SELF-CONCEPT VERSUS REAL SELF

As far as I can see, it is me who constructed my self concept. Of course, I built on my inherited biological constitution and my social experience. I made my separated self. So did you. Each of us made his empirical self.

Schucman argues that the empirical self we made for ourselves were made as replacement selves; that we use them to substitute for our real selves. To her, our real self is unified spirit, which she gave a Christian name, Christ, and the Son of God. The son of God is holy, that is, unified with his father and all his brothers. But that unified son of God, that holy self, was replaced with an unholy self, a separated self, the ego self concept. To live on earth is to have an unholy self, a separated ego self. (Whole self, is contracted to holy self; separated self is unholy self.)

The ego is the earthly self, a dream self, a dream figure housed in body. To Schuman, the ego and its body do not exist. As she sees it, space, time and matter are non-existent, and are, at best, dream existent; they exist in dreams, but do not exist in spirit.

Schucman rearticulated the truth found in Hinduism and Buddhism. Her book contains the perennial wisdom of mankind. She christologised Hinduism. She stated the truth and nothing but the truth and God helped her. (I reached the same conclusions as Schucman did before I head about her book and its thesis. I eventually read her book and essentially agree with its thesis.)

The only problem with Schuman’s book is that it is written in Christian language and some of us choose not to do anything with formal religion. Religion tends to compound fear by teaching folks to fear God. Misguided religion teaches its adherents to worship an imaginary, all powerful God. That made up God (it is human beings who invent whatever idea they have of God; God is our individual and social constructs) is used to restrict freedom of thinking.

Religionists try to restrict their thinking to the parameters approved by their religion. Already those who call themselves students of A Course in Miracles try to limit their views to what Schuman said. Indeed, they have already evolved a pope, a chap who scarcely has understood what his mentor wrote but who now has taken it upon himself to approve what folk’s say. This man set himself up to decide whether folk’s interpretation of the Course is in line with what the book teaches or not. This is sad, very sad, indeed.

Religion tends to lead to conformity hence stifle the generation of new ideas and lead to social stasis. Therefore, the individual is best served to be outside the confines of organized religion and think his way to his real self. Thereafter, he should gather with like minded persons to share ideas about their true self. We do that at Science of Thinking Institutes around the world. (We call it institute because it is a school where we learn and teach about the real self and how to think correctly, not a place to propagate useless dogmas.)

The salient point in Schucman’s theological thinking is that she recognized what Buddha before her did, that this world came into being and is sustained by desire and wishes.

We wish to be on earth. We wish to live in separated forms. Matter, space and time enable us to seem to live as separated selves. I am over here, probably thousands of miles apart from you. That distance separating us is space. It takes time for either of us to get to one another. We do not seem joined. We seem to have separated selves. We see ourselves in bodies and bodies give us a sense of boundaries. I am in my body and you are in your body, so we seem separated from each other.

Schucman correctly sees our world as an illusion; she teaches that in reality we are connected to one another, that there is no space and gap between us; that there is no space, time and matter and that to the extent that we see space, time and matter that we are in the world of Illusion. Indeed, seeing, perception, itself is part of the illusion of this world. In unified state, there is no other person to see, there is no seeing in heaven. Heaven is characterized by knowing.

The lady theologian, the best that America has produced, is correct. We are joined. This is a fact, not conjecture. I know so from direct experience, not speculation. However, I am not here to tell you about my experience of union. I am here to help you experience union, so that you would know about it without merely speculating about it. To help you appreciate this truth, consider that at night we dream and see the entire world we see during the day. In our nightly dreams, we see space, time and matter. As long as we are in that world of dreams, it seems external to us. Then we wake up in the morning and that world is nowhere to be seen. We recognize that the dream world was made up by our thinking.

We think in images. Our thinking imaged the world we saw in our dreams and that world is not real.

In our dreams at night, we see mountains and those obstruct our movement pretty much as the mountains we see in our day world obstruct our movements. But when we wake up in the morning we recognize that the mountains that were obstacles to us in our dreams were not there, in fact. The question, then, is whether our day mountains are, in fact, real obstacles? Of course, if they are believed as real, as we believe our dream mountains as real, they act as actual obstacles. But suppose one knows that our day living is also a dream, would the mountains in ones life still obstruct ones activities? Jesus did not see the mountains we see on earth as such. Thus, he could walk through closed doors, for he did not see obstacles. He walked on water because he believed that there was no water where we see water. The man said that with faith we can move mountains, meaning that if we believe in spirit and deny the reality of this world that we can get through where we had hitherto seem mountains and obstacles.

