70 There is no confusion when there is only one meaning

•  

CONFUSION OF MEANINGS

The body is the central figure in the dreaming of the world. There is no dream without it, nor does it exist without the dream in which it acts as if it were a person to be seen and be believed. It takes the central place in every dream, which tells the story of how it was made by other bodies, born into the world outside the body, lives a little while and dies, to be united in the dust with other bodies dying like itself. In the brief time allotted it to live, it seeks for other bodies as its friends and enemies. Its safety is its main concern. Its comfort is its guiding rule. It tries to look for pleasure, and avoid the things that would be hurtful. Above all, it tries to teach itself its pains and joys are different and can be told apart. ACIM 27:8

God said: You could have claimed all of Creation, from stem to stern, from star to star, from one flight of fancy to another. You claimed only where you landed rather than opening your arms to all.

Then you protested you were denied. You unlearned joy. You divested yourself of it. You chose denser things instead and wrapped them around your neck and dragged them with you for safe-keeping. You unlearned joy and learned possession. You unlearned joy and learned labor. You unlearned joy and made laws to preclude the remembrance of joy. You assigned yourself dominion over other beings and made them your property as well. You forgot that I had blessed animals to your care, and you thought they were cattle.

You forgot who you were too. You saw everyone as less too. You lowered your eyes.” HL 1646 

___________________________

    We project what we believe. This is the source of all our translation problems

We tend to think, with the support of much of external evidences, that the body is the big obstacle to our innate condition and practice of limitless and omnipotent souls. It is indeed a big obstacle, but perhaps not the way we think it is. If this was true, then the body would be the most irreducible opposition to One/God we could imagine. And, more than often, we think it is. It is hard to believe that a perishable, corruptible body could be created by God Who is formless. Yet if it was not created by One/God, it couldn’t have created itself. Then who or what created it? And how could it oppose to One?

It is a question of Meaning and interpretation or translation of meaning. One only creates what is Eternal, Infinite and Changeless in the Sameness of Oneness. It is perfect growth in perfect stillness and changelessness. This means that everything that emanates from Oneness has only One meaning, one unchangeable meaning which is the meaning of One, no matter the form It might take. Meaning reveals an intention, a purpose which is its consistency. And One has only One Meaning, only One Purpose: to Be extensively, brightly, joyfully, and lovingly One. What defines Creation in Oneness is constant unification through increasing and constant integration through extending. Creation IS ITS OWN MEANING because Oneness, as a CAUSE, is ITS OWN EFFECT.

So let’s get back to the idea of the body in terms of meaning. In fact, the definition of “body” (Old English: bodig, Latin: corpus) is so basic, so primitive, that it means only a mass of something with a structure (Hey body!), whatever this structure might be (a sea star, a baseball bat, etc.). A mass is a resistance (gravity) that allows a form to appear, that is, to show, to become visible as a particularity, an individuality, a singularity. The aim of the body is only to express the autonomy and the reality of a form. The only meaning that the body,  as a mass, conveys is that it is separate and distinguishable from other bodies. The intention or purpose of a body is to be separate, nothing else. Hence, its only meaning is to be a form that looks real and autonomous. The body seems to be the perfect opponent to Oneness by defining itself through its separation from the Sameness of One, so by affirming itself as different.

It follows that the body cannot have attributed to itself and by itself the meaning of being an autonomous and real form. Only the mind could invent a device that virtually allowed it (the mind) to create different points of view, different languages, different meanings — using its 5 senses for instance — through different bodies and established these differences in meaning as the basis of the autonomous reality of each body (mass).

Since meaning pertains to language and since language proceeds from the mind, it follows that even the language of the body is what allows the mind to make of itself, of its body and of the world a seeming autonomous reality.

It seems agreed upon that language as a coding system comes from the coding language of our DNA. But what created the language of DNA if not the language of the mind itself?

The body is the physical expression of our conflicted mind

If Oneness has only One meaning, there must have been a “time” when Creation was interpreted or translated as it is: a wonderful game, a wonderful illusion, a continuous joy: forms as pure known effects of Light. Yet Creation is not a real effect because in Oneness there is no Cause, therefore no effects. Creation is One, therefore it has only one meaning and even illusions are One with the Creation itself.  So that “Many” was eternally translated as One, not as many. This is the essence of Love: “My Father and I are One.” The healthy Mind (One Vision), being one with the Heart (One Heart), did certainly not conceive the world of physical forms (as forms) as real and autonomous. Hence must we assume that in those times of One meaning only the idea of the body didn’t even exist! When an illusion is perceived as an illusion, it is a source of laugh and joy. It can’t be taken seriously. Nor does it have to be owned or possessed. It is when it begins to be conceived as real and autonomous that problems of translations, which become equivalent to problems of possession and power, arise: many is therefore translated as many.“You claimed only where you landed rather than opening your arms to all”. The only real impossibility of separating One into two became a virtual possibility. What can be more encompassing than Oneness?

