They are perpetually connected to one another and to their creator, God. God is love and his children are love.

God’s children only feel happy when they are in love with one another and with their father. When they are outside love, union, they are unhappy.

Heaven is love and the earth seems the opposite of love. But because their true nature is love and they are happiest when they are in love, they are hurting when they are in a loveless place. The earth is a loveless place and the children of God are hurting, they live in pain and are crying out for love, for union with one another and with their father.

We are all calling on each other to love each other. We engage in this call in different ways. The best way to seek love is to love. If I love you and you love me that is the way it should be. Unfortunately, the world is not an ideal place. In this world, we seek love in different ways.

One of the ways we seek love is to attack people. All attack on other people is a call on them to love one, to love the attacker. All attack is a call for help.

The attacker believes that the person he attacks does not love him and he attacks him to offer him an opportunity to do one of two things: to respond as an ego and counter attack him and both separate from each other and go defend their individuated egos.
The alternative response to attack is to choose love. Our true self is Christ, the son of God who is as God created him, loving. When we live out of our Christ self, we can only love. In Christ consciousness, if other people attack us, we see their attack as a call for love, because they perceived us as, hitherto, not loving towards them (as having separated from them). Their attack on us is their call for us to forgive them, which means to love them. Their attack is a call for loves, which means to overlooking their attack and in doing so seeing their true self, the loving Son of God, the Christ, and loves them.
When we choose to overlook attack, to forgive and love attackers, we have behaved defenselessly, that is, we chose not to defend our ego.
Our ego and the body that houses it feel hurt and pained when attacked and respond with anger and counter attacks to defend it.
The ego feels hurt and seeks revenge; the ego bears grievances and wants to punish those who attacked it. The ego, the self that we are currently aware of as our self is always defensive, feeling attacked and defending itself, bearing grievances and seeking punishment.
Unfortunately, if the ego defends itself by attacking the person who attacked it, now that person feels attacked by him and counter attacks the person to defend himself and that way the world of mutual attacks continues. Thus, we continually attack, defend and attack each other. The consequence is living in a world of conflict and war, a world lacking in peace and happiness.
The egos pattern of response to attack is guaranteed to perpetuate a world of attack. The world of Christ, the world of forgiveness and love, on the other hand, is guaranteed to bring about peace, happiness and joy.
If a person attacks you and you forgive him instead of counter attacking him, that is, overlook his attack, you have ignored the reality of the ego and overcome the ego and its world and operated from the world of the Holy Spirit, the world of love and forgiveness.
The reward of forgiveness and love is peace and happiness for you (the forgiver). Your peace and joy you give to the person you forgive. (If that person is not a forgiving person hence not a loving person, he would not receive the peace and joy that you gave to him; but do not despair for the Holy Spirit receives it on his behalf and holds it for him until he does what would release it: forgive and love all children of God.)
The forgiving hence loving person is a bringer of peace and joy to a world at war with itself.

Any brother’s attack on you is his call on you to forgive and love him; his attack is a call for help from the person, you, that he feels is capable of helping him, teaching him the true meaning of love as forgiveness. It also means that the attacker is ready to learn the true meaning of love.
When a student is ready the teacher will appear; the attacker is a student of love, the attacked is the teacher of love
One must, therefore, forgive the attacker, that is, love him; in so doing, one gives him peace and joy; commodities lacking in his egoistic life.
What one gives to a brother is what one gives to ones self. One too is an ego and lacks peace and joy, so if one gives another brother peace and joy, one gives ones self peace and joy.
If I give a brother love and forgiveness, I give myself love and forgiveness; conversely, if I give a brother attack and pain, I give myself attack and pain.
The person you attack is likely to attack you and the person you love is likely to love you.
The other person is an extension or projection of ones self. What one does to him, one does to ones self. Love that person means love you; forgive that person means forgive you; attack that person means attack you. What you do to others you do to you. Giving is receiving; as you give you receive.