Our day world, Schucman tells us, is also a dream world, this time, a collective dream world. We all share the dream we call our day life. Because it is a shared dream, it seems permanent.

When a dream is shared, it seems to last long. Thus, each of us lives in the world for a hundred years or so, and those one hundred years seems continuous. The world seems to last billions of years because it is shared by human beings, animals, trees and stars, everything.

When each of us dies, he exits the world’s dream. The world no longer exists for him. (Consider the old philosophical saw: if a tree falls and there is no human being around to observe it fall, did a tree fall? Was sound made? George Berkeley, in his Dialogues, suggests that the world may be in our thinking. This is solipsism. Quantum Mechanics- physicists like Schrodinger, Heisenberg, and Pauli suggest that the observer affects what he observes, that the external world may not be independent of our thinking.)

REINCARNATION

In as much as the wish that led to this world’s seeming existence, the wish for separated self is still there, Schuman says that the individual will be reborn on earth. This is akin to Oriental concept of reincarnation, except that one is merely having different dreams, none of which is real; one is not born in body or die; one merely has dreams in which one seems born in body, in a place called earth and dies and comes back to it.

As Schucman sees it, people come to the world, over and over again, until they recognize that the world is not real, is a dream, and is a response to their wish for separated self. When they give up the desire to have separated self, they return to the awareness of unified self and no longer return to the world of apparent separation. (Buddha called this phenomenon the breaking of the wheel of rebirth. The illuminated person is no longer reborn on earth.)

Schucman and her mentor, Jesus, teach a path to remembering the unified self. Their part is the path of love and forgiveness. They teach that in eternity that we are unified. Union is love. Love is that which glues everything together. God is love. God is unified with all things. The Son of God, in his true essence, is love, for he is joined to all his brothers, to all creation and to creation’s creator, God.

Our world is a place of separation. To separate from union is to attack and seem to split it into fragments. As Schuman sees it, we seem to have attacked, split union into infinite fragments and each of us identifies with a fragment and see other fragments as apart from us. To separate from others is to attack, hence to hate them.

To hate other people is to hate ones self since, in truth, all people are unified with one. To live on earth is to hate ones real self. Out of mutual self hatred we attack and do evil things to one another.

Jesus and Schucman attempts to reverse the nature of the world; they teach love and forgiveness. To forgive is to overlook the empirical world and what is done in it; to see it as dream and ignore the dream. Jesus was killed and overlooked those who killed him and remembered that he is unified with them.

Schucman asks you to overlook those who seem to do evil things to you, for they do it in your dream. If you are a black person and whites discriminate against you, if you are a woman and men rape you etc, Schucman asks you to forgive those people. Why? It is because they have not, in fact, done what you see them do to you. They seem to have done those things in our mutual dream of self attack. They are still as God created them: innocent, holy, sinless and guiltless. So are you despite what you seem to have done on earth, in the dream.

As Schucman sees it, it is when you overlook other people’s apparent evil that you can overlook your own apparent evil; when you forgive other people, you forgive yourself. But as long as you bear grievances against other people’s attacks on you, you must think that what you yourself did in the world is real, that you have committed crimes, and is a sinner.

Believing you a sinner and guilty, you want to be punished, for guilt calls for punishment. You and those who believe in guilt, all people, want to be punished. To separate from God, as we all did, to be on earth, makes us feel like we did something wrong hence feel like we are sinners. To be human is to feel guilty and to expect punishment from the person one sinned against, the person one separated from, God and other people. We all expect God and other people to punish us.

(Christians call the act of separation from God Original Sin, and believe that we are born in sin and live in sin and are punished for our sin. They symbolize this separation in the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Eating the forbidden fruit is metaphor for disobeying God, separating from God, and because of that separation and sin we are punished with suffering and death. The wages of sin, Judaism, the antecedent of Christianity, teaches is death.)

We, as separated egos, invent a God that has nothing better to do with his time than to place us in his hell and satisfy his sadistic nature by watching us burn forever and ever.

But when we forgive others their evils, we forgive our own evils. In doing so, we overcome the world of dreams and awaken in the world of unified spirit, our real home.

