Grace

It is Grace that brings about the final cessation of any identity of separation, otherwise called ego, to reveal all of manifest Existence as this Truth of Love that we also Are...

Part One

It is Grace that brings about the final cessation of any identity of separation, otherwise called ego, to reveal all of manifest Existence as this Truth of Love that we also Are. No ego or identity of separation can orchestrate such a dissolution, nor can any illusion of separation “unite” with what has never in any way been apart.

In Truth there is neither an ego to kill nor something other to unite with. “Higher states of consciousness,” “thoughts as tools with lasting purpose or value,” a “self stored in memory that we can “access,” though these can be extremely noble and helpful understandings along the way, is still just story that we will need to let go of at some point.

All belief in a phenomenal world – things, others, choices, actions, time, space – derives from one single meta belief, that separation is possible.

It is this one mistaken belief that gives rise to ten thousand beliefs, ten thousand seeming choices, the ten thousand things of Taoism and Zen.

In what is sometimes called the turning around and undoing of beliefs, “things” do become useful, just for a while, as “stepping stones.” But only as much as we are willing to let each thing go, step further, go beyond, continue into our own dissolution. Otherwise the spiritual journey becomes merely more ways for ego to reflect back to itself the illusions of its own separate existence, so as to “prove” to the ego it is real.

Belief, through a kind of profound paradoxical willingness, rather than willfulness, brought into the light of awareness, is undone without any doer needed, and we slowly begin to realize that separation was never real.  In all of this world of ten thousand things there has only ever been one temporary choice that we who in Truth are infinite and eternal Extensions of Source, have to make.  Surrender, without any expectation at all, our beliefs in separation.  Or not.

The ego cannot allow this surrender to happen, for the ego is belief personified, an illusion of separation that believes it is real. It will cease to exist when it is finally, fully and clearly seen as merely a choice we made. No one chooses separation when they clearly see in the light of true understanding what it is they have chosen. A corrected mistake ceases to exist, there was only ever the truth, after all.

For those of us who have become seekers, the ego quickly learns to make up “spiritual” games to obscure and veil the truth that separation (ego) is not real.  Spiritual ideologies and even beliefs about the end of ego itself become its new games of separation, new ways of hiding, the “new” ego. As our understandings becomes more powerful, sophisticated and subtle, the ego’s games will also become more powerful, sophisticated and subtle.

We can believe the ego’s games for as long as we wish.  Again, here is the only real choice we have. Continue in the illusions of separation, or share in this Truth that none of it is real, and that in Truth we are one with all of existence.

All that is alive IS consciousness, consciousness seeking itself, recognizing itself and engaging with itself.  We are reflections of the truth all life shares, Whole, Holy. What makes us also human is this power of the Whole to know itself through us, even in the midst of some of our deepest beliefs in separation.

And so it is that only as we become able to bring this one singular choice that seems to hide behind all of the ten thousand things, into consciousness, will Grace be able to reveal its own awareness without any other, as the truth of what we also are. In this revelation even the most extreme appearances and experiences of separation will be transformed.

In the light of awareness what is not true becomes what it has always been, nothing, a mirage whose only substance was belief. We need only say yes to the Truth of Love, with just the smallest measure of willingness, and we will begin to discover a trust for what we cannot ever “know,” only be.  We will start to hear, in the heart of this awareness that we are, what is always softly calling to us, and guiding us Home.

Part Two

Our whole human realm is a projected synthesis of all the beliefs in all the memories, conditioning, games, passions, fears and stories of all the billions of beloveds who are choosing over and over to believe that separation must be real and that its proof is the apparent existence and sensorial experience of a phenomenal world – things, bodies, others, thoughts, separate identities.

Ego holds itself up by its own bootstraps, so to speak, in the sense that it is a belief that believes it is real.  But it is our own belief in the ego’s belief, its belief that it is who and what we actually are, that enables this, gives it power over us.   Ego, the identity of separation, cannot have any lasting power or belief of its own, because it is not real.

We are, in Truth, Extensions of God, Thoughts of God, the Love of God, eternally One with God. We are as powerful as God because we are the Same as God. Thoughts can never be separate from the Mind that conceives Them.  Love can never be separate from Love.

