[janeseymore09092]

god love ya, mark. (and by that i don't mean i'm trying to send you love to neutralize your influence or reactive power over me somehow. ) i just would like to take a moment in our collective experiencing of reality to thank you for representing the acim viewpoint, since i so very need someone to do that intelligently, and here you are doing just that. i truly appreciate it. thank you, really.

now... en guarde'!

one question that keeps coming back to mind for me over and over is about the dichotomy of "our own" personal reality vs. a "shared" collective one we all jointly & simultaneously participate in. it's hard for me to distinguish "when we cross the threshold" from one to the other, since at times it very much seems that my own experience of reality is different from other people's, while at other times, we all very much seem to be "watching the same reality movie".

as a case in point, a few months ago my girlfriend and i were walking down 4th street in san rafael. she sports "rose-colored glasses" quite a bit, and lives by a simple philosophy while ignoring much of what goes on in the world, claiming it a 'better way' of keeping happy. i usually advocate the other side of that fence. we split up in a beauty supply shop, and began having 'very different' experiences. she was caught up with this new lotion or that new hair gel, while i observed myself getting 'stalked' and psychologically prodded by the wandering salespeople to 'move along' (i'm not the typical-looking expensivo beauty supply shopper, i guess). i told my girlfriend i'd run to the bank across the street, then over to starbuck's where we'd meet up again (where's a peet's coffee when ya need one?). long story short, i had unpleasant experience after unpleasant experience within the space of just a few minutes. cow-like richie kids hogging up the sidewalk and somehow blocking any attempts to get around them while i got to overhear their egotistical, snide-filled conversational babble... traffic signals going red on me inconveniently as i tried to put some distance between us... an 'entitlist' suv driver almost barreling me over in the crosswalk 'because he could', and someone who was leaving starbucks almost walking down my back and over my body to get out before i could, even though i was ahead of him and already at the door. almost knocked my coffee clean out've my hand as he sideswiped me. it seemed everyone in the vicinity was out to "give me a lesson" in my attitude toward the snobbish, richie jetset living up here. by the time i found my girlfriend again, i was fuming at 'people in general'. she was delightfully oblivious to any of it, and simply told me it was my own fault, and that i brought it on myself. i'm sure i did.

so yes, we shared the same overall reality of being in the same neighborhood around the same time, yet our personal experiences therein were quite different.

so far, no foul.

but when you say that "forgiveness of self and forgiveness of outer conditions are inseparable concepts", well then, the question of "my" reality vs. a "consensus" reality comes into play again. taken literally, i could well interpret that as meaning that "everything that is bad in the world" (and there's no shortage of that) is somehow my fault too. (my girlfriend likes the sound of that, btw... ). if only i could more fully embrace this "forgiveness/acceptance" concept, well then, wars would end, crime would become passe', corporate greed would evolve into generosity & public nourishment, and corruption on every level would vanish. or maybe... it would just in my reality.

there's a saying the buddhists have... the day the very first buddha attained enlightenment, the world knew peace that day. all fighting, crime, & violence stopped, all bickering and misunderstandings ceased. it was as if the whole world took pause at his enlightenment achievement, and embraced harmony in totality. (then the next day it was business-as-usual, i guess. :d).

sometimes i think we are all living in totally, completely separated realities that just resemble each other (for the sake of common points of reference), but that when we communicate with each other, we are somehow breaching those reality boundaries. in your world, you are the only one there. everyone else is an illusion. in my world, i'm the only one here. everyone else is an illusion. but we are all here (wherever 'here' is)... we're just pinched off completely from each other because we're all in separate realities, yet we're all one (attached via the godlink), so we can communicate to each other (like the way i'm communicating to you right now, via a texting device) to advise & guide & mirror each other to help facilitate the learning of our lessons.

we're all dreaming different dreams, but at the same time, we're all dreaming at once. and somehow, maybe we're all trying to help each other in our different dreams to wake up from them, even though we're all still stuck in our dreams.

wow, now i'm confusing myself. am i still making sense?

but i can verify this much for you... when i do try wholeheartedly to be more forgiving/accepting of my faults (since everything bad in my world is simply reflecting my faults to me), then the world does get marginally better for it, both locally and globally.

so there's gotta be something to all this...

•••av the dream•••