If a person is realistic and accepts the empirical self and the empirical universe, body and matter, and works within their parameters, that is, science and technology, he generally gets what he wants in the empirical world. If you ask for material wealth and work for it, that is, your behavior is objective and within the parameters of science, you tend to become materially wealthy.

The majority of mankind is objective and realistic and think thoughts that are congruent with empirical reality, work hard and receive what they ask for, material wealth.

There are a small percentage of people, perhaps no more than five percent of the population, who are dreamers and idealists. They hate and reject the real world, as it is, and yearn for an idealized version of it. They hate and reject their bodies, hate and reject other people’s bodies, hate and reject everything related to matter and social institutions and desire an idealized version of them. They hate governments and other social institutions and use their minds to figure out how they could be different and better and make people and the world become like them. They use their minds to construct ideal selves and ideal everything and find it difficult to operate in the world as it is.

These idealists do not want to accept the imperfect real world. Thus, they avoid the real world, avoid real world people, avoid real world work situations, avoid real world social institutions, and escape into the world of dreams. In their imaginary dreams, they visualize an ideal everything. They live in that perfect world of dreams.

Avoidance of the real self and real world is a means for inventing an imaginary ideal self and ideal world and living in that fantasy world, a neurotic world. The neurotic thinks that he could become the ideal perfect self and world he imagines and wants to become and feels angry when other people do not treat him as if he is that ideal, godlike fantasy person; he also feels angry at other people for not becoming the imagined ideal selves he made for them.

Neurotic fantasy self and world, imagination, is an attempt to make the self, other selves and the world, as perfect as the real self is in spirit; to make earth heaven like, to make an imperfect earth as perfect as heaven is. But the earthly self, the separated self, the ego housed in body cannot be made perfect, so it is futile trying to make the earthly self and world as perfect as the heavenly spirit self. The neurotic and or psychotic is trying very hard to make the separated self he invented to replace the unified self God created him as, the separated world he invented to replace the unified world God gave him, perfect.

The ego is trying to make its separated kingdom on earth as perfect as the unified kingdom of God. Its efforts are understandable, for we love what we made, they are our idols, and want to perfect them (ego selves, social institutions), except that we cannot succeed in doing so for if our succeeded our new world would permanently replace the world of God; separated self would replace unified self, an impossibility since only unified self can be permanent.


The earthly self and the earth must be forgotten, overlooked and ignored, that is, forgiven, for one to experience the already existing perfect self and perfect world created by God.

The ideal world is a pure mental construct and is unlimited by the external realities of space, time and matter. Therefore, the ideal self and ideal world is not going to come into being, for they are mere products of imagination. Imagination is not reality.

The person who dwells on fantasy and idealism gets what he wants, ideal mental constructs but nothing real in the world of reality. He generally is poor and dies poor. He dies poor still wishing for an ideal, perfect self and perfect world and rich life.

Yet the idealist must be an idealist, for, as it were, he was destined to be so and consequently to be poor and a loser. His unacceptable sensitive body makes him hate and reject it and seek an alternative ideal form of it and he generalizes that to seeking ideals for everything else in life. He is a neurotic ala Karen Horney (Neurosis and Human Growth).

CHANGED THINKING: FROM IDEALISTIC TO REALISTIC THINKING, HEALING OF NEUROSIS

So what to do? What to do is to transform idealism to realism, fantasy to reality. Much as one hates the real and yearns for ideals, ideals are not going to come into being; fantasy is not going to replace reality. So, one must use ones thinking to deal with the real world.

The real world that pays off is the world of science and technology. Escaping into ego idealism, or religious idealism, both of which are mentally constructed, not real in the empirical world, is neurosis. There is secular neurosis and religious neurosis. In neurosis, secular or religious, the ego deceives one into thinking that ideal selves and world can be invented to replace spirit’s perfect self and world.

Both secular and religious neuroses lead to poverty, of spirit and material things. There is God all right, but he is not the idealistic fantasies found in the religions of this world, be it in Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, Christian Science, Unity, Religious Science etc. Religions are social institutions constructed by the human mind, by ego based thinking. They are models of reality, mental constructs hence not real.

