Ask: Can you clear up these purported paradoxes about the Holy Spirit and individuality?
“I've been studying/reading Circle of
Atonement's Robert Perry's (co-author of the New ACIM Complete and Annotated Edition) " Return to the Heart of
God" and in a passage about the Holy Spirit he talks about paradoxes the
Holy Spirit as both the Voice for God and He (HS) is God's Voice. Then he
brings up another paradox the Course
paints a picture of Heaven in which there are beings that have their own
identity and their own will, yet are also at one with the whole and in perfect
unison with a larger will. This is a bit perplexing; how much do we bring with
us, our individual identity into Heaven?” - JW
I’m not certain why the Holy Spirit as the “Voice for God”
or as “God’s Voice” would be a paradox unless one reads “God’s Voice” as God speaking rather than as “God’s
Spokesman”. If you read it as the latter, it means the same as “Voice for God”.
(Voice for God = Spokesman for God/God’s Voice = God’s Spokesman). But perhaps
the paradox is something else?
A Course in Miracles
defines Heaven this way:
Heaven is not a place
nor a condition. It is merely an awareness of perfect Oneness, and the
knowledge that there is nothing else; nothing outside this Oneness, and nothing
else within. (T-18.VI.1)
Oneness (as either Wholeness or the same throughout) is the
experience of God (Truth). At the level of awareness (consciousness,
perception), Oneness is experienced as what ACIM calls the Real World, Vision
(Christ’s or Holy Spirit’s), True Perception, etc. In that View, the world of
form with its individual identities and seemingly-free wills is still seen and
each individual is understood to be part of a larger, unified, unfolding story
of the undoing of not-Truth. It is also understood to be a meaningless
expression of a meaningless idea. (I have written about this a lot in the past
few months). The Oneness of the Mind beyond what is seen in form is understood
to be Truth and the unity one sees is understood to be an extension of the awareness
of Oneness.
Sometimes, one has flashes of this in what I call a “higher”
miracle. As one drops the self, however, it more and more becomes their View.
As ACIM points out in the Manual for Teachers about the last stage, the Period
of Achievement, when self-identification is gone and Oneness is understood to
be Truth:
This is the stage of
real peace, for here is Heaven's state fully reflected. (M-4.I.A.8)
“Heaven’s state” being Oneness.
In my experience of direct Revelation of God (Truth), there
is only God in God. There is no parts, no individuation. It cannot be described
because there is no experience like It at the level of awareness. I can only
guess that perhaps Mr. Perry has experienced higher miracles, but not yet a
direct Revelation, and he has therefore confused the reflection of Heaven with Heaven Itself. This is common and easy to
do if you have not gone beyond a higher miracle to Truth Itself, because the
reflection of Heaven is just this side of
Heaven. But I can tell you, as joyous as the reflection is, it is as different
from Heaven as a photon is from the sun.
>>>>
A mentor is someone with more
experience that you turn to for help along the way. As a mentor, I do not ask
you to join me where I am. I meet you where you are. Email me at Liz@acimmentor.com
to set up a telephone appointment. Learn more at www.acimmentor.com.
If you have a question the answer to
which you think will help others, email it to me at Liz@acimmentor.com
and indicate that you want it answered in the newsletter/blog.
Comments
Jesus’s description of heaven and how events unfold after the body dies is what happens if you are spiritually at the level of Jesus which is what he is encouraging us to attain. You have reached the top of the ladder so to speak and he tells us what happens. This is important information to tie the Course philosophy together. If it wasn’t included, we would all be saying “But what happens when we die?” It would be a distraction to say the least.
But this is not what is going to happen to 99.9% of us. We are a work in progress. We are not spiritually at the level of Jesus. For us there is life after death of some kind. The evidence for this is becoming increasingly hard to ignore. There is no contradiction in this with what Jesus is saying in his Course.
1. Learn the vocabulary.
2. Learn the concepts.
3. Put the pieces together to form a whole.
4. Put the field into use.
The mentor blog is focused on the first three.
I started going through the Mentor Article book to try and find some of what Liz had written. I’ll post it when I find it.
i always thought it would be something that my mind did with what i was perceiving, as in.. 'i will look at this situation or person in my mind and/or in my life there differently' and that will be forgiving them/it/me.
but when i started to really understand what True forgiveness meant, what it felt like, was when i stopped doing that (though habit carried that on for a while of course) and started really trying to sink into not judging my feelings of non forgiveness. i could forgive in the way we start out looking at forgiveness to some degree in some things, different degrees in others, depending on how i measured the 'severity of the transgression'. so i always felt i was going in circles basically.. i'd feel i was getting somewhere, then losing ground again. i *did* become somewhat kinder through this process though.. a little bit, haha.. which was likely what made me open to the next step.
but when i changed my approach to turning it all (forgiveness) inward to practising dropping how i judged myself for *being* judgemental.. thats when i started to feel a shift in actual understanding of the difference between 'forgiveness to destroy' and 'true forgiveness'. so.. when i stopped trying to do it in the way i'd imagined what doing forgiveness was supposed to look like, (ie changing the way i viewed the situation) and started to work instead with the one focus in every situation, of accepting it was not only ok, but the whole point.. in fact it was what 'jesus' was actively encouraging!.. to drop the feeling of guilt when i was judging/attacking something. acknowledge it was coming from some part of me that wasnt loving, was afraid and guilty, and drop the counter-attack guilt that that was where i was. everything else flows from there very naturally.