Thank you, thank you, thank you, Christ and John, for your beautiful and vivid descriptions for encouraging us to take responsibility for our own life situation, including our joy and our misery!
*** gavin
What You Live, You Teach
(emphasis added)
Life in the nightmare that is the illusion is very confusing because, apart from the fact that it is illusory, it is full of conflicting theories, opinions, and assumptions with which you are constantly being encouraged to agree or disagree. These distractions – from just being yourselves and accepting each moment as it occurs – cause you a lot of stress, but because you have become so inured to this way of living, you find it almost as stressful as sitting quietly with yourselves; just being, as in meditation; enjoying a country walk; or watching the sunset.
Being yourselves, quietly observing, without having an opinion or making a judgment, is essential to your well-being. If you do not make quiet space available each day for this extremely non-active way of being, it is practically impossible for you to become aware of your spiritual guidance – the quiet inner voice of your intuition, the Holy Spirit, your True Self – which is always with you, nudging you towards wakefulness, your natural and divine state.
Forgiveness is the door to awakening. When you harbor grudges, resentment, judgment, anger, or blame, the egoic section of your mind is hard at work maintaining the illusion for you, and attempting to convince you that you are all separate, independent beings who have been attacked and deserve restitution for the pain you have suffered. The ego does not want you to realize this and tries to prevent you from being aware of it by nurturing your desire to be right and to be seen to be right. But no one else will ever see you as wholly right, and so satisfaction and happiness elude you, while you spend inordinate amounts of time justifying yourselves to yourselves and rehearsing the story of your mistreatment, in preparation for the opportunity to recite it to the next person you can persuade to listen to you.
To attain a state from which you can forgive indiscriminately, you must first achieve total self-acceptance and self-forgiveness. This does not mean your treatment of yourselves or others is unimportant; it means that, while being aware of your behavior, you do not castigate yourselves for inappropriate behavior but instead, intend to correct it to prevent repetition of the errors that you made. Because you are human, you are experiencing life in the illusion where errors are constantly being made. To blame and judge people for errors they have made only intensifies the seeming importance of those errors, leading people to defend and justify themselves, and encouraging them to repeat the errors to prove that they are not errors, but truly acceptable forms of behavior. This is the egoic need to be right reinforcing itself. As long as the ego demonstrates its need to be right, other egos will try to prove it wrong, and this is the foundation from which all conflicts arise.
So, observe your behavior closely to understand what is driving it, and here you need to be brutally honest with yourselves: do not make excuses; just admit to your motives, no matter how unacceptable they appear to be. Then you will be in a position to make the decision not to be guided by them, which is an essential first step on the path to self-forgiveness. Obviously, you will not have instant success because your motives are deeply ingrained aspects of the character that you display to the world. Nevertheless, as you continue to observe yourselves clearly and honestly, you will find that your behavior does change as you stop being guided by motives that you find inappropriate. Then you will begin to understand why they seemed to control you, and with understanding comes forgiveness. As you start to forgive yourselves you will find yourselves gaining a little wisdom and becoming more accepting of others. And others will become more accepting of you.
Life in the illusion, while indeed illusory, is like a school in which the lessons that you need to learn are being constantly presented to you. You have the freedom to accept them or refuse them, but you do need to learn them – as eventually you will – because the pain of life tends to intensify when you refuse to acknowledge and learn them. This is not due to ‘punishment from God’, but purely from repeating experiences that cause you pain. If you put your hands in the fire, you will get burnt. If you do it again, you will get burnt again. It may seem to you that there is something of great value in the fire that makes the pain of getting burnt worthwhile, but eventually you will realize that that is an error in your reasoning. Then the lesson will have been learnt, and you will cease to put your hands into the fire. How many times do you need to burn yourselves before you learn the lesson? That is the choice that you have to make for yourselves – it is similar to the choice you make either to be right or to be happy. Within the illusion no one can be wholly right, but you can choose to be happy, and that is the choice to learn the lesson.
The lesson is forgiveness, acceptance, and love. It is offered to you constantly, and learning it brings you peace and contentment, which you then teach by example, by demonstration. Each lesson you learn is integrated into your attitudes and behavior, and what you live, you teach. You are in the illusion as students AND teachers. Accept those roles and you will move towards awakening, sharing your Father’s Love and thereby helping others move towards that same destination.
Your awakening is eagerly awaited by all of creation. Learn your lessons, and bring yourself and your sisters and brothers Home. Your arrival is guaranteed as is your joy when you arrive. So learn your lessons eagerly, and terminate the cycles of pain and suffering that you have been experiencing for far too long.
Your loving brother, Jesus.
by John Smallman
preceding originally posted at:
http://johnsmallman2.wordpress.com/2011/06/19/what-you-live-you-teach/
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