The Awareness of Self-Discovery pp. 169 - 177
by William Samuel
A COURSE OF ACTION IN THE MIDST OF TURMOIL
Reader, the following is an essay of urgency pertaining to the
events of the day and "what to do" concerning them. I have been
urged from within to get it written, but it has not been easy to
find the words. Even after many revisions I am aware it barely
touches the hem of the Light I have been given to see and tell
about.
The seed is Here, however-the gist. The discerning Heart, the Single
Eye, will find it and ascertain its significance relative to the
great crunch soon to be brought to bear against the established
ideas of the world-all of them-religious, educational, political,
monetary, social, et al-awesome events perhaps, but nothing to be
frightened of, nothing that can harm Identity.
As simple, unjudging Awareness, we can watch it all with wonder and
excitement like children standing on a high peak surveying the
pounding surf below. The storm passes and the earth is refreshed.
The Real remains untouched.
The honest action of our daily experience appears to be a quiet
middle ground, a delicate balance. Consider, for instance, the
cautious balance between not yielding and not contending-or not
contending and not yielding.
In the human scheme of things, the refusal to yield to something we
have come to perceive as a false authority is accompanied by the
world's moral demand to do battle with that authority and set it
straight-always for the idealistic benefit of others, of course.
Such action is the product of human "education" and has become the
intuitive reflex of a society geared to "progress." But there is
another course of action open to us wherein we quietly refuse to
yield to any authority but the Divine, yet remain careful (for our
own peace and the benefit of the world) not to overstep that refusal
thence to begin contending with the binding, confining false
authority.
Of course, the world holds this course in grand contempt. Even the
world's metaphysicians, by and large, attempt to rectify
appearances, but our tangible freedom in daily experience will never
be found outside this delicate balance between not yielding and not
contending.
No, we do not cow before the supposed power of images, signs and
symbols, that have no power; we do not act as floor mats nor yield
ourselves servants to obey the appearances of the world and its
sundry enslaving ideas. But neither do we take those actions that
constitute a battle with the world's pseudo-authority. When this
delicate point is perceived and lived (and lived!) our vision of
war, rebellion and personal inharmony is ended.
BY WAY OF EXPLANATION
A growing portion of my correspondence concerns itself as follows:
(1) "Our children (or grandchildren) are anti-establishment,
anti-adult, anti-social and contemptuous of nearly everything
conventional. All they are for are mind-changing drugs. What am I to
do?" (2) "My organization (school, business, church, body) is
woefully caught up in the dictatorial emptiness of old conditioned
thinking and would attempt to enslave me thereby. What am I to do,
pull up stakes or battle for an improvement in my organization?"
As appearances go, our response to the second question has given
rise to the appearances that motivate the first. The answer to the
one is the answer to the other-but that answer does not exist out
there with rebellious society and its destructive actions, nor with
the recalcitrant, dictatorial organizations so many would like to
see reorganized to fit a new pattern. It has altogether to do with
this action the reader is right here-no one else and nowhere else.
One does not have to "pull up stakes" or "battle for an
improvement." There is yet another course of action, a barely seen
center ground upon which one may stand and find himself having
cleared up both situations for himself at once. As this
action-WE-are stops its battle with its "out there," we see the
meaning behind the world's turmoil and see it without fear or loss
of equanimity.
For me it has been helpful to learn the hard lesson that challenging
the pseudo-powers of the world does not mean a battle. To challenge
the authority of a power that is not God is to stand firm on the
single ground of God's omnipotence, therein discovering the
powerlessness of the pseudo-authority-and finding it in the first
hand language of my own experience.
To battle with the pseudo-authority in either action or argument is
to give it (in my own experience) the very power it does not possess
outside my belief that it is a power to overcome, change, heal or,
as I am some times tempted, paste in the mouth with a tomato-as if
there could be a power besides God! Even then, the battle is with a
belief-a personal determination that a power besides God exists
capable of binding us and doing us in.
The faltering heart, the swollen joints, the fractious groups and
warring nations are the evidence of that fictitious belief. To see
the end of the mischief "there," we end the contention with our own
images "here." Reader, you see this?
It is not the people in our world who must do this. Rather, this
consciousness that "includes" those people does it first, then we
see our mirrored Self-images doing likewise. We be the lifted up,
pristine Awareness smiling at itself here and find ourselves living
the Christ of our Self perceived. Self-inclusive universe smiling
back from the mirror.
The images of perception, whether they be institutions, people or
feelings, are not the masters of the consciousness (Life) reading
these words. Rather, institutions, people, feelings have their
apparent existence because ISNESS (God) is aware as this awareness
we are. Dominion resides where this one exists. To be dictated to by
a false authority is to yield oneself servant thereof and sleep
enslaved. To let our own images lead us around by the nose just
because "they say" thus and so is as senseless as the television set
that trembles in fear that one of its images will smash the picture
tube. We question the basic authority of the slavemaster by
understanding the reasons for its appearance in our affairs.
~~~~~~~~
Yes, lest we be fooled and find ourselves adding to the picture's
agony rather than seeing the naught of it, we awaken to the narrow
pathway between the challenge of external authority that would bind
us, and doing battle with it.
The present rebellion of certain groups within "society" will stop
its senseless destructiveness and come out from its subverting,
perverting nastiness only as this awareness-being-I ends its own
contention with its included images. Within the cause-effect arena
of mental manipulation, the appearance of a society being ripped
apart by guilt-ridden groups demanding freedom is the inevitable
consequence of our own vain effort at mental manipulation-attempts
to elevate a mistaken sense of Self up to a Perfection that is
already All. He who would try to improve the world, spoils it, as
Laotse said.
The time is ripe to stand fast as the witness of the ALLNESS we know
to be the Fact of existence. We pull in the insensate reins of
contention here-as-I-within before we can understand why our images
appear to be going off half cocked in all directions. We live and
act the Christ-Comforter we are to our own perception of existence
first.
We do not save our world by doing battle with it, tearing it down,
burning it up, creating doubt or suspicion, undermining it, healing
it, manipulating it or trying to resign from it via a letter of
resignation or drugs. We "save" it by seeing it as it is, seeing
ourselves as we are, and acknowledging ISNESS to be the basis for
all that is, has been, or could be.
WHERE THE AUTHORITY IS
God, the reality being this single and only AWARENESS I AM, is the
authority that blooms the bud, scatters the seed and flashes its
Cosmic Light around the universe. This authority has never been
vested in a human organization, be it a body with organs, a
scientific institution, a financial institution, a marriage
institution or a smother church. Furthermore, none of us has ever
been unfaithful to this Divine Authority being Identity, nor "lapsed
from the faith." How, in God's allness, can Identity lapse from
Itself?
Undoubtedly, organizations (even as the body) perform legitimate,
worthwhile services, but those services are abrogated to whatever
extent we give the organization power to enslave its members or to
whatever extent we claim a position of superiority or inferiority
for our own appearances of organization or views of Reality.
Isness, not people, is the genuine authority for individual action.
The consciousness that reads these words stands as its own
self-evident proof of being, Deity's awareness of existence. Its
relationship to Being is not governed by the man-made laws of any
intermediary, no matter how correctly (Divinely) authorized it is or
professes to be. The communion between Reality and this
consciousness-we-are is not now, and has never been, routed through
any external church, philosophy, system, leader, ritual, institution
or book-to include the Bible. Intercourse with Reality is direct, as
direct as Allness is ever its own sameness. Enlightenment, the
"mysterious agreement," is between IS and AM, the single ONE,
Self-evident to and as this Awareness-I-am. My proof of this fact is
the Light I live as, and see enlightening my Experience.
When this is understood, we find our Light appearing on the scene
via books, institutions, friends and strangers at every turn of the
road-and we know when that appearing is our own Within disclosing
Itself to us in the language of the moment.
The "authority of the organization," whatever its appearing, resides
in That being THIS consciousness. That which presents itself as
intermediary-pope, church, institution, government, society, bible
or canon of ancient law-exists powerlessly in "us" (Me) as images of
this awareness-I-am.
"SO WHAT DO I DO ABOUT MEMBERSHIP IN MY COLLEGE (OR CHURCH OR
BUSINESS OR WORLD)?"
The Golden Thread of the Absolute exists. We know because we have
found it. We feel, know and see the Fact of Singleness-evidence of
God's ALLNESS. We who discern the Thread are come as the savior of
our own appearing, the Christ to the Experience we are.
As I see it now, it makes no difference whether we are inside an
organization or outside it, provided we do not feel a sense of
restriction. Even then, cutting ourselves away does not mean we will
find the restriction gone. It is the sense of being an identity
capable of being restricted that appears to me as a "me" bound by an
ailing body, oppressive organization or a flat pocketbook. The axe
at the root has to do with this one's position, not the "Church's."
Identity is a matter of SELF determination and in the end, no
organization, not even the body, can prevent the discovery.
Therefore, I do not presume to tell anyone whether he should join an
organization or leave one. We each follow what seems the
Heart-directed course of action. For myself, I once thought the
wisteria vine was the most beautiful of all the flowers in the
garden. As a gardener, I worked with my wisteria to the exclusion of
all else and awakened one day entangled, no longer free to follow
the sunlight outside the shadows. For me (though not necessarily for
thee) it seemed wise to come out and be separate from that clinging
vine because I could neither speak nor write of my own self-unfoldments
without violating rules to which I had willingly agreed. So I cut
myself away from the organizational rules and found the more distant
purview of the wisteria lovelier than ever! More: I found the beauty
of the orchid! I found the larkspur, the rose, the dandelion, the
sassafras root and the wild woodland outside the regulated boundary
of the garden!
Every flower in the garden is ME and I take my nectar from any book
or blossom I see I be at the moment. Only those organizations that
permit such freedom can survive.
In all fairness I must point out again that my entanglement with the
wisteria of old theology was not the wisteria's fault. A vine is a
vine-neither good, bad, right nor wrong-but who can make wisteria
into heather or a dandelion into a rose? If there isn't enough shade
beneath the pine, we sit under an oak, but we don't cut down the
pine nor strip it of its limbs. Its shade may be quite enough for
the tufted titmouse, the bushy-tailed squirrel or the mercenary who
thinks that tree is the only tree capable of dropping an "apple" in
his lap.
~~~~~~~~
Which is easier: to play the role of a great crusading contender
doing impossible (and miserable) battle with society and its
organizations, or to stop playing that role and rest in the happy
Already? For myself, I prefer to let pine trees be pine trees and
wisteria vines be wisteria vines. If, in blaming the vine for my own
entanglement, I should succeed in pulling it up by the roots, what
will I have to show for it except a hernia, a sore back and the
sight of a wrecked society ripped apart by excessive zealousness?
God's Phoenix of ALREADY does not have to rise from the ruins of a
shattered society. It will appear to, of course, but those who know
the forthright way of the middle ground-of the already Infinite-will
not be troubled as the dream's last soliloquy is sounded, as the
curtain falls with a crash and the mortal arc lights give way to the
Light of the Eternal, sunshine of the Real.
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