They seek salvation from their egos, the separated, special selves they made to replace the unified equal self their God created them as, the holy son of God, the Christ. They seek to be saved from their egos and the pain and suffering induced by the ego and its world.

Human beings separated from their creator and from each other and developed separated consciousness, the consciousness we all have on planet earth. Originally, we had unified consciousness, but now we have separated consciousness.

On earth, we feel all alone, pained and are unhappy. In our aloneness and unhappiness we seek surcease. Initially, we think that the way to obtain release from our pain and suffering is to seek ego perfection. Thus, we seek ego idealism, perfection and superiority, with the belief that if we became better ego selves that we would recreate the peace and joy we had in our original heavenly home.

Neurosis and psychosis, the desire for important, ideal, superior, perfect ego self and ego’s world is really the desire for God, albeit in fantasy, that is, in ego terms. God is experienced not in ego terms but on his own terms, unified terms.

We are all seeking the peace and joy of our original home, except that now we seek it in ego terms, via success in this world and becoming more perfect egos. Of course, that is not going to happen, for no matter how much we wash the anus it would still smell of feces. The ego cannot be made to become holy (unified), for by definition it is a separated self and, as such, must cause pain.

It is only when the wish for separation is given up and one desires to return to unified state, a non-ego state that one begins to obtain surcease from the pains and sufferings of this world.

And to our present interest: saved by whom? Is the savior outside one or is he inside one?

Traditional Christianity teaches that salvation comes from outside one, from a man who supposedly lived in Palestine two thousand years ago. The Christian prays to this Jewish character to save him.

But is salvation going to come from outside one, is Jesus Christ outside one and from whence comes to save one? No.

Salvation is inside one. Salvation comes from inside one. In so far that one trusts in Jesus to save one, it is not an outside Jesus, it is an inside Jesus Christ, the Jesus who has eliminated his ego and merged with the Holy Son of God, the Christ, hence is properly referred to as Jesus the Christ. That Jesus Christ is not outside one but is inside one, he is part of ones higher self, the Holy Spirit.

EXAMPLE FROM MY LIFE

It is all too easy to talk about religious principles in the abstract. Priests do that all the time. They explicate what the scripture says. What they do is religion, not spirituality. Spirituality is rooted in personal experience. The spiritual teacher teaches from his personal experience and does not just explicate what scripture says. I will, therefore, draw from my personal experience in teaching the nature of salvation.

I will examine a dream I had at age four. I know that I was four years old for that was how old I was when my parents built a new house and moved into it. The dream occurred during the week we moved into that house.

Generally, remembered dreams, like remembered childhood experiences are distorted. However, distorted or not, it is the symbolism of this dream that matters. It tells me about me: my expectation of salvation to come from outside me.

In the dream, I found myself in the middle of the street in front of our new house. I was crawling on all fours. Suddenly, a truck was coming towards me. Instead of quickly crawling away from the middle of the street, I began to cry, wailing for some adult to come and pick me up. I was literally paralyzed by fear and could not move forward or backward. I just stayed in the middle of the road crying and the truck kept coming closer and closer.

Nobody came to rescue me. In fact, there was no one in the vicinity. As the truck was about to slam into me, I woke up from the dream, still crying. My mother came into my room, apparently, to find out why I was crying in the middle of the night. I told her about the truck that nearly ran into me. She consoled me and put me back to sleep.

This dream has stayed with me all my life. Whenever I am in difficulty I remember that dream. What does the dream mean?

DREAM INTERPRETATION

Dreams can be interpreted in many ways. In fact, the same dream has several interpretations, all of which are probably true. Each interpretation serves the need of the dreamer at the time he is interpreting it; as his understanding improves, he may have different interpretations of the same dream. Here is my present interpretation of the dream.

I was in the middle of the road and danger in the form of a truck was coming towards me and I was paralyzed by fear and asked for other people, people outside of me, to come and help me. I did not try to help me. I did not go inside me to ask a higher force, God, to help me. I wanted other human beings, other separated selves, egos, to help me, not God to help me.

Other people, outside forces did not come to my rescue. Nobody outside me helped me. There is no hero out there riding on a white horse coming to rescue poor, weak me.

Obviously, I felt weak and vulnerable and could not help me either. I wanted another force to help me. Another force was necessary to help me, but I rooted that force outside me, rather than inside me. That outside force did not come to my help. If I had rooted the rescuing force inside me, and looked inside me for help, I would have been helped.

The meaning of this dream is that in life, which is always a danger field, I tend to feel weak and vulnerable and expect outside other people to come and help me. No one comes to physically help me. I cry out for external rescuers and none comes. In the meantime, I am not destroyed by the dangers that confront me. The truck did not crush me to death. Before I am crushed to death, I wake up. That is, before I am destroyed by the difficulties of this life, I manage to avoid them, but in the meantime am paralyzed by fear and anger at a world that I perceive as not rescuing, caring, and loving me. This dream shows that I have dependent personality features, that I do not help myself but expect other people to do for me what I ought to be doing for my survival. Like all dependent personalities, the hoped for rescuers do not come to rescue me, so I stay not helped.

Another episode from my life will help make the point. I was in what was called Biafra, in secondary school. At some point, I was big enough and, as such, a candidate for conscription into the Biafra Army. Recruiters used to march around and pick up boys, boys from about age fourteen on, and march them to army training camps, give them quick and shoddy training and march them right to the war front.

At some point, my father decided that all the boys in the family had to be trained and placed in rear battalions, to avoid the constant harassment we faced from recruiting soldiers. My brother and cousins went through this process and were trained at a near by local army training camp and upon completion were released and placed at such rear battalions as medical corps, signal corps, supply and transport corps etc. All of them (at least four of them) successfully went through this process. Then it was my turn. My friend, Joseph and I were sent to the training camp and the commandant was given specific instruction to release us to my family after the training. Arrangements had been made where, upon completion of our training, we were to go to. We went through the shoddy six weeks training and were waiting for discharge.

One day, in the middle of the night, an army truck came and all of us were marched into it. Joseph and I tried to remind the commandant that we were supposed to be sent home and he ignored us.

