Your Personal ResurrectionWith Easter coming upon us, now is as good a time as any for you to accept your personal resurrection. Although we do not literally nail ourselves to a cross, most of us crucify ourselves daily: we criticize ourselves, we talk ourselves down, we berate ourselves for our mistakes, and for our shortcomings we give ourselves the gifts of thorns and nails. This season offers us the chance to give ourselves the gift of lilies instead, thereby experiencing the opposite of your personal crucifixion -- your personal resurrection. Although Jesus was not the only man to be nailed to a cross, he is certainly the most famous of the crucified. Jesus taught many great lessons but I believe his greatest lesson (and the lesson that encompassed all of the others) was that of his personal resurrection showed the way of your personal resurrection. Here is what I believe he would have us learn: This is a world of cause and effect, with our thoughts and beliefs being the cause and all that our bodies experience being the effect. Therefore, for Jesus to experience a resurrection of his body, He first must have experienced a resurrection of His mind. What is a resurrection of the mind? It is to have one's mind relinquish all beliefs that lead to an experience of separation from Unity, and in their place wholly accept the belief of Infinite Love and Oneness. In so doing, our minds become one with the One Mind. As soon as Jesus the man valued only love-based beliefs He became Jesus the Christ, the embodiment of the Christ Principle. From that point on, He knew that separation from Unity was impossible and in the acceptance of this self-evident truth became one with the almighty power of God. It was because He realized he was under no laws but God's that He was able to transcend the laws of medicine, physics, health, economics, geography, and any and all of the other laws the world abides by. He transcended (and broke) every law we believe a body must follow in order to survive. It was because He accepted an unlimited mindset that He was able to transcend and manipulate the body. He was now Limitlessness Itself, so His body and the body of others became meaningless to him. He was no longer limited by nor defined by His body because He realized He was a perfect Thought of God. It was the resurrection of His mind, therefore, that was the personal resurrection, the resurrection that was important to Jesus. All bodies were just symbols to Him after that, illusions representing a belief in the possibility of separation from the Infinite. His manipulations (miracles) of His body and the bodies of others were done with even greater ease than a magician performing parlor games. Logically it follows, then, that the resurrection of His body was, except as a teaching tool, of little importance to Him, a forgone conclusion and an obvious natural outcome. Why would He value the rebirth of an illusion? To Jesus, His bodily resurrection was just another example of Limitlessness being able to manipulate the limited. (To the inevitable question of how He performed such a huge miracle as a physical resurrection, I can almost hear Him say, “Ah, no biggie.”) I believe He felt no pain on the cross, no anguish in those last few days, no sense of betrayal by Judas, and no sense of abandonment by the disciples. It doesn't make sense that anyone who truly experiences Unity could believe that pain, anguish, betrayal, or abandonment could be real, as all these emotions are only possible when one invests in the notion of duality -- of an "other" -- as a possibility. It is impossible to know "All is one" while at the same time thinking there is an "other." In Unity, there is no "other" to betray or to abandon; there is no body, with its central nervous system, to experience pain. There is a story told that when another Christed Master, Buddha, was asked by His disciples who He was -- "Are you the Buddha, the great Teacher, the Enlightened One?" -- He merely replied, "I am none of these. I am awake." Like the Buddha, Jesus, too, was awake. He awoke from the dream of separation because He came to the only realization that is possible: we cannot be outside of Infinity, it is an impossibility. Yet this is the idea dualistic religious beliefs demand we accept: "God is Infinite yet we are separated from Him." An awakened mind sees the impossibility of that statement and no longer invests in the confusion of trying to sustain it. Jesus stated that He was our elder brother and taught that we could do anything He had done and more. He told us we don't have to forge a new path to enlightenment; we just needed to follow His example. And the example He was suggesting we follow was not of his physical crucifixion but of his meaningful and more personal resurrection -- the resurrection of the mind. His example was one of forgiveness. By forgiving ourselves for believing that we could ever be separate from That Which is everywhere, we would experience Unity and claim our natural inheritance as the Divine Children of an unconditionally loving God. Free your mind and the rest will follow -- automatically, effortlessly, naturally. No matter what your religious beliefs, no matter what date your religious calendar suggests is the "right" day, make today your Easter, your day of personal resurrection. Accept your rightful place in Unity.
============================================ About This Lecture On Your Personal Resurrection ============================================ © 2006 Wesley J. Doherty/An Easier Life, Inc, All rights reserved. You are free to use material from the "Your Easier Life Newsletter" in whole or in part, as long as you include complete attribution, including live web site link. Please also notify me where the material will appear. The attribution should read: "By Wesley J. Doherty of An Easier Life, Inc. Please visit Wesley's web site at www.AnEasierLife.com for additional articles, programs, and resources on how to have your easier life." (Please make sure the link is live if placed in an eZine or in a web site.)
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