The Second Voice

It sounds like this:

I want to be separate. In fact, I demand it. I want to be an individual, distinct from everyone else, and everything else. I want to be special. I want you to play roles: cousin, sibling, friend, spouse, neighbor, citizen of another town, state, country. I want to at once hold you close and keep you apart, away from me. I do not know what I am, and that scares me. So, I pretend I know what I am; I discover all that I find around me, all the various things I label "nature." Or "universe." I learn how these work, all the many attributes of the natural world around me.

That is the loud voice we accept as our voice, our self. But there is another voice. Actually, there is but one voice, we just perceive two. The voice we perceive as loud is a sort of whistling in the dark as we make our frightened way: "Look! I'm not afraid. Here I am! I'm headed home!"

Might it be true that we are one infinite self? Would this self not be the "second" voice? Called the still small voice, but "still" and "small" only because we demand the first voice be real. Why should that idea, that we are not separated beings, but one self, be so strange an idea to us? Why so frightening a thought?

Because we think it means we lose something precious to us. Our individuality. I pause from typing, and I look up. There are two little shelves above my head. There I have some books, and various things that I treasure: a couple of old bookends I inherited from my mother, engraved with the image of a World War One aviator...various things scattered around me. Me.

What is "me"? Why do I still refer to "my" body as myself? Why do I look at these objects without automatically knowing they are part of me, pieces of my own mind? Why should that thought be so outrageous? I feel as if I am stuck inside what we call a body. I have a thing inside my skull that seems to make me think and speak, and able to observe what is called the outside world. Why does it seem so strange for me to understand that everything I see...is me?

I have to remind myself that the world I see is in my mind, that I invented the world I see. A Course In Miracles teaches this, that we made the world up. But long before I had heard of ACIM,I always had a sense of "I am doing this". It makes perfect sense to me, and yet I still give more attention to the loud voice than the still voice. Why?

As soon as I ask "why", the "small" voice tells me to be still. The voice reminds me that the Course also says, "myself is nothing, but my Self is everything." This tells me that the self we think we are, demand to be...that we made that self up in order to perceive the world we made in which to hide from our Self, which is us! "There is no world!" --ACIM.

As I ask what is "me", it follows that I would ask, what is "you". You must be my brother. Not your body, but you. Beneath your loud voice. It must be that we made one another. We needed something with which to perceive this world we were forming out of our fear and guilt for our perception that we enraged our Creator. So this body came to be. We are hiding.

It is impossible that we are scattered, isolated beings scrambling on a great rock in a cold dark space. It has been asked, "How did the impossible happen?" For me, the simple answer is that it didn't! Is that not the whole point? The world is but a tiny instant of fear that was gone in that same instant in which it seemed to appear. We need not demand to be anything that we are not. The world is over.

I hear morning birds outside my window. Their song reminds me of the Song we all hear. It is eternal. I need not fight against the world I see (the sounds I hear). I need only forgive (overlook) the world. The world is shadows. It lasted an instant because it never was. It is not our Creator's Will, and so it is not our will, as His Son.