If you choose to respond to others attack from your separated, individuated self, your ego, you will feel hurt by their attack and feel angry and defensive. The ego responds with fear, anger, sadness, depression, paranoia, mania etc when it perceives itself attacked.
On the other hand, if you respond to attack from your Christ self, from forgiveness and love, you do not feel fearful, angry, sad, paranoid, manic etc; you feel at peace and are happy.
The choice is up to us how we respond to others seeming senseless attacks on us, to respond from ego frame of reference or from Christ frame of reference. Whatever frames of reference we choose to respond from we take the consequences.
If when attacked we respond with fear, anger and counter attack we experience lack of peace; if we respond with forgiveness and love we experience peace.
What do you want, peace or war? Others attack on you offers you the opportunity to decide how you respond and what consequence you receive, peace or war.

Other people are external pictures of us. Other people and the world mirror our thinking. The world is the out picturing of our individual and collective thinking.
We think in images and project those images out and see them as if they are external to us. The world is like a dream and whatever we see in it is a mirror of our thinking.
Because the world is our out pictured thoughts, the individual should not go about trying to change other people, the external world but, instead, should change his thinking. If you change your thinking, from attack and war to forgiveness and love, you see a world that mirrors peace and joy for you.
If at the present time you see a world where other people attack you, and attack each other, it means that they mirror your attack thoughts.
If you do not like the world you see, you should change your thinking rather than try to change other people’s behaviors.

A BROTHER’S CALL FOR HELP


Last night, I was at a meeting with some Nigerian brothers. One of them, for any number of reasons, became enraged at my wife and berated her. For a while, I sat quietly and observed the show he was putting out for us to see. Here is a middle aged man behaving like a five year old in his temper tantrums.
At a certain point, I made the mistake of trying to bring reason to bear on the situation. The first lesson we teach folks in anger management classes is never to argue with an angry person.

ANGER MANAGEMENT

If a person is angry he is semi insane. The thinking part of his brain, the cortex, has shut down and he is mostly operating from the hypothalamus, the animal part of the brain. He is now in attack-defend mood. He feels threatened and is defending himself, physically and or psychologically. He is like an attacked animal and is motivated to counter attack his attacker so as to survive. He is not amenable to reason. Therefore, you should not try to reason with him.
If you see an angry person, you should just walk away, or if you cannot walk away, you should try to keep quiet, as much as you could. You can aid your effort to remain calm by counting to ten, taking a deep breathe and holding your breath and then let it out slowly. You may visualize beautiful scenes, like walking on a beech, in a bed of roses, or whatever makes you feel good.
Whatever you do, do not respond with anger to the angry person’s outburst. Anger management inheres in keeping cool when others are loosing their tempers.
I should have said nothing when this brother was verbally and emotionally abusing my wife, asking her who the hell she thinks that she is insisting that he follow set procedures etc. I piped in with what seemed a redirect and he shifted his anger to me and actually got physical. He was, more or less, like a menacing gorilla, beating his chest in an effort to seem powerful and scare other predators away from his territory.
When he became enraged, I remained calm so as not to provoke him further. Apparently, my demeanor irritated him further and he asked me to leave his house (the meeting was at his house). I got up to leave and he followed me, literally pushing me. It was a mess. But I managed to keep my head cool and left.
I could not believe what happened. I have run many groups for domestic violence batterers and know enough about anger management to know that a man who behaved as this brother did is probably a danger to those around him. Obviously, the brother has anger problem. The chances are that he abuses his wife and children and probably needs to receive anger management training. (His anger is probably rooted in paranoid grandiosity, sense of persecution and jealousy.)

