With the beginning of Lent, I thought a meditation would be a nice way to start the season. This comes from The Way of Mastery. This is told by Jesus through a voice who is living on the planet now. This message is meant to help us assimilate the historical event of Jesus’s death as a symbol of our own lives.
Imagine that you are nailed upon a cross. You are stuck between the vertical axis of eternity and the horizontal axis of time and the body. Imagine that you lift your head, on which you have placed a crown of thorns. What does that represent? It represents the field of the mind as it operates and expresses through the body, through the brain.
Those thorns represent your fearful thoughts, your judgmental thoughts, your limited thoughts, that press and poke upon your own energy field and give you quite a cosmic headache and draw blood. That is, it releases the Life force from you, the power from you, as it drains down your auric field. You dissipate yourself much like a balloon with a slow leak dissipates the power that makes it a balloon.
The “crown of thorns” symbolizes the effect of the thoughts you insist upon when you rest in judgment, or anger, or hurt, or fear. That is, when you choose to deny Love.
Now, the nails merely represent that which would hold you stuck in a dimension, the horizontal dimension of the body and of time, that would nail your feet to the world. “Down to earth” they call it. and yet, above you, the crown of your head is open Heavenward. You are free to receive the Love of God, to choose only loving thoughts, to look gently upon everyone and every event, seeing only perfect innocence.
And so imagine, now, that you lift your head and you realize, “the blood is dripping from my brow by my own hand. The crown of thorns was placed upon me by those who came to serve me, to shock me into the remembrance that I have allowed myself, at times, to have thoughts of negativity, limitation, and fear. No wonder I’ve had such a headache!”
You look to the left and to the right and you see your wrist bound to the horizontal plane by a nail, a hard piece of iron, cold and thoughtless. How many times have you bound yourself to the things of time through your own thoughtlessness, your own coldness?
Now, you turn to look down at your feet, there, crossed over, resting gently upon a small wooden slab, with a nail through them, as though the world were saying, “Don’t you dare try to rise above our level of consciousness. How dare you mirror to us the Truth of our being by always being so sickeningly loving!”
The world will seek to nail you down to earth by insisting that you think with it. For remember always that the world is the attempt to create that which is the opposite of Reality, like many who would gather together to take a drug and to think that their insanity is the same as the bliss and ecstasy of union with God. Yet they wouldn’t dare drive an automobile, cannot think a coherent thought, and don’t even remember where they are.
And now, you turn your eyes from the roar and the din of the world. You see the soldiers, your persecutors, totally unconscious, totally conformed to the authority of the world, so that they have donned the armor and the headpieces and the footwear and carry the spears of a god made as a substitute for Love.
You look out upon the fearful crowd. You see some friends who still see your soul, your Christ-mindedness, and continue to love you. And yet even they are veiled by their belief that death and loss are possible. And so you are completely alone. No one is going to save you. No one is going to rescue you. It is between you and your God.
It is a decision, now, that you must make, to be determined to choose only what is Real, regardless of what the eyes seem to show you and what every mind around you seems to believe, even those who profess belief in your message of Love.
For they look upon the body and an old belief takes hold, “the body is what is real after all. Look at this—it’s nailed to a cross. This is limitation. This proves the world’s thinking is true.”
You must lift your eyes from the world that you think you see and choose to accept a different Reality: Father, into thy hands I commend my Spirit.
Which is nothing more than the choice for sanity in the midst of all conditions, the choice for what is eternal in the field of what is temporal, the choice for what is unlimited in the field of what seems to be limitation, the choice for sanity in the field of what seems to be pervaded by insanity, the choice to remember only thoughts born in Love!
And then, your eyes look down again. Now something has changed – you are at peace! You recognize that you are above the world, you are above the crowd, and a gentle sweetness begins to pervade your entire being. All pain and suffering is forgotten. The nails can hold you no longer. The world cannot keep you down in its insanity. The eyes of the body close, and as they close, the world they had shown you recedes and the Real World appears. You rest in the perfect remembrance that you are One with God. And your attention drifts away from insanity.
And yet, you are quite aware that you can still see your friends. You see the soldiers. You see the tears, the tumult. You see some who are merely standing quietly. And you bless them and release them to have the perceptions that they would choose. For you have come to love yourself so much that you will accept only what is Real. It is finished. The resurrection now begins.
Easter is your birthday. Easter is a time to celebrate that the crown of thorns has been removed because you have chosen to think only loving thoughts, that you have remembered the power given unto you through which you transcend the awful and dreaded and suffering-filled experience born of fear. For in Love, there is only peace. In Love there is only the infinitude of Pure Spirit. In Love is Christ restored to your consciousness. In Love are you returned. Easter is for you and not for me. Therefore, set aside your images and your practices of me. Make no pilgrimage to me. Make a pilgrimage to the Heart of your Self by looking upon all that you see this day and seeing its beauty, its harmlessness, by knowing that you are looking out through the eyes of the arisen Christ. You are the One who, with me, has overcome the world.
Here is the message of the lesson. You can choose only between Love and fear. In Love are you resurrected. In fear are you crucified. What, then, will be your choice in this hour?
-The Way of Mastery
Theresa Contaxis 