THE SECOND COMING OF CHRIST TO THE WORLD

Initially, God created you as Christ, unified spirit, and you died when you identified with separated ego, and came to this world. Now, you have permitted the ego, the spirit of separation and rebellion, in you to die. You have permitted Christ to be reborn in you. Christ has come a second time to you. You are now living in New Jerusalem, New Israel; you are now at heaven’s gate, helping those of your brothers and sisters still sleeping to awaken and join you. When all children of God resurrect from death (ego state), the world ends.

Christ comes back to the world one at a time. Christ is reborn in each of us when one jettisons the separated ego and reawakens to one’s unified self. Christ will not come to the world from the cloud, as folks believe, but come to us, one person at a time, when that person knows that he is the unified son of God and lives as such, loving and forgiving all people.

LAST JUDGMENT
Each of us must perform the last judgment on the world. This means that each of us must make a decision to let go of the separated ego self and re-embrace his unified self. When a son of God lets go of the ego and its world, he has passed the last judgment on the world, he has overcome the world and moves on to a different world. The last judgment is not going to be done at the same time for all of us, but one at a time, when each of us let go of the ego and accepts his real self, the Christ self, when he replaces hate with love, anger with forgiveness.

THE END OF THE WORLD

How will the world end? The world ends when all people have resumed living as their real selves. Each person experiences the Holy Instant at a time and when all have done so, all children of God would be at heaven’s gate. They would be living in the real world and having a happy dream. Then, suddenly, the gate of heaven opens and all of us know that we are one with God and with each other. We disappear into God and he disappears into us, each not to be lost but to be expanded. There will still be individual us, but now we all know ourselves as unified with God and all people. We all suddenly experience the material universe seems to disappear and experience our selves as unified spirit.

Where would the material universe disappear to? The world of separation will disappear to where it came from, which is nowhere. As Dr Schucman sees it, the material universe does not exist and has never existed for a second. It exists as in a dream. If the dreamer awakens from his dream, the world that had seemed real to him seems to disappear. It did not disappear, for it had not existed.

(Dr Schucman’s eschatology, of course, is different from what physics tells us. According to the present conjecture of physics, the world came into being fifteen billion years ago, in a big bang. The world is expected to end in either a Fiery End or Big Chill. We are told that our sun has enough energy to last four more billion years, after which it would burn itself out. First it expands into a supernova and incorporates its nine planets and then bursts, shatters into smithereens and dust is spread in space. Perhaps, out of that star dust new stars and planets are formed? But, ultimately, science expects the material universe to end in either a fiery end, where every thing collapses into every thing else, or cold end where the galaxies, stars and planets speed off too far away from each other and die cold deaths. I happen to accept the scientific conjecture of the fate of the universe. If so, what do I make of Dr. Schucmna’s poetry? My mind is capable of simultaneously holding ideas and reality. Her poetry, somehow appeals to me, while I have my eyes fixed on the reality of science.)

Jesus became aware that this world is a dream. He was attacked and killed. He did not defend himself. He forgave those who seemed to have killed him. He loved his murderers. But since there was no world and his murderers were mere dream figures, figures produced by his sleeping, dreaming mind, in forgiving and loving his seeming murderers, he merely loved himself. In loving all people, Jesus experienced perfect love for all people hence perfect love for him self.

The experience of perfect love, perfect union, made Jesus return to the awareness of unified spirit, God, heaven. As it were, this world disappeared from his awareness and he continues to live in spirit.

But since he knows that the rest of us are still in sleep and dream this world, Jesus, undertook to return to this world to help us awaken from our own sleep. If we pray to him, ask him to help us, Dr Schucman says that he will do so.

Where is Jesus? Dr Schucman says that he is unified with our true self. Christ is one and simultaneously infinite in numbers.

Jesus, the separated ego, has died and Christ the unified self lives in us. In our own true self, Christ, Jesus Christ lives.

Thus, Jesus Christ is where each of us is, as part of our true, unified self. Ask him to guide you in lieu of asking the Holy Spirit to guide you and he would do so.