THE PHYSICAL AND PSYCHOLOGICAL CAUSES OF ANGER

People feel angry for a number of reasons, including a feeling that they are physically attacked. Anger is a response to perceived attack, real or imagined, on ones integrity. The angry person feels attacked, threatened and his body pours out adrenaline, a neuro exciter which speeds all the organs of his body urging him to fight back. In anger response, the individual perceives an obstacle and is trying to remove it; he feels frustrated in his drive to realize a goal and anger is a mechanism for removing that obstacle on his path to goal attainment. People can kill those they perceive as obstacles to their doing what they want to do.
In our modern world, seldom are people physically attacked to make them angry, so as to defend their lives. The most common source of anger is feeling of psychological attack. It goes like this. The individual has a certain haughty self concept. He imagines himself very important and powerful. Of course, he is not. It is fictional superiority, power and importance, not real power and impotence.
The personality disordered individual presents his desired ego ideal, the important self, to other people to relate to.
When he feels that they did not validate his fictional important self, he feels denigrated and made unimportant. He experiences narcissistic rage. His anger is really from hurt pride.
He uses anger to restitute his injured vanity. His intention is to seem powerful and in anger he is powerful.
The angry person is motivated by power and control. He is what psychoanalysts used to call a neurotic, a man chasing a false important self concept, self image. In today’s psychiatric terms, he has personality disorders, most probably narcissistic and paranoid personality disorders.
(The angry brother has all the indices of paranoid personality, I could see his quest for grandeur, persecutory feelings and inordinate jealousy, all features of paranoid personality. He probably beats up his wife when he feels that she is fooling around with other men and or accuses her of fooling around. He probably intimidates his wife and children with his terrorist behaviors; his anger is psychological terrorism at work; he wants to use it to get folks to feel fear and out of fear do as he wants them to do.)
To heal neurotic anger, one thing is required: the anger prone person must change his self concept and desist from questing after fictional superiority and importance.
The individual must have a realistic self esteem that sees ones self as the same and equal with other people, but not as inferior or superior to them. If he corrects his neurotic self concept and self image he would no longer be misinterpreting other people’s innocent behaviors as attacks on his imaginary important self-concept.
This brother has a false important self concept, self image, and a deluded, grandiose self concept and believed, falsely, that other people insulted his imaginary important self and his anger was a futile effort to seem important.
Alas, acting angrily made him seem like a five you old boy; he seemed pathetic in his flailing around in anger.

When I got home I wrote a memo to those present at the meeting stating my surprise at what transpired.
In the morning, I woke up to see more than five emails from the brother. He wrote at length about his understanding of what transpired.
He boasted how he is a rich man, a successful man and how I am a poor man, a failure in life etc. He bragged and praised himself in every which way his infantile thinking could imagine. At some point he began to read mind and said that I had asked my wife to insult him so as to provoke his outrage and that we had planned it to sue him to get his money! Now we are talking about transient psychosis, delusional disorder with aspects of mania. Clearly, the brother has an underlying sense of inferiority and inadequacy and felt a compulsive need to mask it with his desire for superiority; he pursues the fiction of superiority; he is a pathological liar; he is always hatching tales of how important he is; how his father is an ambassador, how his family are millionaire; how he was a professor at a university…he had at one time taught at a community college and that is the only truth in his fanciful yearns.

For a while, my ego kicked in and felt insulted by this man. My insulted ego asked me to respond in kind to the brother’s verbal onslaught. My responses would be in the nature of defenses, trying to present me as right and him as wrong.
Luckily, I remembered A Course in Miracles famous quote: would you rather be right or happy? If you insist on being right and in seeing others as wrong, and your rightness pours patrol unto fire and you experience conflagration all around you, is that what you want?
Even if you are right, why don’t you allow the other guy to feel right and let go of your own ego’s desire to be right? So, I decided not to defend myself. I went to Church and came back from church and wrote this essay. (This essay is based on Helen Schucman’s A Course in Miracles philosophy; a philosophy that I independently arrived at.)

