And while we all can understand the phenomenon
and the experience of change, once again there is no way
we could understand what changelessness is. So all that the Course could do
and Jesus could do is hint at it and try to reflect for us what that state would be like.
Let me start then by reading to you as I mentioned the opening paragraphs
of "The Changeless Dwelling Place." This is section V in Chapter 29.
"There is a place in you where this whole world has been forgotten;
where no memory of sin and of illusion lingers still."
Now this place would be what the early sections of the text would refer to
as our right mind. But it's the place in the right mind
where the Atonement principle is. It's the place in our right mind
where the Holy Spirit is which is the Holy Spirit being that memory
of God's Love and our identity as Christ that we took with us into the dream
when we believed we could separate and fell asleep,
and that's the beginning of the dream. So I will read it again.
"There is a place in you where this whole world has been forgotten;
where no memory of sin and of illusion lingers still."
And it's that place that the ego seeks to cover up.
"There is a place in you which time has left, and echoes of eternity are heard."
Now it's not eternity as such, it's the echo of eternity.
What he speaks in an earlier section of the "herald of eternity"
which is the holy relationship. An earlier section then too also speaks of the
"reflection of holiness" so here he uses the phrase "echoes of eternity."
They are all different ways of talking about that in our right mind
which is where the Holy Spirit is, which is where the Memory of God is,
the Memory of our true identity as Christ is, where the Memory of love is.
In that dwelling place what we really are seeing is the reflection of who we are.
And if I choose that and I choose to identify with it
then there's no place once I make that choice for this separated individual self
that I believe I am, this very special and unique self that I believe I am.
Because remember what that memory is, is the memory of the dwelling place
of God's one Son. In this world God's one Son has been fragmented
into billions and billions and trillions and trillions of pieces.
When we choose to remember that dwelling place,
which is what the Course refers to as choosing the holy instant,
in that holy instant there is no separation because I have now joined
with the Atonement principle that tells me the separation never happened.
If there's no separation then there's no change, there's no sin,
there's no guilt, there's no fear and therefore there is no time.
So when you're in that dwelling place even though your body
may still appear to function within a world of time and space,
your reality is outside of time and space
which means you're not affected by what happened in the past.
You have no concern about the future. There's no anxiety. There's no worry.
And all you are feeling is the peace and love of the present,
not the ego's false present of guilt but the Holy Spirit's present
of love and peace that comes when sin has been chosen against.
That doesn't mean that your body does not plan for the future.
It doesn't mean you don't have insurance policies. It doesn't mean you
don't make preparations for the future. It just means you're able
to do that without anxiety, without tension, without fear.
You just do it because that's what normal people do in bodies.
What makes you abnormal in the etymological sense of that word,
that you're away from the normal is that you don't share the normal anxiety,
the normal guilt, the normal fear, the normal defensiveness,
obsessiveness that people have.
So in the holy instant it is not really that your personal self suddenly disappears
and you leap into the heart of God, what disappears is all the tension,
all the conflict, all the anxiety, all the depression, all the anger,
all the judgment, all the criticism, all the specialness. That's what disappears.
At the very, very end of the process then the personal self, the I,
the split mind itself disappears.
But that happens only at the very, very end of the process.
What does change as we move along is simply again that we find ourselves
choosing the Holy Spirit more, the ego less, which means again there is less anxiety,
there's less tension, there's less fear of the future, there's less paranoia
of the future, there's less depression over your miserable past, etc., etc.
So you are free of that awful burden of the ego's secret dream
and world's dream which means we're now choosing to spend
more and more time in the dwelling place of the Holy Spirit,
which again is the reflection of our dwelling place in Heaven.
"There is a resting place", and again it's that place in our right mind
that the holy instant represents, "There is a resting place so still
no sound except a hymn to Heaven rises up to gladden God the Father and the Son."
Now this does not mean that you don't hear the sounds of the world
with your body's ears. It doesn't mean that you're oblivious
to what happens around you. What you do become oblivious to
is all the judgment, all the attack thoughts
that the ego associates with the sounds of the world.
Things people say you don't like. Things people do you do not like,
whether they're people in your personal life and personal world
or people in the world at large. So again your body doesn't cease to function.
Your sensory apparatus still does what it always does,
but rather than your brain interpreting it, having been programmed
by the mind to attack and to find fault and to find guilt
and to reinforce specialness and separation, what your sensory apparatus
shows you is now interpreted for you by your mind, by your right mind.
And that's what the Course refers to at the beginning of Chapter 12
in "The Judgment of the Holy Spirit" everything is perceived
as either an expression of love or a call for love.
In other words the way I am towards you, the way I behave towards you,
the way I think about you, the way I feel about you is not changed
by what you do because whether you are expressing love
or you are calling for love by being particularly obnoxious or vicious or cruel
or inhumane and insensitive, makes no difference because once
I interpret what you say and do, hearing it through Jesus' ears
instead of my own I see it as he explains in Chapter 12,
that your attack towards me or others is an expression of your fear
and fear is a call for love. So there is no change in how I am
Why? Because I have now chosen to dwell in the reflection
of the dwelling place in Heaven.
Which means no matter what happens here is of no concern to me.
Now my body may have to make appropriate decisions
and appropriate responses and nothing in this Course would ever suggest
that you should not make the appropriate responses, but whatever it is
you do as a response to what goes on around you if you do it with Jesus
as your teacher instead of the ego, then there would be love.
Love would be the content and nothing will change.
There's that wonderful line I always quote from Chapter 26,
"not one note in Heaven's song is missed."
So this wonderful song that Jesus is referring to here as "the hymn to Heaven."
in the pamphlet, it's called "The Song of Prayer."
In the beginning of Chapter 21, it's "The Forgotten Song."
That song is totally unaffected, that love that really is the symbol
of the oneness that unites Father and Son, Creator and Created,
Cause and Effect, that love, that oneness is totally unaffected
by any silly thoughts such as the tiny mad idea of being separate from God.
Somewhere inside all of us is a memory of that changeless dwelling place.
That's what's in back of that beautiful, beautiful section "The Forgotten Song"
that I mentioned a moment ago, especially the last part of that section.
Because Jesus is telling us that each of us has that memory,
we have the melody of that song still within us.
And yet it's that song that we have all sought to drown out.
The fact that we've sought to drown it out and indeed have drowned it out
in terms of our experience doesn't mean it's not there, it's just covered over.
So again that's what this opening to "The Changeless Dwelling Place"
section is about. It's Jesus' attempt to have us at least if not get in touch
with that dwelling place at least begin to understand that it exists.