Only Love Is

Teach only Love for that is what you are

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Interview by Gene Bogart,
Forgiveness TV
With Nouk Sanchez & Tomas Vieira,
authors of Take Me to Truth, Undoing the Ego

Nouk & Tomas will be teaching a 4 day workshop
in Victoria over the Easter weekend entitled:
'Love Without Limits - Undoing The Ego'
 

 
 Gene: "As potential readers see literally thousands of spiritually oriented books out there, how does "Take Me to Truth, Undoing the Ego" present a unique benefit to those who sincerely desire spiritual awakening?"
 
Nouk and Tomas:
“This is not your intellectual brand of awakening. This is for those who genuinely want to undo the root cause of all suffering – the ego. We offer a guide for those who wish to participate in the daily practice of undoing their ego.
 
Awakening occurs through the conscious application of three major principles being: Quantum forgiveness, Radical self-inquiry and Now moment presence.
 
Many religious and spiritual studies are predicated on the belief that God created this world; our book is based on the principles of A Course in Miracles, which explains that God did not create this world, we did.
 
From absolute Oneness, which is Infinite Love, there emerged a “tiny mad idea” of separation, an illusion of separate individuals. We fell into a dream of this present world of time and space; a dream of duality. Our mission then, is to awaken from the dream, not to get lost in it or to even try to excel in it.
 
This fundamental difference completely changes one’s approach to the journey of awakening. If you still believe that God (All that Is) created this world, you’re bound to experience some serious inner conflict which will always manifest as adversity or scarcity of some kind in your life. Why? Because if an all-loving God is responsible for creating this world of duality, including fear, hatred and death, then we haven’t got a chance of escaping. We are then truly at the mercy of God, victims of a random world totally out of our control!
 
Take Me to Truth, Undoing the Ego, presents the concept of spiritual “awakening” in a way that can be simply applied by anyone at anytime, no matter what the circumstances by offering ways to practice quantum forgiveness, radical self-inquiry and now moment presence. It’s about unlearning who we are not so that who we are can be revealed and we are awakened.”
 
 
Gene: "In the 'undoing of the ego' as your book presents it, what actual advantages are there? What is the ultimate payoff that people can expect to experience?"
 
Nouk and Tomas: “The ego is the belief in separation. It’s the “I” we think is real, while participating in this dream world. It’s really a mass of un-investigated beliefs riddled with fears, phobias and illusory memories. The ego projected this reality in order to escape the massive unconscious guilt that it acquired from the separation. If you (the ego) think you’re at the mercy of a force outside you that ultimately controls everything then you are in a position of “effect”; you’re at the mercy of something (God) that you think is the “cause”. All of a sudden, every disappointment in your life, from minor to major like death, is seen as being done “to” you, making you a victim.
 
If, on the other hand, you begin to embrace the idea that you (personally & collectively) made this reality, and that it is but a dream, then you’re in the miraculous realm of realizing that it’s all a projection of your mind. This perception invites a conscious awareness that in Truth, the world is really being done “by” you, and not “to” you. Now you’re in a position of “cause” and no longer at the mercy of “effects”.
 
Through applying quantum forgiveness, radical self-inquiry and now moment presence, you learn to change your reaction to and experience of events. You learn to “Love what is” and your perception is cleansed. And because you’re realizing that projection makes perception you’re effecting a change at the nucleus level. You will no longer take things so personally, old patterns and habits will drop off and you’ll have more compassion and forgiveness.
 
As you progress, your ego will begin disappearing and the blocks and limitations to experiencing profound love along with it. You’ll be free of the need to judge, defend, protect, sacrifice or control. Struggle also disappears as it’s replaced by an abundance of inspirational motivation that always leads you to exactly where you’re supposed to be. Undoing the ego delivers us from our severely delusional will. Once this “little” will surrenders to Truth, we find that the Universal Inspiration’s Will is all we are and all that we could ever want.
 
On a practical level (the level of form) your life will reflect this integration in all your relationships with people, things, places and circumstances. The ego controls our every waking and sleeping thought and action. If 99.9% of our time is spent laboring through life with the ego’s perception, can you imagine what life would be like once you surrendered that burden?
 
