23 Freedom II: Writing and Playing Life Scripts

                                       Trigg Beach, Perth, Western Australia

“What do your scripts reflect except your plans for what the day should be? And thus you judge disaster and success, advance, retreat, and gain and loss. These judgements all are made according to the roles the script assigns. The fact they have no meaning in themselves is demonstrated by the ease with which these labels change with other judgements, made on different aspects of experience. And then, in looking back, you think you see another meaning in what went before. What have you really done, except to show there was no meaning there? But you assigned a meaning in the light of goals that change, with every meaning shifting as they change.” ACIM XXX-7

“God said: “You were cast in a play once. Unawares, you play that same role again and again. You remember the lines so well, and yet you have forgotten that you already have played that scene. You can’t seem to get off the page.

You do not see what is in front of you. You see the past instead. You feel you have something to undo, and you try to undo it now. You encapsulate the past into the present. You do not know any new lines to say. You were hurt once, and now you hurt yourself again, as if that were the role you had to play, as if you couldn’t choose another role. You are capable. You can change roles. You can step out of an old costume and don new clothes.” HL 3564

 

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Freedom and Meaning

We have seen in the previous blog (#22 Freedom 1: The Mystery of Pleasure) that the freedom to choose is an illusory freedom since it requires that our mind believes in division. In division, the mind tries to attribute a separate meaning to separate objects, including persons. This meaning is also conditioned by an initial judgment followed by perception and is built through comparisons, degrees, levels, and hierarchies, and above all, it varies in time and space. Therefore, this type of freedom of choice is built on the ego system of beliefs which reduces our creative mind to the role of the projector of illusions and reduces ourselves to perceivers of our own projected illusions rather than letting our sane mind assume its role as a creator. Literally, by projecting outside our beliefs, our fragmented and ever-changing meanings, we appear at the same time to be projected in an outside world while, in reality, we are only thrown out of our mind.

But can real freedom be established on the free will to choose what meaning we are going to give to the objects and the events we perceive in the outside world? This would signify that the meaning of the world and of the universe is left to one’s interpretation, which interpretation is a belief, not a fact. Meaning has to be true,  otherwise it is not. And if meaning has to be true, it has to have one purpose which also has to be established as changeless. Otherwise, if meaning changes constantly for every individual, it can’t be true. Whatever the events, there must be a constant, unchangeable purpose which has a constant and unchangeable meaning. Only one real meaning which is the truth must be attributed to all events. If we are to give to varying events varying meanings, this has to signify that there can only be different and varying purposes. Then what is the meaning of meaning if it is constantly changing? Will we have to equate meaning with confusion? Thus varying meaning is the opposite of oneness. Meaning must be one, must have one purpose and this meaning has to be shared with all the universe. Freedom must be the expression of this one meaning and of nothing else, otherwise, it is meaningless, hence non-existent.

 

Freedom and the scripting of self-worth

We could say that, paradoxically, real freedom is not having to choose because the only choice available has already been made for us: WE DID NOT CREATE OURSELF, WE WERE CREATED. But how can we feel free if somebody else is making the choice for us? This statement is at the root of the ambiguity of the concept of freedom. But it is only ambiguous in appearance. The ambiguity resides in the point of view chosen to interpret it.  If we think that God is this “somebody else” Who chose for us then yes, we don’t have any freedom of choice.  But is God really somebody else? God is seemingly somebody else only as our Creator. The son cannot engender the father. He has to engender sons as his father did. Therefore, this choice, even if it has apparently been made by “someone else”, namely by God, is not an obstacle to our freedom. We have total freedom of choice since in oneness we are that choice we make, yet we forgot that to really choose we have to BE what we choose. Since only One is, only God is, then we are One and we have the freedom of choosing ourself. There is no other kind of freedom in oneness. And since we are everything, we choose everything by essence. In a certain sense, freedom resides in total equalization as opposed to selective, conditional, hierarchical, and priority choices. In oneness, choice is meaningless since what is there to choose between 1 and 1?

The illusory freedom to choose in the world of division is in fact the real source of our sense of imprisonment. Because, fundamentally, behind our will to choose between external objects and events, is the deep will to choose ourself . We want to establish by ourself our own sense of worth, our own self-worth. But, at the level of the personal thought system, the duality between God and the ego has generated the sense that God is an obstacle to its freedom, so it feels always threatened, ready to attack by fear of attack, retaliation and its guilt counterpart; it also feels anger, rebellion, anxiety, resentment, lack and unstable sense of self-worth.  And since the personal thought system has no inner meaning or foundation because it was based on a negation,  this will  to define its own worth is constrained to seek outside itself the elements of its own definition.

So the universe did respond to our will to establish by our own means our self-worth. It offered us the possibility of writing and acting and even becoming the scripts of our life(lives) as if what we decided to establish as our self-worth, self-meaning, self-identity was real.

The scripts we write and enact on our earthly existence(s) are necessarily repetitive since they are based on the negation of our true inherited, unchangeable, undividable divine worth which is also our unchangeable script. This divine worth is synonymous with divine meaning or divine identity because worth, identity, and meaning are indivisibly one. But how, on earth, can we build self-worth with exclusively outside separate elements or references? Should we put a tag on us saying “made with local and imported products”? Ego builds its sense of worth on the pleasure/power to get what it wants and needs from the outside. It cannot rely on any internal resources since ego is a fake, it has no consistency, no existence. Waiting to be loved, to be recognized, or doing everything to be loved or recognized, attaching, and being attached never bring the peace and equanimity of an eternally given and unchangeable self-worth.

