God knows, and you want to be like Him in order to be inspired. So when you communicate with God, do so from your own knowing that He is there, listening and ready to spring into action with you.
— When you pray or otherwise communicate with your Creative Spirit, don’t assume that just because It’s all-knowing, It’s going to handle every problem for you. Remind yourself that you’re a co-creator, and you have the free will to choose to either be or not be consciously connected to that Creative Spirit. When you consciously surrender to the co in co-creator, it will assist you in a zillion mysterious ways.
— Here’s a suggestion from one of our great commonsense ancestors, Mark Twain: “Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great.” Your ambitions are of God, so as you communicate with Him, ask for the strength to ignore those around you who’d malign or otherwise disparage what you and your Source have placed in your heart.
— Remind yourself as frequently as you can that to surrender is a sign of enlightenment and strength. What you’re surrendering to is responsible for all of creation—it’s to this omniscience and omnipotence that you’re surrendering, and it’s here that you’ll gain your power to live an inspired life.
Many years ago I copied down this observation by the brilliant Ramesh Balsekar, an enlightened scholar. I still ponder this frequently, and I feel that it concisely sums up what I’ve written about in this chapter: “Most of the near-perfect actions or performances, and almost all the works of creativity, happen in this state of egolessness, when the tenet ‘Thy will be Done’ is actually put into practice.”
As you pray to the All-Knowing Source, it only makes sense to close your communion with these four words: Thy will be done. But keep in mind that Thy will also includes you.
CHAPTER 16
IT’S ALL ABOUT REMEMBERING
“The memory of God comes to the quiet mind. It cannot come where there is conflict; for a mind at war against itself remembers not eternal gentleness. . . . What you remember is a part of you. For you must be as God created you. . . . Let all this madness be undone for you, and turn in peace to the remembrance of God, still shining in your quiet mind.”
— FROM A COURSE IN MIRACLES
I HOPE YOU’VE GATHERED BY NOW that becoming inspired isn’t achieved by attending workshops, learning new techniques, or by following a master teacher—it can only be accomplished by returning to Spirit, or going back to a place where we experienced bliss. After 15 chapters emphasizing this point, there shouldn’t be any doubt that we originated in love and peace from a spiritual Creator.
This chapter is going to focus on our communication with God from a perspective of remembering Him, rather than trying to befriend some spiritual presence we don’t know. That is, we need to tune our prayers and discourses to help us recall who we really are and what it was like before we came to this physical world.
Most of us will probably find it difficult or even impossible to recollect what we abandoned so long ago when we adopted ego as our self-definition. But this picture of eight-month-old Tysen Humble (one of my grandchildren) in a bathtub has to inspire anyone looking at it to see the relevance of remembering.
What a joyous creature in rapturous harmony with life! Tysen’s expression reveals pure and complete bliss, and just looking at him is enough to make us smile—especially when we think about what we surely must have felt when we were his age.
This beautiful baby also communicates something to us about ourselves: As we remember our Spirit, we want to keep in mind Tysen’s state of jubilation and absolute contentment. It isn’t just a smile and a burst of laughter that’s responsible for that blissful expression on my little grandson’s face—there’s an invisible force coming through what we see in the photo, and that’s what we want to return to. If we could see our Spiritual Source with our eyes, we’d witness pure joy, ecstasy, happiness, and peace—the photo you see on the previous page is a personification of that. It’s also important to note that we emerged from the same vibrational energy as Tysen, and we had the same inner sensation that’s unmistakably evident on that baby’s face. It’s denied to no one.
If we train ourselves, we can recall feeling the bliss that’s on my grandson’s face and which inspires his entire persona. Everything we’ve ever experienced is still stored as an invisible memory, and we can access it if we choose. For example, when my grandmother was close to death and doing what some called “involuntary hallucinating,” she was pulling out all kinds of facts from her earliest days. Street addresses; the names of neighbors; locations of family outings; relationships with friends of her own mother, who were only there in my grandmother’s infancy—all of it was somehow available to her. It turned out that in some mysterious way, Grandma was tapping in to memories that everyone else thought couldn’t possibly be recalled because she was only a baby at the time.
I have no idea how she did this—all I know for certain is that we reach into our own personal history and bring to the present thoughts that impact our state of mind as well as our level of inspiration. You see, the mere recollection of something in the past that we call a memory is capable of affecting us either positively or negatively in the present moment; therefore, they’re extremely powerful tools for our current state of mind. Obviously there are some negative memories lurking around somewhere in the nethermost regions of our mind, but why access them if they’re going to cause us to feel uninspired? Instead, let’s think about how to get back to that delirious happiness that’s portrayed by the gleeful Tysen, who’s only a few months removed from 100 percent immersion in the rhapsodic arms of his original Creator.
What I’m trying to make clear here is that we’ve got to figure out how to return to where we came from in order to commune with our Spiritual Creator. Therefore, being inspired itself is going to require us to go back and do some major remembering.
