Reality – Page 6 – It's All In Me

After the Walls Come Down

February 15, 2015 Higher Up IDEALSLeave a comment

Walls now crumbled, things start shifting

No one can deceive you

You find yourself where you always were

But no one will believe you

You tell them your new story

Because in Truth you know it’s theirs

In the Mind of God where we live and move

Death has no power there

Resurrection is a promise

Because no one ever dies

Once they choose to live the Life

Which reveals that Love abides

Now you’d think that this was good news

And the simplest of decisions

But soon you see that’s not the case

When people have the habit of division

At first you understand it

Since you were living by those rules

But once it became so clear to you

You start to think of them as fools

How could they not get it?

Can’t they see that we’re all One

That there’s no such thing as separation

When we focus on the Son

But no one you’re telling wants to hear it

Especially not from you

“Suddenly you’re so high and mighty.”

“We know what you used to do.”

“Don’t act like you’re so holy.”

“Remember the way you used to be.”

“Then you go and find religion.”

“Now you stand here judging me.”

You try to tell them you’re not judging

And that religion is not what guides you

It’s just that now you see the Truth

That all our lives we have been lied to

This is bigger than religion

The Truth is so much more

Religion is a roadmap to the Center

But it can’t take you to the Core

When you see it you can’t forget it

It transforms your entire life

Now you’re willing to surrender everything

For the Pearl of greater price

You’ll let go of all attachments

To receive what God’s ordained

But you never thought in doing so

Your relations would be strained

But now it’s starting to hit you

The Truth does not always bring accord

That’s what Yeshua was trying to tell us

When he said he came to bring a sword

This is rarely preached in churches

For this fact we don’t prepare you

When people just want you to join the club

We fear that it will scare you

We try to tell you of the joys

But forget about the costs

Which is natural when we choose our words

From a paradigm of loss

You see the connections we think we’re losing

Are ones that never did exist

Who they accepted was a false us

That’s why the true us gets dismissed

But we shouldn’t take it personally

It’s not the real you they’re rejecting

They doing what the ego does

It’s the false them they’re protecting

To do this they will attack you

Your temptation is to get them back

Which insanely makes them happy

Since it seems to keep the lie intact

Yesh says, “Pick up your cross and bear it.”

“Come and follow me.”

“The Truth is that since we’re all One

If you get lifted they get free.”

“I know that it’s a mystery.”

“But as I told you it is Light.”

“Being low is the way to go

If you’re to see the highest heights.”

“But you cannot take them with you.”

“Still you must give the invitation,

So they can see how much they’re loved

And perhaps surrender separation.”

“While you can’t control the outcome,

You’ve power over what you give.”

“So while they may not see it now,

One day they’ll remember how you lived.”

“They’ll know you lived forgiveness.”

“They’ll see you knew what you were worth.”

“That you saw yourself as a child of God

Despite the conditions of your birth.”

“And perhaps that will be the trigger.”

“That they can live forgiveness too.”

“But in the meantime you must show them,

By forgiving what they do.”

See 1 John 4 for perspective.

Walk Through Walls

February 14, 2015 Higher Up IDEALSLeave a comment

Walls do not exist

They’re figments of imagination

Designed to blind our consciousness

From what we’re afraid of facing

There are walls that are made of money

There are walls that are made of stone

And walls that are made of false beliefs

Passed down but not our own

Our walls are what protect us

They tell us who we are

And they also tell us who we aren’t

To keep those who aren’t us very far

Almost everybody has them

It’s how we maintain our borders

So those who know that they aren’t real

Are often caught defying orders

We see them as the outcasts

At best they are the martyrs

We take those who are simply living Truth

And we make them movement starters

That’s how we define them

Using retrospection

Approving of them after death

While in life they got rejection

In our guilt we make them heroes

We make them even greater in our minds

We tell ourselves we revere them

But in truth we’re drawing lines

“This far and no further”

Is what we’re really trying to say

“The quickest way to get a statue

Is to go the martyr’s way.”

Now we’re making walls with dreamers

And most of us don’t know

They want to make us famous

So we have nowhere to go

But here’s the thing that we don’t get

I was serious about what I said

Our walls truly do not exist

They’re all made up in our head

Taking away the body

Does not take away the being

We think we’ve put a stop to Truth

But we don’t know what we are freeing

Yeshua called it the last enemy

Because it’s the one that never was

And from it we’ve created worlds

Built on the premise that it does

It’s the Wall that shapes all walls

Telling the lie, “There’s nothing left.”

