Patricia Pearce

Helping You Be the Change

Duped by the Big Lie

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The actual Big Lie is the one we tell ourselves over and over and over again in our own minds

I’ve been following the latest happenings in the American Dream, in particular the January 6th hearings, and they’re pretty eye-opening. They are revealing so much more than what was taking place behind the scenes of Trump’s attempted coup.

Since the moment Donald Trump walked onto the political stage I have seen him as someone playing a key role in our collective awakening. Not because he is a light worker doing battle with the forces of evil, as some believe, but rather I see him as a supreme depiction of the ego-mind. I see him showing us quite clearly how the ego-mind operates so that we can see it in ourselves and begin to dis-identify with it.Continue Reading

The Mind’s Lone Star State

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The idea of a “lone” anything is coming to an end.

I know many of us may be deeply troubled by what is happening in the state of Texas. I’d like remind us that this world is a form of dream, and if we look at these events from that understanding we can see how they can help us in our awakening if we are willing to allow it.

So let us do some dream work.

As you know, Texas calls itself the Lone Star State. Texas culture places a high value on autonomy and individualism, takes great pride in being big, and sees itself as set apart from the rest of the nation.

In a dream, all characters and all elements represent an aspect of the self. In this sense, “Texas” symbolizes an inner state, a state of mind, in which the self believes itself to be alone in this universe, able to set itself apart from the Reality of Union. This, of course, is an impossibility. Nonetheless, the mind has inhabited this illusion of separateness and created a world based upon it.Continue Reading

Reflections on the George Floyd Case

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Dear One,

I know you would like insight into what wants to be said about the verdict rendered this week in the case of George Floyd’s killing.  As you know, there are various levels from which to observe this world. One is at the literal level of events themselves. Another is a higher and wider vantage point from which one can see the symbolic meaning of the events.

On the literal level, this verdict reflects what your world thinks of as justice. A great wrong was committed, and the person who committed it was held accountable. Therefore, justice has been served.

This is a variation of the eye for an eye story. In this understanding of justice, a wrong is answered with a corresponding punishment, and the belief is that this restores some sense of balance, some sense of rightness.

And yet, even from this level it is obvious that no punishment can undo what was done. No punishment can ever return George Floyd to his life and to his loved ones. In this sense, justice is never and can never be achieved.

Your own mystical experiences have shown you that this world is a dream, and as you know, dreams are symbolic. Therefore the events in your world are symbolically depicting beliefs held in the mind. This is not to say that, because it is a dream, there is no suffering. As you know, the mind that is experiencing a dream is experiencing it—all of its anguish, all of its elation.

Knowing this world to be a dream you can see that this event is revealing a belief held in the mind, and that this verdict, which sets a new precedent for your society, is a turning point because it signals that the mind has begun to change. It is beginning to divest from the erroneous idea of racism.

On the literal level, Derek Chauvin was on trial, and beyond him as an individual, the idea that police can act with impunity toward Black people was on trial, and from a broader perspective still, the idea of white supremacy was on trial.

Now this is where a distinction is to be made when it comes to the concept of judgment. Within the domain of the ego mind, judgment is that which deems something “bad,” and this idea of judgment is a crucial keystone in the ego’s thought system.

And yet you know that in right-mindedness this sort of judgment does not exist. What does exist is the ability to discern truth from falsehood, Reality from illusion. From the vantage point of Love, white supremacy isn’t “bad.” It is illusory. An error in the mind. Something that has no basis in Reality, which is absolute Love.

One of the driving desires of ego is to be special, and white supremacy is the belief that an entire “race” of people is special. (Please understand that the idea of race is yet another illusion.) This belief in specialness is what the mind is now moving away from. This is the erroneous fallacy the mind is beginning to see through.

As you also know, in dreams each element and character depict an aspect of the dreaming mind. In this sense, Derek Chauvin is a representation of this erroneous idea in the mind. His actions were not merely the actions of an individual, but an enactment of a belief. The fact that the mind is now rejecting this belief, rejecting the fallacy of white supremacy, is a hopeful sign to you that egoic consciousness is indeed waning and its grip on the mind is loosening.

So how then are you to hold this situation? As always, you are to hold it in Love. To hold the Floyd family in Love. To hold all the people of color who have been repeatedly traumatized because of this fallacy in Love. To hold the Derek Chauvins of the world in Love, for they are lost sheep who are alienated from the truth of themselves.

