BOOK CLUB: WEEK THREE
Delving into The Mystic Jesus
Welcome back to the Book Club for THE MYSTIC JESUS: The Mind of Love...
Here are the next set of pages for Week Three, excerpted from Chapter Two, pages 54-81.
On these pages we explore the false beliefs of the ego and its common manifestations in the various areas of our lives. The ego is the power of your mind turned against you, in opposition to who you truly are. The mystic Jesus dissolves this power of the ego and guides us to the spiritual truth of who we really are: an extension of God’s Love. In Chapter Two, we begin the work of becoming more spiritually conscious, making changes on both inner and outer planes.
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Chapter 2: Reflections of Light
People can have an almost pathological need to “make something of themselves,” as though who they are already simply isn’t enough.
To the ego, you will never be enough. It doesn’t tell you that you did something wrong; it just tells you that you are wrong. Few of us, no matter how kind our parents or how healthy our upbringing, survive into adulthood without an arsenal of rockets in our head shouting us down before anyone else has a chance to.
That’s why knowing who you are spiritually is essential to a healthy sense of self. If we only accept the world’s estimation, then we’ll never feel like we’re enough, because the world is dominated by the ego’s vicious nonsense. If we accept ourselves as God created us, we recognize we’re no better and no worse than anyone else. All of us are special, and none of us is special. At the deepest level of our spiritual identity, all of us are perfect creations of God.
Central to understanding this is recognizing where we came from. A Course in Miracles says we have an authorship problem. We seem to think we authored ourselves, which if you think about it is incredibly arrogant. Or we think we were created by our parents, a sperm and egg apparently carrying magical powers to produce feelings, hopes, great art, and an ultimate yearning for transcendence.
The mortal you is a result of your parents having sex, of course, and your mortal personality is in many ways a result of how your parents behaved since the moment you were born. But none of that is the Real you. Your worldly parents parented our worldly self, but God is the parent of who you really are. We have always lived in Him, and we will always live in Him. Our problem is when we fail to individuate from our parents, yet individuate too much from God.
The ego is like an impostor, a veil, a wall made of broken shards of glass behind which lies an endless field of roses. It’s a mask we wear that convinces not only others, but even ourselves, that this impostor is who we are. But you are not a body, you are not your personality, and you are not the mere sum of your human experiences. You are something so infinitely, magnificently beyond all that, and all your deep grief is you longing to be you.
There are many ways to express all this, none better or worse than any other. God is loving thought, and you are an extension of that thought. God is loving cause, and you are its effect. God is Father, and you are His beloved child. Jesus is someone who actualized all that, and in identifying with him you begin to identify yourself.
Apocalyptic Beginnings
When I look back over the span of my life, I sum it up pretty much like this: “It could have gone either way.”
I’ve met so many people living in dire circumstances I know could have been mine. One different turn here or stupid choice there, and it could be me spending years in prison, addicted, on the streets, or even dead. I’ve been up close and personal with some of the deepest suffering, and I know that there but for the grace of God go I.
I was a bit wild when I was young, and I had many opportunities to self-destruct. The fact that I barely escaped disaster delivered a very powerful message to me: to spend the rest of my life doing whatever I could to persuade others not to be as stupid as I had been. To take life more seriously. To be more responsible toward myself and others. To try my best to be the woman God would have me be.
This isn’t some goody-goody mentality. It’s simply the gratitude and praise that millions of us feel, knowing that something bigger than ourselves delivered us from the lowest rings of hell. A lot of good things come out of that too, including the development of emotional antibodies of some kind. Once you’ve seen the worst, when you see it again you’re not so scared.
Ironically, that this is true for so many people is one of the most hopeful things happening in our world today. It means we’re ready for what comes next. While many traditional Christians believe we face the Apocalypse up ahead, after which there will be a thousand years of peace, the mystic reads that chapter of the Bible differently.
A lot of us have already experienced our personal apocalypse. For some it was the diagnosis of cancer. For some it was getting sober. For some it was unutterable loss. For some it was bankruptcy. For some it was divorce. And from the experience, we have grown more wise. Just as Jesus would appear during those thousand years of peace, in a way he has appeared to us. And each of us now carries a piece of the wisdom that, when combined with the wisdom of others, can and will save the world in time.
Either that, or it’s absolutely within the realm of possibility that we could bring about a global apocalypse. It’s not up to us what we learn, but only whether we learn through joy or through pain. If we choose not to be wise, we might blow up the world. If enough of us choose to follow the wisdom we’ve gained from living life so far, then we will avoid a global calamity and go straight for global peace.
In both of those scenarios, Jesus is standing there when the apocalypse is over. In a mystical interpretation he is with us now, showing us how to bypass the darkness and go directly for the light. He has already transcended. Now so can we.
The Power of the Morning
I look at morning prayer and meditation the way I look at physical exercise. If I do it, it works. It takes work to strengthen our attitudinal muscles, just as it takes work to strengthen our physical muscles. We use spiritual exercise to counter the emotional gravity of victimization and anger, shame and self-hatred, the way we counter physical gravity by working out. The mystic Jesus is like a spiritual trainer. He can’t do the work for you, but he can show you how to do it for yourself.
There’s no better time to do it than in the morning.
