The
Lingering Illusion (Seek Not Outside
Yourself)
Seek not outside yourself. For it will
fail, and you will weep each time an idol
falls. Heaven cannot be found where it
is not, and there can be no peace excepting
there.
Each
idol that you worship when God calls will
never answer in His place. There is no
other answer you can substitute, and find
the happiness His answer brings.
Seek not outside yourself.
For
all your pain comes simply from a futile
search for what you want, insisting where
it must be found. What
if it is not there?
Do
you prefer that you be right or happy?
Be
you glad that you are told where happiness
abides, and seek no longer elsewhere.
You will fail. But it is given you to
know the truth, and not to seek for it
outside yourself.
No one who comes here but must still have
hope, some lingering illusion, or some
dream that there is something outside
of himself that will bring happiness and
peace to him.
If
everything is in him, this cannot be so.
And
therefore, by his coming, he denies the
truth about himself—and seeks for
something more than everything—as
if a part of it were separated off and
found where all the rest of it is not.
This
is the purpose he bestows upon the body...
that it seek for what he lacks, and
give him what would make himself complete.
And
thus he wanders aimlessly about, in search
of something that he cannot find, believing
that he is what he is not.
The
lingering illusion (dream that there is
something outside of himself that will
bring happiness and peace to him). will
impel him to seek out a thousand idols,
and to seek beyond them for a thousand
more. And each will fail him, all excepting
one...
for he will die, and does not understand
the idol that he seeks is but his death.
Its
form appears to be outside himself. Yet
does he seek to kill God’s Son within
and prove that he is victor over him.
This
is the purpose every idol has, for this
the role that is assigned to it, and this
the role that cannot be fulfilled.
Whenever you attempt to reach a goal in
which the body’s betterment is cast
as major beneficiary...
you try to bring about your death.
For
you believe that you can suffer lack,
and lack is death.To
sacrifice is to give up, and thus to be
without, and to have suffered loss. And
by this giving up is life renounced.
Seek
not outside yourself.
The
search implies you are not whole within
and fear to look upon your devastation,
and prefer to seek outside yourself for
what you are.
Idols
must fall because they have no life. And
what is lifeless is a sign of death. You
came to die, and what would you expect
but to perceive the signs of death you
seek?
No
sadness and no suffering proclaims a message
other than an idol found that represents
a parody of life which, in its lifelessness,
is really death, conceived as real and
given living form. Yet each must fail
and crumble and decay, because a form
of death cannot be life, and what is sacrificed
cannot be whole.
All
idols of this world were made to keep
the truth within from being known to you,
and to maintain allegiance to the dream
that you must find what is outside yourself
to be complete and happy. It
is vain to worship idols in the hope of
peace. God
dwells within, and your completion lies
in Him. No idol takes His place.
Look
not to idols.
Do
not seek outside yourself.
An
idol cannot take the place of God.
Let Him remind you of His love for
you, and do not seek to drown His
Voice in chants of deep despair
to idols of yourself.
Seek
not outside your Father for your
hope, for hope of happiness is not
despair.Let
us forget the purpose of the world
the past has given it. For otherwise
the future will be like the past,
and but a series of depressing dreams,
in which all idols fail you, one
by one, and you see death and disappointment
everywhere.
To
change all this, and open up a road
of hope and of release in what appeared
to be an endless circle of despair,
you need but to decide you do not
know the purpose of the world. You
give it goals it does not have,
and thus do you decide what it is
for. You try to see in it a place
of idols found outside yourself,
with power to make complete what
is within by splitting what you
are between the two.
You
choose your dreams,
for
they are what you wish,
perceived
as if it had been given you.
Your
idols do what you would have
them do and have the power you
ascribe to them, and you pursue
them vainly in the dream, because
you want their power as your
own.
Yet where are dreams, but in
a mind asleep? And can a dream
succeed in making real the pictures
it projects outside itself?
Save
time, my brothers; learn what
time is for. And speed the end
of idols in a world made sad
and sick by seeing idols there.
Your holy minds are altars unto
God, and where He is no idols
can abide.
The
fear of God is but the fear
of loss of idols. It is not
the fear of loss of your reality.
But you have made of your reality
an idol, which you must protect
against the light of truth.
And all the world becomes the
means by which this idol can
be saved. Salvation
thus appears to threaten life
and offer death.
It is not so. Salvation seeks
to prove there is no death,
and only life exists.