But once we see the other side

We know there’s no such thing as death

Now the walls begin to crumble

Once we know that they’re not there

And all of a sudden Yeshua makes sense

When he tells us don’t be scared

You can’t imagine what you can imagine

When there’s nothing there to stop you

The first thing that you realize

It that the ego self is not you

We’ve just been dreaming limitation

When in reality there is none

But soon we’ll know ourselves as we are known

The very image of the Son

Out of Order

February 13, 2015 Higher Up IDEALSLeave a comment

What if the very last day

Was really the beginning?

Losers get all the trophies

Because there’s no such thing as winning

Being fair isn’t fair

We just get what we get

And I can change the whole world

Since nothing’s happened yet

The whole world is out of order

Nothing is what it seems

It’ll be your worst nightmare

To fulfill all of your dreams

The void is now full

With infinite potential

Never fully actualized

Just to keep it existential

Freed by our limits

We are living beyond borders

Stifling chaos

In a realm that defies orders

Undoing the Big Bang

Is as easy as folding paper

Everything returns to zero point

In the mind of the Creator

It’s the ultimate “do over”

For that which was not done

Temporal ties cannot terrorize

In unmanifest light of eternal Suns

All things are forever

In the mind that cannot die

But only in not being born

Can you possibly know why

When I’m In Poetry Mode

February 9, 2015May 1, 2015 Higher Up IDEALSLeave a comment

I have many states of being

Most of them conditioned

Circumstantial ways I am

Depending on my position

If I’m on top I am a certain way

If on the bottom I’m another

Each one relative to what’s going on

Which determines how I’m covered

But when I am in poetry mode

I’m not circumstantially dependent

I enter into a different realm

Where I am consciously transcendent

There’s no thing as linearity

Removing the cause of the effect

For when life turns into poetry

All frames of reference intersect

At the point of their convergence

We find the poem’s entrance into time

Emerging out of no where

Thus impossible to confine

Always open to interpreting

It’s expression has no end

And as the author I am one with it

So who can say where I begin

Perhaps the poetry created me

To bring itself to form

Pre-existing my corporeal self

A possibility outside the norm

Now I’m not just a person being

But an event within creation

Composed of seen and unseen forces

Forming a poetic destination

I’m not encountered but attended

Participation is a must

If you ever want to know me

Before I turn back into dust

For when I’m not in poetry mode

I am a man devoid of being

Processes functioning mechanically

With eyes that have no seeing

Here to do until I’m done

Trying to get my tasks complete

My meaning and my function one

Until I’m considered obsolete

Then I am replaced

With a newer model off the shelf

That’s why a life without being poetry

Is like living without a self

Sinnovation

January 26, 2015February 3, 2023 Higher Up IDEALSLeave a comment

Imagine a world without Sin.
What kind of world would it be
If there was no such thing as wrong
And right was all that we could be?

There would be no one to judge us
No crimes we could commit
It would just be one big free for all
No forgive and no forget

The ones with all the resources
Could just keep on taking more
They could screw over future generations
And just forget about the poor

The ones who have the least
Could make a big deal about the scraps
And never work together
So they become each others’ traps

The ones who claim to love the world
Can live off self-congratulations
While seeking to stay in comfort
So that no one tests their patience

Politicians can flap their gums
Saying what we hoped they say
Then when they fail to live the dream
We all can look the other way

Pundits can make a million bucks
Just for talking out of their ass
Then party with the one percent
While claiming to be middle class

Religionists can live guilt free
Because this world is not their home
And those who don’t believe in God
Can create religions or their own

Poets can stand on the side lines
Judging what they see
Thinking while they speak in rhyme
“Please no one look at me.”

Hey, this is starting to sound familiar
Kind of sounds like the world we’re in
That makes it more convenient
Just to do away with Sin.

Everything is awesome
No one really needs correction
Who needs to think of right and wrong
When we have egos for protection?

I can tell myself almost anything
Then convince myself it’s true
And I don’t have to be responsible
If the enemy is you

This system is ingenious
It’s a win-win situation
We can make it a sin to say there’s Sin
Now that’s what I call Sinnovation

It’s the ultimate invention
And we all are benefitting
Even losers win in the game of Sin
It’s high stakes, but we’re all betting

Do you think it’s not that simple?
Well that’s just another lie
Just replace religious statements with fashion ones
And soon you will see why.