Belief is “about” something “other” than the believer. Yet in Truth there is no other. A believer without belief becomes, through its own dis-illusion, the very essence of Freedom. In other words the ending of belief is the ending of the illusion of believer, ego, and bondage. What is left is what we always and already Are.

Duality is the backbone of illusion.  We made duality up by believing there could be something separate from Everything – that is from God, Love, Tao, Eternity, whatever term or symbol we use so we may have conversation about this.  In Truth we have never been separate, duality is a fiction, the past does not exist, memory is not real (actual), and the future is a dream based on the “past.” All of that is what the ego uses to fence us apart from what is truly the truth of ourself, here and now.

Anything that comes and goes is not real. All fear is made up to further the ego’s belief in separation. Fear is the ego’s “proof” to itself that it is “real.”  All fear and aggression is fear of God, of Love, of Self, a rebellion against the Truth that we also are. Fear cannot be real because Love never attacks and there has never been and can never be anything separate from God, from Love, from Self.

When I say a thing is without a cause, I mean it is without a particular cause. Your own mother was needed to give you birth; But you could not have been born without the sun and the earth. Even these could not have caused your birth without your own desire to be born. It is desire that gives birth, that gives name and form.

The desirable is imagined and wanted and manifests itself as something tangible or conceivable. Thus is created the world in which we live, our personal world. The real world is beyond the mind’s ken; we see it through the net of our desires, divided into pleasure and pain, right and wrong, inner and outer. To see the universe as it is, you must step beyond the net. It is not hard to do so, for the net is full of holes.

Look at the net and its many contradictions. You do and undo at every step. You want peace, love, happiness and work hard to create pain, hatred and war. You want longevity and overeat, you want friendship and exploit. See your net as made of such contradictions and remove them. These are the holes. Your very seeing them will make them go.
~ Nisargadatta Maharaj

Part Three

We become identified with stories, memories and beliefs in the same way we become identified with the body.  We believe our stories are who we are, a whole huge virtual landscape of drama, fear, desire and judgement. All of it weaving into and as the experience of the body. The body is the cornerstone, the container and the charnel ground in all this, seeming to hold together a separate collective of experience which we have chosen to believe is what we are. The belief that thinking is real is the belief the body is real. Always it is the same singular mistaken belief, that we can be separate from Source, God.

The ego mind/body identity is a “whole” in a sense, in that it all arises out of that one core central belief that we are separate.  It is like a “whole” little separate “kingdom” we believe we have carved out of the unity and inviolability of God, a kingdom we are the sole ruler of, with all of it centered around beliefs in danger, scarcity, pain, suffering and sorrow, intermixed with other various beliefs in accomplishment, gain, satisfaction, pleasure and thrill.

In order to maintain all of our tiny “separate” little kingdoms, separate from each other as well as separate from God, it became necessary to forget that we are extensions or, in some traditions, children of our Source.

Yet something in us still remembers.

That Something keeps softly calling to us, come home, return to this Truth that we already Are, and have only forgotten.  That is what the seeking for happiness is really all about, no matter how much we may confuse our desire for happiness with things, wealth, fortresses, special relationships, power, fame, sensation, romance, etc.

There will always be a little part of us that has not forgotten, still knows we are not separate from God. That part IS the calling. And paradoxically that “little” part is Everything, for it remains as always the Truth of what we Are. The Christ, as it were.

And even as that little part of us is also what we most fear, we don’t really want this little kingdom. What we really want is happiness, which is our true heritage and nature as Extensions or Children of God. Love and Happiness are the Same.

God is always extending, through Love, extending as all of us and each of us, in all our infinite variations or expressions of One, and through each of us and all of us God or Wholeness is also extending outward into and as Creation.

The choice we have is to surrender all that we have made in the beliefs of separation, and allow it to be transformed into what it already is, Creation, through the power of a Love that transforms everything.

Or we we can choose to keep holding on to separation.

Beloveds seeking the Truth often speak about the letting go of attachment and desire, yet most have only a vague sense of what that is.

Attachment is believing that a thought, feeling, emotion, sensation, perception, thing or memory is real and inseparable from what and who we are.

Desire is believing that there is something other, apart from what we are, that is real and will make us happy if we somehow attain or obtain it. Yet nothing separate from what we already are can ever bring true happiness. No illusion can bring happiness.

Only the Truth is capable of happiness.

~ John Fridinger
Spring, 2013
Saluda, NC