Personal Reality, Session 636
The state of grace is a condition
in which all growth is effortless, a transparent, joyful acquiescence that is a
ground requirement of all existence.
Your own body grows naturally and easily from its time of birth, not
expecting resistance but taking its miraculous unfolding for granted; using all
of itself with great, gracious, creatively aggressive abandon.
You were born into a state of
grace, therefore. It is impossible for
you to leave it. You will die in a state
of grace whether or not special words are spoken for you, or water or oil is
poured upon your head. You share this
blessing with the animals and all other living things. You cannot “fall out of” grace, nor can it be
taken from you.
Love perceives the grace in
another. Like natural guilt, the state
of grace is unconscious in the animals.
It is protected. They take it for
granted, not knowing what it is or what they do, yet it speaks through all
their motions and they dwell in the ancient wisdom of its ways. They do not have conscious memory, again, but
the instinctive memory of the cells and organs sustains them. All of this applies in degrees according to
the species, and when I speak of conscious memory I am using words that are
familiar to you – I mean a memory that can at any time look back through
itself.
In some animals, for instance, the
rising of such memory is apparent, yet still highly limited, specialized. A dog may remember where he saw his master
last, but without being able to summon the memory, and operating without
the kind of mental associations that you use. His connections will be of a more biological
nature and will not provide the leeway, that your own mental conditions allow
you.
The dog does not recall joyful
appreciation of his own state of grace from a past, nor anticipate a recurrence
in any future. With the large freedom provided
by the conscious mind, however, man could stray from that great inner joy of
being, forget it, disbelieve in it, or use his free will to deny its existence.
The splendid biological acceptance
of life could not be thrust or forced upon his emerging consciousness, so to be
effective, efficient, to emerge in the new focus of awareness, grace had to
expand from the life of the tissue to that of the feelings, thoughts and mental
processes. Grace became the handmaiden
of natural guilt, then.
Man became aware of his state of
grace when he lived within the dimensions of his consciousness as it was turned
toward his new world of freedom. When he
did not violate, he was aware of his own grace.
When he violated, he fell back into cellular awareness, as with the
animals, but he felt consciously cut off from it and denied.
The simplicity of natural guilt
does not lead to what you think of as conscience, yet conscience is also
dependent upon that moment of reflection that in a large measure sets you apart
from the animals. Conscience, as you
think of it, is caused by a dilemma and a misunderstanding of the
conditions set upon your physical existence.
Conscience arose with the emergence of artificial guilt.
Artificial guilt is still highly
creative in its way, an offshoot made in man’s image as his conscious mind
began to consider and play upon the natural innocent guilt that originally
implied no punishment.
The conscious mind is a maker of
distinctions. It brings to the surface
of awareness whole gestalts of previously unconscious material, then assembles
and organizes it in ever-changing form. Through
purposeful focus, a literally infinite amount of such data can be unconsciously
sorted; then only the desired elements will emerge.
The conscious mind is endlessly
creative. This applies to all areas of
conscious-mind thinking. It is also the organizer
of physical data, so natural guilt became the basis for all kinds of
variations. These closely followed man’s
religious and social groupings. The
latter are also the result of the aware mind’s capacity to play upon, mix and
merge, and rearrange perception and experience.
Man is innately good. His conscious mind must be free, with its own
will. He can, therefore, consider
himself bad. He is the one who sets
those standards in his own image.
The mind is also equipped to see
its own beliefs, reflect upon them and evaluate their results, so using this
tool as it was meant to be used would automatically help man in recognizing
both his beliefs and their effects. Part
of this great permissiveness has to do with the fact that man is to realize
that he creates his own reality. Free
will is a necessity. The leeway given
allows him to materialize his ideas, meet them in physical experience, and
evaluate for himself their particular kind of validity.
The animal has no such need. It nestles safely within the confines of its
instincts while exploring other aspects of awareness with which man is not so intimately
familiar. Yet natural grace and natural
guilt are given you, and these will also grow more fully into conscious
awareness. If you can sit quietly and
realize that your body parts are replacing themselves constantly – if you turn
your conscious mind into the consideration of such activity – then you can
realize your own state of grace. If you
can sense your thoughts steadily replacing themselves then you can also feel
your own elegance.
You cannot feel guilty and enjoy
such recognition, however; not on a conscious level. If you find that you are berating yourself
because of something you did yesterday, or ten years ago, you are not being
virtuous. You are most likely involved
with artificial guilt. Even if a
violation occurred, natural guilt does not involve penance. It is meant as a precautionary measure, a reminder
before an event.