But this is what we chose to experience. In reality, there is always that infinitesimal fraction of pseudo-time where the idea of separation traversed the mind. It was over the very instant it happened. We are just reenacting this past, thinking that it is still present. As God says: “You were cast in a play once. Unawares, you play that same role again and again. You remember the lines so well, and yet you have forgotten that you already have played that scene. You can’t seem to get off the page.”

We desperately try to get some meaning out of these remembered lines. But the lines don’t deliver it because they are empty of meaning. And they are empty of meaning because they don’t have any unified purpose. A divided purpose is not a purpose, a divided meaning is not a meaning and a divided truth is not a truth. The meanings we give to anything in the outside world of events change constantly, and their purposes shift accordingly or vice versa. The personal thought system is very open to interpretation which is different each time we are thinking of it. We add or remove elements from our scripts every time of the day and then the events seem to have different meanings. What would the universe be like if God was changing his script constantly? He created us Once and For All.  He didn’t have a second thought and He still doesn’t. With the personal self, purposes change, goals change, meanings change, and self-worth changes accordingly.

The past is the only reference the personal thought system can use because there is no present, no now known to the ego, and the future is only a mere projection of the past. It is an old recording repetitively played. Every attempt to built our own self-worth is bound to fail because it is meaningless.

Scripts have no meaning in themselves and yet,  it is in their meaninglessness that lies their usefulness. When we start realizing that we constantly change meanings by varying our judgments, changing labels, seeing other meanings when certain elements of the scripts are changed, we have to acknowledge that we make it impossible to get any meaning out of separate existences, with separate purposes. Perception multiplies judgments and purposes.  If only one meaning is given to everything, what is the use of judgment and its expression, perception/interpretation? Communication, which is sharing, is possible only if the symbols that are used to communicate mean the same thing to everybody. Only the language of One can achieve this purpose because One is the purpose and the meaning. So we are the expression of this unique purpose, unique identity, unique self-worth, and unique meaning of One.

 

Choosing compassion as the base of our self-worth

The only real self-worth is totally and equally shared by the universe. Any other attempt to invent or fabricate self-worth is condemned to failure. Self-worth has to be free from judgment and perception and it has to be shared with all the world without any need to sacrifice anything.  Self-worth cannot be divided, compared, stratified in levels, and unequalized. There is only one self-worth and it resides in universalness, not in specialness. All things have only one purpose, one meaning, and this one purpose one meaning is to be one.

Desire is a powerful force in the universe but any total, absolute fulfillment of desire is impossible if it lies on the outside. The only real fulfillment is to accept that our worth was given to us. We don’t have to superimpose on it a self-created self-worth. Nothing can be added to oneness. In that respect, compassion might be a better basis to realize self-worth than desire.

Compassion is about serving the universe without suffering. It is a good way to rewrite the scripts of our life.

 

A word on suffering

We could almost say, if not absolutely say, that the source of all pain and all suffering, including physical pain, lies ultimately in looking outside to confirm or infirm our real identity which is also our self-worth. By outside, we mean attachment, holding to the past, not letting go, sense of lack, everything we are reacting to as if it was coming from an exterior source. Despite its seemingly multiple variations, pain is the expression of the apparent loss of love. Pain is the symbol of a wound: we have closed ourself to infinite love to experiment what it feels like to lose it and then remember it. In a certain sense, pain is a great teacher because it forces us to accept vulnerability not as a disease but as a condition to remember love.

Yet it is not an easy lesson to integrate because even if we know that ego is only a script of a movie we write, enact and watch at the same time, we cannot necessarily change it when we want to change it. The external sources of pain and suffering (physical, emotional, mental, etc.) may or may not disappear even when we make the move of turning towards the inside rather than the outside. But if we cannot change ego’s script at will, we can put an end to the suffering that ego’s script brings on us. In one way or the other, ultimately, the only real cure to pain (including death) is “God is” and nothing else is.

Looking outside for confirmation makes us believe that the body’s senses inform us of what is going on in the outside world. We believe also deeply that judgment follows perception, that if we think or judge things in a certain way it is because of what we perceive as “what’s going on outside”. But to acquire the inner vision, we have to reverse completely this statement and say that it is our judgment that created our perception of what’s going on outside. The body’s senses don’t “sense” anything if we acknowledge that we are only really experiencing our own script or movie. It is always the mind that is suffering. By itself, the body cannot suffer because it does not have any will by itself. It is neutral, like the memory. We have to put into question what the mind does with the body. And what is suffering if not fundamentally a sense of being isolated, separated, a sense of lack in ourself?

Hence we have to reverse the thought that judgment follows perception. Perception follows judgment, it is not the other way around. What we perceive, through our body, of the outside world is the result of judgments our mind made prior to experiencing the perceptions of them and these perceptions are only the results or the effects of those judgments. In other words, we see what we project to see.

And when we think “sacrifice”, is it not equivalent to a call for pain?

 

Written by Normand Bourque on Apr 15, 2013