To surrender judgment and control is to experience intimately an indescribable joy that consistently permeates your perception.
 
Gene: "I know it's difficult to summarize a detailed thought system such as you've presented in, 'Take Me to Truth, Undoing The Ego', into just a few short words... but as much as it's possible here, how would you sum up the process of awakening?"
 
Nouk and Tomas:
“Well for starters awakening is not a glamorous affair.
It’s really a demolition project!
The ego loves to spiritualize the whole awakening process by suffusing it with the special beauty or power of certain objects, places and practices. It thrives on intellectual knowledge and is enthralled by amazing phenomena. While all these are OK in themselves, they often develop into spiritual bypass mechanisms if they become one’s focus, instead of the job at hand which is awakening.
 
We need to remember that all these things, as great as they are, are still projections coming from our own minds and are occurring at the level of “form”. If we truly wish to undo the ego then we need to return our thoughts/intentions to the only level that’s real: the mind. Everything that exists in our perception is “caused” by our mind, so any real changes must originate from that source. Spiritual awakening is usually preceded by some sort of disillusionment, perhaps a relationship break-up, death, illness, identity crisis etc. It’s often heralded by the “falling away” of a long held perception. While this is usually the beginning, we find that the entire process becomes a succession of uninvestigated beliefs falling away.
 
You might ask, “Why all this discomfort? Can’t we just awaken with love to love?” The answer is no, because as an ego, you don’t know love. The ego can’t possibly understand it, give it or receive it. Love is our natural State beneath our dysfunctional perception. To get to it requires the systematic dismemberment of its entire belief system.
 
According to A Course in Miracles, there are six stages to be experienced and their purpose is the development of Trust. As the ego is undone, a new and profound layer of Trust is seen to emerge from within and mirrored back to us from our seeming outer reality.”
 
 
Gene: "I'm sure that to a lot of people, the practice of forgiveness might seem like the hardest thing to do! Are you ever asked if there is perhaps an easier way?"
 
Nouk and Tomas: “A paradigm shift is required and it becomes easy once you understand and practice it. We’re not talking the old brand of forgiveness here. That sets both of us apart because if I’m big enough to forgive you for the awful hurt you caused, then I’m setting myself above you and I’m making myself a victim. I’m giving you absolution for doing something of which I was a victim. I’m forgetting that there’s really only One of us here. You’re my own projection and while you appeared to offend, I must remember that there’s only one ego here appearing as many.
 
So if I want to awaken out of this dream, I need to remember that you’re appearing here to give me an opportunity to forgive you, by realizing it never really happened at the Highest level. In fact, when I’m forgiving you, I’m actually “overlooking a mistake” that your ego, which I projected, seemed to make. Every time I view it this way, I’m forgiving myself and undoing another great chunk of the unconscious guilt that keeps me in the birth and death cycle.
 
So, when someone offends us or presses our buttons, we could view it as an opportunity to apply quantum forgiveness. We could remember that our Purpose is to awaken and see that every forgiveness opportunity that presents itself, gives us the chance to surrender another great chunk of ego that’s been obscuring Loves’ presence in our lives.”
 
 
Gene: "I've heard that both of you, Nouk and Tomas, are pioneering a rather miraculous dynamic in the relationship area. Your story is totally out of the ordinary; in fact, it's almost unbelievable! Is this concept that you are living and teaching perhaps responsible for bringing about a paradigm shift in the area of relationships?"
 
Nouk and Tomas: “Before our awakening, Tomas (my co-author) and I were married. We later reached a point of awareness where in order to save our relationship we decided to end the marriage. This sounds crazy to the ego, but let me explain because there’s quite a miraculous outcome to all of this, and it will continue to reverberate far beyond our limited perception.
 
In the beginning, we viewed relationship & love much the way the rest of the world does. He was there to meet my needs & I was there to meet his. We fell in love, joined in a commonly accepted goal, got married, had a precious daughter and each pursued our own careers’ journey.
 