We were driven right to the war front. As we got to the front battalion headquarters, a sergeant asked us to fall in line and we did. The sergeant recognized my friend, Joseph as his home boy and asked what on earth a school boy was doing at the battlefront? He called him out of the line and said that he was going to send him right back home. Joseph asked the sergeant to call me out of the line and he ignored him. I was marched to the trenches.

Joseph was sent home, in this case, to my father’s home and he told my parents where I was. In the meantime, I became furious at being subjected to sharing the fate of what I called ordinary soldiers. In Biafra, it was well known that it was the children of the poor who were mainly sent to the battle front. The children of the rich were mostly in rear military formations. I was furious at being treated like riff raff.

I was angry at God for abandoning me; I was angry at my parents for abandoning me; I was angry at the training commandant for sending me to the war front. I was angry at those who started the war and compelled school boys like me to go fight it for them. I asked: if adults are going to settle their problems with war, why don’t they go fight it out by themselves, why use school boys to do their fighting for them? I was angry at any one in authority for subjecting me to the humiliation of being at the war front.

(Adlerian psychoanalysis would say that I was a spoilt and pampered boy and, as such, was made dependent and expected other people to do things for me, to rescue me when I am in trouble; it would suggest that I did not have the inner resources to do things for me. As Adler sees it, spoiling a child saps and robs him of his inner strength and belief in his own ability to fend and shift for himself. Adler insists on parents making their children do things for themselves so as to develop a sense of independence and self reliance. I do not recall any one spoiling me, but as a sickly child my mother did over protect me, and that probably contributed to my tendency to wanting other people to rescue me rather than rescue me. We are not talking secular psychology here; we are talking spiritual psychology.)

Interestingly, I was not afraid of being killed. While I was angry at being so treated by the world, I actually wanted to stay and see a battle before I left the battle front.

I am very willful and knew that if I made up my mind to leave that I would leave and if any one tried to stop me, it would become a battle between him and me. As a child, I was oppositional defiant and do not do something because any one asked me to do it.

I knew that there were military police stationed close to the battle front that could pick a disserting soldier and send him right back to the trenches. But I also know me that once my mind is made up, no one can stop me from doing what I want to do. I could actually shoot a person who tried to stop me from doing what I want to do. The point is that I could have left the trenches if I wanted to. I decided to experience one battle before I left. In fact, when a battle ensued, I volunteered for behind enemy activities, the most risky job. After that battle I had had enough and decided that it was time to leave, and left.

The relevant point here is my anger at being abandoned by God and man. I felt like the universe was not helpful to me. I felt that no adult came to rescue me from the battle front, just like no adult rescued me from the on-coming truck. I felt furious at the entire world for not rescuing me from danger.

My temper tantrum at the war front is really another form of crying out to adults to rescue me when I am in trouble. In the real world, each of us must help himself and not rely on others to rescue him when he is in trouble. A mature person who finds himself in a dangerous situation tries to use his own inner resources to get himself out of it rather than feel angry that other persons, his parents included, for not come running to do for him what he needs to do to cope with the exigencies of the situation. I was simply immature and childish in my response to the war situation. My being young makes no difference, after all there were fourteen year olds at the war front, and those did not cry to their mamas to come rescue them but did what they had to do to survive.

This war time experience tallies with my tendency to expect external other persons to come to my rescue. Generally, no one comes to my rescue. In the dream no one came to rescue me. At the battle front, no one came to rescue me.

No matter how much I wish that other people rescue me, other people have not rescued me. Simply stated, external others have never rescued me. I have never been saved by forces outside of me.

What this means is that no one outside of me is ever going to save me. My salvation cannot come from outside me. No hero on a white horse is going to come rescue me from the difficulties of living on planet earth. If I wish for other people to rescue me, as I have done in the past, they simply will not do so.

Please notice that my friend, Joseph was rescued by an external other but that external other, who apparently could have rescued me, did not do so. He did not do so for my destiny determined that no external other person should rescue me. Only a force inside me can rescue me.

My body is weak and vulnerable; as such, I cannot do many things by myself. Like all human beings, I am weak and powerless. I cannot do many things for myself. We all need each others help. Therefore, to say that I need to look inside for salvation does not mean that I should look to myself for total help.

By myself I can do nothing. I am totally powerless. Clearly, other people can harm, even kill me, if they want to. I have no real power to deal with the external exigencies of living on planet earth. To believe that I have the power to do many things for myself is delusional. The individual does not have that much power to help himself.

THE HOLY SPIRIT IS THE INSIDE POWER THAT CAN SAVE ONE

To look inside one for salvation does not mean looking to ones ego self for salvation. It means looking to a higher power, a power that is not ones ego self, to save one. That higher power is not outside one, it is inside one.

Let us revisit the dream at age four. Obviously, no outside person came to rescue me and I could not help me, either. My ego could not help me and other people did not help me. What then could help me? Only an internal force could help me. Only a power higher than me could help me. That power is God.

Where is God? Is God outside us? Is God inside us? Clearly, God is everywhere. If God is everywhere it follows that he is both inside and outside us.

If other people had helped me in that dream, since God is in them, God would have helped me through them. But as noted, other people did not help me. That is, the God outside me, the God in other people did not help me. (Although that God helped me by asking me to trust in the God inside me, read on.)

The only God that could help me is the God that is inside me. My salvation does not come from outside me but from inside me. What this means is that the God that is inside me, the Holy Spirit, and in so far that Jesus Christ identifies with the Holy Spirit and is the Christ, he is inside me, is the only power that could help me. The God inside me, the Holy Spirit can help me. If I learn to look inside me, to trust the God inside me, it will help me.

In the dream, other people did not come to my rescue. In the battle front situation other people did not come to my rescue. As far as I can tell, no person outside of me has consciously rescued me. In fact, as I look at my life, I cannot say that any person, outside of me, has ever saved me, cared for me and rescued me.

But do understand the meaning of the statement that people outside me have not rescued and saved me. I am not blaming other people for not helping me.

By not directly helping me, people are indirectly helping me. They are telling me to look inside me and discover the real source of help inside me, the God in me. They are asking me not to trust other men, not to trust other egos, but to trust the God in us for my salvation.

