When you hold a coin in your hand, what do you think? What goes through your mind while you experience that cool metal between your finger tips? What sort of judgment arises when you feel the ridges of a quarter with your fingernail? How do you categorize a nickel when you see the date it was made? Maybe you can remember what a penny tastes like (don’t deny it, every kid has put a penny in their mouth)? The change in your change bowl has a smell (you know this because you got experience it while you tried to get all that change into those little paper tubes). Do you accept or reject a dime because of its smell?
Coins have a sound. If you’ve ever been around slot machines, you know the sound of coins. Maybe you have an opinion about the sound of coins (because they remind you of a big win in Vegas or the mess the kids made when they broke your penny jar), but does the sound of a coin make the coin less or more? Maybe you have a psychological preference over which face of the coin is better (this happens because of all the coin tosses we’ve participated in to have the experience of winning or loosing), but would a coin be a coin if it didn’t have two faces (at least in the US in 2017)?
Life is the coin. I’m not talking about the “life that comes and goes as this temporal unit I call Lance.” I’m talking about eternal life, the life essence, the divine manifestation of consciousness…the ONE life.
Really we could say life is an infinitely faceted gem something like this one:
The coin has all these attributes like its two faces. When you embrace the coin as a coin and accept the coin in all its “facets” for its use as a coin, you neither accept or reject any aspect of the coin. It’s just a coin in its wholeness as a coin. If you call one face good and the other face bad, you accept both faces as properties of the coin. If one face is tall and the other is short, one is black and one is white, one is ugly and one is pretty…you accept the coin as the coin.
The ONE life is like this coin. The eternal life manifests as good and bad, black and white, tall and short, ugly and pretty. Our acceptance of these manifestations as the ONE life allow us to experience the ONE life as the eternal life. The total acceptance of all aspects of life is the love that is our divine nature. It is the love that is the light that we are.
Like the facets of this gem, life takes the form of all the physical and temporal aspects we experience. The divine accepts all that it is as its self because there is no other but it manifests as the gem to experience the brilliance of itself shining through itself. When we accept all things without judgment or opinion or categorizing, and so on, we step back from the facet we think we are to see eternal life for all that it is and all the ways it manifests.
When this happens, we find the peace that is our essence. We find our wholeness that is the joy which is the fragrance of what we are. We aren’t our story. We are something much bigger than that limited perspective.
We could say God became us to see himself, but that would be limited. “God” doesn’t see or taste or smell or feel or hear or even have thoughts. Those are limited concepts as is the label “God” or “himself.” Still “God” manifests as what we call us so that he/it/she (limited labels) can experience what he/it/she manifests as using our five senses and our thoughts. This way of thinking is beyond thinking. It blows our minds as it should. Our true self is the consciousness that precedes the limited ability to have a thought.
We experience life as the divine true self when we accept all the facets that are the manifestations of eternal life. Jesus called this love. He said we should love “God” (the all that there is) with everything we have (the limited self) and we should love our neighbor as ourself (because they are ourself). This love is the gateway to experiencing this limited manifestation as our true self. It opens the door to let the light in and out. We transcend the limited seeing to experience the light shining on the gem and the perspective to see the brilliance of the gem itself as THE self.
These are all pointers to a greater truth that is beyond our limited thinking abilities. It is the “way” that Jesus pointed to. It is the truth that Jesus manifested. It is the life that he demonstrated.
I bet the next time you hold a coin in your hands and experience the coin as the awareness you are, you will have a different experience. The next time you judge “good and bad” you will see faces on a coin. The next time you reject one for the other, you will see that you have rejected the coin itself.
You might be reeling right now from the limited self. You might say “but there is bad in the world” and I would agree. Still the evil we experience is the manifestation of the divine through the limited self lost to the illusion of a separate self. A genocidal maniac thinks what he is doing is good. Hitler thought what he was doing was good. When you see it all as the facets of the gem, you will manifest the light as the light. When the collective consciousness of “mankind” sees the brilliance of the gem, everything changes. How long does this take? Who knows. Jesus said he didn’t know the hour and only the Father knows. I think he was telling us to embrace the coin, see the gem, admire the brilliance and not live in a perpetual desire for a future of our making. That would be limited too.
Try it out for yourself. Let the coin be a coin. “Love” the coin as a coin. See what happens. This life is a wonderful life (as Jimmy Stewart says). Find the brilliance. See the eternal life. Experience the coin as a coin.
Yay God!
Lance
alancetotheheart 