Yes, you can change your thinking pattern, change your mind, and go from idealistic to realistic thinking and make it in this world. You can then become an existentialist and accept the world, as it is, even though it is purposeless and meaningless and make the most of it via science and technology, without fleeing into religious fantasies.

We are part of undifferentiated life and continue to live in it forever and ever. From undifferentiated life we become differentiated and live in separated ego self and in matter. Matter is composed of particles of atoms and must decompose; in body we must die. As long as we still wish to experience separation, body, we re-manifest in matter again and again until we give up the wish for separation and return to union.

This is an impersonal process. What matters is how we live in matter, the here and now, realistically or not.

If you want to be successful in this world, accept yourself as you are and make the most of it. If you have a sensitive body hence hates and rejects it and seeks an alternative ideal body and self, learn that you cannot escape that body. Accept it, study it on scientific terms and adapt to it.

Study science and technology and stop yearning for ideal states that would never come into being.

In terms of making a living in this world, seek a realistic profession that produces what people actually desire and sell it to them. You should not seek a profession to make you become an ideal, perfect, all important, all powerful, grandiose self, but one through which you understand an aspect of phenomena and use that knowledge to sell to people what they desire and make a living from doing so.

Understanding the differences between idealistic and realistic thinking (real psychology), for example, is useful. People need to understand their real selves and their false selves. People demand such knowledge. If one markets that knowledge, people will buy it. They buy it for it helps them change their patterns of thinking and heal their neurosis and psychosis. One can make decent living selling information on the different types of self: empirical real self (body based self and its world); Ideal self (as in neurotic yearning for ideal self) and ultimate real self, unified spirit self).

Neurotic escape from reality and its extreme form, psychotic negation of reality and escape into fantasy is unproductive. We can understand why folks have a desire to negate empirical reality and escape from it into unrealistic mental constructs, it is rooted in their bodies over sensitivity, and helps them to accept their bodies without using their minds to negate them and escape into fantasy land.

RELIGIOUS IDEALISM, NEW AGE RELIGIONS, NEUROSIS

Nineteenth century RELIGIOUS idealists rejected their bodies and used their minds to construct ideal selves. They centered their ideal selves on their religion and its chief dramatic personae, Jesus Christ. They called their new religion New Thought (today, it is called New Age) religion.

These religious idealists emphasized changing their thinking and believed that positive thinking led to healing their minds and bodies. They believed that if somehow they got rid of negative thinking that their physical diseases would dissipate.

They called their practices mental healing, mental science, metaphysics etc. It is true that thinking in a realistic manner produces peace and happiness in the individual’s mind. But it is not the case that one does not need medications or that one can use thinking alone to heal one’s sick body. One needs nutrition and medication to make ones body healthy.

You cannot use your thinking, prayer, to regenerate your body’s cells, as the apparently racist founders of Unity Church believed. (See Neal Vahle, The Unity Movement, particularly chapter 13.)

On earth, human beings are scheduled to live and die. Perhaps, they can live to be 120 years before they die. They are not going to keep their bodies alive forever.


(Actually human beings already have other bodies, ones constructed of pure light photons, the bodies we see in dreams. That body, too, would dissolve and die. Ultimately, people live in formless, spirit self, the real self God created them as.)

Much of our human ego fantasies, religious idealism or secular idealism, are really an attempt to recapture the real self, formless, spirit, in form, in matter.

It is impossible to make spirit become matter and matter become spirit. Only spirit can be perfect; matter cannot be perfect. The ego and its material world cannot be made perfect, as spirit is.
The idealist wants to make his empirical self, body and ego, as perfect as his real self, his spirit, and cannot succeed, for matter corrupts whatever it is made of.

Matter was formed in the spirit of opposition, in rebellion against ones reality, unified spirit and desire to be its opposite. Matter is used to make separation seem real in our awareness. That which came into being in opposition to unified reality cannot replace reality; body cannot be made perfect, for if it becomes perfect, it would then replace the reality of spirit.


