All posts tagged: Illusion

Idea Power

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Course Ideas

I don’t believe there is any greater power than that of an idea, deeply held, and slowly it is becoming clear to me that all we behold is the product of these generative seeds.  In the three books of A Course of Love, Jesus speaks frequently about ideas, and in a passage that I love he says, “Giving ideas life is the role of creatorship.”  This statement comes in a section of the Dialogues– the […]

Flying in “V” Formation

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Christ / Poetry

One day the Beloved glanced over and saw me schlepping my burlap bag of memories dull dreams and weathered photos across a landscape of cars, glass bottles, and tinted-glass personalities like a lonely tortoise having a near death experience during the evening commute. Curious, She picked me up.  My legs dangled awkwardly, pumping the air in their usual slow, auto-piloted circles as if nothing had happened, as if I might still actually be plodding along, […]

Witnessing One’s Self

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Course Ideas

The places within us that are not yet healed, and have not yet been dissolved into the pure and guiltless and shameless and never-confounded substance of being, are like movie stars, and the events of the lives we lead the flash bulbs of a traveling horde of annoying paparazzi.  Our wounded places simply can’t avoid them—can’t get a break.  Offstage, without their make-up on, these stars just want to be left alone.  Can we not […]

Stare Down

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Course Ideas / Poetry

I could say I wasn’t afraid. But I was. Me and that feeling looked each other in the eye, and I looked away.  Shrugged my shoulders. Flicked up my collar. Kicked the dirt. Got a hobby. Next day shipping, of course. Ran half way across the world. Whatever. I was desperate to tag out, to sneak out of the ring, maybe get into promotions, have an office with high ceilings, be famous or happy or […]

Beauty Revisioned

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Course Ideas / Science

A pitfall in our thinking is the notion that there is a fixed place at which we are destined to arrive- (I can’t avoid noting the obvious link between the terms destiny and destination)- a condition to realize that will be immune to change, an ideal state to occupy or embody.  Alas, there is not.  At the same time, I do think the Truth is constant.  Identity, properly construed, is constant.  I think that we […]

Not a Choice At All…

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Christ / Course Ideas

Sometimes we lose sight of the sheer unprecedentedness of our awareness.  We are aware.  It’s a worthy subject of reflection.  Some would say, perhaps, that at one point in “time” there was no such thing as awareness, and somewhere along the way, there was.  Thinking this way causes my neurons to enter states of quantum superposition… and get stuck.  I can imagine unawareness, somehow.  As if it existed, and maybe still exists.  I know that […]

Boyhood Ontology and the Promise of Salvation

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Christ / Course Ideas

Time capsules are intriguing.  Your elementary school teacher encourages you to round up some receipts, a few movie tickets, maybe a back-of-the-envelope journal entry with your favorite candy bar or song written on it, along with a note of encouragement to your future self, and then you and your classmates shove all these notions into a box or a tube and bury it.  Kickball, the old standby, would probably have been a more thrilling recess […]

Beyond Ethics. Beyond Temptation. Beyond Suffering (Part 1)

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Course Ideas

This is the first of a three part series on the very best that a world rooted in separation has to offer.  We’re going to take a brief tour of three fundamental elements of the world that works for no one, and deconstruct them a bit.  Not because we want to get preoccupied with turning nothing into something, or start marching up and down the streets in protest of false concepts, but because we want […]

Mutual Arising

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Christ / Course Ideas

In the Dialogues of A Course of Love, Jesus describes the process of “becoming”.  In this state, we have realized or glimpsed unity consciousness, but we have yet to fully shed the conditions of our past.  This joyous wholeness that tickles us still often feels like the movement of an outside hand.  Creation is witnessed as a beautiful and awe-inspiring dynamic, albeit one we still perceive as taking place- at times- “out there”.  We experience […]

Snookered

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Poetry

The surest sign you have once again been snookered by unreality is that you find yourself in an all too familiar position- crouched down behind a waist-high swath of shrubbery, sweating, heart pounding, vision tunneled, thinking you’re about to pull a fast one and nobody else will know. Take caution in such moments. You are being set up. Silence is irresistible bait. You tremble inside of it with anticipation, blinded by possibility, while the One […]