“Do not do this again”, is only
the afterward message. I am placing
these concepts within your time scheme because in your terms they were born out
of it. But the fact is that all “time”
is simultaneous.
In a simultaneous time, punishment
makes no sense. The punishment is an
event, and the event for which you were being punished, exist at once; and
since there is no past, present and future, you could just as well say that the
punishment came first.
We have mentioned reincarnation
hardly at all, yet here let me state that the theory is a conscious-mind
interpretation in linear terms. On the
one hand it is highly distorted. On the
other hand it is a creative interpretation, as the conscious mind plays with
reality as it understands it. But in the
terms used there is no karma to be paid off as punishment unless you believe
that there are crimes for which you must pay.
In larger terms there is no cause
and effect either, though these are root assumptions in your reality.
I use these concepts, again,
because of their familiarity to you. In
the world of time they appear as real. We
return once more to that moment of reflection, for it is here that both causes
and effects first appear. Dimly, in your
terms, it can be traced by observing animals that even now roam the earth, for
each in its own degree – far less than yours – shows that reflection. In some, for all intents and purposes, it
does not exist at all. Yet it is there,
latent.
The greater your “period” of
reflection, the greater the amount of time that seems to pass between events.
You seem to think that there is an
expanse of time between reincarnational existences, that one follows the other as
one moment seems to follow another.
Because you perceive a reality of cause and effect, you hypothesize a
reality in which one life affects the next one.
With your theories of guilt and punishment you often imagine that you
are hampered in this existence by guilts collected in the last life – or worse,
accumulated through the centuries.
These multiple existences,
however, are simultaneous and open-ended.
In your terms the conscious mind is growing toward a realization of the
part it has to play in such multidimensional reality. It is enough that you understand your part in
this existence. When you fully
comprehend that you form what you think of as your current reality, all else
will fall into place.
Your beliefs, thoughts and
feelings are instantly materialized physically. Their earthly reality occurs simultaneously
with their inception, but in the world of time, lapses between appear to
occur. So I say one causes the other,
and I use those terms to help you understand, but all are at once. So are your multiple lives occurring as the
immediate realization of your being in the natural extension of its
many-faceted abilities.
“At once” does not imply a
finished state of perfection nor a cosmic situation in which all things have
been done, for all things are still happening.
You are still happening – but both present and future selves; and
your past self is still undergoing what you think is done. Moreover, it is experiencing events that you
do not recall, that your linear-attuned consciousness cannot perceive on that
level.
Your body has within it the
miraculous strength and creative energy with which, in your terms, it was
born. You most probably take this to
mean that I am implying the possibility of an unending state of youth. While youth can be physically “prolonged”
far beyond its present duration, that is not what I am saying.
Physically, your body must follow
the nature into which you were born, and in that context the cycle of youth and
age is highly important. In some ways,
the rhythm of birth and death is like a breath taken and exhaled. Feel your own breath as it comes and
goes. You are not it, yet it comes into
you and leaves you, and without its continuous flow you could not physically
exist. Just so your lives go in and out
of you – you and yet not you. And a
portion of you, while letting them all go, remembers them and knows their journey.
Imagine where your breath goes
when it leaves your body, how it escapes through an open window perhaps and
becomes a part of the space outside, where you would never recognize it – and when
it has left you it is no longer a part of what you are, for you are already
different. So the lives you have lived
are not you, while they are of you.
Close your eyes. Think of your breaths as lives, and you the
entity through which they have passed and are passing. Then you will feel your state of grace, and
all artificial guilts will be meaningless.
None of this negates the supreme and utter integrity of your individuality,
for you are as well the individual entity through whom the lives flow, and the
unique lives that are expressed through you.
No one atom of air is like
another. Each in its own way is aware
and capable of entering into greater transformations and organizations, filled
with infinite potential. As your breath
leaves you and becomes part of the world, free, so do your lives leave you and
continue to exist in your terms. You cannot
confine a personality that you “were” to a particular century that is finished
and deny it other fulfillments, for even now it exists and has fresh
experience. As your moment of reflection
gave birth to consciousness as you think of it – for both really came
together – so then can another phenomenon and kind of reflection give birth to
at least one dim conscious awareness of the vast dimensions of your own
reality.
The animal moves, say, through a
forest. You move through psychic,
psychological and mental areas in the same way.
Through his senses the animal gets messages from distant areas that he
cannot directly perceive, and of which he is largely unaware.