You and all the others who are here on the planet at this time to fortify the presence of Love are doing a great service, greater than you know. By holding Love in your Hearts you are enabling the dreaming mind to awaken to the truth of Love.

Always remember that the realm of Spirit is with you, holding you in the greatest esteem, and with unbounded gratitude.

Eternally,
Your True Self

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Spring at the Penitentiary

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It’s time we rejoin the community of Life.

In the heart of my neighborhood here in Philadelphia stands an imposing building that looks like a medieval fortress complete with turrets.

Eastern State Penitentiary, which is now a museum dedicated to raising awareness about the criminal justice system and mass incarceration, was built in the early 1800’s and was originally conceived as a visionary reform to the criminal justice system of the time, which used various means of corporal punishment as the sentences for crime.

The idea that was envisioned and which took on form at Eastern State Penitentiary was that a person found guilty would be removed from society for a period of time to contemplate, without any distractions, what they had done. The belief was that, by contemplating their wrongdoing, inmates would reform themselves. They would become penitent, hence the name penitentiary.

It was the first time that time became the sentence for a crime, and people doing time at Eastern State Penitentiary when it first opened had absolutely no contact with other human beings. They were kept in their own cells, handed their meals through small openings in the wall, provided a Bible, and given lots of time to think.

What the people running the penitentiary discovered, though, was that rather than becoming penitent, the inmates started going insane. They were subjected to what we now know as solitary confinement, something that is completely unnatural for human beings, social creatures that we are. (After a year of COVID, some of us had had a glimpse of the toll isolation can take.)

Frequently, when I pass by Eastern State, I think of how the penitentiary is a carefully architected depiction in stone of our story of separateness. Most of us, most of the time, live inside a sort of prison of the mind, believing and perceiving ourselves to be cut off from one another, from the Earth, from the Source of our Being, even from our true Self. This perception, even though it is illusory, has resulted in us feeling an existential displacement from the community of All Being.

Many years ago I got an inside glimpse into what actual incarceration is like when I was sentenced to a week in federal prison for engaging in civil disobedience when the US launched its invasion of Iraq. It seemed symbolic that I and the dozen others protesters who were sentenced with me, had to report to the Federal Detention Center on Earth Day.

Walking into that prison, leaving the spring sunshine and blossoming trees behind and stepping into the completely artificial environment of cinderblock walls, florescent lights, cell blocks and locked doors, was one of the most surreal experiences I’ve ever had.

While I was there, I reflected on what it would be like to be in this environment year after year.

Earlier in the day I had stood with my eye glued to a tiny pinprick of clear glass I had discovered on the frosted window of our cell. Smaller than the head of a pin, it was my only view to the outside world. Looking through it I could make out the basic outlines of buildings, cars, a distant highway. I realized that for me the cruelest aspect of imprisonment would be to live months and even years never seeing a moonrise or a flower opening to the sun, never feeling the breeze on my skin or breathing in the smell of the woods after a rain, never hearing birdsong or touching the rough bark of a tree or walking a beach and feeling the sand beneath my feet. Ripping people away from the web of life and caging them in a world of artificial lights and unyielding surfaces was inhumane, the antithesis of the spiritual truth of interconnection. [ excerpt from Beyond Jesus: My Spiritual Odyssey]

This is the month when we celebrate Earth Day, an observation that calls us to renew our relationship with the Earth and to restore the damage done by our dream of separateness. It is a time for us to bring down the walls of isolation that we have built within ourselves so that we can know our oneness with all life on the planet.

The other morning, I took a walk around Eastern State Penitentiary. It was a gorgeous April morning, and the flower beds in front of the prison were brimming with hundreds of daffodils, tulips and iris. Along one of the towering walls the air was full of birdsong, as birds flitted in and out of cracks and crevasses between the stones where they had found safe places to build their nests.

That this historic site, such a graphic symbol of humanity doing time in our story of separateness, should now be a place where birds can hatch new life and daffodils and tulips open their petals to the sun moved me. It reflected the shift so many of us sense is happening on the planet right now as we move beyond the egoic consciousness of separateness and into an awareness of the truth of Love.

