of pain, intensity of ecstasy, intensity of depression, intensity of life, intensity of death. Freedom in heaven mirrored into attachment and a sense of property on earth. Yet, duality was not a condemnation, it was a decision, a choice, and, therefore, a prerequisite to making the experience of separation possible. “You separate to learn there is no separation. You were born attached to your mothers so that you could dis-attach yourself and learn your Oneness with Me.” (HL 1) Binary illusion could be the only possible seeming universe to dream an impossible dream, to give meaning to what was meaningless.
What was changeless in heaven became the law of change in the relative world.
Being separated from having, to give something on earth took the meaning of losing something, according to the laws of thermodynamics and their extensions into accounting and banking. Being also being separated from doing, everything in the relative word had to consume energy and perform work to maintain its structure and extend it. It also had to compete, reduce the other to oneself through attack or warfare. Entropy does not prevail in heaven.
In this fragmented, seeming unity of the living world, language appeared as a device both to express duality as a working reality, which is the loss or forgetting of meaning, and, at the same time, to overcome duality by recovering the memory of meaning, that is remembering the original intent of One in creating us. So languages were “fabricated” to express the loss of purpose and meaning (the Tower of Babel) and, at the same time to restore this purpose and meaning. This is the spirit of language: an attempt to reestablish the broken communication between heaven and earth.
The language of measure and the measure of language
Language is tightly bounded to space and time so it has to be bounded to measurement. What are space and time if not measurements? Measurement is what establishes position in time and space. Moreover, it is only through a position that we can represent time and space because taken separately, time and space cannot be physically grasped, they are abstract coordinates or numbers. And in the relative world, everything needs a position, not only in physics, but also in sciences in general, philosophy, politics, and daily life. Positioning through measurement is applied in multiple ways, not only in music, architecture, engineering but also in all the concepts we use through language. And this localization is made through the body. Language itself is constituted of units of sounds that are metered and positioned in one way or the other. No matter the language, there is always a grammar that rules the positioning, sequencing, and modulating of its localized components. The words themselves are positions as well as units of positioning. The nucleotides sequences on a gene are also positions as well as components through a ruled grammatical sequence or chain. Moreover, mental, emotional, and physical images (pleasure or displeasure) exist only through localization: they are all expressed relatively through position, through distance in time and space. And they always involve memory.
It is also interesting to note that what we call speed –which is another representation of time– is a position at two different times. Our physical constitution limits us to observe states that are characterized by a unique position. Time is what allows a change in position. This gives us a clue on how “real” space and time can be: they are closer to perceptual effects than to solid realities. Couldn’t we experience reality directly without the necessity of positioning where the states superpose, canceling speed and collapsing time and space? Quantum physics already answered yes to that question.
God says in the quoted Heavenletter: “You are used to it. Besides, you tell yourself there is safety in numbers. What do you say to Me now? Do you tell Me, “Wait, God, later, I’ll see as You see”, or do you say, “Okay, God, I’ll open my eyes and not fool myself and others about Who I Am any longer. Okay then, God, I will count as far as One.”
Yes, a pseudo-safety was built in numbers and language as a symbol of positioning in time and space. But instead of counting as far as one, we already trespassed the one limit to engage in the binary track of 2. That is what property is all about: mine or yours. Mathematics turned language in a totally numbered language. We also rely on theories of knowledge that are based on perceptions of the world, which are themselves measurement experiences in localization through observation. Indeed, we believe strongly in the safety that numbers bring us (bank accounts, life expectancy, white cells count, etc.)
But can we count as far as One?
Bringing truth to illusion or illusion to truth (ACIM)
Basically we would like to reconcile the heaven view with the earthly view. But is it possible?
First, is it possible to bring down or integrate truth to the world of illusion? In the relative world, we establish relationships of the part(s) to the whole by assuming that the whole is constituted by the sum of its parts. That is the way we think in science especially in physics and biology. It is called the systemic approach. This thought system can have a relative meaning only at the level of perception where change is possible. But at the level of truth or real knowledge, there is no difference between the part and the whole. The whole cannot be divided, nor can it change. It is thus impossible to bring the truth down to the world of illusion. Oneness and duality are incompatible. If one is true, the other is false. In other words, dualistic thinking cannot incorporate truth since it negates oneness. Can we learn what truth is from illusions? This is equivalent to ask if we can make illusions real and justify our belief in them? Truth refers only to itself. Perception refers to what is not itself. It refers to what is outside of itself. Oneness is its own meaning without any outside elements to add to its meaning. Its meaning can extend from the inside only. Outside forms don’t have any meaning by themselves. They can’t be their own meaning. This means that they are meaningless by themselves. They only have relative meaning to the personal thought system.
Since we separated from our original and only meaning, the world beliefs are directed toward the body. The mind through the body cannot have access to knowledge since perception is the base of interpretation or judgment while knowledge cannot be interpreted. But the real problem is not the relative world of illusion itself. It is the mind that is deceiving itself, making itself inconsistent and confused by playing unconsciously at being separated and, at the same time, at being unseparated. The split mind is very ingenious in trying to escape from making a real decision between being separated and being unseparated. But the compromise is impossible. It is not a two-way track. The approach to truth or knowledge in the dualistic world separates the method from the content which seems to make the escape from decision making easier. But the knowledge of truth does not care about ingenuity. Method and content must coincide. We are the subject, the verb and the complement. We are the method and the content because we are the knowledge, we are the truth. Truth cares only about love which is its owns meaning and can refer to itself in an ever-extending way, without redundancy.
If we accept once and for all that we did not create ourself (as the ego likes to suggest), that we are not the author of ourself, then it is possible to bring the illusion of a self-made self to the truth. There is nothing to change and there is nothing to do. There is only illusion to undo. Because only the truth can undo illusion while illusion cannot restore the truth. Perception will always deceive us. Truth will never deceive us because truth is our substance.
The ego makes us believe that we can understand ourself alone, trying to give our fabricated identity an apparent meaning. But we get our real meaning from the total sonship of which we are a part equal to the whole. We cannot have any meaning by ourself if our meaning is separated from the whole of creation. ” You can see yourself as separated from your meaning only by experiencing yourself as unreal. This is why the ego is insane; it teaches that you are not what you are. “(ACIM 44-3)
There is no possible compromise between the self we made and the self that was given to us. “Okay, God, I’ll open my eyes and not fool myself and others about Who I Am any longer. Okay then, God, I will count as far as One.”
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