Schucman restated the eternal truth in her Christological language. One cannot really add anything better to what she said. The only problem with her methodological approach to awakening to our real self is that it is religious and one is not a religious person. I am a scientist and express the perennial wisdom of mankind in scientific language.

If you like religion, then read Schucman or Hinduism or Buddhism. We are all saying the same things. But if religion makes you angry, as it made me, and then consider my secular representation of what is found in the world’s religions.

Religion is any attempt to reconnect people to their source, to help them remember their true nature. I want to accomplish religious goals through rational thinking.

As I see it, everything is a result of our thinking. I like the word thinking. I do not like the world mind. Mind tends to be deified and reified as if it is a person and worshiped. We say my mind as if mind exists apart from us. Mind is abstraction for the act of thinking.

There is thinking in the universe. The universe is a thinking universe. All things think, in different forms, of course.

We are part of a thinking universe. Everything thinks along with us. As Schucman recognized, we think in images. We see a world that represents our thinking. First, we think and our thinking is simultaneously shown in images. This is a fact, not conjecture. The external world we see is the simultaneous representation of our collective thinking.

When we die, that is, stop thinking in terms of this world, separated thinking, the external world is no longer there for us to see. Of course, we do not die. We merely exit this world and go to other modes of thinking.

Different modes of thinking show us their own different worlds. What folks report seeing in near death experiences is a world produced by that mode of thinking. As long as you choose to believe it as real, it seems real, and, in fact, is as real as our present world. But like our present world, the near death world, what Orientals call the astral world, is a fantasy and a dream and does not last forever.

What, in fact, exists forever is the world of union, the world of God, what Christians call heaven, Hindus call Brahmaloka and Igbos call Elegwe. That world is a world of connected light, a world where everything is joined to everything else, a world where there is no space and gap between people, a world where there are no you and I, no seer and seen, no subject and object, a unified world. That is the real world. It exists and is our real home. We are foreigners in our present world of separation. (Don’t you feel like an alien here? I do.)

Unified state is the only world that is real. All you have to do to find out whether this is true or false is deny our present world, and deny the separated self you have invented for you, and with which you replace the unified self that is your real self.

The condition for experiencing heaven is that you give up the world of perception. If you consider that price too much to pay, well, you are not yet ready to return to your real home and real self. Keep on dreaming. Dreaming is allowed. God does not stop you from dreaming. Indeed, he is in the dream with you and is guiding you.

By all means stay in the journey without a distance, a journey to nowhere. (Everywhere is already in God and you, as part of God, is already in God and can, therefore, go nowhere that you are not already in; there is no place apart from you, so there is no distance to go to.) Like the prodigal son, you are on a journey to see if you can be independent from your father; at first, you seem to succeed, but eventually you learn that you cannot and return to your father and home, unified state. When you return home, heaven will throw a party for you and rejoice, for God’s seeming dead son is resurrected from death, the lost sheep is found. Dream on, my friend, for dreams are permitted. You have the freedom to dream, no one, not even God can prevent you from dreaming. What you are not allowed to do is permanently change your nature; you can dream of separation but you cannot make yourself permanently separated from God. You are always as God created you, unified with him and all creation. All you can do is dream that you are separated from God and your real self, that dream does not alter the reality of our unified spirit self. (Ndi muoso na edu anyi nu uwa.)

It is very difficult to negate this empirical world, to give up ones self concept and self image. As noted, one feels terrorized and, in fact, constructs psychotic and or neurotic self concepts and self images and identifies with those rather than face selflessness. The death of the self, as we know it, is very terrifying.

Western psychology, as superficial as ever, defines psychosis as this or that. But psychosis is really an invention of a more deluded false self and false world when the individual recognizes that his earthly self and world are false.

Insanity is efforts to make our world seem real when it is recognized as not real. To do so, the insane person must vaguely recognize that our world is not real. Thus, insane persons are closer to heaven, to God, more than we tend to realize. Of course, they are not in God, heaven; they are afraid to meet the condition of heaven, God, their real selves: give up their earthly selves.

Neurosis, which I can speak from direct experience, is a product of being closer to God, to the real self and to heaven. The neurotic is aware that our world is unreal. He is aware that his body and ego self is unreal. Because of this vague awareness, he hates and rejects his body and ego. He then uses his thinking to construct an ideal body and ideal ego self for himself and for other people. He aspires after becoming his ideal body and ego and world. His life is motivated by an obsessive compulsive effort to seem his ideal perfect selves.