At Church, the minister talked about how people have pain in their lives and are carrying that pain to wherever they go to. We tend to engage in geographic therapy, thinking that if we go elsewhere that our issues would be resolved. But the fact is that we take our psychological pains with us to wherever we go to. We must, therefore, stop and look into our minds and understand our issues and try to solve them rather than run from them.
Most human beings are walking wounded persons. They experienced psychological injuries and are living in psychological pain. At best, they are worried well neurotics.
What needs to be done is to pause and understand ones issues and deal with them rather than deny them.
This boastful brother obviously feels inordinately inferior and has a need to seem very superior and important. His life is geared towards seeming like he is a very rich, powerful and important person. He goes about calling himself professor when he is at the moment unemployed. Apparently, being called professor makes him seem very important.
Long term psychotherapy and anger management would probably help him deal with his unresolved issues. For one thing, he would learn to accept himself as he is and no longer have to put on airs, wear the mask of being an important person. He is suffocating in that mask of importance he wears. He lives in psychological pain, anxiety and anger, and paranoia. He would develop unconditional positive self acceptance. He would see his real self as good enough and no longer have an inner compulsion to tell lies about his non-existent accomplishments.
The brother’s issues are not the essence of this essay but my reaction to them. His behavior is an opportunity for me to choose once again, to choose differently. Hitherto, I had chosen the ego (separated self) and behaved like the ego. In ego state, I am motivated to counter attack, to punish my attackers etc. That path only leads to defense and more defenses, hence the world’s conflict.
This brother’s attack offers me an opportunity to choose differently, this time, to choose to respond to him from my Christ self.
Christ is the son of God as God created him. Christ is our true self. Christ is love. When Christ perceives attack on himself, he forgives the attacker and loves him.
Christ does not defend himself; Christ does not bear grievances and grudges, Christ does no seek punishment for the wrongs done to him; Christ knows that this world is a dream of the opposite of heaven. Heaven is unified and this world is a dream of separated self.
In heaven, we share one self, the unified self, Christ, the Holy Son of God. Christ, the son of God is in his father, as his father is in him and he is in his brothers. There is no space or gap between one son of God and another and the son of God and his father. God is in his son and his son is in him; the two share one self. God is one side of a coin and the Son of God is the other side of it. God and his sons share one self and one mind.
Christ is always forgiving and loving. He sees others attack on him as a call for love when love is missing. In that light, this brother has attacked me. Why did he do so? He probably felt that I did not love him. How so? He probably felt that I did not respect his desired power and prestige.
He goes about calling himself a professor and I call him by his first name. That probably makes him feel disrespected. All told he probably sees me as not validating his assumed important self. Obviously, he wants to seem important and powerful and wants those around him to collude with him and see him as such. If he is affirmed as an important person, his ego feels good but if not his ego feels humiliated.
Moreover, in the said organization he was bucking to become the president. He tried his best to make alliances with other members so that they would vote for him as the president. Unfortunately for him, he does not have leadership and managerial skills. He is not a doer, he is a mere talker, a man who wants the world to see him as a boss but does not understand what bosses do; bosses work harder than the average worker. Where the average worker puts in eight hours of work a day and goes home, managers often work double that time.
Apparently, he saw me as a rival, as an opponent for leadership position. I did not see him as a rival. I did not see myself as in competition with him. What is there to compete for? I am not interested in false power and wealth.
So how do I respond to him? I was tempted to respond to him from my ego. But the ego is a false self, not my true identity.
My true identity is Christ and that means that I must forgive and love him; his attack on me is a call on me to love him, for he perceived me as not loving towards him.
I choose forgiveness and love. In forgiving and loving him I give peace and joy to me; so I am not doing him a favor by forgiving him, I am doing me a favor.

MY ALLEGED HATRED OF IGBOS


In one of this man’s letters to me, he talked on and on about how I hated Igbos.
Translation? He believed that I hated him, an Igbo. Do I hate Igbos? Do I hate him? Nothing could be further from the truth.
Somewhere, I pointed out that Igbo culture is very conditional in accepting its people; people tend to be accepted when they succeed and ignored when they did not. This produces fear of rejection in Igbos. Many of them strive to succeed and, in fact, as the world considers these things, but not as God knows them, succeed. However, they tend to pay a heavy price for living in a conditionally accepting culture.
Karen Horney, Carl Rogers and other psychologists have taught us that a conditionally accepting culture tends to breed people who hate their real selves and identify with false ideal false selves. They invent a composite picture of a successful person and want to be like him and hate themselves to the extent that they do not approximate that ideal social self-concept and self-image. They have an obsessive compulsive desire to measure up to the picture of success and fear being a failure; Igbos, in general, fear not being like the person their society would not accept.
Where this fear of failure is intense, some Igbos use creative imagination to invent fictional successful selves for themselves and identify with them. In doing so, they develop neurosis, personality disorders, even psychosis, such as delusional disorder and mania.
(In mania there is excited thinking and behaving, a feeling of euphoria, a belief that one has enormous powers, powers that one dos not have, poor judgment and some delusional beliefs, such as seeing ones self as wealthy and all powerful, when one is not. In delusion one believes what is not true as true, such as the brother believing the make belief world where he is very rich and all powerful and others are poor and weak. There is grandiosity, persecution, jealousy etc in delusional disorder. Such persons tend to be very fearful and angry. The brother is obviously a fearful and angry person. He does not even know what true courage is: to forgive and love all God’s children despite their different conditions on earth.)
Conditionally accepting Igbo culture produces people who feel inadequate and seek adequacy and that often lead some to denigrate other persons so as to obtain compensatory sense of superiority to them.
Who does not know that Igbos would like to feel superior to Yorubas and Hausas and other Nigerians?
No human being is superior to others. The very desire for superiority is neurotic; if that desire is believed it is psychotic.
An insane person is a person who believes that he is superior to other persons. A sane person is a person who knows that he is the same and equal with all human beings. The president of a republic is exactly the same as the beggar on the street.