AVOIDANCE OF THE REAL SELF/AVOIDANCE OF UNIFIED SELF

The neurotic person avoids being his real self, avoids other people’s real selves and avoids real social institutions. In close quarters with his real self, other peoples real selves and real social institutions, he appreciates their imperfections and avoids them, and attempts to construct ideal selves, ideal social institutions, all in his mind.

Avoidant personality and its avoidance behavior is a means of separation; it is rooted in the desire to go construct ideal, perfect self and perfect everything on ones own terms. We desired special selves, a self of our making and avoided heaven’s union.
In the world we made, we inevitably see imperfections and seek to perfect them hence the ongoing avoidance of our empirical world, a world that came into being in opposition to unified reality must be in opposition to whatever it made. We live in a world of opposition and must oppose whatever we made as we opposed what God made. We must oppose our own constructed ego self concept and social institutions and attempt to make them perfect.

This is a forever struggle until opposition is given up and one returns to the world of union, the formless, spirit self where real perfection exist, not in this world of separation, space, time and matter.

Our reality is perfect union. Union is love. Union, love, peace, joy, happiness, sameness, equality, oneness, God are synonyms. Love, Union is all there is. God is love, God is peace, God is happiness, God is sameness, God is equality, and God is oneness, that God is unified self and unified state. Nothing real exists outside from union, God, love.

What seems to exist outside union, love, God, that is, separation, is not real, is fantasy, a dream, an illusion. We desired to create ourselves, create each other and create God and could not accomplish that fantasy in eternity and seem to have separated and come into a dream world, earth, where we dream that we have accomplished our wishes.

Forgiveness, that is, overlooking the separated world we invented, ignoring it, not defending it, being defenseless to attack…attack brought the world into being and the world is maintained by attacks and defenses and when it is not defend, when it is forgive, disappears from existing in the forgiving person’s awareness.

All that exists is love, union. Separation, attack, makes us not experience that love. Forgiveness is a means of over looking the world of separation we made to replace the world of Love that God created. Forgiveness is not love but is a path to recovery of the awareness of love that is always there but we do not see it.

Forgiveness is salvation in the sense that it brings us to the gate of oneness but does not make us one for in forgiveness we are still on earth, are still in forms, albeit light forms.

Forgiveness gives us some of the peace and joy and union of heaven in a lesser form. Forgiveness is a precondition for re entering heaven, for it removes the veil with which we hide the face of Christ, love in us. Forgiveness banishes the darkness that is this world and brings us to light, union, and heaven. When we are tired of living in separation, we all join hands and reenter heaven as one self, the unified son of God who is one with his father.
God is one side of the coin and we, his son are the other side. Both sides, God and his one Son, who are infinite sons, exist forever and ever.

THE POWER OF THE EGO MIND

Just because the empirical world is an illusion does not mean that in the here and now it does not seem real. Dreams seem real to dreamers.

The son of God is all power. He used his all powerful thinking, mind, to invent the world we seem to live in. A mind that dreams an unreal world and makes it seem real is indeed powerful.

Though the world is a dream, a non-reality produced by magical thinking, it is still a powerful world. It is not easily gotten rid of.

In dreams, we see mountains and those mountains prevent our movement. The mountains, though not real, seem real in our dreams. It is only when we awaken from dreams and realize that there were no mountains where we thought that we had seen mountains that those mountains no longer constitute barriers to our freedom of movement. On earth, space, time and matter are real barriers to our movements. But when we awaken from the earth’s dream of separation and enter the unified world where there are no space, time and matter, we no longer have the barriers of the world limiting us.

Enlightened persons like Jesus Christ, while still on earth, knew that the earth is a dream hence did not believe it as an obstacle to their movements. Jesus knew that the mountain he saw on earth is a dream mountain and that the water he saw was dream water. Hence he could walk on water, for he knew that there was no water where he was walking on, so could not sink. But you who believe that the dream, the earth, is real, that there are waters and mountains, you would sink into the water if you tried to walk on it and would bang your head and get hurt on a wall if you tried to walk through it. Jesus knew that there are no walls and could walk through seeming walls.