In relationship, the ego always has an unconscious goal of which we’re not aware. Its catch cry is, “seek but never find”. And it makes sure you live out its prediction, even if it looks like you’re the victim of circumstances. Unknowingly we enter a relationship, each with two independent self-seeking goals. The ego seeks to be “special” and its need is for pseudo-worthiness which it aims to take from another for itself. In a secret pact, it agrees to give its partner part of its own special pseudo-self in exchange. The problem for all worldly relationships is when one or both partners fail to meet the ego desires of the other which is inevitable. This is where our “special” relationship fell apart.
 
In 1990, we were introduced to ACIM and I knew without a doubt that this was the Purpose for which my life was intended. Like many new comers to a spiritual path, I made some pretty terrible misinterpretations and a lot of mistakes in those early years. It was explained to us that Love can never end, can never be terminated & that Love can never turn to hate. This was absolutely profound! On the deepest of levels I knew this to be true, but how to achieve it? We saw at that time, that the institution of marriage (for us back then) represented the ego’s special relationship. And seeing that, we both decided to embrace a whole new Love, one of which we had no clue about.

 
Our story is radical; you don’t have to end a
marriage to enter into a Unified relationship.
It’s just that we were pioneers at the time and extremes seemed to reign.  In the book we talk about the miraculous Unified relationship (Holy Relationship) and the transformational process from the ego’s ‘special’ relationship to the Unified one. We have since discovered that Love cannot ever die, disappear or end…. and that there’s absolutely no limit to it.
 
Only the ego imagines that it experiences love turning to hate. Why? because as young children and now, as children in adult bodies, we’ve never been “seen”. No one has ever really seen us, because most of the love we’ve ever experienced was of the ego. It was a pseudo love that never reached & touched our core. Even our parents as loving as they may have been, were still largely in their mistaken identity, the ego.  So the sad fact is that most of us have been raised and judged by the ego perception of our parents and others.
 
Without a truthful mirror of who we are and perceiving from our own uninvestigated ego, imagine trying to love others? We can’t see another truly, neither do they see us, so how in the world can we believe that Love can never turn to hate or diminish?
 
For Tomas and me, we learned the meaning of love through the dismantling of our old relationship in the quest for a Holy Relationship (Unified Relationship). We bravely surrendered the ego props of judgment, expectation and guilt and started to see each other as a part of One Self.
 
We dared to practice truly seeing each other. As we learned to accept each other without the usual judgments, and underpinned by the desire and willingness for the highest outcome for each other regardless of our fears, we grew to experience a Love that exceeds our wildest imaginings.
 
In seeing the other as yourself, the chunk of ego that previously kept you trapped in a dualistic world falls away and all of a sudden you’re seeing, experiencing another dimension here while you’re in the dream. ACIM calls this “The Happy Dream”. Now you really are a miracle worker. We hear so much about “Oneness” in spiritual teachings but rarely do we get to witness and really participate in its awesome dynamic. That’s because we don’t practice Oneness consistently. Every time we take offence we’re not seeing Oneness, we’re seeing duality and reinforcing it in our perception. To see Oneness we must practice it! Its miracle can only be known through extending it in spite of what the ego interprets as threat.
 
For instance, if someone offends you, you realize two things, 1. That this is your own projection, and 2. That the offence is coming from their ego. Any attack or judgment is always a cry for love and being so, it deserves a loving response which is always forgiveness.
 
The only way to reach a critical mass in terms of manifesting miracles and undoing the ego is to consistently practice the dynamic of forgiveness and boy did we have to practice with each other! ‘The Miracle will justify your faith in it’. We are living proof of it.”
 
Authors & Teachers: Nouk Sanchez & Tomas Vieira
Interviewer: Gene Bogart Producer of Forgiveness TV.
Visit: www.genebogart.com
Gene Bogart is the Producer and Co-Host of the highly successful Gary Renard Podcast.

 


 

 

 

Why

A Course In

Miracles?

By Jewel - Julia Day


We all say we want to “Wake Up” but what does that mean?  Are we really ready to relinquish our individual dreams of specialness and individuality now and for all the illusion of time and space?  