The brother’s mail to me tried to convince me that he is a successful person and that I am a failure in life. He struggled mightily to present himself as powerful and me as powerless. (Clinically, these are classic paranoid symptoms. See David Swanson et al, The Paranoid; William Meissner, Paranoid Process; Psychotherapy for the Paranoid Process; David Shapiro, Autonomy and the Rigid Character and, of course, DSM IV sections on the various types of paranoia: schizophrenia, delusional disorder and personality disorder.)
This man’s claims about how rich and powerful he is, his boasting about power he does not have made the point that I was trying to make that Igbo conditional acceptance of people produces neurotics and psychotics.
Now, suppose that it is, in fact, true that he is richer than Bill Gates should not that make him humble?
He is rich? The man’s credit rating is so abysmal that when we sought certain securities and asked him to secure them he said that no financial institution would look at his request. He is so rich that I essentially foot the bill of the organization.
I have seen mentally ill folks who were eating out of garbage dumps but still claimed to be billionaires, or if they have religious ideation, Jesus Christ or whoever their paranoid grandiosity could latch unto. These people feel inferior and want to seem superior and tell tall tales of how powerful and rich they are.
If, in fact, a human being is rich and powerful common sense ought to teach him to be grateful to God for blessing him. But this deluded brother feels a need to tell the world that he is rich even though he is demonstrably dependent on his wife for supporting him. The poor woman works double shifts to help support him while he presents an image of a successful rich man to the world.
The real issue is that somehow I had given him the impression that I hate him and hate Igbos. I have heard that some other Igbos apparently read my constructive criticism of their culture as hatred of them.
It is sad that in my effort to understand people, as they are, I had given some persons the impression that I do not like them. This is a mistake. I apologize. I love Igbos and all human beings.


IGBO SENSE OF PERSECUTION

It is necessary to understand that this brother’s boastfulness and anger is partly rooted in his Igbo sense of persecution. Many Igbos, apparently, believe that other Nigerians persecute them.
(Anger is biosocial in origin; in this essay, I stress the social aspect of it; I am, however, mindful that there is a biological aspect to it; angry persons tend to be excitable persons; they probably inherited a tendency to have quick somatic arousal; a situation that suggests over active adrenaline and other neuro exciters and or low neuro inhibitors like GABA. This paper will not address the biochemistry and biophysics of human thinking and behavior.)
This sense of persecution is partly empirical and partly rooted in their personal psychologies. It is true that some Nigerians do not like Igbos and in the past had killed them. Yet we must observe that the psychology of Igbos contribute to their unfortunate fate. Generally, they present a fictional important self to other people and bid them to acknowledge that grandiose self concept and self image. When their false self is not acknowledged by other people, they feel paranoid sense of persecution.
The solution to this insanity is for them to deconstruct their self concepts, give up desiring ideal perfect, all powerful self concepts, reconstruct their self concepts and accept their real selves, a self that is the same and equal with all persons. Each of us is the same and equal with all persons. As long as the individual pursues superiority and power he would be prone to paranoid fear, anger, sadness and hypomania.