Do not minimize the power of your thinking, mind, for it produced your world and whatever you see in it and whatever happens to you. The world is an out picturing of your and our collective thinking. You are very powerful.

Think only forgiving and loving thoughts, for those bring peace and joy to all people. If you decide to misuse your thinking, mind, and think destructive thoughts, you will produce destructive effects in your world, for your thought is very powerful. Do this: tell a person that you are going to punish him, even kill him and see what happens. His ego knows that you can harm or even kill it. He therefore engages the affect the ego made, fears, and becomes fearful. He may panic and run away from you.

The ego is an illusion but in its illusory world it is powerful. You, the ego, can hire or fire some one from his job; you can harm or destroy human bodies, as in wars. You can kill those who believe that they live in bodies. In a word, the ego, your present self concept is very powerful, and along with other people’s egos produces the effects you see in our world. Therefore, do not misuse your ego’s power; use it constructively, to love all people.

I once told a man who was boasting about what he was going to do to me that I would get him jailed, for I knew that he engages in shady activities. This bragging egotist fled town. I aroused tremendous fear in him and he panicked and fled to go seek safety. My ego, your ego, our egos are very powerful in the world of illusions we live in, so do not threaten any one, so as not to generate anxiety in him.

If you make others feel anxious, you must feel anxious, for what produces that effect on others must also produce that effect in you; you must believe that others can harm you in other to believe that you can harm others. Hence you must feel anxious when other persons threaten you. If you stop believing in your ability to harm other people, you also stop believing that other people can harm you hence you stop feeling anxious when other people threaten you.

AVOIDANCE OF WORKING IN GROUPS

The idealist avoids working with other people, working in groups, for he wants to be alone and in his aloneness dreams of perfect self and perfect group activities. He must learn to work in groups, with other people and within organizations and stop yearning for separated self where he is free to use his mind to construct ideals that can never come into being.

This does not mean subjugating ones self to the stifling organizations that characterize extant work organizations. It may mean starting new work organizations where optimal freedom is given to members to be their productive real selves, not their unproductive imaginary ideal selves. (Defense of the ideal important self via vanity, pride, narcissism, leads to unproductivity in the work place.)

MYSTICS ESCAPE FROM THE EMPIRICAL WORLD

The mystic chooses to negate the immanent, temporal world and concentrate on the transcendental world. He escapes from the material world and does not bother with science and technology that study and adapt to the empirical world. He does not make efforts to adapt to this world’s reality.

Generally, the mystic does not do things to prolong his physical survival in this world. Jesus, a Gnostic mystic, saw life in body as not good enough and did not defend his body when it was attacked; he died young, reportedly at page 33. (The wisdom attributed to the man is seldom found in folks under age fifty.)

I am not interested in negating this world and escaping from its realities. I am not interested in doing what the mystic does. I want to be here and understand how the world works, study science and technology to enable me adapt to this world and live for however long I can live on earth. I am not an escapist and I do not negate the empirical world, though I understand that it is illusory.

While on earth, it is possible to change ones patterns of thinking. Hitherto, one thought in an unrealistic, neurotic pattern, which is, hating and rejecting the bodily self and pursuing an idealized mental self. One can desist from doing so and, accept the bodily self and its world of space, time and matter.

One can redirect ones thinking to science and technology, so as to cope with the exigencies of this world. If one thinks of realistic ways to adapt to this world, one will do them and make a useful living in this world hence get what one thinks about.

One does not need to do what psychotics do, ignore the realities of this world and live in the world of imagination and ideals and merely wish for how things ought to be. Things are not going to become ideal. One must live with the imperfect world, as it is, and make the most of it. One must work hard to earn a living to support ones self and ones family. The material universe has enough resources to feed several billion human beings.

A healed mind is a changed pattern of thinking, from ego based to Christ based thinking. From thinking of vengeance to thinking of forgiveness, overlooking what other people did to harm you in the past, with the understanding that they could not harm you and that you could not harm other people’ real selves. (We can only harm our false self, the ego and its body. What can be harmed and or destroyed, ego and body, is not important and ought not to be defended. It is actually only defense that makes the ego and body to seem important).