YOUR ATTACKER IS YOUR SAVIOR

I like the teaching of A Course in Miracles. It teaches that all attack is a call for love when love is missing, and that all attack is an attempt to save one. It goes like this. Other people did not rescue me. Other people did not do good things for me. Other people, in certain situations, in fact, attacked me. In America, for example, white people did discriminate against me. I was denied jobs that I believed that I was qualified for.

If I identify with the ego, I would feel angry at those who attacked me, those who discriminated against me, those who denied me jobs etc. I would hold grievances against them and seek vengeance; I would desire for those I perceive as my enemies to be punished.

This is the normal ego response to attack. Many black folks look forward to the day white folks would be punished for their sins against black folks. This is a very understandable ego response. The ego bears grudges and seeks vengeance.

But A Course in Miracles teaches that there is another way of looking at the same attack situation. For instance, there is another way of looking at white racism.

Clearly, white racists denied one jobs, there is no denying that fact. When I completed my doctoral dissertation at UCLA, I did not obtain a job. I was turned down by so many of the white employers that I had applied to that my self esteem took a blow. Ones ego felt attacked and angry. That was appropriate ego response to discrimination.

The Course says that there is another way of responding to the same anger making situation. It teaches that one should overlook the racist’s discrimination and that one should forgive the racist; see the Christ in him and still love that Christ in him.

In forgiving the racist’s discriminatory behaviors, one forgives ones own past evil behaviors. In overlooking the racist’s discrimination, his sins, one over looks ones own evils and sins toward other people.

In forgiving other people, hence forgiving ones self, one overlooks ones sinful world. One over looks the world of separation, space, time and matter. One overlooks the past, present and future. One over looks the world of multiplicity and reaches the world of union.

Our world is the world of separation and division, a world of you and me, a world of seer and seen, subject and object. If you forgive that world, if you over look the world of separation, you have essentially tuned it out. When you tune out the world, you have said, in effect, that the world is not real and that it is a dream; you have said that what is done in the world is like what is done in a dream and has not happened. What is done in a dream, hence has not been done, does not matter and is not occasion for fear and anger at those who did something good or bad.

What is done in a dream has no permanent effect on people; therefore, one should over look it and not be angry/afraid from it. What has real cause is what God created, us. God is the cause and we are his effect. God is permanent and his effect, us, is permanent. Our dreams are mere wishful thinking and are therefore causeless and effect less.

You see the world as a stream and people in it as dream figures doing dream things. You over look the dream and what are done in it. You tune out the dream world and experience a different world, the world of union, the unified spirit world of God.

If you forgive your attacker, the person who discriminated against you, you have overlooked the world he represents for you, the world of separation. You then attain the world of union, the world of God.

In effect, forgiveness brings you to the gate of heaven, to the door to union. If you forgive the world, hence your self and love all people, you suddenly experience what the Course calls Holy Instant: unified experience where you feel at one with God and all his creation; you experience what mystics of every clime call unitive experience, a world where the father and the son are one, a world where all are one, where there is no you and I, no seer and seen, no subject and object, a world of unified spirit self.

The unified spirit self is eternal and immortal. It is permanent and changeless. It is the opposite of our world. It is the world of total union, peace and joy. It is a world where language does not apply, for language and speech adapts to the world of separation, the world of space, time and matter, our world.

The world of God is not the world of perception, but the world of knowledge. Perception is only possible in a separated world, a world of space, time and matter such as our world. A world of union requires knowledge, not perception. The world of God is ineffable and is beyond our ego intellectual categories. It is a non-conceptual and non-perceptual world.

The Course, in effect, says that the world that did not seem to love one, a people that did not seem to help one, a people that did not rescue one, in fact, are helping one. By ignoring one, by not helping one, by not doing anything to help me, I tuned out the external world. When I see another human being, honestly, I do not expect him to do any thing good for me. I see him as a self interested person and as doing things that serve his self. His selfish behavior neither makes me angry nor not angry. I just assume that all people are egos and, as such, are motivated by their self interests. I do not expect help of any sort from other people.

By not expecting help from other people, I go inside me and seek help from the Holy Spirit. I have faith in the Holy Spirit, the God inside us, and the God in the temporal universe. I expect the God inside me to help me and he does help me.

How does he help me? He helps me by requiring me to love and forgive all people. As noted, if I love and forgive all people, including those who overtly did not help me, I experience oneness with God and all creation.

Other people are dream figures in my dream of separation and specialness. Dream persons cannot help the dreamer. It is the dreamer that produced his dream and the dream people in it. I dream and produce the world I see. I produced the dream figures I see on earth (and, they, in turn, are dreaming and produced me and the persons they see on earth; our real self is formless, unified spirit self, but we denied that self and took on a different self, the self in body, the ego separated self.)

If I ask other people to rescue and help me, what I am doing, in effect, is asking my dream figures to care and rescue me. They cannot help or rescue me, for dream figures only do what the dreamer asks them to do.

My dream makes people do what they do to me, as their dream makes me do what I do to them. (Their dream and my dream ask me to become an enlightened person, so as to teach them about our true self, the unified self).

I am the dreamer and I am supposed to rescue myself, not my dream figures rescuing me. If I over look what my dream figures do to me, I forgive and love them. I then experience the non dream world of God, the world of total love, peace and joy. If other people, dreamers too, forgive me, and forgive all people, they overlook their dream and experience the world of God.

My duty is not to wait for other people to awaken and save me but for me to awaken and try to help them awaken, too. My concern is my own personal salvation, not whether other people are saved or not. But if I become saved, by looking inwards to trust the God in me, then, I can model salvation and teach other people, through personal example, to look inwards, to have faith in the God in them, so as to become saved from the pains and sufferings of the ego self and ego world.

EGO IDEALISM AS EFFORT TO SEEM IN CONTROL

Human beings would like to believe that they are in charge of their lives. In fact, the whole experiment on earth is an effort to seem in charge. God is in charge. God created us. God extended his one self to us. We are part of God. God gave us his creative abilities. We do create. We create like God. But we create with his power in us. Without God we cannot create. At some point we resented the fact that God created us and wanted to create ourselves and create each other, which is impossible. There can be only one creator in the universe, God. We are created and are not the creator of ourselves. To seem to create ourselves, we went to sleep and invented this world of space, time and matter.

