A universal assembly for true discernment
Anne Blanchard shares her experience of purification and awakening, unfiltered and as it happens. Raw, reflective, brave, and infused with clarity, Anne’s open honesty inspires us all to dive deep into the spiritual journey instead of simply skimming the surface. She continues to share deeply from various non-dual teachings and teachers.
In this program Anne Blanchard facilitates one of the core practices of the Awakening Together community. This program provides an opportunity to be in community with others who will to find that place of no-place, that attention to our natural attentiveness, that innate humanness that can often be overlooked. Anne Blanchard facilitates this program on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays at 7:30 – 8:30 am ET/5:30-6:30 am MT by leading participants through gently guided Being Aware of Awareness meditation. All are warmly welcome.
This meditation was led by Kate Brennan.
Today’s lesson says that we are afraid of meaninglessness. It says, “The ego rushes in frantically to establish its own ideas” in the “empty space that meaninglessness provides,” because the ego is “fearful that the void may otherwise be used to demonstrate its own impotence and unreality.”
In other words, the false idea about who you are is held up and maintained by the meaning your thoughts give to everything you see and experience. There’s a fear this false idea about who you are will collapse, and you will no longer see yourself as the person you think you are.
To realize this for yourself, consider doing this extra exercise today:
Notice how you feel as you say this. You may feel differently with some items on the list than you do with others. Write down what you feel next to each opinion on the list.
After you finish this exercise, look carefully at what you felt as you practiced the exercise. Was it always easy to say, “I can let this thought go completely and never bring it up again,” or did you experience resistance to the idea of letting go of some of your opinions?
Resistance is fear. The resistance you experienced as you thought about letting go of some of your opinions is the ego’s fear that “the void,” which is the space that is left when the false self’s meaning is taken away, may demonstrate “its own impotence and unreality.”
Your opinions are a means for maintaining the ego. The resistance you feel when you think about letting them go is an ego preservation strategy. That’s why today’s lesson says:
“It is essential, therefore, that you learn to recognize the meaningless, and accept it without fear.
It is essential to realizing your true Self, because in order to realize truth, you must let go of the meaning that supports and maintains the false.
What is a miracle?
Our special theme says, “A miracle is a correction. … It merely looks on devastation, and reminds the mind that what it sees is false.”
I had a dream a few nights ago. In the dream, my daughter, my boyfriend and I were traveling to Yellowstone National Park in a station wagon very much like the one my parents had when I was a child. Jasmine, Ron and I rode in the front seat. In the backseat, there was an unattractive woman and her mindless daughter. The woman was Ron’s new girlfriend, which he added to our family. I was being nice and accepting of our situation; I welcomed her and her daughter into our family.
We stopped at a Route 66-like truck stop. Ron and Jasmine got our dog out of the very back of the station wagon and took the dog for a walk. I opened the backdoor to let Ron’s new girlfriend and her daughter out of the backseat, intending fully to be polite—even believing that I liked them—when all of the sudden, my anger burst out unexpectedly.
I couldn’t believe how rude I was to this woman. My intention was to be nice! So, I tried to apologize, but again anger and hatred poured out of me.
I ran away from the car, horrified by my own behavior, and ran into the truck stop restaurant to hide. There, inside the restaurant, I met Dolly Parton. She showed up as a fairy godmother type of character. She was there to help me look at my feelings and to discover what was true for me. Since I had been lying to myself about how I felt, this was important and helpful.
That’s the end of the dream. However, when I woke up, I saw where all of the components of the dream came from.
If you look at these seven details, all of which are stored in my subconscious mind, you can see that the subconscious pulled these details together in a new way to create the dream. The dream was simply old memories and impressions woven together to create a new temporary tapestry.
I am sharing this with you, because this is how our world is made too. All of the old ideas—old thoughts, perceptions, impressions and beliefs from the collective subconscious—are woven together to create what appears to be a new present, but it is actually just a regurgitation of old thoughts, perceptions, impressions and beliefs. And the miracle sees it as meaningless regurgitation.
Some people may give my dream meaning by analyzing it and saying, “This means that, and that means this,” but that misses the point entirely. The point is that the dream (and the world) is meaningless. When we give it no new meaning, we accept the correction. If we give the dream meaning, the subconscious is rebuilt, and the regurgitation continues.
It’s true that I can look at my dream and see what is in my subconscious. The seven elements above show that. But seeing that enables me to look at the dream and realize, “Oh, the dream was just made up from a random reordering of the subconscious.” In other words, what I see in the dream is merely false.
And that is true of the world we see also.
I let forgiveness rest upon all things, For thus forgiveness will be given me.
Today’s lesson says, “I thank You, Father, for Your plan to save me from the hell I made. It is not real. And you have given me the means to prove its unreality to me. The key is in my hand,…”
The “means to prove its unreality to me”—the key—is forgiveness, which is abiding as the unaffected Self. Abiding unaffected is giving no new meaning to the regurgitation that is the world.
The Loving All Method is a gentle way of abiding as the unaffected Self. Therefore, living the Loving All Method is forgiveness. It is the key.
Let’s review the Loving All Method today. Although you have read this more than once before, it is always possible a sentence or word that did not stand out to you before will now shine with new, previously unseen clarity. Therefore, although the mind may want to skip reading this, because the mind thinks it knows it already, let’s bypass the mind’s opinion and read Chapter 12 of The Most Direct Means to Eternal Bliss again today.
Note: I would like to point out an error in my mind, and how error manifests into suffering. If you look back at the seven elements from my subconscious, which created the dream, you will notice that element #1 included a judgment I made about another. That judgment, left uncorrected, is what led to the suffering of the Regina-character in the dream. Without that judgment, the dream could have been completely benign, like the real world. Loving everything exactly as it is (the Loving All Method) corrects all errors.
