V. Healing and the Changelessness of Mind, Paragraph 2
2 Only minds communicate. Since the ego cannot obliterate the impulse to communicate because it is also the impulse to create, it can only teach you that the body can both communicate and create, and therefore does not need the mind. The ego thus tries to teach you that the body can act like the mind, and is therefore self-sufficient. Yet we have learned that behavior is not the level for either teaching or learning, since you can act in accordance with what you do not believe. To do this, however, will weaken you as a teacher and a learner because, as has been repeatedly emphasized, you teach what you do believe. An inconsistent lesson will be poorly taught and poorly learned. If you teach both sickness and healing, you are both a poor teacher and a poor learner.
I read this paragraph and thought I understood it, then I was guided to read again more carefully.
Only minds communicate. Obviously I have no idea what true communication is because I thought it was what we do when we talk to each other. On more careful examination of this idea I see how flawed it is. What I say to you may or may not be true and even if it is true it may or may not be truth. In other words, I may be saying what I believe is true, but be wrong about it. Or I may be saying what I have convinced myself is true when all along I am really hiding the truth even from myself.
Perhaps what I am saying is for you alone. My words to your ears. In this case it is not true communication because it is limited and it separates. Limitation and separation have no place at all in the Kingdom. Words can be symbols for the truth but always, even under the best of circumstances, they will fall short of true communication. When we speak to each other, body to body, it is only vaguely similar to communication.
The impulse to communicate is the impulse to create. What passes for most communication is chatter. We speak on the surface of things because we cannot find words for what really matters and yet that impulse to communicate remains. So we try. We want to communicate, we want this very badly and we try to communicate even when it is very hard to do.
Have you ever tried to express something important and just couldn’t find words for it? I have had a few mystical experiences and I don’t know if words exist that could allow me to describe what actually happened and how it affected me. Yet I try anyway. I feel a strong need to communicate this and so I give them words even though the words only serve to diminish the experience.
In our true state communication is forever unbroken. What is known by one is known by all. We don’t need to fumble for words and disingenuousness is neither possible nor desired. How deeply freeing and satisfying it must be to truly communicate.
Communication is also the impulse to create. This is the reason we long to communicate and that we do so even when communication is so severely limited. We are creators and the impulse to create is not diminished because we are pretending to be something else. While we are in denial about our true nature we cannot create, but the impulse remains and so we try. We struggle to communicate, and we make as a poor substitution for creation.
The ego thus tries to teach you that the body can act like the mind, and is therefore self-sufficient. The ego can do nothing about the impulse to communicate and the impulse to create so it tries to convince us that this is the purview of the body, and we accept this without question. We believe that we can only communicate through speaking words. We believe that we can only create with our hands.
In accepting these limitations, we are accepting the ego belief that we do not need the mind, and that separation is real and we are bodies. How very small we make ourselves and our world. In believing that the body is sufficient unto itself, what we think no longer matters to us, and all is about behavior. We have taught ourselves to believe the unbelievable, that as long as we don’t act on our dark thoughts, they don’t really matter, and only behavior counts.
Yet we have learned that behavior is not the level for either teaching or learning, since you can act in accordance with what you do not believe. I remember the first time, as a young teenager, I learned the hard lesson that people don’t always say what they believe. I walked up to a group of girls at school and one of them said to me that I looked really nice in my new outfit. Later I discovered that she really meant that she thought my outfit was pretty awful.
People’s actions are not always congruent with their thoughts. Sometimes it is deliberate as it was with the girl in my class, and sometimes it is unconscious. Sometimes it is meant to hurt, but often it is meant to hide what we think of as our awful secrets, or to put on a front designed to convince others that we are what they expect us to be.
We want to be liked and loved, and yet we don’t feel likable and lovable. We notice the dark thoughts in our mind and think we will never be accepted if people know what is going on in there. We imagine that our ego is more awful than everyone else’s when actually we all share the same ego.
This is one of the reasons I often share my ego thoughts as teaching examples. I will no longer hide behind appropriate behavior. I will expose the ego thoughts that would otherwise keep me in the belief that we are different. To be a good teacher and a good learner, I must be consistent in what I teach. This means a change must occur at the level of the mind, not at the level of behavior.
All of my life I had tried to bring my behavior into accord with what was expected of me. I wanted my behavior to teach what I was, even though it was not the truth. Then I learned to allow my mind to be healed knowing that behavior is always informed by the mind. A healed mind teaches healing consistently, thus assuring that I am a good learner and a good teacher.
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