Jesus so completely identified with the Holy Spirit that he now deputizes for him. Jesus is not God but he acts on behalf of God.

When you let go of your separated self, ego, and embrace Christ, via perfect love and forgiveness, you, too, will act for God.

SALVATION

What are salvation, healing, redemption, and deliverance? All these terms mean one thing: to return to the awareness of ones true self, which is unified self. One is unified with God and all people. To know so, one must love and forgive at all times. The saved child of God loves at all times and forgives all those who seem to have wronged him.

What is his reward? The saved child of God lives in peace and happiness. To the extent that you love and forgive all people, to that extent do you experience peace and joy?

Do you feel peaceful and happy? If you do, then you are a loving person. If not, you do not love other people, you do not forgive other people; you do bear grudges and grievances and seek vengeance and revenge for the wrongs done to you.

You do not forgive other people, and since all people are you, this means that you do not forgive yourself.

If you do not forgive other people, hence do not forgive yourself, you do not feel peaceful and happy (for, as you do unto others, you do to you…if you judge others, you must judge yourself, if you hate others, you must hate yourself, if you do not forgive others, you do not forgive yourself, for others are you, literally, and what you do to them, you do to you, and what you do to you, you do to them…blame other people means blame yourself; blame yourself means blame other people; so, neither blame yourself nor other people; forgive your self and others their mistakes).

SIN, PUNISHMENT AND INNOCENCE

The unforgiving mind thinks that he is a sinner and that other people are sinners. For what one thinks of ones self is what one thinks of other people. He then denies that he sees himself as a sinner and projects his self-view to other people and sees them as sinners and wants them punished. He wants God to punish others but God knows that he is all people hence to punish any one is to punish himself. God does not punish other people hence does not punish himself. Without waiting for God to punish sinners, which he will not do, we, egos, undertake to punish them for him. We punish them and since they are us, we punish our self.

Are you a sinner? If you did separate from God, then, you are a sinner. But separation is impossible. The Son of God cannot separate from his father; he cannot disobey God’s will. He merely dreams that his wishes had replaced his father’s will.

Reality remains as God created it: unified. We have not separated from God. Because we have not separated from God, we have not sinned. All the seemingly evil we do on earth are done in a dream. What is done in a dream has not been done. Therefore, we are innocent.

We have not done what we see ourselves do on earth, in the dream. White folks, on earth, in the dream of separation, do discriminate against black folks. They do so in the dream. In reality, they have not done so. They remain as God created them, Holy, sinless, guiltless and innocent. Despite black people’s wish that white folks be guilty hence punished by God, they are innocent and will not be punished by God.

Despite your wish that Hitler be guilty and punished, he is not guilty and has not been punished and will not be punished. When you experience Holy Instant, Hitler is there in heaven with all the so-called saints. Hitler merely entered your dream and acted the role of a murderer in it, a role your dream called for him to act. If he seemed to have murdered you, you are immortal and were not murdered by him. Forgive him. Love him. If, in the first place, you had loved him, he would not have called for your love by attacking you.

If you want to prevent future Hitler’s in this world, love all people, for, if you love people, they would not feel unloved, hence would not attack you as a violent call for your love.

DISCUSSION
Is Dr Schucman correct? I leave it to you to decide. I have tried to explicate her philosophy. If you want a more thorough presentation of it then read her book. But I must warn you that she wrote in a convoluted, highfalutin, gabbled gook manner. Her book is written in pretentious Shakespearean verse. Apparently, she read Shakespeare and tried to imitate his style of writing in her own writing.

I did not come to this world to teach what dead white men and women teach, or what oriental religions teach. I am here to teach what seems true to me. I am an African and can only teach what I believe is useful to Africans.

What seems true to me? As of today, what seems true to me is that everything in the seeming external world is my idea. Of course, the external world seems to exist apart from me. I assume that the external world has temporary existence apart from me but that ultimately it does not exist apart from me. In the here and now, I operate as if the external world seems apart from me. I study it in a scientific manner and use technology to adapt to it.