By age six, I was aware that I hated my body and self. I used my thinking to image a better body and self. At age twelve, a man from my area came back from America and had PhD. My father treated him like he was God. I resolved that he must be very important and wanted to be as important as him, to be respected as my father respect him. Subsequently, I did not relax until I had PhD. Then I realized that that degree did not change me. I still felt as worthless as ever. Still desiring social worth, I sought a high position in society. I worked hard for it. A few years after leaving college, I was the executive director of a mental health agency. Still, I felt as worthless as ever. I then dropped out of the rat race to seek alternatives to social worth. In my late thirties, I immersed myself in the study of Hinduism, Buddhism, new age religions and traditional Christian religions.

Neurosis is a product of the individual’s awareness of his existential worthlessness and valuelessness. This is a correct self assessment. The problem is what one does with that fact.

The neurotic attempts to construct a better self and a better world. He does not succeed.

The psychotic seems to succeed and live in his imaginary ideal world. The neurotic knows that he is still living in his imperfect world and is unhappy with that world and is unhappy with himself. He is Henry Thoreau’s man who lives a life of quiet desperation.

Western psychology talks shop about neurosis but do not cure it. I have practiced most of the psychotherapies that purport to heal neurosis: Freudian, Adlerian, Jungian; Fromm, Horney; Ellis rational emotive therapy, Beck’s cognitive behavior therapy, Skinner’s behavior therapy, neuroscience’s medications, and so on and so on. None of these works. They merely address the symptom not the disease itself.

What heals neurosis, as well as other mental disorders, is change of thinking. One must change ones pattern of thinking.

Living is thinking. The universe is a thinking universe. The neurotic must give up desiring to be perfect and ideal on this world’s terms. He must eventually give up his self altogether and accept a different self, a different world, one that is not a product of his separated thinking, but is a product of his unified thinking.

THINKING PRODUCES HEAVEN AND EARTH

Like this present world, our mutual thinking is responsible for producing what people call heaven. Please note this fact.

Our collective separated thinking produced our present world; our collective unified thinking produced heaven.

To heal your neurosis, psychosis and normalcy is to stop thinking in a separated manner, individualized in neurosis and collectivized in normalcy, but to think in a unified manner.

Go into meditation, stop ego based thinking, tune out this world, exit it and return to the world of union.

Our real thinking, unified thinking, produced heaven…but because that world is unified and knows so, it is permanent, changeless, eternal and immortal…this does not mean that it is static; thinking still goes on in heaven and that thinking adds to heaven; heaven is forever expanding, for our thinking is creating new things that are added to heaven hence expand it. Heaven is perfect peace and happiness. These are facts, not conjectures.

HEALED HEALER

Each psychotherapeutic method is first meant for the person who propounded it, and eventually for those like him. The therapist is a sick person. His sickness is his separation from his real self. If his therapy is any use, it must first heal him. Having healed him, he knows from experience that it is useful and then extends his therapeutic approach to other people.

Alfred Adler was a neurotic. He felt inferior and compensated with superior feeling. His individual psychology helped him reduce but not eliminate his inordinate sense of inferiority. Karen Horney felt worthless and aspired after becoming an ideal woman. She studied medicine, at a time few women were admitted to medical school. But despite becoming a supposedly prestigious medical doctor, she still felt worthless. Her psychoanalysis somewhat helped her reduce her intolerable sense of worthlessness. Unfortunately, she died before she fully understood the Zen Buddhism she was beginning to explore. If she had succeeded, she would have healed her neurosis. Sigmund Freud was a neurotic. His psychoanalysis, apparently, did not heal his neurotic anxiety, for he died a very anxious person suffering from all sorts of phobias. Since his therapy could not heal him, it could not heal pother people.

Skinner and behaviorists were empty vessels making a great deal of noise. True, we do learn a great deal of things. Our whole educational system is based on learning. Nevertheless, it is infantile reductionism to claim that all we are is learned and that you could modify people through classical and operant conditioning. You can practice positive and negative reinforcements all you want; you can not change neurosis until you change the neurotic’s pattern of thinking.

