Day 53
5 There can be no order of difficulty in healing merely because all sickness is illusion. Is it harder to dispel the belief of the insane in a larger hallucination as opposed to a smaller one? Will he agree more quickly to the unreality of a louder voice he hears than to that of a softer one? Will he dismiss more easily a whispered demand to kill than a shout? And do the number of pitchforks the devils he sees carrying affect their credibility in his perception? His mind has categorized them all as real, and so they are all real to him. When he realizes they are all illusions they will disappear. And so it is with healing. The properties of illusions which seem to make them different are really irrelevant, for their properties are as illusory as they are.
This, of course, reminds me of “A Beautiful Mind,” in which a brilliant but schizophrenic scientist begins to doubt his own beliefs, and so learns to disregard the voices and the visions. He has used the most difficult of all classrooms to learn, and therefore to teach, that our thoughts are illusions, and that we choose the ones we want to believe. Believing them is all that gives them life in our personal worlds.
Closer to home for me is my second husband, Charlie. Charlie’s story is one of schizophrenia as well. He sees things and hears voices that no one else does. I can assure you they feel as real to him as the voices and visions that you and I share. His are as real (or rather unreal) as ours, since this is all an illusion. But because of his paranoia, and the fact that others don’t believe in his “reality” it is more painful than most of ours.
The challenge for him all of his life is that when someone questioned his understanding, he would have to sort through those thoughts and then try to decide if the meaning he gave them was right or if the other person was right. His paranoia made this so much harder because it told him that people were trying to mislead him. Because he believed that thought, it was very real for him.
We do the same thing, although without a malfunctioning brain it is easier for us and since most people sort in more or less the same way with pretty much the same conclusions, we don’t feel so uncertain and afraid of the process. My experience has been that believing the same way as everyone else does not make my decisions right, it just makes me one of many who have given meaning and value where there is none.
This is why I want to let go of my thinking mind which will always function within the parameters of the illusion, and so never lead me out of it. Another way to express this is that I want to let go of directing and analyzing and giving my attention to the ego thoughts in my mind. I want to disregard appearances, and disregard meaning and thinking, and wait for direction from something outside ego to be given me. The Inner Ramana through Regina calls this receiving direction through the mind from outside the mind. When that happens there is nothing for me to do with it but to be grateful and to follow the way it points.
What a relief to realize I can stop figuring out which illusion is truer than the other, and just know that all illusions are false. This will make such a clear and open space in my mind that I can be filled with truth. What is happening now is that I do this and then find an illusion I like and pretty soon I have forgotten my purpose and am off and running with another story.
In NTI, the Holy Spirit tells me that I will make a sincere decision to put them down but will then pick them up again, but not to worry about this. He says that this is like cutting off the leaves and I will continue to do this until I get to the root. He says it is a moment to moment decision. So in this moment, my decision is for God.
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