Meditation Options
When you read today’s message, please surrender to it. It is a message about surrender, but in order to fully realize the lesson in the message, you will have to surrender to the message.
When today’s message asks you to do something, surrender to it, and do it right then. If there are thoughts in your mind that say you don’t need to do it, or you don’t have time to do it, or you can do it later, practice self-inquiry to notice how the mind is trying to stop you from surrendering.
Why would the mind try to stop you from surrendering?
Is the mind trying to control you?
Is the mind in control of you, or is your Heart in the lead in your daily life?
In the Bible at John 15:4, Jesus said:
Abide in me as I abide in you. Just as the branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in me.
“Abide in me as I abide in you,” is a call to surrender. The “fruit” that Jesus spoke of is awakening. Just as he told the disciples previously that salvation (awakening) is not possible for man, but only for God, this scripture points out that awakening is not possible if the mind remains in the lead. Surrender is necessary.
When I was the scribe of Inner Ramana, I received guidance to add, “Abide in me as I abide in you,” to my mantra practice. In other words, just as I said, “I am that I am” to myself whenever the reminder came to do so, I also said, “Abide in me as I abide in you,” to myself whenever the reminder came to do so. As I used this mantra, I felt my inner desire to surrender. Through using the mantra, my resistance to surrender weakened, because I noticed that I (the true ‘I’) wanted to surrender. As I became more aware of my desire to surrender, surrender came more easily to me.
If you feel guidance to journal about anything you read as you read today’s message, surrender to that inner prompt, and journal with inner wisdom as guided.
Thoughts of Awakening # 316
The past has no meaning now.
Any meaning it ever had
was only the meaning you gave it.
Now is a fresh moment.
This means that meaning from the past
can be looked at anew
and new meaning can be given.
However to make this change
do not deny one critical point.
Any meaning the past seemed to have
was absolutely given by you.
From our Holy Spirit
*If you don’t already have it, order The Seven Steps to Awakening. That will be our text for Year 3.
Regina’s Tip for Lesson 12
Today’s workbook lesson begins by saying:
“The importance of this idea lies in the fact that it contains a correction for a major perceptual distortion.”
The major perceptual distortion is the idea that you are the person you think you are.
Today’s lesson asks you to look about yourself and say, “I see a ___________ world,” and fill in the blank with whatever descriptive terms happen to occur to you, regardless of whether the terms are positive or negative.
Have you ever considered what causes you to see something as positive or negative?
Self-referencing is what leads you to see something as positive or negative. For example, if you are a city dweller who works in an office all week and looks forward to Saturday in the park, you may see rain on Saturday as disappointing or depressing. If you are a farmer who raises vegetables in the dry climate of eastern Colorado, you are probably happy to see rain whenever it occurs.
Rain is just rain. It isn’t positive or negative. However, rain is perceived as positive or negative by self-referencing thoughts.
Today’s lesson says, “I am upset because I see a meaningless world.”
We could also say, “I am upset because I reference the world to a self, thinking I am that self, when I am not.”
What is a miracle?
Our new special theme says, “A miracle is a correction. It does not create, nor really change at all.”
Recently, we played a game based on the teaching in Rupert Spira’s book, The Transparency of Things. We used a book or some other piece of paper with words on it as a prop. First we read the words on the page, and we noticed what they said, and then we shifted our focus to notice the paper on which the words were written. We became aware of the paper that was already present, even though we weren’t consciously aware of it when our attention was focused on the words.
A miracle is similar to that shift in focus.
When we shifted our attention from the words to the paper, we did not create the paper. We merely became aware of it. In fact, nothing changed at all. The words already appeared on paper. There was no material change. The only change, if we call it a change, was that we became more aware of the paper.
A miracle is like that. It shifts our awareness from the specific focus of the ego to another focus that is not of the ego.
I can attack but my own sinlessness, And it is only that which keeps me safe.
We can use this sentence from our workbook lesson to notice how a miracle works.
If I read the sentence with emphasis on “attack”, I may see the sentence in this way:
I can attack but my own sinlessness,
and it is only that (attack) which keeps me safe.
The sentence may look a little crazy written that way, but the ego’s perception is crazy. And in fact, the ego perceives exactly as that sentence is written above.
When thinking with the ego thought system, don’t you think attack keeps you safe?
Pause and look at this for a moment. Remember some subtle ways that you have attacked, because you thought that was the way to be safe.
Now, if we shift the focus in the sentence, we will see the sentence differently. Let’s put the emphasis on “sinlessness”:
I can attack but my own sinlessness,
and it is only that (sinlessness) which keeps me safe.
Now the meaning of the sentence has changed completely, although the actual sentence itself remains the same. The only “change” is a shift in focus, but the shift in focus changes everything.
With this shift in focus, we move outside the ego’s way of thinking entirely. Now attack is the opposite of safety, because if I attack anything, I attack my awareness of my sinlessness, and only my sinlessness keeps me safe.
A person who reads the sentence with the emphasis on attack, and believes that emphasis, is going to understand, think and act much differently than one who reads the sentence with the emphasis on sinlessness and believes (or puts faith in) that meaning.
This shift in perception from seeing attack as my safety to seeing non-attack as my safety is a miracle.
In order to help initiate this miracle in you, please contemplate the following today:
Meditation Options
Today’s reading addresses three common ideas that people have about ego death:
Do not read today’s message too quickly. Pay attention, and notice that none of the statements above are true.
Thoughts of Awakening # 315
Knowledge is within
beyond the mind.
Knowledge is constant
before and beyond the world.
Knowledge is realization
of the truth of what you are.
Knowledge is peace,
because it is the end of all questions
and the permanent rest
of the doubting mind.
From our Holy Spirit