You see everything has a standard
A bunch of made up rules
And if you fall outside them
Certain tempers will get fueled

There’s a way to be from your town
Or be a fan of a local team
There’s even a way to be countercultural
All of you know just what I mean

You know because you’re in the priesthood
Of the standards that you uphold
Even if your standard is to have no standard
To you there’s a way that that unfolds

We want things to go the “right way”
Which is the way inside our heads
So when things just go the way they go
We think that they went wrong instead

Such is the way of made up standards
That we hate but seem to need
And that’s why we can’t be free from Sin
Without a true Standard to intercede

The End of All Seeking

January 24, 2015March 20, 2022 Higher Up IDEALSLeave a comment

At the end of all your seeking
You find what wasn’t lost
And that you’ve paid the greatest price
For that which had no cost

You’ve died at least 10,000 deaths
But now you die no more
And killed at least fifty times as much
Thinking God is keeping score

You’ve traveled in and out of time
In your aims to conquer space
And now you see there’s no here or there
To see outside your face

At first this thought disturbs you
“How could this ever be?
All those times I killed to live
I was only killing me.”

Where are all your enemies
Oh soul that thinks you know?
The Ways of God are past understanding
Where thoughts divided cannot flow.

All the chaos you created
To prove that you are you
A self that is not Self Itself
A being not quite True

Then through the gate one final time
Your exits now have ceased
Once again you’re One again
For you refuse to feed the Beast

You made the One Decision
That undoes the first divide
The incision in your vision
That appears as polar sides

And now you see what “He” sees
Why He does what He has to do
And now you’re saying with Him
“Father forgive them for what’s untrue.”

“No one has ever harmed me.”
Darkness does not conquer light.
Who I am in God is True
Now vision usurps sight

We are something like Eternal
We are before we were
The plank no longer in your eye
Free from time distorted blur

Now go and tell a brother
A sister or a friend
That All is One and they are It
No more occasion for our sin

Of course some will condemn you
No longer special will they be
When they hear that what they thought was theirs
Is not real in Unity

But secretly you love this
In Heaven’s realm you’ve found your treasure
No longer striving, all is yours
In the Truth We are Together

Now no longer seeking
For there’s nothing left to find
We see that Truth is never hidden
For there’s no space outside the Mind

Let’s stop seeking for that which cannot be lost.

Toward Unfiltered Consciousness

March 18, 2014March 18, 2014 Higher Up IDEALSLeave a comment

This morning I found myself stuck on The Root. For those of you who have never heard of it, it is similar to The Huffington Post, but with articles that are more tailored to the interests of a largely African American audience. Some of the articles that I got mesmerized by were a 4 page article on African American Slave Holders, one on the push to get Dr. Ben Carson to run for POTUS, and an article about people’s reactions to the new version of Annie being cast with the little black girl from Beasts of the Southern Wild, Quvenzhane Wallis. As I read the articles, I monitored my thoughts around the subject matter to see what I could learn about myself and how I relate to the world. You see, I have chosen to be a person who checks in with myself a lot. If a thought occurs to me that I feel is questionable, such as, “Why is Ben Carson a Republican?”, I am inclined to examine it to see if I can determine where it came from and whether or not it is a thought I really resonate with or if it was one handed to me. Like with the Ben Carson thought, I can distinctly remember my father telling me that any black man who is a Republican these days must hate himself or other black people. With that in my head, my mind immediately tried to tie Ben Carson to the black slave holders who I had just read about in the previous article. That led me to consider other so called, “black on black” violence and exploitation. I say so called, because if people of other races exploit each other no one calls it anything. I’ve never heard anyone say “white on white” or “brown on brown” crime. Anyway, after a single thought starts making too many divergent connections, I usually stop the train and get off and then ask myself how I got there in my mind. From there I determine whether I want to keep going with that train of thought or move on to other things.

For a long time, if I came to realize that a person I was talking with was jut parroting what they were told by their family without ever taking a look at whether or not those thoughts actually served them, I would start the process of removing myself from the conversation. My reasoning for this was that I felt like that tendency among people to just go on automatic pilot mode is what allows a lot of dysfunction to keep moving through the generations. “My mother or father did it so I do it.” never sat well with me. And besides, I really don’t see the point of that line of thinking. In this way, I am like Socrates, who said, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” The way I see it, if my life is merely a consecutive string of undisciplined reactions to my environment and conditions based on what I was force fed to believe through propaganda, then in essence I was never really here. That being said, I don’t merely limit myself to the Descartes[ian] ideology, “I think therefore I am”. I see thinking as a part of “who I be”, but not the whole. Other relevant aspects of how I express my being are feeling, intuiting, accepting, and surrendering to just name a few. But all of these aspects or faculties or facilities of my being fall under the umbrella of Consciousness. For me, Consciousness is the essence of who I am. Consciousness is the intentional observer/influencer of my being and the channel through which I deliver my activities into the world. In my opinion, without Consciousness, the world is nothing but vanity.

