Belief is a sword that we draw to defend ourselves from the truth.
The truth is simply this that is right now. Alive. Untamable.
Unbelievable. Any belief about it diminishes its grandeur. Any
opinion about it divides its wholeness.
When belief and opinion appear, as they will, know that you are
wielding a weapon that cuts and diminishes reality. Set them aside as
quickly as you can without doing further violence. Know that the
weapon drawn to cut another down to size also cuts you. Divides you
from your true self.
There is nothing wrong with disagreement. Disagreement can be
creative . Disagreement helps one to see beyond the horizon of the
known and familiar.
But when I am committed to being right, and I am committed to making
you wrong, when I have to cut you down to build myself up, that is
when the truth, the living truth, is shredded.
It is perfectly possible to disagree, and challenge each other,
without needing to win the argument, without needing desperately to
be right. But that requires a sense of self that is not in any way
dependent on particular beliefs and opinions. It requires a deep love
for reality, for this that is as it is right now. That love does not
come from the mind, which is divisive by nature, but from reality
itself.
And so we know that the truth is love. Reality is love. Reality is
welcoming of everyone and everything. Reality does not take sides,
except to take both sides!
When the individual prefers reality to anything the mind can create,
then that love can permeate even the individual mind or “self.” But
the starting place is not to try to wrestle the mind into compliance,
but to take the perspective of reality, which is perfectly happy with
things exactly as they are (which is not to say that anything will
stay as it is!).
Can we live in the dynamic fullness of this that is as it is? Can we
live in the paradox that reality is perfectly comfortable with
conflict, and that being fully embraced by reality, and fully
accepting that embrace, has a tendency to reduce conflict? Conflict
comes from the belief in separation. Holding such a belief is part of
the real, but the underlying truth is that reality is an unbroken
whole, and to accept the embrace of reality is to return to
wholeness. Embraced by the whole truth, how can any partial truth
survive for more than a little while?
Beliefs and opinions are having a field day, but no one ever believes
anything without someone else believing the opposite, so a kind of
temporary balance is struck that hints at the underlying wholeness
that is never truly broken and can be recalled at any moment.