you will gradually see the error of false identification disappear.
For example, if you want to stop a compulsive habit of overeating, begin by no longer identifying yourself as a body full of cravings (ignorance). Instead imagine yourself as pure eternal peace and joy always unified with God. Ignorance keeps you from genuinely experiencing pleasure or fulfillment via the senses because you clutch at what appears to provide it rather than seek purity or true happiness. A false identification will always betray you. The senses will keep tempting you with objects of desire.
Unlearn the false identification of your thoughts with your ego-senses and instead see yourself as a part of the infinite. As you do, you will still act on your thoughts but you will be acting as a divine perfectly balanced eternal being. I love the idea of eternal soul presented in this excerpt from the Bhagavad-Gita:
The illumined soul …
Thinks always: “I am doing nothing.” No matter what he sees, hears, touches, smells, eats … This he knows always: “I am not seeing, I am not hearing: It is the senses that see and hear and touch the things of the senses.”
To become an illumined soul we must not conceptualize ourselves as our senses and all that they lust after. That is ignorance. We are not the objects of experience, but the silent observer within the experience itself. Seeing ourselves in this way provides us with a new tool for problem solving. Try it the next time you feel the impulse to overeat or consume a toxic substance or even to spend time in painful grief over a loss.
A dramatic example of this presented itself in the following letter and poem I received from Mary Lou Van Atta of Newark, Ohio. She is speaking directly to this idea of false identification as she writes of her ordeal and how she ultimately found a spiritual solution by remembering who she is, rather than who she had falsely believed she was.
Dear Dr. Dyer,
My son was murdered in a robbery attempt two years ago. Frankly, I thought I would never recover from my grief and loss. Amid all the clouds in my life and mind, I was somehow led, once more, to your books and tapes. I had read and listened to many in previous years and while I had enjoyed them, I was too busy to truly listen. Upon going over them again, I realized one underlying truth in all. We are spirit in body—not a body with a spirit.
I am once more a happy, healthy woman with a full steam ahead system. I will always feel my loss of Ross, but I know it is not the end of the story. I can wait. It’s O.K.
I have enclosed a small poem that I hope you will enjoy. I wrote it but you taught it.
Again, thank you.
Sincerely, Mary Lou Van Atta
Indeed, as Patanjali reminds us, we are spirit in body. Believing otherwise is ignorance through false identification. In that state of ignorance we become solutionless in form. When we experience what Saint Paul called a “renewal of the mind” we are able to see ourselves as we truly are.
With Mary Lou’s permission I include the poem she wrote. It summarizes this first ancient “radical” idea. The central act of ignorance is not being ill-informed, but in falsely identifying yourself as your form.
I AM
The “I” that is me—you cannot see
You see only the form that you think is me. This form that you see, will not always be; but the “I” that is me—lives eternally.
The next time that you face a problem that you have been unable to resolve, try redefining yourself as Mary Lou suggests in “I Am,” and put into practice your true identification as the eternal experiencer rather than the object of that experiencer. Ask yourself these key questions from the ancient Upanishads: “At whose behest does the mind think? Who bids the body to live? Who makes the ear hear and the tongue speak?”
Your true identity is the mind of mind, the eye of the eye, and the breath of the breath. Go there and you will find the beginning of a spiritual solution to any problems you believe you have. Here is how Meher Baba described this process of overcoming one’s ignorance as we are defining the term here.
“Thus, though he begins by seeking something utterly new, he really arrives at a new understanding of something ancient. The spiritual journey does not consist in arriving at a new destination where a person gains what he did not have or becomes what he was not. It consists in the dissipation of his ignorance concerning himself and life, and the gradual growth of that understanding which begins with spiritual awakening. The finding of God is a coming to one’s own self.” Your objective in applying this ancient wisdom is to dissipate your ignorance concerning yourself and life.
THE SECOND APHORISM
The mind of the truly illumined is calm because the peace of God within all things is known, even within the appearance of misery and disease.
This second aphorism brings to mind the adage that the three truly difficult things to do in life are: returning love for hate; including the excluded; and saying, “I was wrong.” It is the first and most difficult item, returning love for hate, that I want to explore here.
As I was studying the ancient words of Patanjali I came across a reference that implied the following: God cannot express God’s self in you when you are not at peace. As I thought about those words I had a deep realization that God is love. I recognized that it was in a state of stillness that the realization occurred. If it requires stillness to know God, then we need to be in a place of loving calmness in order to be able to have God’s assistance in problem solving. Thus, the most difficult thing to do, to return love for hate, becomes much simpler when we are able to be peaceful because that is actually God expressing God’s self within us.
When we return love for hate we express the peace of God that is within us. Our response has a calm and loving quality. This calmness is a vital aspect of the consciousness that makes it possible to tap into spiritual solutions.
I’ve selected two passages from the Bible to reinforce the relationship between stillness or calmness and God. By taking the scriptural statement and reversing it, we can clearly recognize what happens when we are unable or unwilling to choose stillness. So, “Be anxious, or fearful and you will not know God” is what we have in place of “Be still, and know that I am God” (Psalm 46:10).
Instead of “God is love; and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God in him” (I John 4:16), we would have “God is fear and he that dwelleth in fear cannot dwell in God, nor God in him.”
Probably you are thinking that this makes sense. God is still. God is love. When I am neither, I have no chance of allowing a spiritual solution to present itself. But how do I get to that place of calmness? I believe you can move into that state of knowing God within through stillness by intentionally choosing calmness in moments of anxiety or fear. Yes, you can choose to be calm at any moment by reminding yourself that you are no longer choosing to live by your conditioned past. It is largely because of our conditioning that we leave God behind when we leave calmness.
We have trained ourselves to be fearful and anxious when presented with problems. If we choose, we can retrain ourselves to be calm and to allow God to express God’s self in us once again. As I discussed in chapter one, problems begin, unequivocally, in our minds. We may have to remind ourselves that our mind is where the problem exists, nowhere else. Thus the “illusion” which I mentioned earlier. Correct the error, and the illusion disappears. Our conditioning has led us to the error of thinking of ourselves in terms of finite beings.
James Carse, in his book Finite and Infinite Games, describes a world of finite games in which winners and losers, rules, boundaries, and time are all extremely important. In the world of finite games, titles, acquisitions, and prestige are of paramount significance. Planning, strategy, and secrecy are all crucial. To become a master player in the world of finite games you have an audience who knows the rules and who will grant you a reputation. Being identified with losers in the finite game is frightening