If I were to draw a picture of how I imagine Consciousness being, I would draw Consciousness as the Light of Creative Intelligence, my mind would be the slides or film I want to project, and the projector itself would be my body. As I project onto the world i.e. the screen, the Intelligent Light of my Consciousness is also observing what I project and engaging with the receivers at multiple levels. This creates an expansion in Consciousness which then brings greater illumination to the slides or film which represents the thoughts that occur in Mind. As the illumination intensifies, there is more clarity to the thought projections. This continues until the projections become an ideal representation of the Conscious Intelligent and Creative Light. When that happens the slides and/or film are no longer necessary because I will no longer have anything to project onto the world or onto others in order to justify my existence. At that point, I will be functioning as pure Consciousness–an uninterrupted and unfiltered, freely giving and freely receiving creative being. I think this is how it works for all of us. I believe that that is our true nature. As I said in the post Switched At Birth, I believe that we all came here as pure being, and then, for many of us, the inaccuracies and sometimes flat out lies began, starting with the very names we identify with. But beyond our names are the other associations that become the filters through which we give to and receive from Life. And for me that is where The Root came in this morning. As I read the articles, I could feel my filters engaging.

Before reading those articles, I was simply Conscious Being. Besides, my dog and some lady bugs, no one was home. I had done my morning devotions, meditation, and prayer. I had caught up on this campaign called The One Great Hour of Sharing with my daughter, which has the tagline, “We are One” and was feeling grateful that I have another day to get closer to the Root of my Being–my Source who I most often refer to as God. I will admit that for some time now, I have “fallen off the wagon” when it comes to remaining sober to what I believe is God’s reality of Life. That is to say that without constantly checking in with myself, praying a whole lot, reading the Bible and other expansive material, and talking about the Higher activities of life, I feel the temptation to get intoxicated with the smaller story of who I am, the roles that I play in the world. I know that I am not my roles any more than I am my thoughts. I am not a fictional character. But as many of us know, sometimes it seems easier to play one.

Tomorrow, tomorrow I love you tomorrow, just as long as you’re not yesterday.

When I looked at the articles, I felt some of my fictions coming up. You’d have to read the article on African American slave owners to get an idea of what my feelings might have been, but I will say that, if I jumped into a time machine immediately after reading it, I might have caused some trouble for some of those people. When I read about Ben Carson, I found myself thinking of him as having become a cartoon character. He’s a brilliant doctor and I’ve read some intelligent things from him, but I will say that I have my challenges with how it seems like he has straight up bought into the vanity of the political world. Granted I don’t know him or any politicians, but it all looks like reality TV to me at this point–even President Obama. And finally, when I saw people having a problem with a black Annie, I felt myself wanting to take it personally. Besides the fact that I am a sensitive person and almost cried both times when I watched the trailer, I could easily project my curly haired daughter into that character and the thought of people tripping off of that bugged me. Like the author said in the article, “Annie is Black, Get Over It”.

All this being said, I am confessing that my particular black filter was kicking in in every one of those articles. Of course there are purely human elements that I would bristle at such as slavery in general, Carson’s seeming disregard for people who do not identify as heterosexual, or people being overly critical of an obviously talented child actor simply based on her race regardless of what that race might be. Still I have more to examine about how my filter influences my work in the realm of Consciousness and how it effects my ability to give and receive freely. It is really interesting because, while I believe that experience informs a considerable portion of how we engage the world, I do also believe that we are capable of transcending our experience thus enabling us to live in what St. Paul called the “newness of life”. In the newness of life as I aspire to live it, everything about life is new and fresh and pure moment by moment, even our very selves and our relationships to others and the whole wide world. I’m not going to get into it right now, but what it basically means to me is that once we identify ourselves as children of God and citizens of eternity, then we live in a realm where as he puts it, “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.” and ” In that renewal there is no longer Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave and free; but Christ is all and in all!” As a person I understand as having examined his own life, I can see Paul adding a whole lot of other categories that we hold onto into that list–married, single, heterosexual, GLBTQ, rich, poor, healthy, unhealthy, red and yellow, black and white. I know that I am a citizen of eternity where there is no division among us and for the most part I live out of that space with everyone I encounter, but I’m still working on that tension between that reality and how I encounter events in time that seem to thrive in anti-consciousness and denial.