We came to the world as if we do not have an already existing self. Our first order of business here is to invent the separated, special self concept and self image. Each of us invents a separated, special self for himself and does so for other people. Thus, I have a separated self concept and a separated concept for other people, and they do the same to me.

On earth we create ourselves and create each other, in illusions, not reality, of course. The self concept, the self image are replacement selves we made to substitute for the real unified self that God created us as. The self that we are aware of, the self concept, the self image, the human personality, the ego is made by us. It is not our real self but it is a self we made. It is our idol; we made it and are proud of it.

The ego, the self concept, the human personality is the antichrist, the opposite of Christ, Christ being the unified real self God created and the ego being the separated false self. The ego is an antichrist in that it wants to kill Christ, kill the real son of God and replace him as our self.

The ego would like to seem in charge of our lives. At some point, each of us recognizes that the ego, the self concept and self image, the personality we made to replace the real self that God created does not have power.

By myself I cannot predict what is going to happen in the future. I do not even know what is going to happen to me in the next second. I have no way of protecting myself. I am totally powerless over the past, present and future. Aware of my powerlessness, aware of our collective powerlessness in ego, we seek ego ideals.

Neurosis and psychosis are pursuit of exaggerated ego ideals and false ego power. The neurotic is aware of his powerlessness to do anything by himself. He resents that fact and invents an ego ideal that seeks to be all powerful, to be superior, ideal and perfect. His hope is that his fictional all powerful and superior self would be able to protect and save him. Neurosis, and its exaggerated form, psychosis, is an attempt to invent a self that protects one, a self that is in charge and does for one what God does for his son, protect him. But the neurotic and or psychotic self, the all powerful, superior, ideal, perfect self is as unable to protect one or defend one as the plain old ego self. The powerful ego is as unable to predict the future as the powerless ego found in normal persons.

Neurosis and psychosis are private religions; the individual invented the neurotic god and worships it, hoping that if he makes it as powerful as is possible in his imagination that it would protect him. That neurotic self image is a craven cow, a cow made of gold and worshipped to protect one, but it cannot protect one, for as a cow it does not have power.

The mentally ill worships his self concept, self image, the false powerful fantasy self he made to protect him, and despite all his worshipping of a false self he is as powerless as ever, he is not in control.

Simply stated, the ego, the separated self concept is not in control, it is not in charge. We made it to seem in charge of our lives but we are not in charge of our lives.

If we accept that we are not in charge of our lives, are not in control, that the ego is not in charge, the question then is who is in charge?

The atheist says that nobody is in charge. To the atheist, we live in an accidental universe where events just happen in a random manner. An earthquake happens and people die. There is draught and no rain and there is famine and people die. On the other hand, there is rain and good soil and people produce bumper crops and eat and live. It is all a product of accident, chance and randomness, the scientific atheist says.

The agnostic is unable to make up his mind as to whether God exists or not and as to who is in charge and is debilitated by his inability to make up his mind; he vacillates, fence sitting, doing nothing, not as bold as the atheist with made up mind, or the religionist with an equally made up mind in the other direction.

INNER SHIFT: FROM TRUST IN EGO TO TRUST IN GOD

The ego based religionist believes that God created the world and is in charge of it. He does not see how man could have created the stars, moons, mountains and the world. He believes that God created the world and prays to that creator God to protect him. He seems realistic except that the atheist and scientist is his nemesis.

The atheist asks the religionist: how can a loving God have created a world where earthquakes, hurricanes, floods, tornadoes, volcanoes, draughts and diseases of assorted kinds suddenly come and wipe out thousands of people? How can a loving God have created a world where an Adolf Hitler kills millions of people and Joseph Stalin wipes off millions that disagree with his irrational socialist doctrine? It does not seem to add up. A loving God would not seem to have created this world.

In fact, what seems rational is to believe that in so far that we have a need to believe that some one created this world that the world was created by an insane god. Only an insane intelligence would create a world where people live in poverty and are killed by assorted diseases. Only an insane but intelligent force could have made the human body, a marvel of engineering yet a body meant to die and rot. Only an insane god would have made a world where there is suffering and death.

If we must talk of God the only rational god we can talk of, the atheist contends, is an insane god; the creator of this world is an insane god. You know what? That is exactly the truth.

God the son became insane and out of his insanity invented this world. God is one. He extended himself to his Son, who is all of us. The Son of God, all of us resented that God created us and wanted to create ourselves.

But the son cannot be his own father and cannot be his father’s father. To seem to have created ourselves (in Hindu categories), we cast a spell on ourselves, Maya, magic, and seem to have gone to sleep, and in our sleep dream the world of space, time and matter, a world of separation, a world that is the opposite of the world of God.

God created an eternal, permanent and changeless world. The opposite of that world is a transitory, ephemeral, changeable and dying world. We invented our world in opposition to the will of God. God willed union and we desired separation; God willed love and we desired hatred; God willed that we join each other and we wished for separation from each other.

Our world is the work of an insane intelligent force, not the wok of a sane intelligent force. God did not create our world, we did. We created this world. It is, however, not real; it is an illusion, a literal dream.

The things we see in our world are dream figures; they do not exist in the real world that God created. In God’s world, everything is spirit, an idea in the thinking, mind of God and in his sons’ thinking. God is spirit and spirit is permanent, eternal and changeless.

Our world is made of energy and matter and therefore is changeable and must die. Every person born in body must die; there is no exception to that general rule. In spirit we are immortal but in body we are mortal, by our own wish.

THE TRANSCENDENT, THE SON OF GOD AND THE IMMANENT GOD

God is merciful. He knows that we are sleeping and dreaming this world. He enters the world we made as the Holy Spirit. There now seems three Gods in existence: God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit.

God the Father is the transcendent God, he is not in this world. He is spirit. God the Son is us, all of us collectively as the one son of God.

When God the Son seemed to have separated from God the Father and invented this world, God the Father entered his Son’s dream world as God the Holy Spirit.