There must have been a Plank’s instant in Eternity — the flash in the pan — where a tiny idea, a click, a turn of a switch in the mind suddenly irrupted: “What if?” Of course, there are no “ifs” in Oneness because everything is Eternally Real, Present, hence Instantaneous and Synchronic. But because Oneness is so encompassing, it must also encompass the ultimate negation: ‘I am not the Only One‘. Even if this is impossible, impossible or opposite must be included in Oneness otherwise It wouldn’t be Everything and Nothing (a teaching of  Conversations with God). And being included in Oneness, the impossible as a possibility was translated in a “What if” paradigm which manifested, but in the form of a dream, an IF. Then, this tiny but real and unique possibility of the impossible negation happened without really happening, by definition, and it is what makes the experience of separation on Earth (the physical bodies) also unique in the Universe. The virtual paradigm “What IF I am not the Only One?” allowed Oneness to make the real experience of its Unity in Truth and Love through the seeming idea of separation taking the form of a body. Is there a better instrument to make us forget our One meaning than the idea of the body which gives us the possibility of losing ourself in so many different and seemingly real serious meanings? Confusion of meanings means conflicts of meanings. The rest is history again…

The body as the dreamer

“The body is the central figure in the dreaming of the world. There is no dream without it, nor does it exist without the dream in which it acts as if it were a person to be seen and be believed.” (ACIM) This only tiny impossibility “What if I wasn’t the Only One?”, as encompassed by Oneness, is exactly what produced instantly and for the length of one Plank’s instant this dreaming device and product of the dream itself called the body. The rest is recorded history in our memory of the past.

Since there is no causality in Oneness, the body as the producer of the dream as well as the product of the mind’s dream must be the source of our belief in causality, in the law of cause and effects. Since the mind could not have the power to really separate from Oneness, it had to simulate, through forgetting, that it had been separated from Oneness by the body. Then the mind became a cause, but without real effect. Through the mind forgetting itself as a cause, the body became the unconscious projected cause. The body seemed trying to prove in all possible ways that it was real and autonomous. Therefore the mind could delude itself by thinking that what it was seeing as the outside world was not produced by what it (the mind) thought it did but by the body. Then the mind could make another tiny step: it was possible to think or believe that what the mind did was in reality being done to itself. The fear and guilt that irrupted with the ‘What if” was also transferred to the world outside. The fearful and the guilty were coming from outside.

In other words, the essence of the dream is to invert causality so that we cannot even perceive ourself as the dreamer, but as the dream of our body and we cannot control the body’s actions. Nor can we control its meaning, its purpose, or its fate. Illness, suffering, fear, guilt, and death are of the body and we can’t change that. The world outside is guilty and has to be feared, dominated, attacked or flighted.

The meaning of the mind’s fall into oblivion is that we forgot that what we think has been done to us is what we did ourself. We projected what we believed, yet we inverted it by believing in what we projected as an external cause of ourself.

Since ideas always stay very close to the mind that generates them, it is useless to try to change our behavior(s). A behavior just expresses the way we use our mind to think about ourself. It is by changing our mind about ourself that our behavior will change accordingly.

    About Learning, Memory, and Consistency

What created the body was a conflict in the mind, thus it was an error in translation of meaning between and from One to Many. Something was apparently or virtually lost in the process of translation itself. This error in translation made the mind think, through the mask of the body, that the world outside was real, that each form had its own meaning. That is where and when the mind started changing the meaning of One life to possess and control its forms (Many) rather than share Its One meaning: life turned out to be a perpetual conflict instead of a peaceful flowing of eternity. That must be how the mind invented the dream of death as it invented the dream of the body because “any thought that the mind has can then be applied as the mind directs it (ACIM)”.

As we are already enlightened, but ignore it, we are already Creators, but ignore it. To get back our omnipotent and omniscient status, we have to go through a process of LEARNING or more precisely of UNLEARNING.

Both the Laws of Oneness and the laws of the world aim at consistency because meaning is what gives consistency or coherence to the laws. But the main difference between the two systems of laws is that the Laws of Oneness never change with circumstances. The meaning is always the same no matter the form. In Creation, the form does not alter the One meaning, it makes Oneness understandable, augmentable and increasable in Love, Joy and Sharing.  In the world of forms, the meaning changes with the form and the belief of the mind and it has to be so if we are to believe in the reality of the form. The worldly laws are adapted to circumstances and by doing so, they can yield diametrically opposed results because they have to respond to two conflicting voices, therefore their inconsistency.

It is our memory of the past that needs to learn, hence that needs the good translator. Our memory of the Present doesn’t need translation because the memory of the Present is the Present itself.

The One meaning doesn’t need translation, but it needs extension. The memory of the past cannot extend because it has no real meaning.

 

Written by Normand Bourque on Jun 29, 2014