Ferreting out the Fraud and Loving the Child Within

03-18-01

Ernest Holmes

"No matter what the problem or its magnitude, you have really nothing to do but convince yourself of the truth which you are affirming. As quickly as you succeed in convincing yourself of the reality of your desire, results will automatically follow."

Joseph Murphy

When I am finishing a picture I hold some God-made object up to it -- a rock, a flower, the branch of a tree or my hand -- as a kind of final test. If the painting stands up beside a thing man cannot make, the painting is authentic. If there's a clash between the two, it is bad art.

Marc Chagall

For God's sake give me the young man who has brains enough to make a fool of himself!

Robert Louis Stevenson

The first and worst of all frauds is to cheat one's self. All sin is easy after that.

Pearl Bailey

Youth itself is a talent -- a perishable talent.

Eric Hoffer

The Lesson

We do have to get honest with ourselves. If we don't, it is no surprise to anyone else when we make mistakes, mistakes over which it seems we cannot get. Our friends, our loved ones could tell us when we are not being honest with ourselves, but they don't, because that would imply that we have the same privilege to be honest on their behalf. While we are meant to be true to ourselves, to the Divine that is within us, for the most part it is up to us how we set up a structure of support for this kind of unvarnished honesty. And, when we act like it doesn't matter, pretty soon, it is no surprise that we find ourselves surrounded by a world of hurt, disappointment and pain. One where it looks like we are right, that it doesn't matter, that all our efforts to change are fruitless. Yet, we have to begin hopefully that something does matter, and that it matters most, and is most effective for us personally, when we are honest with ourselves.

In metaphysics we know that whatever we continue to think about will be mirrored back to us. The idea comes down to a realization that You are Divine. Yes, I meant you in your seat there, you are divine and because you are divine you can expect divine results! So, if you have unhealthy beliefs and attitudes, if you have been unsuccessful in your efforts at change, it is your job to release them and create and dwell in ideas of good. These divine ideas will multiply in the mirror of consciousness and come back to you many times over, creating a flow of good into your life. When we begin to create a change, often it is a very small change, and yet just such small changes have moved river channels to places far from their original course. We have to remember that when the old negative ideas come to visit, we must make sure to affirm that we have changed our minds. Yes, you know you used to believe such negative ideas, but now you have moved on and the past is simply the past. You don't have to dwell in the past. In the present you are blessed by the newness of each moment.

It is our part of wise spiritual practice to build ones faith. One of the ways that we can build the foundation of our faith is to move toward our heart's desires. The idea that if “you can see it, you can be it” comes to mind. Visualization really does work, and through visualization you can create the realization of miracles. By miracle I mean what George Bernard Shaw said when he wrote that "A miracle is an event which creates faith. That is the purpose and nature of miracles. Frauds deceive. An event which creates faith does not deceive: therefore it is not a fraud, but a miracle."

This is one of the ways we ferret out the fraud in our lives, by building our faith and the foundations of our spiritual practices. We don't do this alone. We do this by placing our faith in God. This is a practice, it is not something that we say once and then "Voila! Nirvana." Each of us, maybe not now, but for some time in our lives lived lives that were absent faith in the divinity of all of life. We lived without a sense that there was anything sacred in our everyday lives. Or perhaps, we lived without hope and felt that life was so hard and that it was by means of stealth and manipulation that we somehow got by. These old thoughts, these old patterns of living made their marks on us and it is our spiritual task now to reverse the habits of these old ways of thinking and then to forget about them: to think something new and powerful that magnifies and multiplies the abundant expression of Love and a sense of acceptance of the good that is already here, the good that is already ours. Just as we are blind to things that we have never seen and then we see them everywhere as soon as we know, the good of life has always been everywhere and by choosing cynicism and self-righteousness we blinded ourselves to its existence. One of the things that I find most amazing is that some things really are easy to stop. Some times we have to stop many times to make something stick, but the act itself is easy.

I watched the movie "The Kid" this week starring Bruce Willis. OK, I admit it, I fell for Bruce Willis when he co-starred in Moonlighting. That aside, there was such a wonderful central premise in this movie, of a guy about to turn 40--think "Passages" where we remember what we said we'd be, and realize that we are at that certain stage of life, and have NOT done what we said we would do. How they come to grips with that for the 40 year old and the 8 year old is the subject matter of the movie. This uptight guy about to be 40 and his 8 year old self through the magic of movies come together face-to-face. As the adult, he tries to return the 8 year old to the past, and in so doing he begins to come to grips with decisions he has made about life that have shaped who he is, and the possibilities his life holds for him now. In the process the kid he was asks the man he is now about the fraud his life has become. The boy asks him how come there is no lady, no dog named Chester, who is the best dog in the world, and he is not a pilot. The kid, faced with his future, sees that he has become a "loser." The adult sees that he lost track of his youthful innocence, his dreams and values.

Just so we are talking about the same thing, I'll say that innocence is the primary quality of youth that we lose through unconsciously wandering through life. Innocence requires consciousness if it is to be maintained. Innocence in a mature spiritual being is the ability to be with life the way it is and to remain unchanged by it. As we develop as human beings we develop sophistication at the cost of our innocence. We get jaded, sarcastic and cynical to the degree that we lose the ability to appreciate how good life really is. How might we recover our innocence once we are already sophisticated?

