The Artistry of LIFE: Knocking on the WHITE DOOR

Chapter 17: Conscious Mind vs Spirit

17 - Conscious Mind vs Spirit

“To accept the spirit totally the artificial self has to die."

What is an artificial self, I thought. Here we go again with the complicated stuff. I knew that the spirit was love, so the artificial self must have been the opposite of love. Turns out it is all about pride and vanity.

“When the spirit comes through you, it is either YOUR spirit, or THE spirit. There is no way to distinguish the spirit from your spirit. The spirit says to the artificial self ‘Do not love me you are not worthy. But there is a place within each that is worthy.’ The place deep within is the real self. That is the place the spirit resides in as it waits for the artificial self to die.”

“What is the artificial self? Can you define it?”

“For millions of years we have lived uninterrupted on this planet in one form or another. Each being passes along living tissue to the next so that there is tissue within each of us that is millions and millions of years old. Our identity is encoded within that tissue. With the advent of speech and written language, we also have a second identity. This is the identity given to us through our descriptions of the world.

When we see a tree, we see reality. The amount of information is incredible. We know its size, shape, color, smell … we know the essence of the tree. These are the thoughts of the real self. When we say the word ‘tree’ we are only dealing with a rudimentary description of a tree, an artificial tree, not a real tree. What can be put into words is always, always, always, nothing but a description. Descriptions can never be real. They are artificial. Somewhere within us is a description of the self. It is no more real than the word tree is an actual tree. Yet, we use that description to identify ourselves. Nothing could be more foolish.

The real self needs no description. It needs no logic, no reason, no pride, no greed, no lust. It does not need to control or lie about the description of itself. The real self accepts easily that it is so complicated it can never comprehend itself. Life is not to be understood completely, but to be witnessed and lived. All the artificial self can do, with its limitation to language, is be the best system of descriptions it can be. It pretends to have descriptions that are truthful and correct for as many things as possible. Yet, even the best description is artificial, arbitrary and wholly incomplete.

Let me put it to you another way. You get to choose a husband. There are two candidates. One is an illiterate deaf mute. You can never talk to him or hear him speak and know his descriptions of you and of the world. He cannot write you notes. You can point to the mower he will mow the lawn. You can point to the trash and he will take it out. You can lie in bed naked and he will sexually satisfy you. The other is a vegetable in a box, but he is equipped with a brain harness that allows him to speak to you with an artificial voicebox and he can hear you as well. You can never touch him, see him, kiss him, etc. He can never mow the lawn, take out the trash or sexually satisfy you or have children with you. Which would make a better husband? Obviously, you could learn to have a fairly normal relationship with the deaf-mute. All you can do is have an intellectual relationship with the other. Without the physical aspect it is not a real relationship.

This is the same as the real self and the artificial self. The real self does not communicate through words by itself. Yet its actions can communicate what you need to know. The self that is words only cannot be real, ever. If, however, the artificial-self subjugates itself to become nothing more than the mouthpiece for the real self: If it gives up all attempts to claim that its words are real, then that would be like having a husband who can do everything. Imagine that the illiterate deaf mute is connected to the vegetable. The vegetable can speak for him. That is how people work. They are divided. Only when the voice willingly gives up any semblance of control and becomes the humble mouthpiece for the real  self does the being reintegrate and become one.”