Judge

August 5, 2013 Higher Up IDEALS1 Comment

Judge

Am I jealous of your ignorance
Because I wish that I were too?
Do I call your innocence, stupidity
Because I can’t do what you can do?

Why do I judge
When I know that I don’t like it?
Is it because I know I’m you
But I have no way to fight it?

Did I create a “heaven”,
To prove that I’m better?
Is it because I think I am now,
And I just want to be forever?

Well if “God” is always right,
If I try to judge I know I’ll fail
So if I refuse to admit this
That’s what will keep me in this “hell”.

I wrote the poem above when I was on a flight from Baltimore to Orlando. There was a family coming on the plane who had never flown before. Out of nervousness, the mother kept apologizing for her family and confessing this fact as they loudly found their way to their seats. They were the last people to be seated on the plane and essentially the rest of us were waiting on them. My former wife and I were headed to the Sunshine state to spend some time at the Disney parks and go on a cruise. I assumed that this other family was headed to Disney as well. Needless to say their children were very excited and it only made sense. However, despite the plane having several families on-board presumably headed to the same destination, it seemed that many people were judging this other family.

From my seat I could hear the surrounding passengers mumbling such things as, “find your seat already” and “it’s not that hard”. Even my wife was a little bothered and probably embarrassed. You see this family who had never flown and was having a very hard time were African-American like us. Now to some people reading this you might think that their ethnicity doesn’t matter, but you’d be wrong. With a lot of Black people, we tend to take it personally and feel embarrassed if other Black people are doing something that draws public scrutiny. I could go into the psychological reasons for it, but I will just make it simple and say that in a world that runs largely on first impressions and stereotypes, there is a frequent and underlying fear that what other people do will reflect back on us if we can be identified with those people. We fear that whatever judgment someone makes about the offenders will be generally projected onto us.

I have found that this tendency is most prevalent in cultures with a dominant sense of collectivism but it happens with all people who see themselves as directly connected with others in some way such as family, teams, political party, nationality, etc. It is the whole idea of being guilty by association. I remember being a child and when the news announced a serious crime my family would be praying that the criminal was not Black. Largely it was because we didn’t want to hear the bad news of another one of us being accused of a crime, but as I learned soon enough, it was also because we didn’t want whatever crime that was committed to reflect on us; further exacerbating the already existing and deliberate tendency of the larger society to view us in a negative light. At first I couldn’t understand why my family felt that way until I noticed that if the criminal was Black, the newscasters would always state that fact, but if they were White, they would never mention it in their descriptions.

I thought about this as I watched the faces of the people on the plane. Being the sensitive type, I allowed myself to feel as much as I could trying to get a sense of what was going on with not only the family trying to find their seat, but also with the other annoyed passengers, and my own inner person. I tried to turn up my compassion and to think more about what the people were experiencing than my own judgments about how I thought people should be. As I watched the family struggling to get in their seats and find a place for their carry-ons, I thought about what it might feel like to already be nervous about flying for the first time as adults not to mention having excited children tagging along. I imagined that they probably were feeling very anxious and likely it was this anxiety that influenced their decision to wait until everyone else was on the plane before boarding. Having never been on a plane before, they would not have known the carry-on situation and therefore did not anticipate having to try and find a place for their stuff because passengers who boarded earlier took their once empty bin. Add to this that they were on display as all of the other seated passengers annoyingly waited for them to get their seats, and I could only imagine that this whole situation was torture for them. Consequently, the wife was subtly pleading for compassion by constantly revealing their inexperience while the husband seemed to be pulling an Adam with a face that said, “this was all her idea.”

As for my wife and the annoyed passengers, I already mentioned part of what I felt was getting to her and some of the other Black passengers who barely looked at the family. There were some passengers who could care less and were just settling in for the flight and then there were those who were projecting their frustration on the family as if they were doing something to them on purpose. At first my mind wanted to make it a racial thing. I wondered if the family was White if they would have been less annoyed. And I think the answer for some of them would have been yes. Is it personal? Sometimes yes, but more often it is no. People just tend to have greater affinity for those who they seem to have more in common with. It is like a programming. They don’t even know they do it half the time it is so ingrained. And then there are the people who are just people who are easily annoyed–which in the Metro-DC area is not uncommon. There are a lot of people who live their daily lives in a rush. Anything that seems to make getting to where they want to be take longer is subject to the wrath. It could have easily been a snow storm and they would be angry with nature. Everything outside of themselves is an equal opportunity annoyer (made up word). These stressed out people probably need a vacation more than anyone. But it is probably likely that they if they were going to Disney, they were going to try and conquer it and ultimately leave their vacation more tired than they were when they arrived. I’d say that they were as good of candidates as anyone for Jesus’ insight to “forgive them for they know not what they do”. And then there leaves me.