Whereas the world seems apart from me, that world is represented in my mind as ideas. I do not know what the external world is; all I have are ideas of it. The world is what I think that it is; the world is what other people think that it is and what we collectively think that it is.

Each of us is operating in relative ignorance. Society is operating in relative ignorance. Science is still in its infancy. We have only begun to know the truth about the nature of matter and energy.

In the meantime, we have ignorant ideas of what the world is. Each of us acts in accordance with his (ignorant) idea of what other people and the world are.

I see you. I have an idea of who I think that you are. That idea is colored by my past, my history, learning and experiences. My idea of who you are cannot be who you are, in fact. Nevertheless, I react towards you as I see you.

I have an interpretation of who you are and respond to my own interpretation of who I think that you are. That is to say that I am not really responding to your real self but to what I make of you; I am responding to my own projections.

You do the same to me. You see me, you have ideas of who you think that I am and behave towards me accordingly.

All perception is based on interpretation of what seems real. All interpretations are flawed. At best, ones perception is 90% accurate. One is always 10% wrong in ones perception of other people.

Still, one relates to other people in light of ones perception of them. As long as we live in a perceptual world, we seem condemned to false perception and response to each other.

Is there no way out of this dilemma? As long as we live in the world of space, time and matter, past, present and future, we must live in the world of perception. In the world of perception, we must color what we see with our past. We must distort perception. We must respond to other people inappropriately. So what shall we do?

Those who have experienced eternal union, folks like Jesus Christ, say that there is a way to purify our perception, so that we see people, a bit, as they are in fact, but not hundred percent as they are. As long as we are in the world of perception, we can never know people as they are, no matter how much we purify our perception and try to see people correctly. The mere fact that we are perceiving people, that is, interpreting who they are with our past learning, we are distorting who they, in fact, are.

To know people as they are, we have to return to the non-perceptual world, to unified spirit. At present, we are on earth, not in heaven. We are in the world of separation, space, time and matter.

Jesus Christ tells us that if we love and forgive all people, ourselves included, that we shall have purified our perception. Love and forgiveness purify our thinking, mind. Whatever we do out of love and forgiveness, we have made holy. Whatever we do out of hate, we have made separated. (Holy is contraction of the word whole, to be holy is to be whole, that is, unified, returned to our original and true self, unified. To be separated, unholy, not whole, is to live in a false state. Nevertheless, holy, whole also means sanctified, innocent, guiltless and sinless.)

While still in the world of perception, hence still dreaming that we are separated, if we see people as unified with us and love and forgive them all, we would see them a bit correctly, as they are.

In their reality, people are love. Love and forgive them. If you consistently do so, people no longer look ugly in your perception. If you forgive and love a person, he suddenly looks beautiful in your sight. If you hate a person, he looks ugly.

Let us see how this works. In America, white folks generally discriminate against black folks. Aware of discrimination against those who looked like me, I hated white folks. I looked at them with hateful eyes. In those hateful lenses, they seemed ugly to me. As a matter of fact, when I was in my twenties, the life and death of a white person meant nothing to me. I saw whites as criminals and as lower in evolution than animals. Their death elicited no sad emotion from me, not one bit. I saw them as plagues and their death was good riddance.

But I began to practice forgiveness and love. I try to forgive all people, whites and blacks. I forgive racism and discrimination and follow that up with teachings on how to live a non- racist life. In so far that I have forgiven whites their racist behaviors, I tend to see them as human beings. If I am in a totally forgiving mode, a loving mode, all human beings, black and white, look beautiful to me.

Hatred makes the world look ugly; love makes the world look beautiful.

Forgiveness does not mean tolerance of racism. The Holy Spirit is the correction principle. He did not come to the world to perpetuate its mistakes, but to correct them. He is here to reinvent the world, to show us how to live a more beautiful life.

The Holy Spirit asks us to love and forgive one another. What this means is that the Holy Spirit asks the racist to love his fellow human beings. As a person who identifies with the Holy Spirit, one must teach racists to love and not hate any one.

The teacher of love does not condone hatred. He insists on love and where he sees non-loving behaviors, such as racist behaviors, he teaches those involved to become loving persons.