SOME METAPHYSICS


It is doubtful that human beings can live without religion (metaphysics). A true metaphysics enables folks to develop inner peace and happiness; it enables them to have equanimity and not be disturbed by the exigencies of this world.
Here is a metaphysics that might help folks with anger problems. Anger is never justified just, as fear is never justified. Where there is anger and fear there is no love. Fear is the absence of love; anger is the absence of love. Love is union; only separated persons, egos, feel fear, anger, depression and paranoia, mania and other mental upsets.
God created us; he created us by extending his one self into each of us. Each of us is an extension of God, a part of God, a son of God.
God is union. We are eternally unified with God and with each other.
God has one self and one mind. We all share the one self, one spirit and one mind of God. In eternity (which is forever, including the present) all are unified.
At some point, a point that has never occurred, we desired separation from God and from each other. We sought to go seem special, to go seem to have created ourselves. Apparently, we resented the fact that God created us and wanted to create God, create ourselves and create each other.
Our wishes for self creation and separation are impossible of gratification, for God created us and we cannot create God or create ourselves.
What we cannot satisfy in heavenly reality we dreamed.
This world is our dream of separation. On earth, each of us dreams that he has a separated self, a self housed in body, a self living in space, time and matter. He sees gap between him and other people; it takes time for him to reach other people. His body is wired in such a manner that he feels pain when it is hurt hence feels fear of being hurt.

THE EGO

On earth, each of us invents a separated self concept and translates it into a pictorial self image for him to see. Each of us also invents self concepts and images for other people and for whatever he sees. The world is a place where self concepts, that is, separated selves, seem to interact.

THE HOLY SPIRIT

When the Son of God, all of us, seemed to separate from his father, God, and from each other, God the father entered our world as God the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is the correction principle. He is here in the temporal universe to teach us that our real home is unified, not separated.
Now there seem three Gods: God the father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit. This phenomenon is also called the Holy Trinity or Triune.
God the father is the transcendent God; God the Holy Spirit is the immanent God in the temporary universe; God the son is us, the collective us, all creation.

Our ego is our earthly personality; it is the separated self that believes that it created itself and created God. We navigate the world with our ego, our earthly personalities.
In our earthly mind are three parts: the right mind (where the Holy Spirit and Christ are), the left, wrong mind, where the ego is and the unified one mind of God and his Son.

On earth, each of us thinks and behaves from his left mind, the ego mind. The Holy Spirit, the right mind, urges him to try to think and behave from the right mind.
The right mind, the Holy Spirit, Christ mind, is the mind that forgives and loves all people. It sees the past, present and future and overlooks them and knows that there is only one time, the eternal present of God.
The ego mind is the mind that bears grudges and grievances and does not forgive those who attacked him. The ego mind sees the attacker as guilty and wants to punish him. The ego mind maintains this world.

The mission of the Holy Spirit is to teach us to remember our real self, the Christ self, which is represented by the Holy Spirit, in the right mind, and respond to others attacks on us from that perspective, that is, to forgive and love the attacker.
If the individual responds from the right mind, forgives and loves all people, he is rewarded with peace and happiness.
Peace and joy are the gifts of God, the gifts of behaving as God wants us to behave, forgive and love one another.
If you forgive others their attacks on you, you are doing yourself a favor, you are giving yourself peace and joy, and extending that peace and joy to the person you forgive. However, if the person you forgave is not yet a forgiving person, he will not receive the peace and joy you gave him; the Holy Spirit will receive it for him, waiting for him to learn to forgive and love and then receive those gifts of God.

REAL SELF, HAPPY DREAM, GATE OF HEAVEN AND HOLY INSTANT

When an individual consistently forgives and loves all people, he lives in peace and joy. He is metaphorically living at the gate of heaven (though separated, he is near union). He is not in heaven for heaven is a place of formlessness and perfect union.
(Only the formless, the same and equal can unify; heaven is the abode of the formless, same and equal persons. The earth, on the other hand, is the abode of form, differences and inequality; the different and unequal cannot unify, they must be separated. If you desire heaven’s union you must accept our sameness and equality and stop defending ego differences and inequality. The brother sees himself as better than me, that is, he is defending his ego, and that is, he is insane for sanity lies in accepting all people as equal.)
On earth we live in forms, in bodies and therefore are not in heaven. But if we approximate heaven’s condition, love, via forgiveness, we are at the gate of heaven. We are still living in the world of illusion, still dreaming that separation is possible but now we are having a happy dream. We are now living in the real world, a world that though still separated approximates the world created by God: is peaceful and happy, what Bahaullah called the lesser peace; heaven is the greater peace. The happy dream, heaven’s gate, the real world, purgatory, call it what you like, is our world reinterpreted by the Holy Spirit and made a bit loving, a bit unified.

