Beyond Suffering
Transcribed from a research reading by Penney Peirce,
conducted in trance at a class on Healing Emotional Pain
at The Center for Applied Intuition, summer 1987, and updated for today. . .
“It is a terrible thing, this kindness that human beings do not lose. Terrible because when we are finally naked in the dark and cold, it is all we have. We who are so rich, so full of strength, wind up with that small change. We have nothing else to give.”
— Ursula K. LeGuin
It’s deceptive when people advise you to “just love yourself” and everything will be fine. Our predominant model of living is linear, that is, we visualize projecting or sending (and receiving) love along lines. So we naturally use that image when thinking about loving ourself. But how can we get outside ourself to project love back to ourself?
You cannot be separate from yourself in order to see yourself or love yourself. You can only BE yourself and that means if you ARE love, the only thing you can do IS love. Love is who you are and love is what you do. So, don’t love yourself, just love. Just love, just love, just love. “I am Love, I am Loving.” Don’t try to receive love: Be love.
The only time we move into suffering is when we try to receive love, because the underlying belief is we don’t have enough love, that love comes from the “outside world” and we have to GET it. And the outside world doesn’t really care about us. So there is unnecessary effort and stress.
There is a great error when we try to love other people or please them so they will love us, because it introduces the idea of will power trying to control the flow of love, as though love is a limited resource. And any time you use will power, you believe you don’t have what you’re trying to get, so that belief determines the outcome, and you won’t get love.
When you try to love yourself by looking at your image through other people’s eyes — there is only a facsimile of love. Depending how you sense how they see you, that’s all the love you’ll allow yourself. You have lost your connection with the central issue that you ARE love and all you want is to radiate it, share it, experience it, and feel it in motion.
So if you know who you are, why do you ever stop yourself from doing that? You need to go into a deep state and feel the sense of truth about who you really are, then from that place you must say, “There’s nothing else in this world except me, the individual me and the great me, and I am Love, so my whole world is Love. And I will never allow anything that is not this, that does not have this quality of oneness and love, to exist in my world, in any of my dimensions. So — the alternative to suffering: the statement and experience of “I AM.”
You must first have the experience of yourself, and second, you must bring that experience into the body, into the here and now. It must become a feeling. How do you do that? You center. Bring your awareness inside your skin: Here. What does “here” denote? It denotes the body, it denotes space. Then you come into the now. Now denotes time. Time and space — put yourself squarely into the intersection of time and space where your physical body exists; come into alignment with that location. And as you do you say, “I am Love; and I am Here, and I am Now. 100%. There’s not one part of me that isn’t Love, not one part of me that isn’t Light. I am everything.” This is the warrior’s stance — total presence, total conviction, total knowledge, no doubt. So, you are Love, you are Here, you are Now, you are in the body, you have BECOME the body AS the higher superconsciousness or soul consciousness.
Next, start expanding the bubble of your present moment, in terms of space and time. So from the awareness of being the body, next become the aura; “I am everything around me for 3 feet, 5 feet, 10 feet, above and below. I am the luminous egg. I have no skin; my body is open. I am light permeating everywhere. I am a collection of particles of light floating in space; a ball of light.” Let the light clear until you simply feels its presence in everything around you, and keep expanding yourself, gradually including everything into your conscious awareness, until you reach a point where nothing in this world exists outside of you. “I am the world; the earth exists inside my consciousness; the peoples of the world live inside of me. The solar system lives inside my awareness.” You can go as far as you want, making the universe personal — then you can come back again, knowing you are the full spectrum of self.
Realize that as you increase your awareness of size or scope, which is space — you have also increased the amount of time you have. You have empowered yourself for action, because you have unlimited time and space. And, if you have included other people inside your consciousness, they are partially being created by you and are therefore a part of you, an aspect of you. And they must be embodying a certain thought or facet of your identity. So there is a learning here — that as you look at others and say, “This is me. How is this me? What is the message they bring?” — then you know more about your own inner dynamics and the ingenuity of your creativity.
The skin is no boundary. What occurs inside your mind, the thoughts that are seeded to you from the inner self, are also happening in the outer mind, that which we often refer to as the “environment” or your world, your reality. The environment is your outer self. The inner and outer selves always act in unison, so that if you will start matching or aligning the occurrences in the “world” with the same thoughts inside your brain, you will feel bigger, more confident and at peace, and more of your Self will be available to the conscious you.
So, to summarize, the key to ending suffering is to be fully present, here and now, as your true Self, including others within you as your Self. If your Self is Love, they are Love. If you are in harmony, they are in harmony. If you are Love, your whole world is Love if you have merged with your world. If you are loving, the world is loving, the people in your world are loving, loving anything in their world, and if you come near them, they love you. You are “in love” together.
If you are your Self, there is no suffering. And yet there will be people who occur within you who still suffer. Just be with them. Don’t believe them. Think, “I hear you, and I KNOW you are not hearing your Self. I am going to be with you, fully, for even just one moment.” Let them feel your presence, let them merge into it as much as they wish, let them become you, as you become them. Let the beingness equalize, and your certainty will transfer to them and they will KNOW.
And it won’t be you who’s done it, it will be the Self who has done it. It’s your alignment with and affirmation of what is already so, being communicated to the part of them that knows this is true as well, to that little spark inside them that has never been blown out. That little spark perks up, says “You are right! That’s what I’ve been waiting for, and now I can come into activation. And I will displace through my own presence all that is not true in this personality.” As this occurs there is the possibility of instantaneous healing, sudden positive personality changes, or personal transformation.