A good teacher models his teaching. If you value love, be a loving person. If you live a loving life, the hateful racist would learn from your peaceful and joyful life style and love other people. When we all love one another, the world becomes a lovely and happy dream.

FEAR VERSUS LOVE BASED THINKING AND BEHAVING

Dr Schucman made a clear distinction between what she called fear versus loved based thinking and behaving. She said that when we separated from God, from other people and from our real self, we developed fear. We developed fear of punishment. We believed that we did something bad and that God and other people, those we separated from, are after us, trying to catch us and punish us. To live on earth, which is to be separated from God, therefore, is to live in fear. To be human, the lady doctor tells us, is to be fearful. She says that to be human is to be fearful, feel guilty and expect punishment from God and other people.

Do you feel fearful and guilty and expect punishment?

The lady doctor tells us that there are only two emotions, love and fear. She said that God made the emotion of love and that we, human beings, made the emotion of fear. Love is the emotion that unifies; fear is the emotion that separates. We do separate from those we fear. If you feel that some one is endangering your life, you do fear him and separate from him. In that sense, fear is a means of maintaining separation. On the other hand, if one feels that other people support one’s life, one does move towards them. We unify with those who love us and those we love; thus, love is union making. God being union, the affect he made is love and the ego being separation, the affect it made is fear.

Please note that Dr Schucman gave a different interpretation to the origin of fear. Normally, we tend to see fear as a biological mechanism evolved by all animal organisms to alert them to danger that could harm and or destroy them. All animals, with the exception of a few, do feel fearful when they perceive threat to their lives and respond with fight or flight, to save their lives. Fear has biological markers, such as fast heart rate, rapid breathing, taut muscles, and rapid movements in the nervous system, quick thinking and so on. Despite these seeming verifiers that fear is biological in origin, Dr Schucman tells us that fear is psychological in origin, and that it is caused by our sense of wrong doing, and guilt. To her, the act of separation from God is tantamount to Catholicism’s idea of Original sin. As Catholics see it, we sinned against God and live in sin. That existential sin is rooted in the allegorical act of disobedience of Adam and Eve in the mythical Garden of Eden. Schucman gives a different interpretation to the original sin: separation from God. As long as we live in separation, that is, on earth, we live in sin (a sin that has not been committed, since, at no time, she tells us, are we separated from God.)

Dr Schucman tells us that the emotion that we are operating under shapes how we think and behave, that if we are in love we think loving thoughts, that is, unifying thoughts, and that if we are in fear, that we think fear based thoughts, which are separating thoughts.

It is self evident that we tend to think in a certain manner when we are under the influence in fear. When one is afraid, one imagines all sorts of horrible things happening to one. One exaggerates all the bad things that could harm and or destroy one. If you are afraid of your boss, you imagine that he or she is going to fire you from your job; if you are afraid of your teacher, you image that she is going to give you bad grades; if you are afraid of your spouse; you imagine that she is going to leave you. Fear produces uncertainty in human beings.

What fear makes people think are, generally speaking, unreal thought? However, if people persist in their fearful thinking, they tend to generate what they fear. For example, if you feel that your boss will fire you from your job, though he was not thinking about doing so, you will eventually do something that would make him fire you. Fear of your boss makes you put a distance between the two of you and not relate well to him, hence make him not to trust you. Not trusting you, he may find it easy to fire you from your job. (You fear your boss and coworkers because you do not like the job you are currently doing; you want to be fired from that job and will be fired. You want other people to fire you, so that you would gratify your desire to feel like a victim unto whom others do bad things. If you had courage, you would quit the job that you hate and go seek and do a job that you truly love doing and do it well, so that nobody would sack you from it.)

Fear produces what is feared. Perhaps, it does so by generating some sort of negative energy that communicates to other people that you want to experience what you are afraid of? If you fear punishment, you will eventually be punished, so that you experience what you fear.

Apparently, what you fear is what you want to experience. Think about that: if you fear discrimination, you want to experience discrimination; if you fear rape, you want to experience rape and if you fear failure, you want to experience failure.