The forgiving and loving person, though still in the world of space, time and matter, occasionally experiences union with God, heaven; he occasionally perceives the empirical world disappear and he enters the spiritual world, the abode of oneness, a place where there is no you and I, no subject and object, no seer and seen, a place of perfect oneness, hence perfect peace and happiness.
Heaven cannot be described in words, so we cannot describe it. It is, nevertheless, real; in fact, it is the only reality there is. Our world is a dream, a fictional place with fictional selves, ego personalities, and dream figments going about thinking that they are real and are important. Important, indeed, their bodies are food for worms and worms are food for other organisms.

SALVATION, REEMPTION, DELIVERANCE, CHRIST’S SECOND COMING, LAST JUDGMENT

Each of us meets heaven’s conditions at his own time. He does so when he learns to forgive and love all people. Salvation, redemption and deliverance means that one is now totally forgiving and loving; they mean emancipation from the clutches of the ego and its pain, fear, anger, sadness, paranoia etc. To live in ego state, on earth, in the world of separation is to live in fear and anger; to feel fear and anger is to live in hell. (Our temper tantrum throwing brother lives in ego state, in fear and anger, in hell. Have pity on him and forgive him; but know who you are having pity for; you. You are having pity for you, for the collective son of God. The son of God sentenced himself to pain and suffering by seeking separation.)


When a person consistently forgives other people, overlooks the attacks on him, he has passed the last judgment on the ego and its world; he has renounced the ego and returned to his true identity, Christ, the unified self, the Holy Son of God who is as his father created him, unified with his father and all his brothers. He now lives in peace and happiness (the lesser peace).
The forgiving and loving person joins the saviors of the world (a savior is a person who forgives and loves all people) and works with them in trying to save those who still live in the ego, in fear, in anger (he teaches them how to overcome anger, via forgiving attack).
When all of us have learned to live from our Christ self, the self directed by the Holy Spirit, are forgiving and loving, the world disappears and we all experience formless oneness, heaven; as it were, we the sons of God disappear into God and he into us and the dream of separation ends. We résumé our eternal mode of existing, in unified spirit.

The end of this empirical world may take millions of years before it is accomplished. In the meantime, each of us must seek salvation, that is, learn to forgive and love all persons at all times. To the extent that each of us learns to forgive and love he is saved and lives in peace and happiness and experiences occasional Holy Instant, union with all.

GOD, LOVE, UNION, PEACE, JOY, BLISS

In reality, we always live in love while imagining ourselves in a loveless place; we are always in union while dreaming that we are in the world of separation; we are always in God while thinking ourselves in ego states.
To know this fact, one must forgive and love at all times. Forgive others attack on you, which forgives your own attacks on other people, and experience oneness, unified spirit, heaven.