Only Spirit is real. Spirit does think. Spirit has mind. Thus, in our thinking, minds are God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit.

In addition, in our minds is the ego self, the self we made to replace God the Son. Where God the son is, where Christ is, where Buddha is, where atman is, is now the ego, the sleeping Son of God.

Our true identity is the Son of God. Our true mind is the mind of the Son of God, Christ’s mind. But in sleep and dream, we invented a different self, the ego self, and a different mind, ego thinking. On earth we are egos and think in ego terms.

The ego is the separated self who seeks to create himself, create God and create other people.

The ego does not exist independent of the son of God. The Son of God invented the ego self and ego mind and identify with it. Thus, on earth we see ourselves as separated selves living in body. Body gives us a sense of boundary from other people. We think through the separated ego self.

You are reading this material with your ego mind, for I am writing it with my ego mind. In heaven there is no ego mind and there is no writing and reading.

When we invented the ego self and ego mind and identified with it, God created the Holy Spirit and placed him where we placed the ego self and ego mind. Thus, in our minds are now two selves and two minds, two modes of thinking: the ego and the Holy Spirit. If you like, the Holy Spirit is our right self and right mind, and the ego is our left self and left mind.

On earth we think with the ego mind, but if we choose, we can think with the mind of the Holy Spirit.

The Holy Spirit’s thinking takes us back to God; the Holy Spirit is the link to God, a bridge between earth and heaven, a communication devise between the ego and Christ, the sleeping son of God and his father.

On earth we trust our ego thinking, minds. We think with our ego minds. We see ourselves as the egos. In the ego we see ourselves as in charge of our lives, and we see other people as separated from us. In ego we live in a world of space, time and matter.

When we turn inwards and recognize that there is another mode of thinking and living while we are still in this world and turn to it, turn to the Holy Spirit’s mode of thinking and living, we have made an inner shift in perception. We are still in the perceptual world, in this world; we still see other people and live in space, time and matter. But now we remember that in reality there is no space, time and matter and that other people are parts of us.

In truth, we are literally unified with God and other people. In heaven there is no you and I, no seer and seen, no subject and object. In God all share the self of God and share the thinking, mind of God. This is literal not figurative.

When there is an inner shift in perception, we recognize that the seeming other people we see in our world are parts of our one shared self and one shared mind. We think with other people, as they think with us; all thinks through our joined mind.

The person who attacked you, who did a bad thing to you, was thinking with your mind and, as such, attacked you with your permission. He is him yet is you. What he did he did do and yet you did it. What I did I do yet you did it.

In America a white racist discriminates against a black man because he thinks that he is separated from a black man; he sees space, time and matter between them. This is the illusion of the world, the belief that other people are separated from one and, as such, and that what we do to others we did not do to ourselves.

In truth we all share one self and one mind and what we did to others we did to our selves, literally. The racist discriminates against a black person. This means that the black person has discriminated against himself.

When the discriminated against black person attacks and destroys the white racists world, as will eventually happen, this means that the white racist has destroyed his world.

Let us not be too abstract, let us bring the discourse to the personal level. The racist who denied me jobs is me. I denied me jobs through the racist. I did to me what the racist did to me.

Whatever I choose to do to the racist, in retaliation for his discrimination against me, the racist did to himself. The racist and I share the same self, the Son of God, the Christ self, albeit in sleeping and seeming separated forms.

If the person who attacked me, who discriminated against me is me, what should I do to him? If I were rational, I would forgive him. If I were irrational, I would counter attack him, and since he is me, to attack me some more, through his defensive attack on me.

In forgiveness one sees the other person as ones self and chooses to overlook what he did that seems evil to one. One loves the forgiven person and models love for him.

On earth, forgiveness is the true meaning of love. If one truly loves the attacker; if I, as a black person, forgive the white racist who discriminates against me, I have forgiven myself my own evils towards other children of God.

In forgiving others I forgive myself. In forgiving myself/other people, I overlook the world of egos, the world of separation, space and time. When I forgive the egos world, overlook the world we made in insanity, I am able to see the world created by God.

Forgiveness brings me to the gate of heaven, to the world created by God. Forgiveness gives me peace and happiness; forgiveness also gives peace and happiness to those I forgive.

The person who does you evil expects you to return his evil and must live in fear of your counter evil, hence does not know peace and happiness. When you forgive him you reduce his defensiveness hence gives him some peace and happiness.

Americans, for example, live in total fear; they are like mad men, always preparing for war but always living in fear, they jail the evil doers in their society and like all jailers must live in jail with those they jailed. To be an American is to be the quintessential egotist. In America, the ego reigns supreme. Here, people trust on their egos to protect them.

The ego sees itself as fragile and in need of protection. The ego feels grievance and seeks vengeance. It expects other people to attack and hurt it and attacks and hurts other people in self defense. It believes that its attackers ought to be punished; it holds grievances and seeks revenge.

Everywhere, the American judicial system, an ego based justice system, tries and punishes evil persons and puts them in jails.

Americans set up their government: judges, courts, police, jails military etc to act on their behalf, to be their surrogate ego seeking vengeance and punishing their enemies.

America is the ego based civilization per excellence. It knows nothing of God, though Americans talk too much about God.

The death of America will be the death of the ego based civilization. After her fall, momentarily, however, there will be another ego based civilization, the Chinese civilization. That civilization will not last more than a century before it falls.

One does not need to consciously do anything to bring about the end America’s ego reign. America has her rendezvous with destiny. She must do what she is fated to do and like all other empires based on the ego, hence slavery and oppression, will disappear into the garbage dump of history. She must end for a Christ based civilization to finally dawn on earth.

Rome, Russia etc were all once great civilizations but are no more, so will America. Like Rome, America began as a slave society and continues to the present as a discriminatory society. When she has exhausted her fate, when the ego has exhausted her reign, in traditional Christian categories, when Satan (the ego is called Satan by Christians) has exhausted her appointed time, she would be replaced by a different type of society. The end of Satan’s reign will mark the beginning of Christ’s reign on earth. The end of the reign of the ego, the reign of hatred, is the beginning of the kingdom of God on earth, the reign of the will of God, which is love, on earth.