The universe gives you the opportunity to experience what you fear. Why? So that you learn that even if what you fear happened that it would not destroy you. Discrimination does not weaken black people, in fact, it makes them stronger human beings; rape makes women see men for what they are, fear driven little boys exercising powerless power over women; failure makes one learn that one can only fail if one accepts permanent failure; as long as one has not given up, one is not a failure.

In my experience, exaggerated fear is generally found in those who believe that they are in charge of their lives and are in control of their environment. Those who do not believe in a higher power being in charge of their lives tend to be more fearful than those who believe in God protecting them. The fact of the matter is that the physical and social environments are so vast and powerful that no human being understands them, much less has control over them. Therefore, to believe that one has control over the environment is an illusion and generates fear, for deep down one understands that one does not understand even one percent of the contingencies of life affecting one, for good or bad, and has no control over any thing. If one leaves control to God, does ones best and accepts uncertainty and ambiguity one tends to experience less fear. This behavior does not mean that, in fact, God exists. To science, God is an illusion (See Freud’s Future of an Illusion.)

In my experience, human beings tend to attempt using religion as magical wand with which they try solving the problems of this world. Magical thinking is thinking that attempts to solve the problems of this world in a superstitious and unrealistic manner. Scientific thinking, on the other hand, tries to understand problems, as they are, and solve them realistically, with technologies.

I have noticed that some of the folks who call themselves Students of A Course in Miracles, who adopt Dr Schucman’s philosophy, tend to use the Course as magical tool to make life bend to their ego wishes. Their egos attempt to use the book and its ideas to control the world. Of course, the world is objective and has its laws independent of the individual’s wishes; hence, magical thinking does not yield the desired results.

If you want to be rich, you have to earn it the old fashioned way: work for it (or, if you are the antisocial, criminal type, steal it). You cannot become rich by merely wishing to be rich and sitting around and asking the Holy Spirit to give you money. Life does not work that way. To sit around doing nothing and expecting the good things of this life to drop into your laps is the best recipe to become poor. Expecting God to help one is magical thinking and paralyzes those who do so; what works is helping ones self and trusting that a higher power is working with one (even if that belief is an illusion, it gives one psychological security).

Most prayers to God are magical efforts to control the environment and predict the future; it does not work. Only science and technology works.

In society, we know that other people can harm us. Therefore, we construct laws and governments to enforce them. Laws and governments are what protect us from each other’s depredations. America, for example, is a law and ordered society. Most Americans obey the laws their leaders make. They, therefore, feel safe and secure. Their laws protect them. On the other hand, many Africans do not obey their laws; and, therefore, do not feel secure.

Of course, there are limits to the protection offered by law and order. To believe that the civil authorities totally protect one is magical thinking. The fact is that if a murderer wants to murder one, he can do so, despite the protection of the legal authorities. If terrorists are bent on sacrificing their lives to their crazy gods and strap bombs around them and walk into crowded rooms and blow themselves up, they will kill those around them. Simply stated, this life of ours has contingencies that are beyond our control and beyond the control of law and order authorities. Therefore, one must find a way to trust in a higher power to protect one and, in the meantime, resign one’s self to the fact that in our world seeming random acts of violence and kindness do occur; one is not in charge of the world.

THE EGO IS NOTHING AND WITHOUT BELIEF IN IT NOTHING IS HAPPENING

Dr Schucman says that the sense of separated I, the ego, is nothing and that it does not even exist. The self that we currently think that we are, she says, is a dream self. A dream self is not a real self. As she sees it, our sense of self, the separated ego, does not exist in reality but in a dream setting.

The ego is a self that must be believed to be real to seem real. If it is believed as real and defended (with the various ego defense mechanisms that psychoanalysis described, and with fear and guilt) it seems real to one. But if it is not believed, it does not seem real. In fact, if we totally withdraw belief in it and do not defend it, when it is attacked, become forgiving and defenseless, the ego disappears into the nothingness from whence it was conjured from.

