Don Quijote and Sancho Panza ride again
Making the world a better place is misguided
Cervantes saw through the insanity of fixing the problem where it is not. Fighting Windmills is a powerful picture of the human condition and it made Don Quijote into a book for the ages. For we get to look at ourselves in our insanity. However, that realization is a beginning, not an end, but it is definitely a necessary first step, for until we begin to see and own our own insanity, we are not even motivated to seek another way. It may help to see the mechanism of projection. It always comes back to the old Hegelian dialectic, of thesis, antithesis, synthesis. In psychological terms it is about projection, countermeasure (attack), guilt. We don’t like the guilt, so we project it on someone or something else, in a forever cycle of rinse and repeat. It can never be sorted out at this level. The cycle can only be broken if we chose to question it.
What, then, should happen? ²When God said, “Let there be light,” there was light. ³Can you find light by analyzing darkness, as the psychotherapist does, or like the theologian, by acknowledging darkness in yourself and looking for a distant light to remove it, while emphasizing the distance? ⁴Healing is not mysterious. ⁵Nothing will change unless it is understood, since light is understanding. ⁶A “miserable sinner” cannot be healed without magic, nor can an “unimportant mind” esteem itself without magic.
7. Both forms of the ego’s approach, then, must arrive at an impasse; the characteristic “impossible situation” to which the ego always leads. ²It may help someone to point out where he is heading, but the point is lost unless he is also helped to change his direction. ³The unhealed healer cannot do this for him, since he cannot do it for himself. ⁴The only meaningful contribution the healer can make is to present an example of one whose direction has been changed for him, and who no longer believes in nightmares of any kind. ⁵The light in his mind will therefore answer the questioner, who must decide with God that there is light because he sees it. ⁶And by his acknowledgment the healer knows it is there. ⁷That is how perception ultimately is translated into knowledge. ⁸The miracle worker begins by perceiving light, and translates his perception into sureness by continually extending it and accepting its acknowledgment. ⁹Its effects assure him it is there.
I cross posted a few items that to me seem real breakthrough insights in the mess of our collective Covid insanity. That is the necessary first step, but it is a beginning not an end, just like seeing the insanity of Don Quijote and Sancho Panza for what it is becomes a beginning not an end, for there is no world to be saved. There is a mind to be saved from its own insanity. And as A Course in Miracles reminds us very clearly: we will only change our mind once we begin to recognize that we are our own worst enemies, and therefore Jesus, Quan Yin, Krishna, and other ascended masters are our guides who help us pick up the thread of Ariadne and begin to find our way out of the labyrinth of human wants and desires. These teachers represent a truth that comes from outside the ego thought system, speaking of a Kingdom not of this world. This is why ACIM is clearly only about the mind and never about the world. The ego’s permanent defense is that the course is not sufficiently practical, but the answer that Jesus once gave Helen is still with us:
You may complain that this course is not sufficiently specific for you to understand and use. ²Yet perhaps you have not done what it specifically advocates. ³This is not a course in the play of ideas, but in their practical application. ⁴Nothing could be more specific than to be told that if you ask you will receive. ⁵The Holy Spirit will answer every specific problem as long as you believe that problems are specific. ⁶His answer is both many and one, as long as you believe that the one is many. ⁷You may be afraid of His specificity, for fear of what you think it will demand of you. ⁸Yet only by asking will you learn that nothing of God demands anything of you. ⁹God gives; He does not take. ¹⁰When you refuse to ask, it is because you believe that asking is taking rather than sharing. (ACIM, T-11.VIII.5:1-10)
Once we begin seeing the insanity, the first response tends to be to blame somebody else. We blamed a ‘virus’ for our condition of fear and uncertainty. We embraced the insanity of the various ways of fighting the illusory enemy, with lockdowns that destroyed the world economy for a generation or more, and a pretend ‘vaccine,’ that required even altering the meaning of what a vaccine is in the first place. Still, some 25%-30% of the population saw through it to one degree or another, and refused the vaccinations, and as of a recent Rasmussen survey, the population is clearly waking up. As much as governments used fear to motivate their program, it is encouraging to see that a good percentage of people were not swayed by that, but again, that is just the beginning. If we sought salvation by vaccination, we ended up in the hellish vortex of fear that just sucks us down the drain hole of unwanted consequences. Where Jesus tells us to build his church on the rock of spirit, we insist in building it on the quicksand of this ego-world, and as we flail about, we just sink deeper and deeper. And again, now we are into fixing what we can about the damage from the vaccine adverse events, but if we do not learn where and why our train derailed, we are doomed to repeat our mistakes ad infinitum.
So often it all seems murky to us, yet with experience we can eventually learn to sort out the two options, which always boil down to a choice between the ego and the Holy Spirit, which is what we really are in truth: our true Self. Ego choices will always be painful, for the ego is our false self, an illusion of self-hood, born from the thought of separation. It is always a choice between peace and war, love and fear, and so on. Eventually, we cannot help but learn the distinction, and to learn that all we have to do is not to choose the ego.