One needs do nothing for Christ replacement civilization will raise on its own accord. In so far that one needs to do something, it is to remove the obstacles to it. Love is everywhere but we mask it with hatred; when we stop hating each other we see that we always live in the presence of love. We live in love and dream that we live in hatred; we live in unified state and dream that we live in separation.

The replacement civilization is led by the Holy Spirit and Christ; it is a Christ based civilization, what Christians call a New Israel, a New Jerusalem, a world led by Jesus Christ.

In this context, Jesus Christ is not a person, but is a metaphor for love and forgiveness, a world based on love, forgiveness and human brotherliness.

(China and Asia will be the dominate power by the end of the twenty first century. In the twenty second century, Africa will emerge from the shadows and begin to contend for power. By the end of that century, all regional dominations will end and the world turns to Christ based civilization, one based on love and forgiveness.)

For our present purposes, when there is an inner shift in perception, one recognizes that one is one with the seeming other person, one with the person who seems to have attacked and hurt ones body and ego self. One forgives and loves that person. One loves the entire world.

Forgiveness and love makes one experience ones oneness with the entire world. When one constantly loves and forgives the world, one experiences what Helen Schucman called Holy Instant, what traditional Christianity calls mystical union with God and all creation; in it, one knows that God and his creation are one.

Inner shift in perception leads one to trust in God’s Holy Spirit to guide one; one now has faith in God to protect one. Even though God did not create this world, through his Holy Spirit he protects his children in the danger prone world they made.

If one has total faith in God to protect one, that is, if one relinquishes ones trust in the ego to protect one, one becomes peaceful and happy. The gifts of God are peace and happiness.

I DREAM OF JESUS CHRIST

A few years ago, I was totally immersed in studying Hinduism. At some point, I believe that I had understood it. However, I was not comfortable with its Indian language and was struggling for a way to replace it with the Christian language of my upbringing.

Where Hinduism talks about Brahman, I talk about God; where it talks about Atman, the part of Brahman, I talk about Christ, the Son of God, where it talks about self realization; I talk about oneness with God in Mystical union (see Evelyn Underhill, Mysticism and William James, Varieties of Religious experience). I, more or less, translated Hindu philosophy into Christian categories.

At some point, I had a chat with a chap and explained to him my understanding of God. Upon hearing me talk, he told me that some one had already done what I was struggling to do: put Hinduism into Christological categories, that Helen Schucman wrote a book called A Course in Miracles, in which she did what I was trying to do. He urged me to read that book.

I bought that book and tried reading it. The language was foreboding. It was written in Shakespearean verse. I am not used to reading verse poems. I am used to reading prose. I could not really get into the book. Moreover, the ideas in the book seemed convoluted, gabbled gook and I threw it away.

In fact, I was unkind to its writer. I concluded that Helen Schucman must have been a neurotic of a dissociative type; a multiple personality that dissociated from her true self and identified with an alter ego she called Jesus Christ, and from what seemed his perspective wrote her book.

I did not believe in channeling and, in fact, did not care for channeled materials. I am at home in the world of ego reasoning; it does not help one much to tell me that something is written by God; what one tells me must be self evidently true for me to pay attention to it.

I threw A Course in Miracles away and continued with my life. Then I separated from my wife, moved out of our house, and to save money, moved into a rooming house. In the house was an old high school mathematics and music teacher who, apparently, was divorced and had moved out of his house. He became a friend of mine. We talked about all sorts of subjects.

We shared the same kitchen and dinning room. One evening, I saw him reading A Course in miracles. I told him that I had tried to read that book but could not understand it. He said that that is the case with most people, and for the next few days, undertook to explain the thesis of the book to me.

Subsequently, I happened to be at a bookstore and saw that book, again. On the impulse, I bought it, and, this time, actually read it from page one to the last page. I even read the Workbook and Manual for teachers. I did not read it as a follower, but as one who wanted to understand what it is all about, that is, I read it with critical eyes.

The book contained a strange philosophy, a philosophy that stood our normal way of looking at our world on its head.

Somehow, I felt that the book contained the truth. But out of nowhere I became seized by anger at Jesus. I wanted to know why he wrote the book in such convoluted language that very few persons could understand. I have a doctorate degree and still I could not understand the book. How in the world does he expect the average person with only high school education to understand his book?

I wondered why he did not write it in simple prose, say, like Ernest Hemmingway’s, so that simple folks could read and understand it without the help of those purporting to help them understand it. Already, a veritable cottage industry has arisen purporting to interpret the book for the masses, and each claiming to teach its true meaning. It seemed to me that given the religious wars we had in the past, all due to different interpretations of what Jesus allegedly taught that the old boy ought to have spared us another headache by presenting his ideas in a readable book?

For weeks, I kept on being angry at Jesus for returning to the world and creating confusion with this confusing book. I was in fact so furious at the man that I wished to get my hands around his neck and strangle him. I vaguely remembered my anger at him in the past, too. I have always identified with Thomas the apostle and somehow see myself as him in this life time. I have always been argumentative and doubting of whatever is said to be the truth.

One evening, around 6 PM, I sat in front of my computer and tried to write down my issues with the boy, Jesus. Why am I so furious at the chap, I asked myself, why not just let the matter drop? I did not even know for sure whether he existed or not. For all I know he could be a clever story propagated by the Jews to deceive the world. Didn’t racists claim that the elders of Zion are out to control the rest of the world and cleverly scheme to control our minds? Couldn’t Christianity be part of the plot by the elders of Zion to control us gentiles?

It was Seattle during the summer. At 6PM the sun was still up. I could see through my window that the sun was up outside my room. However, suddenly my room became dark, I mean pitch black. I got up from my desk to see what was going on. I looked outside the window but everywhere seemed dark, dark at 6PM in July Seattle, that is strange! I tried to moving towards the door, to go outside, to find out what is going on.

I was standing in the middle of the room when suddenly I found myself at Venice, California beach. I was gamboling with my five year old son. I carried him on my back and was running along the shores, a sandy beech. We were having fun when suddenly my attention was attracted by a man sitting by a beech chair with a book on a table. He had a beech umbrella on over his head. What caught my attention was his hue. He was as white as snow. You could look through him. He wore the traditional Catholic priest’s white robes. He looked like Pope John Paul. (I liked John Paul so much that I actually went to Rome and tried to get a glimpse of him.)