SUMMARY

Last night, a brother verbally abused my wife and me. My ego perceived his behavior as a psychological attack on it and urged me to counter attack him. If I do so, he would defend himself and counter attack me. The result is that we would separate from each other and perpetuate the world of separation.
We came to this world by attacking each other and the world is maintained by our attacks on each other.
Our mutual attacks push each other away, thus enabling us to experience the separation we wish to experience. This brother attacked me thus urging me to separate from him and if I fall into his trap, I would separate from him and in so doing continue living in my ego state, in separation hence feeling the gifts of the ego: fear, anger, sadness, depression, paranoia, mania and other mental upsets egos experience.
This brother’s seeming uncalled for attack (at an unconscious level, I asked him to attack me, for there are no accidents in God’s universe; we experience what we desire to experience, what we want to learn from; I wanted to learn about his angry nature and, perhaps, help him heal it) offers me an opportunity to choose again, to choose differently, this time to love rather than hate, to forgive rather than bear grievances.
Actually, to forgive him is very simple. Everything he said about me is false. Not one word he said about me is correct. His perception of me is delusional, paranoid, period. He is not processing reality accurately, not even in ego terms. He is operating from an excited nervous system and is actually in a minor manic episode (hypomania…he said all sorts of rubbish about me that any one with the slightest knowledge of me would know that he was not talking about me; he was projecting his paranoid thinking to me). Because I realize that he is experiencing transient psychosis hence had thought disorder with characteristic word salad, confabulation and illogical association I do not have to be angry at him. I must overlook everything he said.
To overlook others verbal and or physical attacks is to forgive them. To forgive is to love, for in a world of mutual attacks forgiveness is the true meaning of love. (On earth to forgive is to love; in eternity there is no attack, only pure love, that is, union and its peace and joy.)

I choose the gospel of the Holy Spirit rather than the gospel of the ego, forgiveness rather than grievance and attack. I totally forgive this brother. I totally love this brother. In doing so, I give me peace and happiness; in giving me peace and joy, I give him peace and joy…though he may not yet receive it, given his confused emotional state, the Holy Spirit has received my gift to my brother for him. He will receive my gift when he heals his psychological disorders.
The brother obviously has personality disorders and anger management issues that he needs to go address in psychotherapy. He needs to deal with these issues at the secular psychological level and finally seek some spiritual understanding as to why we live on earth. He will find his God and his real self, Christ, in his own way, not my way, for each of us came here alone and must find a solution that fits his issues. We, however, must return home in the company of each other, when we forgive and love one another.
Brother you did not attack me. You did not do anything to my real self. You abused my false separated self.
That which can be abused and eventually destroyed has no worth. The ego and its body are valueless.
The part of us that has worth, our spirit cannot be attacked and or harmed by any one; he is safe in his father’s mind, for our minds leave not their creator’s mind.
Brother I forgive you but go seek help for your anger and psychological issues. However, it is not for me to worry about your issues. The sole function of an atonement worker is to atone for his own sins, to heal himself by forgiving all people. I have healed myself by forgiving you and all of us. And in doing so find the peace of God. Peace and joy is preferable to the transitory wealth that tickles your fancy.
The reader of this piece may think that I made this brother out as the guilty one and myself out as the innocent one; him as the sick one and I as the healthy one. Nothing could be further from the truth than that. The brother is obviously sick. His sickness, however, is my sickness projected out for me to see and heal. He is me mirrored for me to see. His Igbo culture based issues are mine, too. His temper tantrums were the way I used to react many years ago. When I was eighteen years old, I remember reacting exactly as I saw this man react to attack, real or imagined. I acted out at others, was angry at those that I thought had done something bad to me, when, in fact, they had not. This man thought that I did something bad to him when in fact I did not. He is me writ large. He presented my issues for me to see them clearly and heal them. (He is also you, for his apparent paranoid reaction is the way human beings react when they feel attacked, real or imagined.)
As for guilt and innocence, he is innocent, for all children of God are eternally innocent. They have not separated from God and have not done what we see them do on earth. They do what they do only as in dreams, and what is done in dreams is not real.
We all remain as our creator created us: innocent, guiltless and sinless. But in time, on earth, we seem guilty. We do bad things to each other. What we need to do is to correct our errors and mistakes, not to crucify each other. (The Holy Spirit’s mission is to correct our errors.)
The brother has to correct his ego based mistakes and learn to love people. In the meantime, it is not my job to worry whether he forgives; my one task is to be the one who forgives all God’s children. In forgiving all of us, I become an example for other people to imitate.
The ego is a tricky thing and those who trust and ask it to guide them always lose. We worked hard to achieve an objective and just as we achieved it our egos clashed and self destruct.
Those who redirect their ego goals and make them in alignment with the purpose of the Holy Spirit, God, that is, make them forgiving and loving, ultimately, achieve their goals.

Peace and joy to all my brothers in Christ, the one holy Son of God.

Ozodi Thomas Osuji
Ozodi@africainstituteseattle.org