When the past is forgiven, you live only in the present, lovingly. You must overlook the past, forgive it, to become aware of the only reality there is, love, union in the present…forgiveness is necessary to see the love that is always there.

A mental healer is a person who has learned to think forgiving and loving thoughts hence has peace and happiness in his life and teaches other people to do the same. When we forgive, overlook the past, live in the present now, we live in the awareness of love, union, and hence feel peaceful and happy.
HEALED MINDHEALS BODY


A healed mind, a mind that thinks only forgiving and loving thoughts, a mind that prefers union heals its physical illnesses.

Physical illness is produced by unforgiving thinking, by desire to make ones self a body so as to experience separation and specialness and avoid love, avoid other people, avoid God, avoid union.

A healed mind must produce a healed body. Where the body is sick the mind is sick (prefers separation and specialness to union and love). Love, that is, union heals the body but love requires forgiveness to produce healed body.

When forgiveness is practiced, one often experiences ones self in light form, photons and when one ultimately loves, one experiences ones self in formless unified spirit. (This is called Holy Instant, mystical union etc.).

The light body is already there, for God, as the Holy Spirit, created it at the moment we invented our dense body forms. The light body is waiting for one to forgive ones physical body and the ego to see it.

But as long one focuses on the ego and its body one cannot experience light body. It is an either or situation; you experience one at a time but not both. If you focus on spirit you experience light body, spirit, and do not know that body, ego exists; conversely, when you focus on body and ego, you do not know that spirit exists.

Light body gives joy but not as much joy as unified formless self.


FORGIVENESS IS NOT THE END BUT THE MEANS TO THE END, LOVE, UNION IS THE END

Love and forgiveness is not the same thing, although forgiveness is a means to getting to love hence, in a manner of speaking, approximates love. Forgiveness gives some of the gifts of love: peace and happiness but not to the extent of love. Love is total peace and joy, bliss, whereas forgiveness gives attenuated peace, brings one to the gate of heaven, love, union, and gives one the lesser peace, for one is still in form, albeit light form, but not the total peace of formless heaven.

Forgiveness is a means to attaining love. Love, union, God, peace, joy, sameness, and equality is all there is. Nothing that is not love/union//peace exists.

We wished for separated existence, in pursuit of specialness. Our wish led us to our mutual attack on union, love, peace, sameness, equality, God and in doing so, we no longer experience union, love.

One cannot identify with separation and experience union; one cannot be the opposite of love and experience love. Separation is love’s opposite; specialness is equality’s opposite.

To separate from union, God, we collectively attacked union, love and seem to have shattered it and each of us identifies with a fragment of it.

To be on earth, in form, in ego and the body that houses it, I attacked union, I attacked love, I attacked peace, I attacked joy, all of which means that I attacked God. You did the same thing. Thus, we see ourselves in a world of separation.

Now, if I overlook the world of separation which I made by forgiving what keeps it going, grievance and counter attack, if I forgive others attacks on me, I simultaneously forgive my own attacks on others and on myself. In forgiveness, I overlook what maintains separation and thereafter experiences the union, love that is always there.

We live in union, love, while seeing hate, separation. The prerequisite for returning to the peace, joy, love and God that is always there is for one to forgive what maintains separation and the world of mutual attack, grievance and punishment (that presupposes that attack is real and that separation is real).

Forgiveness is not love but a means to love. To forgive is to do something, to undo what we did to maintain separation.
To love is to do nothing, for we did not create love, union; God did. We merely undo what we did; we made separation and when we undo it we experience union.

We must remove what we did to mask love, union; we must remove the veil that hides the face of Christ in us. To see the face of Christ, light form, in each other we must forgive each other.
From a forgiven world, Christ vision, spiritual seeing, we return to experiencing formless unified spirit, aka heaven, which is peace and happiness, which is bliss.

Ozodi@africainstituteseattle.org