BOOK CLUB: WEEK FIVE

Delving into THE MYSTIC JESUS

Welcome back to the Book Club for THE MYSTIC JESUS: The Mind of Love...

Here are the pages for Week Five, pages 110-143, the beginning of Chapter Three.

This week you’ll read about the “Temples of Relationship,” as we explore our relationship to God, to ourselves, and to each other. You’ll read about the illusions which act as internal barriers to our experience of love, and about the miraculous power of forgiveness. You’ll see how grievances hide the light of the world and keep miracles at bay. You’ll see how Jesus is a guide to dismantling the thought system that would keeps all of us bound in fear.

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The Temples of Relationship

My holy brother, I would enter into all your relationships and step between you and your fantasies. Let my relationship to you be real to you, and let me bring reality to your perception of your brothers. They were not created to enable you to hurt yourself through them. They were created to create with you. This is the truth that I would interpose between you and your goal of madness. Be not separate from me, and let not the holy purpose of Atonement be lost to you in dreams of vengeance. Relationships in which such dreams are cherished have excluded me. Let me enter in the Name of God and bring you peace, that you may offer peace to me.* (T-357)

Driving up to a fashionable spiritual center, I saw a large sign near the entrance. It said, “Love Yourself.” That’s become a trendy thing to say these days, but I thought about what Jesus would have said. He didn’t say, “Love yourself.” He said, “Love one another.”

Not that loving ourselves is bad. It’s both the foundation and the result of our ability to love others. Judging ourselves is no less blasphemous than judging others.

But the current glorification of self—the “love yourself ” culture—has helped create an atomized society of isolated beings, struggling to relate to one another and grieving the loss of love. Looking in the mirror to say “I love you” all the time doesn’t quite cut it long term. It’s not even that we’re looking for love in all the wrong places. It’s that we’re not really looking for love at all.

We’re looking for sales, we’re looking for clicks, we’re looking for prestige, we’re looking for power, we’re looking for things, we’re looking to hook up. But that’s not the same as looking for love. Perhaps we’ve even given up on that.

Love is hard to find out there because it isn’t out there. It’s in here. On the material plane, what we give away we no longer have. On the spiritual plane, we only get to keep what we give away. The only way to find love is to give it.

Too many times a therapist will say, “Why do you think you always pick the same man?” when perhaps it would serve the client best if the therapist asked, “Why do you think you always act a certain way with men?” In other words, why do you push love away? You seem to pick the same man because you keep acting the same way.

In many cases, contemporary psychotherapy has become a cult of blaming someone else. Often it’s the ego’s hotbed of grievances and victimization, using modern buzzwords like “trauma” and “narcissist” to pretty much explain everything. While those words are meaningful and carry significant messages given by important voices in the culture, they shouldn’t be cookie-cutter solutions applied to every single issue. They’ve been cheapened so much at this point that they’re used as a description, an excuse, an almost jingoistic label slapped onto every problem. And notice how rarely the problem seems to be you.

While your therapist is explaining that the person you dated was probably a narcissist, consider whether that person might be talking to their therapist on the other side of town and hearing that you are! The ego just loves to talk about other people’s issues, and brilliantly ignores our own.

I spent years in and out of therapy, and often with smart and very wise people. But I think I would have been better served if I’d been coddled much less and busted much more. Therapy should not be a place where we are bolstered in our belief that we’re weak, or victimized, or forever harmed. It should be a place where we are aided in letting go of the barriers that stand in front of our hearts, that the love that is all around us might enter in and give us peace.

“Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all of the barriers within yourself that you have built against it”* (T- 338). Most of us, if we’re honest with ourselves, could write down on a piece of paper some of the things we do that drive other people crazy. And if we don’t know what those things are, our best friends could probably tell us.

It’s our own behavioral patterns more than anything else that deprive us of love. We continue to grasp for love, when usually what we most need to do is identify the ways we push it away. Our souls are swimming every moment in an ocean of love, for that is God’s universe. But the ego is truly a sly opponent, being, after all, our own mind turned against us. The biggest mistakes I’ve made in love I actually thought were a good idea at the time.

Send love to your friends, to your family, to your customers, to your clients, to your boss, to your colleagues, to your employees, to the people you know, to the people you don’t know, to your president, and yes—to that ex-president too. Send love to Nancy Pelosi and to Marjorie Taylor Greene. Jesus would. Martin Luther King said, “God said I have to love my enemies; He didn’t say I have to like them.”

The world we’re living in today is saturated by a mental poison. It is more than toxic; it’s hateful. And all of us know it. None of us can afford to sit out the process of doing what we can to de-escalate the madness.

And it has to start with us. With every thought we think we’re either adding to the solution or adding to the problem. Either our heart is opened or our heart is closed. There is a way to disagree, to set boundaries, even to oppose behavior that is intolerable, without withholding love. That is the message of Jesus. It is as radical today as it was two thousand years ago.

While I was writing this book, focusing deeply and sincerely on what it would mean to truly deeply love, my assistant made an administrative mistake, and I made a snarky comment. Sometimes people have the extraordinary audacity not to do exactly what we want them to do. Shocking, but it happens.

That’s what makes a relationship the ultimate teaching and learning opportunity. The point is not that other people have to change, but that we do. The work is always on ourselves. The ego is certain that a relationship will be fine as soon as the other person starts acting differently. But the fact that we can’t accept them as they are acting now is the actual problem.

What a victim I was! Couldn’t she see that I was trying to write a book and I needed support here, dammit?!?

There was a time in my life when I would have seen the situation that way—as simply about me not attracting the support I needed. But this wasn’t some random event ironically at odds with the book that I was writing. It was an exact reflection of the book I was writing. The fact that I’m writing about these things brought up all the ways in which I’m not yet living them. That is how perfectly the cosmic computer works.

If my only response to an assistant who doesn’t do as I wish is simply to get angry, then I’m limiting my ability to find the words or behavior that can help her do better. It also keeps me from having larger clarity about the relationship as a whole. This isn’t about her. It’s about me.

But what about healthy boundaries? When is it okay to hold someone else accountable? I threw such questions at Jesus as I made a cup of coffee and slammed shut a cabinet door. “Yeah, I’m sorry you’re going through this” was all I could imagine him saying at the time.

I know it’s okay to set healthy boundaries, disagree when necessary, and hold someone else accountable. But all those things can and must be done with respect and love. When we attack another person, we’re wrong even if we’re right. The issues we’re here to monitor are our own.

My ego would argue that the problem was her behavior; the Spirit points out that the problem is my anger. Situations such as that will continue as long as I consistently push up against the same wall. But the wall isn’t going to give; I have to. That wall is the place—and most of us have one—at which point we can’t see how to act with love and still get our needs met. But we’re going to have to learn. The situation is going to repeat itself until we do.

So what do we do in such situations? Pray for a miracle. Pray for a shift in perception. Say you’re willing to see the situation differently.

Sit down, breathe, pray, and your perceptions will begin to shift. As your mind begins to calm down, one of two things will happen: