JE SUIS LA VIE

It’s been a rough few days. My dear wife has been suffering from a highly virulent seasonal flu, coughing up sputum and going through rolls of toilet tissue. She’s also been running a high fever. Her condition has been such that I have had to be by her side almost continuously, given that her personal assistant has also been down with the flu. My friend Teemu came over to help out last night and mentioned the following text, seen on a sign outside the local Pentecostal church:

JE SUIS

LA VIE

He said it was like the perfect answer to the media’s recent campaign to divide people into different camps with the viral slogan, “Je suis Charlie.” ‘Viral’ is right: it’s a sick way to think. In the name of ‘solidarity’ with the ‘defenders of free speech’ (no argument with the principle, only with how it is being used), the public are called to identify with a name that psychologically symbolizes the wronged, the killed, the victim of the past. To take a stand, not actually for anything real, but against an imagined threat. We are asked to put on the role of the accuser, to take a moral stance of righteous indignation and condemnation.

I’m no apologist for Mohammedan fundamentalism. Or militant Christian zealotry. Or Jewish supremacist fanaticism. As John Lash elucidates in his update, There Are No Shades of Freedom, these three monotheistic religions have been exploited as vectors for a virus of the mind, a soul parasite that some call Wetiko, others psychopathy or the archontic influence. Typical symptoms include authoritarianism, subjectivity of thought, an atrophied conscience and intuition, and distrust toward the world in general and the free inner nature in particular. But what is it that speaks when we hear this adversarial voice of fear?

We hear the thought that thinks separation is real. This thought cannot conceive of love except as an exclusive, particular, limited thing. A weak, soft thing in a hard world, creating only vulnerability. The idea that if we united ourselves in a freely-flowing web of mutual love, we could overcome any obstacle to our true heart’s desire individually and collectively, seems like madness and impossibility, a nice dream but only delusion after all, to this child of the primal thought of separation; the unconscious, unliving, abortive offspring of Shiva and Shakti; the insatiable ghost of envy and hatred toward all life; a semblance of life without the spirit of life, animated only by the energy of the thought that impels and sustains it.

This thought dwells within me. And if you are seeking the same truth I seek, then it dwells within you as well. For if it did not, we would have no need to seek for what we already have: the perfection of our Divine Being.

It is not required for us to speak of spirituality, to read books or blogs, or to even have a concept of ourselves as being spiritual seekers. All that is needed is a willingness to bring the darkness to light. To come closer to what we really are, to embrace an absolute freedom that does not differentiate between right and wrong, better and worse. We have all possibility within us. Only if we are open to meeting the darkest parts of that field of possibility with the light of our innermost heart to illuminate the way, only then can we make friends with our feelings of fear and sensations of pain. Then they are our guides, showing us the next thing to accept and forgive, so that it passes through us without resistance, released out of our field of vibration by the resolving power of Love.

“Je suis la vie.” An expansive, heart-opening statement, open to all possibility. Je suis, I am. Take away but the letter i and you get Jesus, the name of a man. Take the living ‘I’ out of being and you get only a specific form among forms. This is the trick that mind plays on itself.

We are here, as the Adam of myth, as namers of God. We are given the power to express divinity. When we misuse that power by believing and expressing falsehood, we make that falsehood our god and become like our false god, creating a world reflecting that false god’s nature back to us. When we replace our falsely self-identifying thoughts and beliefs with self-illuminating truth, with a way of being that is predicated on neither belief nor non-belief, knowing nor unknowing, we are released from the tyranny of the divided and divisive mind of duality into a pure spontaneous flow of being that springs from our Home Source in the living unity of Light. Then even our human form naturally attains ever more faithful congruence with the nature of the true God, becoming less and less limited in all the qualities and attributes of that divinity.

Love evolves. Fear devolves. This is well explained in the article titled Moral Evolution by Norman D. Livergood. We have nothing to fear from fear when we surrender it and ourselves to the service of the purposes of Love. Then it is only a player in the dynamic of eternal growth – not a hungry, consumptive, cancerous type of growth, but an organic, balanced, intelligently ordered growth producing only more and more expressions of limitless divinity.

We need not deny God by perceiving lies to be true, or by making compromises with lies, or even by attacking lies – giving legitimacy to the primal lie. We need only abide in truth, for the God that cannot be denied lives within us. When we see things as they are while seeing what they appear to be, we see God as God is while seeing what God appears to be: unity in diversity, the self-evident truth cloaked in awful, awesome mystery.

It is a truly divine gift to really, viscerally perceive the innocence of the eternal Christ nature of all that we encounter in life. Life is our mirror. Let us honor it as that, and embrace the opportunities it presents us with in every moment to know ourselves more deeply through loving relationship with every form, sensation, and thought that comes into our awareness. This is the way, the truth, and the life. Some call it dharma, some call it the Tao. It is the working of the One sacred heart.

In Om shanti Om, I leave you now. Have faith. The journey is not what it may seem. We are going Home, helping each other on the way whether we know it or not.

Much love,

William