Day 24
2 The peace of mind which the advanced teachers of God experience is largely due to their perfect honesty. It is only the wish to deceive that makes for war. No one at one with himself can even conceive of conflict. Conflict is the inevitable result of self-deception, and self-deception is dishonesty. There is no challenge to a teacher of God. Challenge implies doubt, and the trust on which God’s teachers rest secure makes doubt impossible. Therefore they can only succeed. In this, as in all things, they are honest. They can only succeed, because they never do their will alone. They choose for all mankind; for all the world and all things in it; for the unchanging and unchangeable beyond appearances; and for the Son of God and his Creator. How could they not succeed? They choose in perfect honesty, sure of their choice as of themselves.
What jumped out at me is the sentence that said;
No one at one with himself can even conceive of conflict.
The reason this caught my attention is that it perfectly describes our state in this illusion. Not only is everything I see in a state of separation, I myself am in a state of separation. The ego personification of Myron is just a gathering of disparate pieces brought together to appear as one. But what is different cannot be one.
As an example of what this means, I thought of all the ways I might describe the personality Myron.
I am honest.
I am dishonest.
I am sad.
I am happy.
I am kind.
I am cruel.
I am forgiving.
I hold onto grievances.
Everything in that short list is true and everything in it conflicts with something else. And each of those has a host of beliefs behind them, each bolstered with their own stories to make them more real to me.
For instance, I notice I feel sad and so my mind starts scrambling for a story to explain the sadness. I realize my son hasn’t called me in two weeks. So I believe he needs to call me. I feel unloved because he has not called me. I think of reasons he didn’t call me and eventually I get to the one where I was not a good mother and now I think I am worthless.
If I feel bad enough the mind starts scrambling to find someplace else to put the blame and I can get a good story going about what a sorry son he is to ignore me after all I’ve done for him. Its funny if looked at with openness, but not so funny if believed. Conflict is painful. It is suffering.
The solution seems to be that I disown all that is not truly Me. As I lay aside the beliefs that make the many facets of my little self, what is left is Self and without all the incongruent aspects within my mind I will be at peace, and this is the honesty Jesus is talking about.
As I lay aside all that is not love knowing it cannot be me, then what is left is only love. From within this state if my son called me I would love it. If he didn’t call me I would love it. There would be nothing but love because that is what I am and all I am, so there would be nothing to experience but love. That is honesty.
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