Becoming Human….

Are you a sinner? No. Is your proxy a sinner? Yes.

Being truly normal is being truly human. We are made in God’s image, and we should act it. Stop thinking of God as a selfish being. We believe that, since we are made in God’s image and we are selfish, then God is, too. But to act as God does, we have to surrender to God. God is the most surrendered Being. He is pure Subject and puts up with our pretense of self-sufficient existence.

To be human, then, is to be surrendered to God—surrendered to Love. God’s nature is Love. Is that your nature? What is your motivation? Do you not understand why we have foursquares? They are designed to uncover the Truth. We always call what we do good; even when we tell ourselves we are bad, we really believe that saying so makes us good. Even in our wretchedness, we are goodness and piety. We never accept within ourselves the negative of the foursquare; instead, we project the negative onto others and keep the pure for ourselves. Really? You are so pure? We are all dirty. You can’t get rid of what you won’t own.

We cannot begin to be in God’s image without first accepting that we are dirty. Only then will we finally begin to head in the direction of pure. Resist your dirtiness and you will remain dirty always, no matter how many mantras you recite. As George MacDonald wrote, “But indeed the business of the universe is to make such a fool of you that you will know yourself for one, and so begin to be wise!”

The small self—who we think we are—is a mess. Thank God it is not actually who we are. We are supposed to learn what the small self is, both good and bad, and then Be who we really are: the Witness of that good and bad. This is not about dissociating, which is just another way of being attached to the small self. This is about being nonattached. Who we truly are is Love. Being the “good” or “pious” or “lady” or “gentleman” that fits your foursquare is just inhabiting and projecting your narrow idea of those qualities—an idea that ultimately is selfish, and not anyone’s true nature.

So’ham. I am That. Not “I am a good person”. Not “I am a lady, gentleman, fearful, courageous, holy”. Sādhana is learning the ins and outs of the worldly playing field and enjoying the joke that none of it is us. We have proxies playing on that field, while all of us actually live in the playing field of the Heart. There is no one, no matter how evil, who does not in Reality live in the playing field of the Heart.

We have forgotten this, and lose ourselves working so hard to perform on the world playing field. We gradually become more and more miserable and wander further away from the Truth of our identity. When we have so forgotten ourselves, our inner voice of “righteousness” is in fact the voice that is the most destructive to us. But we listen to it, and become more and more twisted. Then we are far from being human, because we are so far from being in God’s image. At that point God, in the form of people and events, rises against us and frees us through battle to return to ourselves.

Wake up from the dream that is a nightmare. Wake up from your righteousness and become human. Wake up from the dichotomy of good and bad. Stop projecting onto others. Wake up and love yourself, so that you can love others. The only way to do that is to give up your wrong identity with the proxy on the worldly playing field and return to who you really are. The most human you can be is to know that you are made in God’s image and live that Reality.