If you do not identify with the ego, nothing is happening to you. Consider. If you identify with a proud ego, for example, you might feel insulted by other people’s disrespectful behaviors. On the other hand, if you are not a proud ego, what other people do to humiliate you could only make you laugh. White folks, for example, seem invested in degrading black people. If a black man is proud, he feels humiliatable by white folks. But if he is not proud, he is merely amused by the efforts of white egos to reduce black egos to second class citizenship.

The mature black ego sees the dance of white and black Americans with detachment. In this dance, whites act as sadists and blacks act as masochists; the one inflicts pain and humiliation on the other and the other accepts it.

If a black person jettisons his ego he can get out of the vicious dance of white and black in America.

What is the point? It is only if one identifies with the ego that one experiences the slings and arrows of this world. In fact, if one lets go of the desire to live in body as a separated self, as Buddha corrected noted twenty five hundred years ago, one would not even feel fear. It is desire to live as a separated self that produces all the sufferings of this world. If one gives up desire or desire with detachment, and not be invested in what is desired, one tends to be less affected by disappointments and suffer less.

IDEALISTIC REALIST

I am an idealistic realist; a person who simultaneously accepts the philosophy of idealism and materialism. I am not interested in escaping into some wooly metaphysics. I have my feet solidly planted on this earth. I do not escape from the exigencies of this world into some imaginary ideal world.

Nevertheless, I think that there is a better world. But I will cross that bridge when I get to it. In the meantime, I want to improve the known world, our world.

What does this means in reality? Most things in the world seem, at least, temporarily, out there. But in as much as my response to them is dependent on my perception, my idea of what the things I perceive means, I can change my ideas about everything out there.

I can change my ideas about you. If hitherto I see you as bad, I can choose to see you as good. If I choose to see you as good and respond to you accordingly, I contribute to a peaceful and joyous world. For example, I was raised to see Hausas and Fulanis as bad, for, during the 1960s, they killed my people, the Igbos. I have changed my mind about them. I choose to see them as good persons, but persons, who, like me, can and do make mistakes. I choose to believe that they can learn from their mistakes. I have forgiven them. This means that I Love them.

In return, I ask them to love all Nigerians. If we all love and forgive one another, we contribute to peace and happiness in Nigeria.

What is the point? The point is that in as much as the world is my idea, my perception of it, my conception of it, my interpretation of it, I can choose to have a different idea of what the world means to me. I can change my ideas of who I am, who other people are and what the world means. I can choose to love and forgive all people. Where I had chosen hate and anger, I can now choose forgiveness and love.

I take the consequences of my choice. An unforgiving attitude results in mutual attacks, tension, conflicts and wars. A forgiving and loving approach to people results in a peaceful and happy world.

A SERVICE ORIENTATION TO LIFE

Choosing love means doing something to help a suffering world. A loving person does not stand by and see other people suffer; he seeks ways to alleviate their suffering. I choose a life of service to all human beings.

There is a pay off from serving all people. In serving all people, I feel peaceful and happy and indeed wealthy.

How do I serve people? One serves people with the talents that the universe has given one. I do not have money to give any one. What do I have? I have knowledge of human nature. I serve people by teaching them the right way to live. The right way to live is to love and forgive all. I serve people by teaching people to love and forgive all people.

I do so through my writing and my actions towards every human being I come into contact with.

I know that most people try to live out of their false ego, separated selves. People are normal, neurotic or psychotic, all of which means that they are not healthy, as Karen Horney said; they are not healthy because they are trying to live out of their false, ideal separated selves.

The ego self is the selfish self. I teach people that to be peaceful and happy that they must let go of their identification with the ego, separated self and identify with the Christ unified self.

Our real self is the unified self, who is spirit. Christ is love. To identify with the real self, hence with Christ is to love all people and teach them to love all people. This is my job, my function. I came to the world to teach love, forgiveness and union. I came here to show us how to live out of Christ, unified spirit hence transform our world into a peaceful, happy and materially abundant place.