"The deepest definition of youth is life as yet untouched by tragedy." says Alfred North Whitehead. Can we remain untouched? Can we keep our selves connected to our inner joy? Perhaps by asking ourselves the question "What cynical decisions have you made that have foreclosed the glorious possibilities of your life? Can you give those decisions up and allow life to shine through you as it did when you were a child?" Who said you are not strong enough, smart enough, pretty enough, tall enough? Who can stop saying those things if not you, yourself for your own benefit and for what it gives to the family of man for you to succeed in following your bliss?

Now, I am not talking about glorifying childhood, but ferreting out its wisdom and creativity. Childhood is not for sissies. Hard things happen and no one explains them to us adequately at the time, and we make up a great many rules about how life is out of scant materials such as inexperience, sorrow, pain, disinformation and incomplete impressions. We live out of these rules for a long time before we are mature enough to challenge them, to change the ideas. It is wisdom o notice that we are operating out of rules that are either based in a partial understanding or simply not at all true. Some of the attitudes and beliefs we have we got from our parents, our teachers and other well-intentioned grown ups. Some of these came from our reactions to what we thought were bad ideas, and so we made up rules that said we could NOT EVER do that!

In this process we foreclosed a bit of our freedom; with each of these decisions, we foreclosed our view of the infinite. The good news is that none of that stuff has to be permanent. Whenever you hear someone tell you they can't do something because they are "too old" "too slow" "not smart enough" they are selling you swamp land in Florida. Change occurs out of a willingness to change. Children don't yet believe that they cannot change, and because they don't, little can stop them from things that they wish to do.

Youth is not a time of life, it is a state of mind. You are as old as your doubt, your fear, your despair. The way to keep young is to keep your faith young. Keep your self-confidence young. Keep your hope young. In "The Kid" the boy at 8 was beginning to be afraid he would make a mistake and disappoint his father. So he was beginning to suppress his self-expression. He was beginning to hide his true self and show a "mask" that he thought would be more acceptable. He was beginning not to try certain things because he was beginning to think that he had to know how first. The fear of criticism is the death of genius and creativity.

Youth gets together with their materials to build a bridge to the moon or maybe a palace on earth; then in middle age they decide to build a woodshed with them instead.

Henry David Thoreau

You'd think that Thoreau reincarnated and wrote the script for the movie I have described! Why do we settle for so much less? I wonder that we don't find some compassion for ourselves, that when we were kids we had some glorious dreams, goals and aspirations. Some of them we can still take action upon, if we would but stop throwing our hands up in the air and settling for excuses for the things that we so deeply desired. The greatest of American architects, Frank Lloyd Wright said that "Youth is a quality, not a matter of circumstances."

“Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about.” W. H. Auden said this about writing, but we could apply this to everything about how we live our lives. There are 6 billion people on the planet right now. That is a number that is nearly beyond imagination and it makes you wonder about how original anything can be. We keep trying to be special when the best thing we can probably do is to just be ourselves. The only truly original thing about us as individuals is, most likely, the network of relationships that we have and how we live our lives in that community. This we have a choice about.

If we want to rediscover ourselves, the Divinity that is within each of us, and live our lives with authenticity, we really do need to find the courage to say NO to the ideas, habits, and people that are not serving us. We have to say yes to Love, which is an acceptance of the existence of all of what we are, and that we have been. We have to allow for falling short in some of our dreams and come to a place of peace with the way that it has worked out, and we have to be willing to choose now, in the moment what we would do. We have a new perspective and we can use it! Lamenting the results of our past decisions is not a substitute for the courage to risk living in the present, choosing what and who we will be, what we will do, what we shall demonstrate as our deepest and highest expression of our self. What will we offer God as our way of expressing that which is Divine within us?

We have so many ideas, an endless stream of ideas seems to be the place where we are always standing in our lives. How is it that we are to fulfill all of these ideas, and why would we want to in the first place? Isn’t the idea that we could fulfill all of these ideas some part of the youthful feeling of invincibility that comes of feeling we have forever and things are somehow of equal importance? Just because an idea came by, do we have to act upon it? How do we know which ideas are the ones that we might wish to combine with our creative power? We combine ideas with our creative power when we dwell on them, when we put some energy, feeling and focus and an idea together, we make it real. The idea moves from the invisible into form. It is then quite obvious who we might wish to choose to keep company with, those who would support the creative power for good within us, those who would be there for us when we have to deal with the old and the difficult and we could best chose those who will be there for us when we have to say NO to the past and stand for the present.

Standing in an endless flow of ideas, and you know you are if you have ever tried to stop thinking, we then have to select which ideas from out of this infinite flow do we wish to select and explore. This is what free will is all about. This is your life and only you can be in charge of ferreting out the fraud, the shortcuts, the sellouts which are an ordinary part of human existence, only you can appreciate the innocence you can bring to your everyday life. Only you know if you can benefit from being as vulnerable as a child, taking the risk of innocence and expressing the self you were divinely given for the gift that it is to all of life. This is your true self and “this is the day that the Lord has made. Rejoice in it!” As Ernest Holmes said, and I affirm now “There is a power for good in the universe, greater than we are, and we can use it.”

Whatever things are true, whatever things are noble, whatever things are just, whatever things are pure, whatever things are lovely, whatever things are of good report, if there is any virtue and if there is anything praiseworthy-meditate on these things. Phillippians 4:8