Remembering Your Spirit
At the beginning of this chapter, there’s a powerful quotation from A Course in Miracles that I feel sums up all we need to know to facilitate going “all the way back”—that is, prior to our baby days, our birth, and even our conception. It’s about remembering our origination. I committed this passage to memory many years ago, and I use it as a way to remember who I truly am and where I really came from, particularly when I communicate with my Creator to stay on purpose and in-Spirit.
Now I’d like to go through each of the messages in this observation from the Course one by one:
1. “The memory of God comes to the quiet mind.” We came from a quiet, peaceful place that’s the very essence of creation, so when our mind is filled with noisy dialogue, we shut out the possibility of remembering our Spirit. Incessant chatter keeps us attached to the physical world and produces anxiety, stress, fear, worry, and so many of the emotional reactions that are decidedly removed from God-realization.
A quiet mind is open to recall because it allows us to open a space within ourselves where we experience a sensation of familiarity with Spirit. Intuition sharpens, we access higher energy, and what we thought of as information about God is supplemented with an unmistakable remembrance. Knowing about God is very different from actually knowing God—so a quiet, disciplined mind is needed to be able to remember, and consequently return to, a state of being in-Spirit.
We must minimize distractions when we wish to communicate with God, so being in nature, away from the artificial noises that invade our space, is helpful. But the most important thing to consider is how to keep our mind free from the dizzying, bewildering cascade of thoughts flowing through our head from morning till night, and even on into our dream state. It’s been estimated that we have something like 60,000 separate thoughts every day. The real problem is that we have the same 60,000 thoughts today that we had yesterday!
I’ve made the practice of meditation a part of my daily life because it’s one way to quiet the mind so that the
memory of God is accessible. So by learning to meditate—or at the very least shutting down the inner dialogue produced, directed, and acted upon by your ego—you can open up a space for remembering and returning to Spirit.
2. “It cannot come where there is conflict . . .” In order for conflict to exist, there must be two opposing forces at work; that is, one force—in the form of an idea, a point of view, a desire, or a contribution—directly clashes with another. Conflict defines our lives in many ways, as we oppose our partners, our children, our bosses, our neighbors, and even our countries. In politics, it’s always one party versus the other, and the entertainment industry portrays battling points of view that are usually turned into violent scenes. Essentially, conflict requires “two-ness.”
However, remembering where we came from involves our returning to the oneness of being in-Spirit. After all, there are no battling powers in the Divine realm of Spirit—there’s only perfect oneness, and this is what we want to rejoin. We want to become one again with our Creator, and we can’t retrieve this “memory of God” with a mind in conflict in any way.
Imagining oneness is often a difficult process because we’re so steeped in our beliefs of two-ness and dichotomies. If God (Who is perfect oneness) was able to acknowledge our beliefs in conflicts and two-ness, then oneness simply could not exist. So we need to leave all conflict out of the picture to succeed in remembering God and achieving oneness. In our mind’s eye, this is done by picturing ourselves fully integrated with our Source. Visualizing melting into the oneness of God will lead to a sense of merging until we can no longer make a distinction between ourselves and Him. And this consolidated state is where our memories of God become luminous and unobscured.
3. “. . . for a mind at war against itself remembers not eternal gentleness.” Conflicting thoughts tend to fill our consciousness with never-ending chatter, including plans for retaliation against those people we label as the source of our discontent. It’s not at all uncommon to conduct an imaginary dialogue that goes something like this: “First I’ll say this to her. Then when I say that, she’s going to respond with this. But she always says that, even though I know she’s lying. So this time I’ll trip her up by responding this way. She’ll have to agree that I’m right—but she never does. I know that I’m right, and I’m going to force her to admit it. I’ll tell her that even her own mother agrees with me. . . .” This could go on all day and night, and it frequently does. We conduct this inner combat over and over again—and the only advantage is that we almost always win the argument being waged because it exists only in our mind.
The second part of this teaching from the Course reinforces that a combative mind cannot remember where it once resided in eternal gentleness. Obviously you can’t wage war and simultaneously focus on peace and gentleness, and it is eternal gentleness that you want to remember and rejoin. It’s really quite simple to do this: Just close down the battlefield and surrender. Remove all of the artillery, send the soldiers home, and replace the instruments of war in your mind with thoughts of peace, tranquility, and surrender. Making your mind a place of peace is achieved by your own will, so steadfastly refusing to have thoughts of conflict allows you to activate the glory of remembering your Spirit.
I can recall times in my life when I’ve cluttered up my mind with that back-and-forth inner dialogue with my children or my wife. I’d literally get to a point of exhaustion by silently repeating my side to their side and back again, until one day I made the decision to abandon this battleground in my head. I began to practice putting the word cancel up on my inner screen, and I’d stubbornly refuse to go through those senseless sparring matches in my own mind. After a few days of practice, it became my automatic response to go to eternal gentleness—and peace and Divine guidance were my rewards.