CHANGING THE IDEAS PEOPLE HAVE IN THEIR MINDS

I began my life on earth with a tremendous desire to change other people. My desire to change the world is, of course, rooted in my desire to change myself. To desire to change one’s self, one must see one’s self as bad; to desire to change other people, one must see them as not good. I saw myself, all people and the world as deficient and wanted to change them and make them better than they are.

Now, I have learnt that the world is a pattern of thinking. Each age of this world is characterized by a pattern of thinking.

When we change the world’s pattern of thinking, we have, in effect, changed the world. To change the world’s pattern of thinking is to change its paradigm of what is real and what is not. For example, people used to believe that the world is flat; that was changed to belief that the world is round. That change in conception of the world resulted in changed behaviors, the consequence of which is our exploration of the world.

The individual cannot change other people’s patterns of thinking. That is to say that the individual cannot change the world. What the individual can do is change his own pattern of thinking (and behave accordingly).

When the individual changes his pattern of thinking and behaves accordingly, he models his changed thinking/behaving for other people to see and evaluate its consequences. If his changed pattern of thinking and behaving produces peace and joy for him and those around him, other people will see it and imitate it. If not, they would ignore him. If you model peace, people will learn from you.

The only way you can change the world is by changing your thinking and behavior. You cannot literally change the six billion people on this earth.

Change of thinking and behavior is a choice that each of us must make. You cannot choose for other people and cannot force them to choose, as you want them to choose. You choose for yourself and if what you choose is good for you and the world, the world will choose it. Therefore, work to change your thinking and behavior and stop trying to change other people’s thinking and behaviors. Not even God will change people; he gives them the answers and permits them the freedom to decide when they would choose to receive the answers that he has already given them.

What is the answer to all our problems? Love and forgiveness. What is love? Union. Union is peace and happiness.

CONCLUSION

As we look around, we see things happening to us. Our empirical perception tells us that we are passive agents and that what we do not want to experience happens to us. Science seems to reinforce this view and tells us that we are the victims of random events.

Interestingly, having told us that we are victims of the world, scientists proceed to manipulate that world and transform it to their liking. They study how matter and energy works and develop a technology with which they literally make the world obey their wishes. Here then is the paradox of living: if we are victims of the world, how come scientists are able to do the things they do? Would it not be better to see human beings as co-creators with the world, as acting on the world and as the world acting on them, not in an either or manner, but both?

In my experience, those people who see themselves as victims of circumstances tend to amount to nothing in this world. They tend to be pathetic people, complaining about their fate and blaming every body but themselves. If it is not their parents’ fault that they are poor, then it is the fault of other people. If they are black folks’ they blame white folks for their fate. All these behaviors depower them and make them not efficacious.

In my experience, those persons who tend to be fully alive are those who take their lives into their own hands and go do what they want to do. These people do not see themselves as victims of any one else. They do not ignore the fact that the external environment has impact on them. A tsunami wipes out thousands of people alright. Still, these people go do what they want to do to make their lives worthwhile. They give themselves goals and work affirmatively and proactively towards attaining their goals. In pursuing their goals, the universe works with them and helps them to accomplish them.

As I see it, people on earth are metaphorically dead. To live in ego state is to be metaphorically dead, to live as a false ego-self. True living is characterized by love and forgiveness. To the extent that a person loves all people and dedicates himself to serving the world, he is beginning to awaken from the death that is this world.

In so far that I am doing what I think is useful to other people, I feel alive, and to the extent that I am serving only my ego, I feel dead. The choice is mine to make. I can chose to start the awakening process, by which I do not mean escaping into any religious or metaphysical mumbo jumbo, but any effort to serve all people.

I can change my perception of all human beings, from seeing them as separated from me to seeing them as unified with me and to loving them all.

Corrected perception means seeing all people as the same and coequal with me.

Salvation means making endeavor to do that which serves all peoples interests. To me, that is what it means to be alive.

In the end, the individual can change his concept of who he is, who other people are and what the world means to him. If he does so and follows his changed cognitions with changed behaviors, he is a changed person. However, one must observe that there is a limit as to how much a person can change. The human personality, for example, is obviously influenced by the individual’s inherited body. Changing how one thinks about his body helps but one is not likely to change one’s personality intoto until one has changed one’s body. If one inherited a sensitive body that makes for introversion, one may try and become somewhat extroverted, but one is not going to be a thrill seeking, introspection lacking extrovert. Body is a limit. What one can do is change limiting thinking to possibilities thinking and accepts the limitations imposed by physical reality.