I tend to be one of those people who is initially intolerant of intolerant people. I judge people who judge people and condemn those who condemn others. In reality, this is probably the worse kind of judge because those of us who have this tendency have the luxury of what people call righteous indignation. We can convince ourselves that we have the “might of right”. Usually we can point to religious texts like the one below to demonstrate why our point of view is the more accurate one. Consider Matthew 7:1-6 which admonishes people for judging others. It would be easy for me to point to this scripture when attacking someone I see of guilty of judging others unfairly. Used incorrectly, I could do a lot of harm with this scripture. Much like the away those who are adamantly against abortion can justify killing a doctor who performs abortions, using the “thou shalt not kill” defense, I could come to someone who is judging and say to them, “you are a no good dirty rotten judger of people and I hope that you get what is coming to you because you are just wrong because the Bible says don’t judge.” And when I did, I am sure that I would have a lot of people supporting me who also have pent up judgments about themselves and the world around them that they are just waiting to project onto someone else so that they can get the nasty feeling of self-condemnation off of them. But here’s the thing. That’s now passages like the one below are meant to work.

As the second stanza of the poem asks:

Why do I judge
When I know that I don’t like it?
Is it because I know I’m you
But I have no way to fight it?

Passages like Matthew 7 are spoken to and from a place of Oneness. When Jesus speaks to the disciples and others about why we should not judge, he does not do so only from a position outside of us, but from a place within us as well. He is speaking from the all encompassing reality that we all know and that we all are. Paul touches on this awareness when he says in Romans 1:20,”For since the creation of the world His [God’s] invisible attributes are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead, so that they are without excuse.” While I will not unpack the full breadth of this passage right now, I will point to the obvious implication made here that all of Creation knows the fullness of its Source. We are not separate from Source–from God and consequently from one another. Therefore, we have no excuse for living as if the opposite is true. As the Christ, Jesus lives this reality of Wholeness eternally and speaks to us from this place. Thus, when he makes assertions like the one you are about to read, it comes from that place. And from this place his judgments are true, because their only intention is to remind us of who we truly are. For as it says in 1 John 3:2, “Beloved, now we are children of God; and it has not yet been revealed what we shall be, but we know that when He is revealed, we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is.” Now, in this Light read the passage below:

Matthew 7:1-6

7 “Judge not, that you be not judged. 2 For with what judgment you judge, you will be judged; and with the measure you use, it will be measured back to you. 3 And why do you look at the speck in your brother’s eye, but do not consider the plank in your own eye? 4 Or how can you say to your brother, ‘Let me remove the speck from your eye’; and look, a plank is in your own eye? 5 Hypocrite! First remove the plank from your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye. 6 “Do not give what is holy to the dogs; nor cast your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under their feet, and turn and tear you in pieces.

This poem Judge attempts to convey the essence of this passage–that the judgments we project onto others naturally returns upon us precisely because, in Oneness, those others are in fact us. When Christ through Jesus, advises us not to judge, it is because he knows that it is of little effect in transforming our collective consciousness. Our judgments do not transduce the dark energy of ego resistance into the vibrant all-creative energy of realized potential as we deceive ourselves into believing it will (if you would like this sentence unpacked contact me). Only consciousness can do this. This is what Jesus is telling us in verse 3-5 above. What we often find when we release judgment for consciousness is that once we remove the plank from our own eye, we will discover that there never was a speck in our brother or sister’s eye in the first place. All we were seeing was our own projected planks out in the world. However, if after removing the plank from our own eye, we still see a speck in another’s, our conscious Love for them will show us how it can be removed for the benefit of the All.

Rather than unpack the rest of the poem which mentions heaven and hell in the context of being the ultimate in the human struggle with judgment, I will leave you with this expression I found on the bottle of Dr. Bronner’s soap, “For we’re all One or none! Listen children, Eternal Father Eternally One! We’re All One or none! Exceptions eternally? NONE.” As it pertains to this poem, Heaven is acceptance God’s reality and hell is it’s denial. When we deny God’s reality to others we deny it to ourselves. “What we bind on earth we bind in heaven. What we release on earth, we release in heaven.” Such is the Way of One.