I have scrutinized extant Western psychotherapies, psychological and pharmacological, only cognitive behavior therapies seem useful. Aaron Back’s Cognitive Behavior Therapy and Albert Ellis Rational Emotive Therapy seem useful. Both enable folks to understand their thinking patterns, and where there are bad thinking patterns, help them correct them. Ellis wants to reorient people’s thinking to a more positive and adaptive pattern.

For example, the neurotic bedevils his life with lots of “should not’s” and Ellis helps him to understand that morality is a social construct and that there is nothing wrong with many behaviors per se. If a behavior does not harm other people, Ellis urges you to engage in it. Do not say that you should not engrave in it just because someone said that you should not. Consider sex. There is nothing wrong with it. If two adults consent to have sex, that is their business. What other people think is not relevant. (However, it is always wrong to have sex with children, for they cannot legitimately give their consent. On a personal level, it is wrong to engage in homosexual activity. Homosexuality is a defiant behavior, defiance of natural sexuality; it is based on power struggle, an effort to seem powerful by defying the obvious. However, I am not motivated to crusade against homosexuality; I am just stating what seems self-evident to me. I know that if you oppose homosexuals they will be defiant and doubly engage in their absurd behavior, so one will simply keep quiet over this insane behavior.)

Each psychotherapy is meant for the person who fashioned it and to the extent that it is good must first heal him. Helen Schucman noted that the atonement is first for the atonement worker. It is for the healer to first heal himself before he can pretend ability to heal other people.

What we mostly have in the world are unhealed healers. We see neurotics who have not healed their own neurosis pretend to be therapists and or ministers of God. To be separated from God and his creation is to be sick. To unify with God and his creation is to be healed.

If you are joined with God and all creation, you are healed and can heal those who feel separated from God and people. But until you unify with God and all creation you are an unhealed person and has no business trying to heal any one; you cannot heal any one, any way. All the unhealed therapists and ministers making noises about their ability to heal people are frauds.

Unfortunately, Schucman did not adhere to her own advice and did not heal herself with her spiritual psychotherapy. Clearly, she did not let go of her ego. She continued to live from her ego and, as such, experienced fear. She died an anxious and depressed neurotic woman. Yet, if she had attempted to practice her theology she could have become what she called one of the saviors of the world (what Orientals call an avatar, Buddha vista). It is a pity that she chose to retain her over blown ego and instead of identify with her unified self. In unified self she would have found the peace and joy that eluded her all her life on earth.

I am not really interested in criticizing other persons. I am interested in me and what helps me heal my own neurosis. Science of thinking is first meant for me. If it heals my neurosis, then it can heal other persons’ neurosis.

The question is whether my methodological approach to human beings has healed my anxiety? Am I still a fearful person or have I found freedom from fear?

I have found freedom from fear. Of course, I still have some residual fear. I still live in the ego, I still wish to be a separated self hence am on earth, in the dream of separation. As such, I still feel some fear. Fear is, after all, a means of protecting the separated self.

My approach has healed me and I recommend it to other people. I give to other people what I found useful to me. I give to other people what I have first given to me.

I found Western psychology and psychotherapy useful in a limited sense. I studied Oriental spiritual psychotherapies and found them more useful. I am not an Oriental person. I am me.

What works for other people may not work for me. I am not looking to be any ones disciple for the sake of being a disciple but to seeing what works for me. I am not interested in religious mumbo jumbo. I am interested in what works and helps me overcome my ego and anxiety.

I am not seeking escape from this world and do not want to live in a cave as an enlightened person. I want to be in the world of space, time and matter, but do so with appropriate thinking, thinking that give me and those around me peace and happiness.

Beginning in childhood, at least by age six, I found me and the empirical world imperfect. I found other people and social institutions not good enough. I rejected these so-called realities. I then invented ideal forms of them. I tried to make my ideals replace these so-called realities.

The mental cannot replace the physical. Much as I wished to have a healthy body, my actual body remained weak…a cup of coffee, for example, spoils my whole day, that is how sensitive my body is.

I leant that my fantasy self and fantasy world are not going to come into being. I gave them up.

On the other hand, I still do not like the so-called normal world. I am a very moral person. I do not have conscious awareness of stealing since I became an adult. On the other hand, I see normal persons stealing. The so-called normal person I see out there seems amoral; he seems more like an animal, really. I see normal racists who discriminate against other people. Simply stated, I loathe normal persons and do not want to be like them.