The relationship of anger to attack is obvious, but the relationship of anger to fear is not always so apparent. ²Anger always involves projection of separation, which must ultimately be accepted as one’s own responsibility, rather than being blamed on others. ³Anger cannot occur unless you believe that you have been attacked, that your attack is justified in return, and that you are in no way responsible for it. ⁴Given these three wholly irrational premises, the equally irrational conclusion that a brother is worthy of attack rather than of love must follow. ⁵What can be expected from insane premises except an insane conclusion? ⁶The way to undo an insane conclusion is to consider the sanity of the premises on which it rests. ⁷You cannot be attacked, attack has no justification, and you are responsible for what you believe. (ACIM, T-6.in.1:1-7)
At some point the old truth dawns on us, that where we point the finger, there are three fingers pointing back at us. Fear is just an attack aimed at ourselves. And since we accuse ourselves of having offed God, we feel guilty and we live in fear of enemies within and without. Every opportunity to heal such discord is an invitation to heal our split mind, the proverbial house divided against itself.
Heaven, Love, God, Eternity, Spirit, Oneness, is our home. It is a place without contradictions for truth is true, and everything else is a lie: that is about the only definition of oneness, which is remotely comprehensible to us who live in a dualistic consciouseness, where everything has an opposite. In heaven there cannot be contradictions or choices. What we call spirituality is ultimately simply a matter of nurturing a relationship with that awareness, which can be symbolized in our awareness by any number of figures, be it ascended masters, or angels, or whatever other manifestation on the dualistic plane of this world. In the most elementary terms it is the source of our being.
The world is the place of duality, being in the world, but not of it, means to know that our true nature, our essence, is spirit, not matter. So we are minds that have a body, not bodies that have a mind, as materialism would teach us. The body and the world, matter, are by definition second order phenomena, product of a mind that thinks in terms of subject and object, in and out, left and right, hot and cold, and so on. Differences are our seeming reality. When we insert the prism into the white light, the refraction causes us to see the colors of the rainbow, but the white light continues with us or without us, even while our attention shifts now to the much more interesting world of the refracted light. This world reflects the broken state of our mind.
When we see our broken state, it behooves us to realize that we can only see it, because something within us is connected to a different reality. At that point the job at hand is not to put humpty-dumpty back together again, that will never work, the refracted light is the alternative to wholeness. The point is to wake up and reconnect to our wholeness, and eventually to let go of the separation thought that is the mental prism that gave rise to the world of separation. So, in the end, there is nothing to “fix” within this world, for every choice in the world reinforces separation. The only way to be helpful to anyone in the the world is by operating from this inner awakening. As soon as we make anything in the world in to “the point,” let alone salvation we are again lost in the dualistic pseudo-reality.
Thinkers such as Bernardo Kastrup, Thomas Campbell and Bryan Whitworth in different ways all come to some expression of the fact that the world is a virtual reality, a metaphoric experience and that our source and our ultimate reality is non-dual. It is just difficult to express, as Jesus saw, when he taught that My Kingdom is NOT of this world, emphasizing that there was much the apostles would not understand till later. The West broadly chose Aristotle over Plato, materialistic specifics over metaphysical idealism.
In the realm of spirituality it gets even more confusing for most great religions developed in response to the teachings of great teachers of non-dualism, Jesus, Buddha, etc. but the religions founded in their name end up being dualistic to a large degree, although there were always “saints,” and “bodhisattvas” who sought to teach the way back to the original inspiration. Krishnamurti was a shining example when he disbanded the Order of the Star of the East, with his famous speech Truth is a Pathless land. Truth simply is. It does not need to be organized, and it cannot be organized. This is the reason why organized religion is a contradiction in terms, and ultimately it never satisfies. The religions may or may not be helpful institutions from time to time, they have an awful habit of getting in the way of spirituality, since they remain institutions of the world. Truth simply is.
The journey of healing is the process of reconnecting with spirit, and in our Covid mania, we bought into the firestorm of fear that was unleashed and fanned by the sissies and bedwetters who play government, supposedly democratically elected to boot, and the majority of people went along, and we can now see that the fear-based choice was a cure that was far worse than the perceived “disease.” We don’t even know how bad it will get.
We now know enough about the history of vaccination that this has always been the case, that vaccination was always a fear-based choice, that led to increases in all-cause mortality, even if in some cases it did seem to reduce the prevalence of the target disease. In World War 1 we saw the “blowback,” of poison gas attack on the attackers if the wind shifted, after World War 2, biological warfare became the focus, and we have now seen a demonstration of how it plays out, the virus was meaningless, if such a thing even exists, but the “counter measures,” proved to be devastating.
The world needs a reckoning of sorts, the Nuremberg trials left some doctors dangling from the gallows. But the lesson was forgotten more quickly than one would like. Whatever the process may be, one would hope that it could result in material change in our healthcare system, so it can not be subverted as it was in the Covid situation. Hanging a few people, or even a lot of people is too easy in some ways. The bigger problem was that 99% of our healthcare providers went along with certifiable nonsense, which was obvious to a lay person like myself, based on biology 101. This was a totalitarian and coercive measure, that had little or nothing to do with health. No system will ever be perfect, but that does not mean we cannot improve what we have, and with the right attitude it can be done. Revenge, and any kind of fanaticism will get in the way of truly better solutions, but seeing the face of Christ in all our brothers, might lead to a more humane system. What matters is purpose, not the form. Here is a powerful reminder from Ken Wapnick, based on A Course in Miracles.
Study this course, read this course, practice it, ask Jesus or the Holy Spirit to help you learn it.
That is what you do. That is all you have to do.
That saves the world. The world is a projection of the thought of separation. Undo the thought of separation in you and you are undoing the world, and everyone is healed with you.
Kenneth Wapnick, Ph.D. Act Your Part with Honor, page 105.