The man before me seemed amazing so that I went towards him to find out who he is.

As I got closer, I immediately knew who I was looking at; I was looking at the old boy himself, Jesus Christ. My rage at the old boy returned and overwhelmed me. I was so furious at him that I wanted to kill him.

Suddenly my attention was caught by the book the old boy was reading; it was A Course in Miracles. That book made me even angrier at the man. I stood there wanting to tell him what a fool he is writing a confusing book etc. But I decided to be polite and not use the insulting language that came to my mind. I tried to make conversation with the old boy. (Folks out there tend to fear and respect Jesus, but I saw him as a peer, not as my master, just a friend.)

I said: good book, eh? The man ignored me. My God, I do not like to be ignored, certainly not by any body that looks white. Whites have ignored blacks for too long and if a white man dared ignore me I tend to be furious. I was enraged all over again that the man ignored me. In my mind, I was asking: who the hell does this Jewish boy think that he is ignoring an Igbo man? (The Igbos, generally, fancy themselves superior to all other people, white or black, and I share their neurosis.)

I tried to be civil and professional and tried another tactic. I said: I have read that book; it is difficult to understand what it is trying to say. The man still ignored me. He kept reading that book and ignored me. My God, my anger could no longer be contained and I decided to leave him. I decided that I had had enough and in a huff took the first step to leave him.

At that point, the man looked up from the book and said: “there are many books, many paths to God. You are meant to write your own book on God. Go write it and do not disturb your peace talking about this book. Some persons, including your self, will find some usefulness from this book, others will not. It is for you to take from it what you can and go write your own book. Some persons would find some utility in your own book.

After his brief comments, the old boy disappeared and the dream ended. My room was again bathed in sun light and I could see again.

At no point during this dream was I sleeping. I merely shifted awareness, from my room to the beach, and to the ensuing interaction with the big boy himself.

Many folks would consider the dream a vision? What is a vision? Let us not delay ourselves debating semantics. Dream or vision, what difference does it make?

I went back to my computer and typed the dream and tried to understand what it meant. I called a few friends and told them about the dream and each gave me his or her interpretation of the meaning of the dream. I had many other dreams with Jesus Christ in them. However, we need not go there; one dream is enough for us.

What does the dream mean?

Obviously, it is my thinking, aka mind that produced the dream/vision. Obviously, my experience as a Catholic boy made it possible for my mind to produce Jesus in the like of a Catholic priest. If I had been socialized a Baptist, I probably would have had a different image of Jesus Christ and produced him differently in my dream. Simply stated, it was my thinking/mind that produced the dream.

The Jesus that I saw was not outside me; it was produced by my mind. I made the image of Jesus that my mind could accept, one clad like my beloved Pope John Paul the 11.

Does this mean that the whole dream is a fiction and of no relevance? Not quite so simple. All dreams and visions are metaphors produced by the individual’s mind to teach him a lesson.

At the beginning of this essay, I narrated a dream that occurred when I was four years old. That dream was a metaphor of my dependent personality. I tended to want external others to rescue me. The dream told me that no external others would rescue me, no matter how hard I cried. The objective of the dream is for me to become independent and look inside me for rescue. Since objectively, my ego is weak and powerless, looking inside me does not mean trusting in me to rescue me, but trusting the God inside me, the Holy Spirit to rescue me.

The Jesus dream was obviously produced by my mind, my thinking. We think in concepts and images; my thinking produced the dream in images. The dream’s meaning is for me; it is designed to teach me a lesson.

In the dream, my mind produced a Jesus that my upbringing as a Catholic could accept. The symbolism of the dream is that my mind told me not to waste my time debating the merit or lack of it of A Course in Miracles, but to take from it what seems to make sense to me and go write my own book on the nature of reality. The dream further tells me that not all persons would accept my interpretation of reality, just as not all persons accept the Course.

The dream, in effect, is my mind, telling me to go find my own path to God and take from the Course what is useful, just as I had taken from Hinduism and Buddhism without getting stock in them.

Does that mean that Jesus does not exist apart from my dream? Does that mean that our minds make him up? Is he a dream figure and not a reality?

The answer is yes and no. There was a man called Jesus who lived two thousand years ago in Palestine. He was an ego like all of us. In the course of his living on earth, he recognized that he is one with all of us and one with God. He jettisoned his hitherto identification with the ego and identified with the Christ.

In our world, God and his son, Christ, is represented by the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit teaches love and forgiveness. Jesus, the Jewish rabbi, accepted the gospel of the Holy Spirit and taught it. He became a teacher of God, a teacher of salvation.

The Jews did not like Jesus’ teaching of forgiveness and love. They wanted to continue teaching crime and punishment. Like Americans, Jews wanted to see criminals as apart from them, arrest, try and punish them. They wanted Moses’ law of an eye for an eye to prevail in their world. They did not want to leave the laws of Moses, the laws of the ego, the laws of grievances and vengeance and embrace the laws of Christ, the laws of God, the laws of forgiveness and love.

The Jews, moreover, did not like the fact that Jesus saw himself as one with God. They say his identification with God as blasphemy, as an attack on their ego based God, the God of the Old Testament that punished evil doers.

Recall the parable of the adulterous woman. In it, Jesus asked people to forgive sinners rather than punish them. Recall the parable of the man going to worship God and remembered that a neighbor had wronged him. Jesus said that he must first go home to forgive his neighbor before he worshipped, prayed to God. Recall the only prayer Jesus taught his apostles, the Lord’s Prayer. He asked them to forgive one another before they expect God to forgive them. Finally, Jesus was crucified and he forgave those who crucified him.

Clearly, Jesus taught his followers to forgive one another. Forgive your enemy; present the other cheek to be slapped when one is slapped. As he sees it, God has already forgiven us; God has already given us all that we pray for, but to receive the answers to our prayers, we must first forgive one another.

Forgiveness and love is the condition for receiving the gifts of God. (The gifts of God are peace and happiness.)