So what to do? I looked into spirituality and through rigorous experimentation found out that there is a different way of thinking that produces peace and happiness.

I came to understand that it was me who tried to make the world I see around me ideal, but that the world itself is not this or that, but is neutral. It was me who made other people seem Ideal.

Let me illustrate this phenomenon. Self hating and self rejecting black persons often think that to be ideal is to be white like. Such neurotic black persons make white persons seem ideal like. Having idealized whites, such blacks want to be like them. Some such neurotic Black men, for example, think that white women are ideal and or are better than black women. It is them that give white women prestige hence desire them.

Since it is one who made what is desired seem desirable, one can also make it not desirable. One can deconstruct ones earlier construction of certain women as ideal persons hence not desire them. The individual gives other things worth and desire them. He can choose to see things as worthless and not desire them. For example, a man may choose to see women as not desirable and not desire them. He withdraws the value he had hitherto given to women. This is what Arthur Schopenhauer did, not see women as even worth a second of his time and women see him as a misogynist, a hater of women.

Feminist women who imagine that all men live to do is desire to have sex with them actually do not realize that sex is a function of desire and that men can choose not to desire women and the very presence of women becomes oppressive to such men.

This is what mystics do. A human being can choose to change his thinking and change his behaviors. He can choose to not have negative, or for that matter positive judgment. He can choose not to experience shame and guilt. (I used to feel shame over sex until a woman told me that she has absolutely no shame over sex. To her, sex is a natural thing, an itch that she satisfies when she wants to; to her, sex is neither good nor bad, but just is; she does not attach morality to her sexuality. She is a realistic woman.)

We must learn to correct our thinking. Science of Mind attempted to accomplish this end but did it from a religious perspective. New thought religions like Unity Church and A Course in miracles try to correct human thinking from a metaphysical perspective. Cognitive behavior therapy attempts to correct people’s thinking from the perspective of reason. I build on these antecedents to produce a science and technology of correct thinking patterns.

INCORRECT AND CORRECTED THINKING

Experience has taught me that all that man is, despite his body, is thinking machine. We are always, thinking, conscious of it or not. Even what we call emotions are really products of thinking, thinking that we are not conscious of. Consider the emotions of fear and sex; they would seem outside the realm of thinking, but upon further scrutiny are really produced by thinking. In fear the individual has perceived a threat to his physical and or psychological survival. He has made an evaluation that his life is threatened. He then tells his body to pour out the neuro-chemicals that stimulate his body into behaving in the rapid manner it does in fear, with the goal of making him do what he has to do to survive. Thus, he runs faster or fights more efficiently. The goal is his survival and he survives. This whole response is based on thinking and not feeling. Sex would seem like a purely physical response, but upon closer examination is a result of thinking. It is thinking that desires a particular sex object. A man sees a woman, likes her and thinks of her in a sexual manner. His thinking arouses his body. It is his thinking that aroused his body. If he did not desire sex, he would not have his body aroused. Body responds to thinking.

All of human existence is thinking. Therefore, we must pay attention to our thinking. Where our thinking is disordered, we have mental disorder. (I prefer the term thinking disorder, not chemical imbalance or brain disorder, as neuroscientists, who reduce us to animals, would like us to accept.)

Mental health is thinking health, or ordered thinking. Mental disorder is disordered thinking. Bad thinking leads the body to respond in a certain manner. We then make the mistake of focusing only on what is going on in the body and think that body determined thinking.

Where there is thinking disorder we have to correct it. Corrected thinking patterns are what mental health are all about? In corrected thinking one sees ones self as one with all people and accepts that all people are joined and unified. Corrected thinking means loving every person around one.

When a person loves and forgives all people, he tends to feel lighter. Life becomes a thing of joy. One laughs a lot and is almost always humorous, finding the absurd activities we engage in playful, and not take them too seriously. Laugh, life is not that serious.(My mother used to tell me to laugh. She would sneak behind me and say, Laugh, Tom, laugh, life is not all that bad. I was tense and serious, always wondering what life is all about. She is correct.)

This world is a dream; we ought to make it a happy dream. The world is a drama of our mutual construction; we ought to kick back, have fun seeing the play we wrote enacted before our eyes. What is a play but something meant to entertain?

EXTENDING AND PROJECTING

At night we sleep and dream and the world we see is produced by our thinking. This is obvious enough. What is not always obvious is that our day world is also produced by our thinking.