“A Course in Miracles” (ACIM) is a 1249-page spiritual document scribed over 7 years by a psychiatrist named Helen Schucman and authored by an Inner Voice named Jesus. 
It is a metaphysical masterpiece that moves us even beyond Buddhism, back to Absolute Oneness with God as perfect abstract Love.

It is a clear teaching of pure Advaita, meaning “not two” or “non-dual,” as described in the Hindu Vedanta. 

The Course reads like an Eastern document but made for Western minds, and is beautifully dictated mainly in the iambic pentameter of Shakespearean blank verse.  Forgive the old Christian-sounding words.  Jesus is correcting the misinterpretations passed on through our ego-driven dualistic way of perceiving everything. 

Open your mind to receive what is already here within, waiting for you to remember; “the still small Voice” of love called The Holy Spirit, and the pure unchanging light in which we are all still truly One.

According to the ACIM creation myth, God did not create this world. It suggests that "a tiny, mad idea,” a thought of separation
at which the Son of God "remembered not to laugh,"
caused the making of the illusion we now call home.

This dream of duality was born from the thought in the Mind that separation from God could even be possible. Not True.
 

The consciousness, or individual perception,
that the split mind found itself experiencing, terrified it.  This spawned more illusion, as ideas of "sin, guilt and fear" were born.

Horrified, we (as the now ego-identified split mind imagining separation in place of uninterrupted Love) projected our fear outside
of our Self and hurled our Oneness into a vast hierarchy of individual parts, or what we now call the universe of time and space.


The “Big Bang” is really just hiding place to escape our imagined guilt
for having innocently made a ‘boo-boo’.

The whole dream of diversity,
perception, relationship, birth and death, is based on a fictional separation
and a fictional problem, which the Course sets out to lovingly undo.

In Reality, we are still at Home with God.  We never left Oneness.  Yet we, as the part of the mind that is dreaming, are mesmerized by the images appearing to have individualized into this huge macro-micro duality script. 

But it’s okay because we are actually waking up, slowly and gently, thanks to our decision to identify with the Love, still as God created us, and thereby forgiving the images we think we see.  Instead we see the Face of Christ, or light beyond perception, in all that appears to be, no matter what it looks like.


This radical uncompromising teaching completely dismantles the hallucinating ego. The miracle of forgiveness collapses the dream of individuality and the “split mind” is healed. This is the Atonement. 

By carefully reading the Text, choosing forgiveness with greater and greater ease, and diligently practicing the 365 exercises in the Workbook, all of our illusionary lives will be altered. 

Eventually, our entire perception of time and space will have disappeared. Then God takes the final step, welcoming each one of us Home, in our own perfect timing, as the prodigal son that we are.

Gently laughing as we get nearer to the final step, more and more, we’ll feel a familiar luminous inner peace, joy and stillness.  Our body will become “a wholly neutral thing,” no matter what appears to be going on in it, or in the dream around us.  Peace prevails.

Every kind and gentle thing we seem to be doing for others, we are actually doing only for our Self.  There is only the One Son, One Mind, and we are all Him.  That’s why we need to forgive every body in order to switch over to The Holy Spirit’s script in place of the ego’s version of analysis, guilt, fear and attack. Love, Light; what we already Are, is what heals the part of us who dreams she has “fallen”.

But don’t at all think it is going to be easy. We will each encounter the full gamut of extremes of our attachment to the ego’s precious and insane scripts. Our ego has stored literally millions of secret grievances, judgments, painful thoughts, phobias and vicious symbols, all lodged in our unconscious.

We’ve dreamed, over and over again, that we are darkened, separate, vulnerable little bodies, born to die as special victims of unfortunate and tragic circumstances, sickness and suffering; or conversely, that we, or some body else, is especially perfect; better or the best, for a while, or other endless variations of “special” love in the form of idols, places and stories that temporarily seem to mimic God before they/He betrayed us yet again. 

To wake up, we need to see all of our special grievances, relationships and dramas as merely a neutral classroom for practicing forgiveness, thereby switching all the symbols of guilt and separation over to the Holy Spirit’s script of love, light and kindness.  This makes for a very Happy Dream!