Jesus taught forgiveness, it is as simple as that. What is salvation? To be saved is to forgive the world, other people and ones self. To forgive is to overlook what is done in the world as if it were done in a dream.

Jesus overlooked the world of crimes and saw the face of Christ, innocence, guiltlessness and sinlessness in all his brothers. He teaches us to forgive one another, so as to see the face of Christ, innocence, in each other.

God’s holy Son is innocent; he has not done the evils we see him do on earth; he did those evils in a dream setting and what is done in a dream has not been done.

The racist discriminated against a black person in a dream and had not done so in reality; therefore, he is still as God created him, innocent.

Jesus did live in flesh. Because he taught a philosophy that is contrary to the philosophy that maintains this world…grievance and punishment maintains this world… the world wishing to keep its pathways, arrested and crucified him. Jesus was, in fact, killed and resurrected from death. His body was crucified but his spirit is eternal and could not be destroyed.

Subsequent to his death, Jesus resurrected from death and appeared in his physical body and showed himself to his disciples. He even ate food with them. Then he got tired of that childish ego-body game, and for a while lived only in Holy Spirit-light body, what Orientals call astral body…the body he was in my dream, a body of pure light form…you could walk through that body.

All of us have light bodies, if you try very hard, meditate, you would see yourself in a light body, a body that looks like your present body, but one made of pure light particles, a body made of photons and having no solidly. When we invented our present bodies, the Holy Spirit reinvented our bodies for us. Each of us has a light body. This is the body those who have had near death experiences claim to see. It is not a permanent body, for it is still in matter, though it is in the subtlest form of matter, particles. Whatever is made of matter must decompose. The light body is as temporary as our present dense body. Ultimately, we must all return to formless, spirit self, the self God created us as.

Jesus eventually got tired of playing ego games and returned to formless spirit. He seemed to have disappeared from the world. But he is now in our thinking, our minds, our Spirit. He is part of the Holy Spirit. He is in our right minds; he is the symbolic Christ.

If you insist on seeing Jesus in form, you will see him, in a manner that your experience can accept. My experience can accept him as the Catholic Pope and he appeared as the pope to me. (The pope is the Catholics idea of a holy man.)

The real Jesus, however, is not in flesh or light body, he is one with God. He has reclaimed his true self, the holy son of God, who is one with his father. Nevertheless, if you ask for him, he will appear to you in flesh. Look at the man in front of you, he is metaphorically Jesus. Love him, if you want to love Jesus. If he attacks you, Jesus has attacked you, with the hope that you would forgive him, and in forgiving him forgive yourself, and in doing so come to the gate of heaven and from their jettison the ego altogether and enter heaven, and experience oneness with God and all his creation.

For our present purposes, what I had was a dream, and if you insist, a vision. It was symbolic and meant to teach me a lesson. All dreams and visions are personalized. Each is meant to teach the dreamer, visionary, a lesson. The lesson the dream taught me is only for me. But it is also for you, for in the final analysis, you are like me.

In the here and now world, you will have different dreams and different visions to be taught the lessons you need to learn in your world of separation, your dream that the unified son of God is in many places.

Why did I narrate this dream? Was it to make me seem more spiritually advanced than you, to seem elevated than you? In eternity, we are perfectly the same and equal. It is the wish that one be superior to other people that produced this world of superiority and inferiority.

I am your equal in God. We are equal in God and eternity. But in time, on earth, we are at different places on our journey back to God. You are where you are and I am where I am.

You have asked me to return to God, to be awakened in the light that is our nature. I am part of your real self. You asked me to be an awakened figure in your dream of separation, so as to show you that separation is not real.

I am doing exactly what you asked me to do and what I want to do. I am a figure of light in your dream of the opposite of light, the dream of darkness.

I am symbolic of the Holy Spirit reminding you of your true self, the Christ. I am doing the function you asked me to do for you, a function I willingly undertook to perform. I am your brother Thomas, who has come to help you go from doubt to faith in the truth. (You must first have faith in the unseen truth of oneness, love and forgive all people, before you can experience oneness.)

WHAT IS SALVATION?

To be saved is to forgive and love all people. When we forgive and love all people, we transcend the false selves we currently identify with, the separated selves housed in bodies. When we truly forgive and love all people we overcome the world, as Jesus did. We return to the awareness of our real self, the self that is as God created it, the unified spirit self, aka the Christ self, the Atman, the Buddha. Forgiveness and love are the only means for attaining salvation; there are no other means for doing so.

WHERE IS SALVATION TO COME FROM?

Salvation comes from inside one. When we invented this world, God immediately reinvented it through his Holy Spirit. Our world has already been transformed, remade in the image of Christ. Each of us made an ego self; the Holy Spirit has remade that self in light form. The Holy Spirit has remade our world in light forms. The light world is as real as our dense world is real.

If we forgive and love all people, we momentarily experience the world remade by the Holy Spirit. It is still like our world, it is still in forms. In it, one still sees people but in light forms. It is a world of love, peace and joy. But in as much as it is in form, it is a false world. It is an illusory world pretty much as illusory as our world is an illusory world. But it is an illusion that approximates the truth.

Our truth is love; any world that loves approximates our truth and our real home. The world remade for us by the Holy Spirit has been called by many names, including New Israel, New Jerusalem, New world, new man, not fleshy man, happy dream, real world, gate of haven’t. Call it what you like, like our world, it has no name. But we must all get to that world, a borderland between our world and heaven.

When we all get to that loving world, brought there by forgiveness, we tire of being in forms, gross or light forms, and voluntarily choose to relinquish all forms and return to formlessness.

We, the children of God, disappear into God and he disappears into us, each not to be lost but to be found and to be expanded. In heaven, in the state of oneness are still many us, infinite selves, but there we all know that we are part of each other and are in each other and in God, and God is in us. The world ends and we resume the awareness of our oneness with our creator.

CONCLUSION

Salvation is inside us; it is the Holy Spirit, who is inside us, that saves us. The Holy Spirit is not a person; it is a pattern of thinking and behaving, a pattern that sees all people as part of ones self. The Holy Spirit teaches that wee must forgive and love one another. When we see no differences betwe