Unlike night dreams, which are produced by single individuals, our day world is produced by all of us, including all animals, trees, and everything in being. The world is our collective dream. The world represents our collective thinking.

We think and project our thoughts out and see them as the world. The world is the out picturing of our collective thinking.

We deny that we did the thinking that produced the empirical world. Indeed, we see the external events in the world as things happening to us against our will. In reality, the things happening to us are things that we did to our selves, for our thinking produce them.

If another person attacks you, your thinking produced the person attacking you; simultaneously, the person attacking you produced you to be attacked by him; it is a mutual dream, after all.

The issue here is denial. We deny ownership of the events in our world and see ourselves as victims unto whom good and bad things happen to, when, in fact, those things are produced by our thoughts.

In extending, on the other hand, we take ownership for the world we produce. In heaven, we are thinking. Our thinking, this time called creative thinking or extending thinking, produces what we experience. Heaven is not the boring place we tend to think that it is. It is an exciting place. Our minds, unified and working in tandem, as they work in the temporal world, produce the events in heaven.

Unlike on earth where we deny responsibility for what we produced, in heaven, we accept that we produced what we experience.

Heaven is not static. Heaven is always expanding. (Expanding to where, you ask? Our thoughts create where the universe expands to.)

Heaven’s thoughts are unified and, therefore, produce additions to what already exist. Heaven is permanent, changeless and eternal, we merely add to the permanent and what is added becomes part of the permanent universe.

Even our miscorrelations on earth have some good aspects to them. Whatever we invent in this world with love is purified and saved and added to heaven. For example, the good music produced by Bach, Beethoven, Mozart etc are saved and are heard in heaven. Whatever you value in this world, if it is loving, you will experience in heaven.

A PROMISE TO MY FATHER AND ANCESTORS

My father is like me. My grand father is like me. I did not see my great grandfather, but I hear that he was like me. We all lived pained existence. We all rejected our problematic bodies and our world and used our thinking to imagine better bodies, selves and world and pursued them.

My grandfather and father were neurotic. They wanted to become ideal. At all times, they had an ideal self image in their minds and used the standards of that ideal self to judge their real self, to judge their wives and to judge their children.

We, the children, are imperfect and, therefore, could not live up to father’s expectations. He was frustrated with us because we were not angels.

White racists like to say that all black persons are criminals. My father would literal die rather than take a penny that does not belong to him. He would have experienced heart attack if any of his children stole something. He wanted us to be morally perfect.

Of course, we were not morally perfect. At age eight, I remember stealing a few pennies from my grandfather’s room and spending it on candies. However, I felt so ashamed of myself that the very next day I went to confession (we are Catholics) and confessed my sin and was given penance…pick up trash from the Church yard, and return the said amount of money from my allowances. I do not remember engaging in another stealing episode during my childhood.

The point is that my family is motivated to become ideal, perfect persons. In pursuing our ideal self images, we felt uncomfortable with our real selves. We could not live with our imperfect human nature. We lived in fear for if you desire to be perfect, you must experience fear of not being perfect.

Father is a very handsome man. But he felt like he was ugly. I am not too bad looking, either. But I have always seen myself as not good enough. Why? Because I have always posited an ideal self concept and ideal self image and used them to judge my actual self and found it not good enough. Simply stated, we pursue idealism and could not tolerate the real world.

I promised my father that I would study and understand why we lived in fear. I could not relax until I have found the answer. In searching for the answer to our problem, I studied philosophy, psychology, Oriental religions and new age religions. I learnt a lot from all these. But, ultimately, I found the answer by thinking about what works for me, not other people.

I have fulfilled my promise to my father and ancestors. I have found out why we are unhappy. Our self rejection began in heaven. In heaven, all human beings reject the unified self and seek separated self. In heaven, the children of God opposes the will of their father. Their father wills that all things be unified. To be unified, all things must be the same, equal and be in spirit. We sought special-ness, inequality and differences. To seem to gratify our desires, we seem to separate from unified state.

By opposing the will of heaven, everything we made opposes us. Everything in our world opposes every thing else.

We rejected union and on earth must reject every thing we made. Thus, despite seeming handsome we reject our bodies. Despite having good egos, we reject our egos. We seek ideal bodies and ideal egos. In doing so, we live in fear.

