Every body is an island
for its one.
The ‘I,’ adrift in space,
is masted to its earth core,
the body, bright,
rising slight on the ocean
and the currents
of life-light.
A single tree
is also rising there,
antenna to the sky
of mind.
A plant of nerves,
its roots in sex,
and foliated brain,
that tree surveys
the earth and sky,
the mindful scene,
the move of life,
and would uncapture
this attentive ‘I’.
How can this island
fly or drown?
To what space
can space be gone?
The isle will be forgotten
when the Source
of ‘I’ is found.
from Crazy Da Must Sing: Inclined to His Weaker Side
You *are* your brother’s savior. He is yours. Reason speaks happily indeed of this. This gracious plan was given love by Love. And what Love plans is like Itself in this: Being united, It would have you learn what you must be. And being one with It, it must be given you to give what It has given, and gives still. Spend but an instant in the glad acceptance of what is given you to give your brother, and learn with him what has been given both of you. To give is no more blessed than to receive. But neither is it less.
There is another vision and another Voice in which your freedom lies, awaiting but your choice. And if you place your faith in Them, you will perceive another self in you. This other self sees miracles as natural. They are as simple and as natural to it as breathing to the body. They are the obvious response to calls for help, the only one it makes. Miracles seem unnatural to the ego because it does not understand how separate minds can influence each other. Nor *could* they do so. But minds cannot be separate. This other self is perfectly aware of this. And thus it recognizes that miracles do not affect another’s mind, only its own. They always change *your* mind. There *is* no other.
You do not realize the whole extent to which the idea of separation has interfered with reason. Reason lies in the other self you have cut off from your awareness.
If Yahoo really wants to buy Tumblr and retain Tumblr users—rather than having us leave in droves—one thing they might try is to have Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer reverse her asinine blunder of banning Yahoo employees from working at home. What if she publicly embraced working from home?
What if she did a sort of Howard Beale Network speech: “I don’t have to tell you things suck. Everybody knows things suck. Everybody’s out of work or working multiple jobs that pay for shit. The middle class is disappearing. Rich fuckers like me own the world and are raping the planet faster than they ever have. I told my employees they couldn’t work from home anymore, for Christ’s sake, and hardly anyone blinked! Well, I was wrong, and you should have told me I was wrong! Here we are trying to buy this damn company you all love for over one billion dollars, and the traitor founders are considering taking the offer, even though they have over 100 million users and could raise that amount with a Kickstarter campaign in probably a few hours. But I’ll tell you what: I’m woman enough to admit I was mistaken. I want as many of my employees to work from home as possible from now on. If we buy Tumblr, I want as many of their employees to work from the comfort of their own homes. I want to give Tumblr users props for blogging from their own damn homes or devices or wherever the hell they WANT to blog from. Because this is the Internet, baby, and the only freedom it has is the freedom we give it.”
Perception is a choice and not a fact. But on this choice depends far more than you may realize as yet. For on the voice you choose to hear, and on the sights you choose to see, depends entirely your whole belief in what you are. Perception is a witness but to this, and never to reality. Yet it can show you the conditions in which awareness of reality is possible, or those where it could never be.
Reality needs no cooperation from you to be itself. But your awareness of it needs your help, because it is your choice. Listen to what the ego says, and see what it directs you see, and it is sure that you will see yourself as tiny, vulnerable and afraid. You will experience depression, a sense of worthlessness, and feelings of impermanence and unreality. You will believe that you are helpless prey to forces far beyond your own control, and far more powerful than you. And you will think the world you made directs your destiny. For this will be your faith. But never believe because it is your faith it makes reality.
There is another vision and another Voice in which your freedom lies, awaiting but your choice.
What if you looked within and saw no sin? This ‘fearful’ question is one the ego never asks. And you who ask it now are threatening the ego’s whole defensive system too seriously for it to bother to pretend it is your friend. Those who have joined their brothers have detached themselves from their belief that their identity lies in the ego. A holy relationship is one in which you join with what is part of you in truth. And your belief in sin has been already shaken, nor are you now entirely unwilling to look within and see it not.
Why is it strange to you that faith can move mountains? This is indeed a little feat for such a power. For faith can keep the Son of God in chains as long as he believes he is in chains. And when he is released from them it will be simply because he no longer believes in them, withdrawing faith that they can hold him, and placing it in his freedom instead. It is impossible to place equal faith in opposite directions. What faith you give to sin you take away from holiness. And what you offer holiness has been removed from sin.
The Holy Spirit can give you faith in holiness and vision to see it easily enough. But you have not left open and unoccupied the altar where the gifts belong. Where they should be, you have set up your idols to something else. This other ‘will,’ which seems to tell you what must happen, you give reality. And what would show you otherwise, must therefore seem unreal. All that is asked of you is to make room for truth. You are not asked to make or do what lies beyond your understanding. All you are asked to do is *let it in*; only to stop your interference with what will happen of itself; simply to recognize again the presence of what you thought you gave away.
Be willing, for an instant, to leave your altars free of what you placed upon them, and what is really there you cannot fail to see. The holy instant is not an instant of creation, but of recognition. For recognition comes of vision and suspended judgment. Then only it is possible to look within and see what must be there, plainly in sight, and wholly independent of inference and judgment. Undoing is not your task, but it *is* up to you to welcome it or not. Faith and desire go hand in hand, for everyone believes in what he wants.
This is the only thing that you need do for vision, happiness, release from pain and the complete escape from sin, all to be given you. Say only this, but mean it with no reservations, for here the power of salvation lies:
I *am* responsible for what I see.
I choose the feelings I experience,
and I decide upon the goal I would achieve.
And everything that seems to happen to me
I ask for, and receive as I have asked.
Deceive yourself no longer that you are helpless in the face of what is done to you. Acknowledge but that you have been mistaken, and all effects of your mistakes will disappear.
