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Chapter 30: The Happy Dreams of the Real World

6. Seek Not Outside Yourself

Seek not outside yourself. Your seeking there will fail, and you will lament each time an idol you placed your hopes on disappoints. For an idol is anything outside yourself that you endow with power to save you from what troubles you; that you believe can make whole the lack you experience in your relationship with all things, including yourself. All idols must fail because only miracles can meet the experience of lack with exactly what is truly needed to remedy each such misperception, and miracles come from within.

Heaven cannot be found where It is not, and Peace can only be found where Heaven is. The Divine’s Call to you can never be answered by an idol you have taken as your own. There is no answer you can substitute and find the Happiness the Divine’s Answer brings.

Seek not outside yourself. For all your pain comes simply from a futile search for what you want while insisting where it must be found. What if you learned that 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, for such seeking will fail. But it is given you to know the Truth, through not seeking for It outside yourself.

Everyone who comes to this world must still have some hope, some lingering illusion, or some dream that there is something outside of themselves that will bring them happiness and peace. However, if Everything is in you, then this cannot be so. And therefore by their coming here they deny the truth about themselves, through seeking for something more than Everything, as if a Part of Everything could be separated off and found where all the rest of It is not. This is the purpose they bestow upon the body: that it seek for what they believe they lack, and give them what would make themselves complete. And thus they wander aimlessly about, in search of something they cannot find because they already have it, believing themselves to be what they are not.

This lingering illusion will impel them to seek out a thousand idols, and to seek beyond them for a thousand more. And each will fail them, all excepting one. For they will die, and then they will understand that the idol they sought was merely death—the attempt to find something that is not Life. Death’s form appears to be outside themselves. Thus does the ego in madness seek to kill the Divine’s Child who dwells within, and prove that it is victor over It. This is the purpose every idol ultimately has, for this the role that is assigned to it by the ego, and this the role that cannot be fulfilled because death can never touch the Child of the Divine.

Whenever you attempt to reach a goal in which the body’s betterment is cast as major beneficiary, you secretly try to bring about your demise. For this attempt demonstrates that you believe you can suffer lack, and lack is demise. To sacrifice is to give up something, and thus to have suffered loss and to be without. And by this giving up is Life renounced, for Life is Everywhere and contains Everything, and therefore can give up nothing.

Seek not outside yourself. The search implies that you are not whole within, and fear to see within to behold your believed desolation, preferring to seek outside yourself for what you are, to avoid seeing within. Idols must fail and fall because they have no life, and what is lifeless is a sign of death. You came to this world with the goal of trying to find life amidst death, and what would you expect but to perceive the signs of death you seek?

All sadness and suffering proclaim a message that your seeking outside yourself has merely found yet another idol. All idols represent a parody of life that in its lifelessness is really death, conceived as real and given seeming 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. Every idol in this world was 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 of you to be complete and happy. It is vain to cherish idols in the hope of finding Peace. The Divine dwells within, and your Completion and your Peace is in It. No idol can take Its Place, therefore look not to them. Do not seek outside yourself.

Let us forget the purpose of the world the past has given it. For otherwise the future will be like the past, and will be only a series of depressing dreams, in which all idols fail you, one by one, and you look upon disappointment and despair everywhere. To change all this, and open up a Path of true Hope and of Release in what appeared to be an endless circle of futility, you need only to decide that you do not know the Purpose of the world. You gave it goals it does not have, and thus did you decide what it is for for you. You tried to perceive in it a place of idols found outside yourself, with power to make complete what is within by splitting what you are between inside and outside.

You do choose your dreams, for they are what you wish, perceived as if they had been given you from outside yourself. And idols seem to do what you would have them do, and to 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 except in a mind asleep? And can a dream succeed in making real the pictures it projects outside itself?

Save time, my sisters and brothers! Learn what time is for. And speed the end of idols in a world made sad and sick by perceiving idols there. Your holy minds are Altars unto the Divine, and where It is no idols can abide. The fear of the Divine is simply the fear of loss of idols. It is not the fear of loss of your reality. But you have made an idol of your reality, which you believe you must protect against the Light of Truth. And all the world then becomes the means by which this idol can be “saved.” Awakening thus appears to threaten life and offer death. It is not so. Awakening proves that there is no death, and that only Life exists.

The sacrifice of death is nothing lost. An idol cannot take the Place of the Divine. Let the Divine remind you of Its Love for you, and do not seek to drown Its Voice in chants of deep despair to idols that are all merely mis-projections of yourself. Hope of Peace and Happiness is not despair. Seek not outside your Creator for your Hope.