[Sculpture by Antony Gormley, Lake Ballard, Western Australia]
“God said:…I understand very well your sense of loneliness. I am going to tell you what you already must know. No one, not even the most loving companionable wife or husband, can assuage all the sense of loneliness that takes place within. You can know that your loneliness does have a basis. It is not baseless. You are lonely for something, and it is full awareness of Our Oneness that you are lonely for. Ultimately, that is what you are seeking.” HL 3012
“…You are on a far greater canvas than you believe. You are spirit, and, yet, you bind yourself to Earth as if Earth were the extent of you. It is like you hesitate to leave the safety of the familiar which is fear-based. The limited you can be upturned at any moment. The Unlimited You – never.” HL 4364
“…There is Oneness, and all the rest is an illusion called something else. The something else is often called loneliness or separation or fear or solitariness or independence or self-sufficiency or anger or distress or misunderstanding or another indigestible name.” HL 3365
***
“You can accept insanity because you made it, but you cannot accept love because you did not. You would rather be a slave of the crucifixion than a Son of God in redemption. Your individual death seems more valuable than your living oneness, for what is given you is not so dear as what you made. You are more afraid of God than of the ego, and love cannot enter where it is not welcome. But hatred can, for it enters of its own volition and cares not for yours.” ACIM 13-3
***
Is Aloneness a Dream?
It is curious to observe that the meaning of the English word “alone” became
the opposite of what it was originally: all+one. Alone came to mean apart from One instead of all One. Alone emphasizes being apart—One apart from all— but not necessarily being unhappy. But we are aiming at understanding how full awareness of our loneliness is the access key to our full Oneness and happiness. We are lonely for our all oneness.
There is no doubt that our awareness of the body makes us feel limited as well as separated from each other. It would then be interesting to ask if the body is the origin of our sense of limitation and separation from each other and from our real origin or if the will to experience separation was the origin of the body.
To answer that double-edged question, we have to state that the difference between alone (apart from One) and all One lies in communication. Separation is definitely a rupture in communication.
Can bodies really communicate? The body does not seem to have a will of its own. It is fairly neutral and can be used by the mind for different purposes. It seems more that the body is the dwelling place of a mind that wants to experiment with separation and diversity. In that sense, it is the mind through a projected image of itself that created the “thought” or the “idea” of a body. And what is this projected image of the mind if not the ego?
What is ego if not a wish to leave All-One awareness to experience a special, restricted, limited aloneness or apart-one awareness? Ego is the physical embodiment of the free will of the mind to make itself a particular representation of reality. Differently expressed, we could say that the ego is the will of the mind to experiment “self-creation”. But in order to experiment with self-creation, the mind has to believe without a doubt that the body is real. It has to start dreaming of controlling a world which is outside. This must be the origin of the world we see and that we consider “real”.
But something is not perfect in that projected vision of a real world outside our awareness. And the unmistakable sign of the not-so-real reality of the outside world is the lack of peace and the fear that this projection of our mind generates. Who can conceive a world created by a tormented, fearful Creator? Where do judgment, anger, grievance, condemnation, sense of lack, loneliness, victimization come from?
It is interesting to observe that if we didn’t have any body, we would not experience the duality of the outside reality. It is a necessity that we identify with the body in order to experience the illusion of the reality of the outside world. The body is at the center of the representation we make of ourself. The body allows us to DREAM the outside reality.
If the body were only a thought
The sense of loneliness is definitely related to the body. It has to be based on a will of the mind not to communicate. But this is paradoxical because the essence of the mind is to communicate. Only minds can really join. Bodies can’t join. The mind invented the ego as a device to deny its inherent nature to communicate, to share, which in turn enabled the mind to experience the illusion of separateness of physical forms. So what happens when a mind whose essence is to communicate chooses not to communicate? It must feel guilty. But if it wants to experiment with the outside world, it needs to not-communicate. So the mind, through the device of the ego, displaces its guilt from itself to the body, even if a body cannot be guilty because of itself it can’t do anything. The guilt is hidden by the mind deep into the body so it is put “to sleep”. Otherwise, guilt is projected on “the others”.
That is why the outside world is a constant source of delusion and deception. The sense of guilt is only a backlash of the mind against itself for denying that it is made to communicate, to be all-one but not alone. Through this mind game, we see ourselves in a body and we are seeking for the truth or reality outside of us, through other bodies. This is the dream we have to awake from. Ego is something that we invented to imprison our mind in a frame of limitation. Ego is a persona that we traded with the reality of what we are which is totally inside. We created an upside-down perception of ourself making us believe that our body was inside and the reality outside while it is the body that is outside and the reality inside.
Is the body part of the problem or part of the solution to the sense of separateness, limited relationships, limited love, and limited power? If we consider the body as the expression of the thought of experiencing diversity, multiplicity, differences as “real’, then the problem is not the body itself but our identification with it.
How do we become aware that we are many in One, despite the illusion of our separate bodies? I guess we have to start considering that even if we seem to have each one our own mind in our own body, there is, in reality, only One mind that imagined being separated into multiple minds. That is probably why, despite our personal views and interpretations of the world, which are only variations on the same theme, we all see the same sun, the same trees. One mind, multiple perceptions projected in seeming multiple minds and multiple bodies.
If we consider that the body is just the embodiment of a thought, then we could say that our real natural state or condition is to be body-less. The body is just an accessory, not the essence of what we are. Our real nature is to communicate because we are fundamentally ALL-ONE and aloneness is just a fantasy. There lies PEACE.
Written by Normand Bourque on Jan 26, 2013
Beloved Normand, sometimes your blog seems to put me into another state, almost as if I swoon. Your writing is deep. Thank you so much. Also, you have a knack for finding great Heavenletter quotations!
When you say body, are you referring to this gross physical body? We also have an energy body, mental/emotional body and spiritual/causal body.
Where does the individual mind exist when there is no thought? When there is no thought, where is the ego? When activity of thinking slows down, impressions on the mind-stuff becomes more apparent. From this awareness, one may seek to dissolve the impressions so that nothing obstructs the light that shines forth.
Maybe the sense of loneliness is a cover-up or avoidance of something we’re really horrified of, which is our Everythingness.
Awesome quotes!
Santhan, you ask good questions that I would never have thought of! I look forward to hearing Normand’s reply!
Dear Santhan, the gross physical body must be the densiest envelope in which the mind chose to lose itself. There must be, as you suggest, many layers through which the soul had the impression of going through to end up forgetting who it were.
The absence of thought must correspond to the state of pure Being. In the meanwhile, the experience of forgetting who we are in the physical body has only meaning if it is to remember our freedom. There is nothing bad, even if sometimes we have to experience horror while experiencing individuality. This is the unique process of learning and growing on Earth.
Your comment gives me the idea that the body must have been projected when the mind had to split from the heart to experience loneliness, darkness. At the same time it projected its imagined separation from the Source, it started seeking to come back Home. This is the life dreamed on Earth.