The Atonement is really just the ultimate cosmic joke about a dream that never even happened. So we might as well start laughing now, all the way Home.

 

 

 

Fearless Love for Inner and Outer Peace in a Changing World

 

By Gary R. Renard

 

You can learn to dissolve the illusions of time and space and return to reality, which is Oneness with God and perfect love. This is not love the way the world commonly thinks of it. It's an all-encompassing kind of love that is perfect spirit: innocent, unflawed, immortal, invulnerable and forever fearless. It excludes no one and includes all.

 

Perfect love, which is Divine in nature, must be experienced, for it is beyond words. Yet words and practice are needed to help lead you to that experience. The knowledge of what it's like to be one with your Source is the awesome mystical experience that's been described by Masters throughout the ages. It's the greatest sense of awareness anyone can have while still appearing to be in this world.

 

That experience, upon the end of your physical existence, will become your permanent reality. In the meantime, the more at peace we each are, the more we each will contribute to our world in ways that benefit all. We will find solutions to world problems that are in the best interest of all in place of the old paradigm of what served the best interest of a few.

 

By first of all focusing on our inner environment of peace, our outer environment will gradually begin to reflect that and extend it in ways beyond our wildest imagination.

 

Fearless love is not about leaving it at that like some of the popular spiritual teachings do. Any attempt to remain in the present moment will fail unless certain work is done by the student. That's because there's something in the mind that prevents you from staying in the present moment. Most spiritualities don't even know about it, much less teach you how to have it healed.

 

The truth is that we are not these bodies, we are immortal spirit. We cannot actually be separate from God, but we can imagine we are. That is what this world is. It is an illusion of our imagined separation from God. We spend most of our lives trying to solve the problem of separation within the illusion. The only place where we can actually solve the problem is to go within and release our false thoughts of separation, which is ego.

 

While it is true that in ultimate reality there is nothing to forgive because it is perfect oneness, within this illusion undoing the ego works to awaken us from this dream.

 

If the ego is like an onion, layers of false thoughts of separation, we will eventually undo or peel away all the layers until there is nothing standing between us and our total awareness of our perfect oneness with God. And much like we awaken from a dream we have while sleeping in our beds at night, and see that we have never left the safety of our beds, we will eventually awaken from this dream and see that we've never actually left the safety of God's perfect love.

 

Judgment is the biggest obstacle to fearless love and the quickest way to overcome it is forgiveness. The forgiveness we speak of here is not the old fashioned kind of forgiveness where you say you are wrong but I forgive you anyhow; it is the kind of forgiveness that Jesus taught and practiced during his last lifetime on earth and is taught today through his voice in A Course in Miracles.

 

This kind of forgiveness, which undoes your ego, will allow you to stay in the condition of the endless present.

 

The past and future will be forgiven. And as the Course says, "...if it is forgiven it is gone." It is the kind of forgiveness that says we are not this body, we are immortal spirit and cannot be damaged or die, therefore we are all innocent. Jesus demonstrated this on the cross and did not suffer because he knew he was not a body and that all pain and suffering was only imagined. This was the true message of the crucifixion, that we are not this body and is a message, when fully grasped that shall truly set us free.

 

If we make forgiveness our purpose we will live our lives more and more fearlessly until it becomes our permanent state of being. Through the practice of forgiveness, there will come a point when we will have so much inner peace that we won't care how long it takes us to reach that permanent state, nor will it matter what is appearing to be going on in the world around us. Now more than ever we must find another way. This is another way; it works, and is available to all. You don't have to wait any longer to live life fearlessly and happily. Courage is what is needed when you are frightened that your body might be harmed or killed.

 The more you remember what you really are, Immortal Spirit, the more naturally fearless you become.

From that a life of effortless ease shall emerge. You will learn more about fearless love in my third book,

Love Has Forgotten No One: The Answer to Life.

www.garyrenard.com

 

Suite 214
2186 Oak Bay Avenue
Victoria, BC V8R 1G3
ph: 250-370-1380