Thus, I commit myself to writing about the nature of the real self and publishing on it (in Real Self Magazine) and organizing Real Self Fellowships where all people are enabled to live through their real selves, hence find peace, joy and abundance.

Finally, I recognize that the human mind, the ego, is like a raging bull. It pulls one in all directions, compelling one to think about this and that, to do this and do that. One must tame the raging bull and compel it to go in the direction that one wants to go, and not go to all over the place that it wants one to go to. One must discipline ones thinking, limit it to a few subjects at a time and think them through. Ultimately, one must learn to not only control one’s thinking but to shut off thinking, altogether. In Buddhist terms, one must learn to make one’s mind empty; emptied of all conceptual thinking and just be a void for a while. In an open mind, a mind emptied of all presuppositions and preconceptions of what truth is, a mind that accepts that, in the final analysis, that neither it nor other human beings know what the truth is and stays quiet and asks truth to reveal itself to one, that mind feels quiet and peaceful. Peace and happiness are synonymous. A peaceful mind is a joyous mind. In a quiet mind, the truth of union, whatever that is, dawns.

PS: Even though I am sharing this material with other folk, one should make no mistake about it, it is primarily for me. My goal is selfish. But make sure that you understand what selfishness means. True self includes other people; a truly selfish action serves all people’s real interests.

I write to clarify reality for me. If other people have a need to learn what I am trying to learn (we teach what we need to learn), they can benefit from reading my materials.

I would not feel a bit disappointed if nobody else reads my writings. This is because I understand that folks are at different levels of psychological and spiritual development and will read only what they need to read, not what any other person wants them to read.

As I survey Africans, most of them are not proactively and affirmatively pursuing goals of their own setting. They merely pursue goals set for them by others, particularly by Western civilization. Because they are pursuing other people’s goals, they really do not know where they are going. Things happen to them against their wishes. Circumstances not of their makings push them along They do not have ideas of what types of jobs they want to do and simply accept any kind of job that they can make a living from and survive with. Their goals are to put food on the table and physically survive. Since they are mostly doing jobs that their minds are not in, they do not do them well; they do half assed jobs. More importantly, they are wasting their times, energies and lives.

One cannot get somewhere unless one knows where one is going to. You cannot accomplish goals unless you have goals to accomplish. It is time that Africans paused and examined their minds, knew who they are, identified their real selves and the jobs that suit their real selves and dedicated their lives to doing them. If they do, as Abraham Maslow tells us, they would begin to actualize their potentials and become productive human beings, not the present unproductive consumers of Western ideas and products that they seem to be.

FOR FURTHER READING

Adler, Alfred, (1999) The Neurotic Constitution New York: International Library of Psychology, Routledge.

Berkeley, George. Dialogues.

Campbell, Joseph. (1973) Myths to live By. New York: Bantam Books.

Freud, Sigmund. (1961) The Life and Works of Sigmund Freud. Ed Ernest Jones. New York: Lionel Trilling and Steven.

Horney, Karen. (1991) Neurosis and Human Growth. New York: W. W. Norton.

Hume, David. The Philosophical Works of David Hume. Ed. T. H. Green and T. H. Grose.

Jung, Carl, G. (2001) Basic Writings of C.G. Jung. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.

Kelley, George. (1955) The Psychology of Personal Constructs. New York: W. W. Norton.

Laing, R. D. (1964) The Politics of Experience and the Bird of Paradise. New York: Penguin.

Maslow, Abraham. (1970) Motivation and Personality. New York: Harper.

Schopenhauer, Arthur. The World as Will and Idea.

Schucman, Helen. (1976) A Course in Miracles. Tiburon, CA. Foundation for Inner Peace.

Ozodi Thomas Osuji

Seattle, Washington

africainstitute@yahoo.com