Monday, September 24, 2012

Illusions

I have been out of the blog business, as you can see by the date of my last post.  Every once and awhile  I reach a plateau and have to swill around in it for as long as it takes.  For the past year I have been 'going within' and working deeply with what was being uncovered.  Dreams, symbols, coincidences, life events are the elements of my language of spiritual discernment and sometimes these meanings get murky and very obscure until the light comes and they become transparent.

When I was in theater in undergraduate and studying set design, I learned of a device which creates the illusion of a wall.  It's called a scrim.  An open-weave fabric is hung, sometimes with a scene painted on one side.  Then by using lighting in front of it the look is of an opaque and solid wall.  But if the light in front is dimmed and the light behind this veil is illuminated, the 'wall' fades into a hazy transparency and what is behind the wall appears.  The illusion is determined by the position of the light.  It is the attitude of the light, which plays the trick.

Now, humanly, we are the light of the divine, since it is the omnipresence,  the only stuff out of which everything is made.  But if we keep our attention on the human point of view -- the wall, the pictures on the wall, clinging to our point of view as absolute, this clinging creates the seeming.  The seeming is reality as it seems to us.  And it seems to us, generally, that there are two powers -- good and evil locked in conflict with each other and that we must free ourselves by fighting.  This we attempt to do by gaining a power of good, God.  We think we know what spiritual power is.

This negativity which comes to live within us is an ancient problem which has troubled human thinkers for thousands of years.  Every spiritual teaching addresses it and every spiritual discipline or way of life takes very seriously the deadly nature of self-deception.  It has been called the problem of evil in theology and in Eastern philosophy.  This negativity lives within us as the conscious and unconscious fears of losing life.  Fear is a powerful emotion and has been targeted by many teachings as the root cause of illness, misfortune and death.  It has been proven for centuries that a removal of fear can heal physical disease.

One of my teachers, Joel S. Goldsmith, spoke regularly of "ignorance, superstition and fear"  as incidental to one's mental attitude -- one's erroneous point of view.  He speaks of mental error, of false belief giving rise to illusions which trick us into trouble and of our acting out this inner trouble getting ourselves into more trouble.  Joel in his journey moved from "metaphysics" to "mysticism."  My journey has taken me the opposite way from "mysticism" to "metaphysics."  Maybe these two 'paths' are equally necessary to the whole comprehension of Spirit needed for one to be free of illusion-living.

In metaphysical science, we go behind the scenes, but as detectives.  We seek the light behind the veil of the seeming, but not directly -- we look for clues.   And when the light of Truth comes, the illusory effect is destroyed and we are free of the suffering which mental error or disorder entails.  Joel understood this very well.  And he used to affectionately tell his students about those who on hearing that illness, joblessness, family troubles, etc. are illusion, would ask him, "How do you get rid of an illusion?"

If you have worked with these ideas awhile, you will know that the harder you try to get rid of an illusion, the more of it you have.  If you are a student of Joel, have you read his account of losing his luggage in Africa, lately?

What is not well understood, as I have learned, traveling around the spiritual healing programs and groups of today is why illusion returns.  If illusion is conquered by knowing Truth, and it is, then why do we find ourselves awakening again and again out of an illusion by some painful disillusionment?  Is Truth an illusion?  Recently, mystic teacher Wayne Dyer, discovered he had a rare form of leukemia; then went to a spiritual healer in South America and was healed and now is back in full force on his dog-and-pony show of spirituality.  Is he wiser?  Don't know.  Am I?  Hoping so, won't make it so.  And where there is hidden doubt, there is hidden fear.  And this is what spiritual teaching means by 'disease.'  "Mysticism" is a word for secret knowledge - gnosis.  "Science" is a word for ascertained knowledge.

I just finished reading a great book, which includes my friend Dr. John M. Dorsey, psychiatrist.  Unorthodox Freud: The View from the Couch, uses the only five extant full-book accounts of how Freud did psychoanalysis from first hand experiences.  Dorsey was in analysis with Freud.  The authors Losher and Newton make this statement:  "Everyone knows!  But they don't know that they know and so they don't think they know."  This is the illusion of ignorance.  Knowledge is power.  But how does one 'get rid of' the illusion of one's separation from God -- the belief in two powers good and evil?

Here is what my metaphysical scientist friend Margaret Laird might say about it.  "In all illusion, Truth is the illusion."  "In every sickness, Health is the sickness."

If you have studied Zen, you will recognize such a statements as koan.  It is a paradoxical saying that can trigger an awakening.  Like the scrim, words and concepts veil the true meaning which lives within us.  Our busy living keeps the light of our attention, our point of view, glued to the pictures on the seemingly solid walls of this box of a universe we seem to live, and move and have our being in.

The basic metaphysical idea we begin our spirituality growing with is that this universe is IN us and that we are not IN it.  That idea itself is a koan.  A koan is a symbolic form of enlightenment -- a kind of package of spiritual power, left like a time-bomb set to go off, which when the time is ripe, reverses the light from "out there" to "in here."  One's point of view changes radically -- forever.  And by these inevitable, indispensable steps leading to perfection, by these successive changes in one's root point of view, one comes to dwell in the Light behind the scenes, seeing everything from the God's-eye view.

Where chaos reigned, order rules.  It's like that old platitude about the two sides of a weaving or tapestry.  One side look like a bunch of disconnected threads; the other looks like a beautiful picture.  But thinking in platitudes is not the thinking which is profound enough to 'marry' the powerful feelings which come from within us.

Margaret Laird's teacher, metaphysical scientist Bicknell Young said, "we get out of trouble by knowing we were never in it."  And in a seminar Mrs. Laird discusses the 'generic' disease.  She admits that spiritual healers seem to be able to heal this or that case of cancer, but not the generic disease, the whole genre one might say, called "cancer."

This is impossible she says, until the spiritually conscious individual understands the fact that "there is nothing to heal."  Not until this fact comes to light in the understanding, is the real healing experienced and then sense of separation from God removed.

Until one understands the absolute oneness of Being, and identifies him or herself with the fact that we are already wholly God-consciousness, perfect in every aspect, one's point of view will show up automatically just like the theatrical scrim, with all of the light on the human side, with us glued to the picture on the wall hoping magically it will somehow change from bad to good.  Even if we experience or endure the loss of specific illusions, and we toughen up so we can endure greater and greater disillusionments, we have not touched the generic illusion which keeps us liable to all the troubles -- sickness, lack and fear -- which living on the illusion side "creates."

Until the light of our own individualized divinity comes on behind the illusions caused by our own ignorance of it,  and until it stays on, we will continue to fight demons, never understanding that these "demons" are the angels which our own divine Love-nature provides to meet the human need for enlightenment.