When I was pregnant with my daughter many years ago, I could feel how much was going on inside me as I simply sat on a chair with my feet up drinking a cup of chamomile tea. I was in awe of the thought that new life was being created inside my body. The greatest way I could serve the process was to cultivate health and stillness and inner peace, for myself and for the child within me.
Now I’m similarly in awe of the life that gestates in the womb of consciousness. Sometimes the greatest service I could offer to the child in my womb was to sit quietly and merely be; a life that’s pregnant with greater awareness is similarly grounded in stillness and rest. Inner peace is a fertile field for the birth of the mystic self. It is also its ultimate goal.
Giving birth to another human being, but also giving birth to a higher version of ourselves, means we’re participating in the birth of a new world. While the species can’t continue unless enough of us conceive children, it won’t survive unless we conceive enough wisdom.
The effort to become more spiritually conscious involves changes on both the inner and outer planes. In the words of Martin Luther King Jr., we need “qualitative shifts in our souls as well as quantitative changes in our circumstances.” Some of those changes are lifestyle changes, one of which involves the earliest hours of our day. All great religious traditions emphasize the importance of the morning.
When we first awaken, our minds are most open to new impressions. That’s when we download the state of consciousness that will dominate our day. We have a sacred responsibility to ourselves to choose wisely what that download will be; if we go straight to social media, for instance, rather than going first to God, it’s like eating a bowl of candy for breakfast. Your body doesn’t want that, and your mind doesn’t want it either.
Morning should be sacred, a time when we ground ourselves in a reverent view of ourselves, our relationships, and the world around us. It’s a time to consciously call in the light so darkness won’t overwhelm us. Particularly given the chaos in the world today, acquiescing to the ego’s worldview first thing in the morning is one of the most self-sabotaging things we can do.
We do not need to create the world; it has already been created and created perfectly. Our problem is our attachment to an unreal world that lies in front of it.
The world on this side of the veil is the ego’s kingdom, in which thoughts of fear and limitation prevail. Through the eyes of the Holy Spirit, we gain the power to see beyond the veil. Withdrawing our attachment to one world, we gain the ability to invoke another. Beyond this world is a world we want* (WB-235).
It’s ours to decide which realm of reality we wish to show on the big screen that takes up space in our mind. But the vision of one world will cost us the vision of the other. Grounding ourselves in peace and stillness, love and forgiveness, in the morning is one of the most powerful medicines we can apply to our wounded souls. Spiritual liberation is not a bursting out, but a gentle melting in. The mystic Jesus is the tender power at the core of who we are, and the protector of the mystic mind.
We wake up in the morning and take a shower or bath in order to wash dirt off our body. We want to wash ourselves clean of physical impurities left over from the day before. Through meditation, prayer, mindfulness, or whatever spiritual practice we follow, we do the same thing with our mind. We take a shower to wash away the dirt that has accumulated on our body, and we meditate and pray in order to wash away the stress that has accumulated on our mind.
It’s not just our intellect that is assaulted by the fear and chaos of the world today: our nervous system is assaulted by it. And that weakens our capacity to be effective in the world. We can’t bring peace to the world around us if we ourselves are not at peace. We’re not going to change the world if we ourselves remain unchanged. “Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind” (Romans 12:2, New International Version).
That’s why prayer and meditation matter. Meditation is a scientifically proven process that shifts our brain waves, leading to chemical changes in the brain that cause a deep experience of inner peace. Time spent meditating removes the mental plaque that accumulates on our psyche—the layers of ego thinking that cover over our miracle impulses and make access to the higher mind impossible. Five minutes spent with the Holy Spirit in the morning guarantees He will be in charge of our thought forms throughout the day. Simply sitting, reading inspirational or scriptural material, following a serious prayer or meditation practice, we allow our mind to be in a receptive mode to something higher than ourselves. It transforms our experience of life.
The ego’s resistance to a quiet moment can be very strong, of course; it loves to make a direct beeline for our adrenal system, addict us to fearful thinking, and destroy all impulse control. There are times when it takes more emotional discipline to be quiet and do nothing than it does to send a reactive text. That’s why one of the most undermining things we can do is check email, Instagram, Twitter, and so forth before we meditate in the morning. Just as we train our physical muscles to help us move powerfully, we train our spiritual muscles to help us be powerfully nonreactive and still.
Being a mother myself, I know how many young parents are saying to themselves as you read this, “Oh, but mornings are impossible! She doesn’t understand what it’s like having little kids around!” But yes, I do. And this is what I learned: small children love it when we say very softly, “Hey, now we’re going to have our quiet time with God, okay? We’re going to sit here with each other and just love Him!” I cannot stress how important it is to help small children get used to spiritual practice. Try to do it early. Once the eye-rolling years begin, it’s almost impossible.
Nothing would do more to repair the damage to our families than to cultivate quiet among ourselves. The French philosopher Blaise Pascal said that every problem in the world can be traced to man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone. In both Judaism and Christianity, there is the notion of the small, still voice within, but that voice is easily drowned out by the cacophonous noises of the world.
If we do not fill our minds in the morning with the light of a higher love, the darkness of the world will have its way with us. Our mental energy is going to go somewhere, and if we don’t proactively direct it, devote it, and surrender it to love, then it will be used for the purposes of fear. And of course, that jangles us. Our only two real choices today are