My mother is more self accepting than my father. She is, as the world sees these things, a normal woman. Nevertheless, like all human beings, she has her fears and anxieties from desire of separation and rejection of our unified self. On the whole, mother adapted to the world better than father.

Mother was aware of the futility of this world and dealt with it by taking refuge in ceaseless work. She escaped into work and worked fourteen hours a day. She could not stand a moment of idealness. If she had free time, she cooked or cleaned up, but could not be idle. Was she to have idle time, she would be forced to think and in doing so appreciate our human existential nothingness hence feel depressed and unhappy? Work was her way of coping with our meaningless and purposeless world.

DISCUSSION

This world is not our real home. We are aliens in this world. Our real home is unified spirit.

No one can ever feel at home in a slaughterhouse, this world. We are all yearning for our lost home. We are all depressed by the loss of our loving, unified home.

I love somber music, such as by Bach etc. I found solace in funeral music (This seemed macabre to those around me.) But I know why I found joy in sorrow.

This world was not my home. I feel like an orphan in this world. I am lost in this world. Somber music is symbolic of how I feel in this world.

Celestine Ukwu and Rex Lawson’s sorrowful music appealed to me for they were singing about the human condition, our sense of loss being in an unloving world. (Both men died untimely deaths and returned to their real homes, the homes they missed so much and sang about in their sorrowful songs. My fellow thinkers, I hope that you have found the peace and joy that eluded you in this world.)

I contracted a job to do and have done it. Ancestors, grandfather, Father, I have now understood why you were unhappy in our world.

My goal is to prevent other members of the family from living the tortured existence you did and to help make people happy.

Father I love you and you know it. I know that you love me, too. You are the most loving person in the world and I know it. Despite your criticisms, based on your expectation for us to be perfect, and fear that we would not be perfect, I knew that you love us. You sacrificed your life for us, working fourteen hour days, six days a week, to provide for us. Thank you, my dear fellow man. We love you. Rest well in your heavenly peace, you deserve that peace and joy.

I have done what I contracted to do and when I have spread that message to the world, shown the world how to live in peace and happiness, I will gladly lay down my worthless body and ego and join you in the peace and joy of our father, Chukwu.

Father and mother I love you two. Please forgive me for not being there when you died. I had to do what I had to do, learn about the nature and cause of human suffering and find antidote to it. Until I found the answer, I could not do anything else. My drama is part of the hero’s journey. Until the hero obtains what he is looking for, he can experience no peace and joy. But having found it, his duty is to teach it to the world, as I am now doing. And when his part in awakening God’s sleeping children is done, he leaves the abode of dreams and returns to live among the awake.

CONCLUSION

When we look at ourselves what we see is body. It would seem that our body determines our thinking. Indeed, neuroscience suggests that thinking is epiphenomenal, that thinking is produced by the configurations of particles, atoms and elements in our brains. That is not true. Thinking is apart from body.

Body is obviously there, we can see it. It is like a car with which we drive from place to place in the world of space, time and matter. But there is a driver. The driver determines what the car does. Nevertheless, the health, or lack of it, of a car affects how it performs. If the car is not well maintained, it would not run well. Therefore, we have to take good care of our cars.

By the same token, we have to take good care of our bodies. Good food and medications are necessary for taking good care of our bodies. We have to study the nature of our bodies. Every human being ought to study the physical sciences, at least, up to bachelor’s degree level.

We live in matter and must understand how matter works and design technologies to take advantage of how it works. No one should deny the temporary reality of matter, his body.

However, we must recognize that we are thinking agents. There is something in us that we might call spirit. Spirit is non-material. Spirit has mind, that is, it thinks. It thinks through whatever it manifests in.

For our present purposes, spirit thinks through our bodies. Spirit is love, and wants to love through our bodies. Bodies are temporary instruments of love.

Love your self and love all persons in your world.

Thinking can be well ordered or disordered. Try to think in an ordered manner. This means loving and forgiving all persons, including you.

A mentally healthy person is a person who thinks correctly, that is, lovingly and forgivingly, and does work that contributes to social welfare.

At Science of Thinking Institutes we teach people to think in a well ordered manner hence live loving, peaceful and happy lives. We help to generate and maintain peace and harmony in our world.

Ozodi Thomas Osuji

Africa Institute Seattle

600-1 Avenue, Suite 325

Seattle, WA 98104

(206) 464-9004

ozodi@africainstituteseattle.org