4. “What you remember is a part of you.” Every memory I have is me . . . what a glorious feeling it is to know this! We each have the power to retrieve any piece of ourselves that we desire, and to experience it right here, right now, in this present moment. The great Danish theologian Søren Kierkegaard once observed that “life can only be understood backwards, but . . . it must be lived forward.” In other words, if we can’t go back and remember the spiritual bliss that defined us before the beginning, we’ve abandoned a part of ourselves.
As we move into communion with God, we must know that our inability to remember our spiritual origins is another way of saying, “I’m unable to know myself because I have no recollection or memory of my Spirit.” In fact, the corollary of this line from A Course in Miracles that we’re processing right now would be, “What you don’t remember is not a part of you.” In other words, if we fail to remember Spirit, then obviously it isn’t a part of us.
The most effective thing we can do to remember our Source is to affirm unhesitatingly: I’m first and foremost an eternal spiritual being—I can’t be anything but this. I will never doubt it, and I can go within and try to be like God in all of my thoughts and actions.
When we begin this inspirational practice, the memory of our spiritual origins will emerge from behind the clouds and become unquestionably clear.
5. “For you must be as God created you.” I’ve made the following point repeatedly throughout the pages of this book: We must be what we came from. Just like that droplet of blood must be like the rest of our blood supply because that’s what it came from, we must be of God because that’s what we came from. It’s only by edging God out that we’ve come to believe that we are our false self.
As you communicate with your Source of Being, know that you’re awakening a part of yourself that’s just like God. In fact, you ought to try to approach communication with God by being as closely aligned to the way that you were created as possible—that is, by becoming a vibrational match to the All-Loving Creator. Come to the quiet moments in consultation with God in love, in peace, and without judgment. As the Course is saying, you must be as you were created—so why put on a false mask and pretend to be anything or anyone else? In this way, you can open the channel of communication because you’ve finally remembered to be the way you were created—and that’s the key to effective prayer. And, as Gandhi once said: “Prayer is not an old woman’s idle amusement. Properly understood and applied, it is the most potent instrument of action.”
6. “Let all this madness be undone for you, and turn in peace to the remembrance of God, still shining in your quiet mind.” Let’s take the three suggestions in this teaching one at a time.
— First, the Course says to “let all this madness be undone.” The madness here is that of living in a state of conflict. In other words, we must make an attempt to transcend the dichotomies of our life because the division creates so much suffering and keeps us from living an inspired life. I remember a Ram Dass lecture in which he said, “I’ve firmly come to the conclusion that there are no ‘thems’ for me anymore. I can’t be told who to hate, who to fight, who to subdue—I only see an ‘us’ in my heart.”
All those messages to divvy up our world are insane. All our self-centeredness just drives our ego’s insatiable appetite for making us special and putting other people down. All our inclinations toward violence—even when it’s “acceptable,” such as supporting war in the name of patriotism or endorsing hatred in the name of doing our duty—are wrong. The Course encourages us to be done with this madness once and for all, both in our mind and in our actions.
— Second, we’re told to “turn in peace to the remembrance of God.” Once again, we know in our heart that we came from a place of peace, so any discord can’t be the result of our Creator’s actions. God cannot come to us when we pray from nonpeace, so the solution is to return to the remembrance of Him and ask to be made an instrument of His peace. When I find myself out of sorts, I remember. And what I remember is to turn to peace right now in prayer. I become peace, rather than anguish, and I feel the calmness I long for come over me like a wave of pleasurable relief.
We always have the
power within us to shift into a peaceful mode. And when we respect someone, we’re able to be in peace in their presence by suspending our inclination to be arrogant. For example, I recall watching John McEnroe behave in boorish ways on the tennis court, slamming his racquet, hurling profanities at the referees, and generally being in a very nonpeaceful state—but he never behaved this way when he played his rival, Björn Borg. Amazingly, McEnroe was almost always able to control his outbursts of negativity whenever he played this cool, easygoing, nonviolent, brilliant tennis player. Because he respected Borg so much, McEnroe came to his presence in peace.
— Finally, the Course reminds us that this peaceful remembrance is “still shining in [our] quiet mind.” Notice the words still and quiet—regardless of where we are in life, if we’re breathing we’re connected to our Source of Being, even though the connection might have gotten a bit corroded. We still have the remembrance of God shining inside of us . . . it can’t be otherwise. Our job is to access those memories, and it will help if we keep them in our quiet mind. This remembrance doesn’t shine in our ego mind, our noisy mind, in our self-important mind; rather, it shines in a quiet, nonviolent, peaceful, loving mind. When we go to the quietness, that shining is a luminous reminder of how to approach our Creative Spirit by remembering.
One of my favorite teachers is the Russian mystic Leo Tolstoy. In his powerful book The Kingdom of God Is Within You, I was struck by the words he used to implore his 19th-century readers to heed nonviolence in their war-torn country:
If you believe that Christ forbade murder, pay no heed to the arguments nor to the commands of those who call on you to bear a hand in it. By such a steadfast refusal to make use of force, you call down on yourselves the blessing promised to those “who hear these sayings and do them,” and the time will come when the world will recognize you as having aided in the reformation of mankind.
Living an Inspired Life Page 21