And just as moving was coming upon a gathering of toddlers and their parents sitting on the grass, in the community garden that has been created on the penitentiary grounds, under a canopy of flowering pear trees. They were being led in song by a young woman reading a story to them that had a recurring chorus, a story titled One Love.

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QAnon and the Mind’s Illusion

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Human history is one long conspiracy theory

“An idea shared grows stronger.” ~A Course in Miracles

Over these last few years we have witnessed the truth of that statement, that an idea shared grows stronger. With the rise of QAnon and conspiracy theories we see that it doesn’t matter whether an idea has any basis in reality. What matters is how many people embrace it. If an idea is shared by enough people it gains a momentum of its own, takes on a life of its own, and actually begins to influence the world of form.

I suspect that many of us who are witnessing what seems to be a growing mass delusion are wondering what can be done to stop it. Clearly, reasoning with those who have embraced conspiracy theories in hopes it will snap them out of the spell doesn’t help. If anything, it causes them to become more resolute, doubling down on the falsehoods.

As someone who sees this world as a form of dream, I frequently look at what is happening in the world from that perspective and do dreamwork on the events of the world, engaging with them at the level of symbolic meaning to discover what the events can teach us.

Having worked with my own dreams for decades, I know that dreams come to help us understand something about ourselves that we need to know, something we need to integrate or heal or release. Given the epic moment we find ourselves in as we transition from the egoic consciousness of separateness into unitive consciousness, I also see that our collective “waking” dream is offering us essential information that can support us in this shift.

So I ask myself: What is this QAnon dream showing us that can support us in our awakening?

What QAnon Is Revealing

The most obvious thing about the QAnon phenomenon is that it is revealing how capable the mind is of believing things that are simply not true, things that may in fact be quite absurd. Just as Donald Trump has hyperbolized the ego mind, showing us what it looks like so we can recognize and release it within ourselves, QAnon unmasks the mind’s capacity to embrace illusion and take it to be reality. It also shows us how stubbornly the mind holds onto its beliefs even in the face of contradictory evidence.

This phenomenon is nothing new. If we step back and look at human history, we can see that it is one long episode of the human mind believing things that are not true: believing the gods are out to get us, believing the Earth is flat, believing sickness is a form of divine punishment, believing we can be condemned to eternal damnation, believing we can decimate the Earth and continue to survive as a species, believing people with certain skin tones, sexes, gender identifications, cultural backgrounds, investment portfolios are superior and deserve to have power over others, believing that any of us, ourselves included, could be unworthy of love.

To put it bluntly, human history is one long conspiracy theory, and at the core of all of these beliefs is an erroneous idea: separateness. This is the idea upon which our world has been built and it is the essence of the egoic consciousness that is now passing away.

A Mind-Blowing Realization

Many years ago I had an experience that I write about in my memoir Beyond Jesus in which the veil between the worlds was torn away and I saw clearly the interconnectedness and absolutely loving nature of Reality.

In that moment, I was shocked to see how deluded my own mind had been, how I had actually believed myself to be a separate self (aka ego), isolated in my own experience. I was stunned to see that I had been living my entire life within that illusion, never having the slightest inkling it was an illusion.

That awakening experience, which culminated with the mind-blowing realization that we are in a collective dream, turned my life and my understanding of the world on its head. It also colors how I see the followers of QAnon. You see, I, too, have believed ridiculous things.

One of the most remarkable things that experience revealed to me was that judgment doesn’t exist. Judgment is just part of the egoic illusion. And so to abide in unitive consciousness one must be willing to let go of judgment (a stance that is utter blasphemy to the ego mind) and to see all from the vantage point of Love, which encompasses all and rejects none.

Working with this QAnon dream I gain a great appreciation for how we humans must look from the vantage point of the divine realm: a species caught up in a story, an illusion, that causes us such great suffering.

Our Reality-Check

So if the mind is this gullible, if it is this capable of believing things that are illusory, how can we know what thoughts we can trust? How can we discern truth from fantasy in our own minds?

There is one way, and it is this: Reality is interconnectedness, mutuality, reciprocity. It is Love. So any thought, or theory, or story that points to anything other than Love is not Reality-based.

This is the Reality check we can apply to our own mind’s thoughts and beliefs. Every story the mind harbors of enemy, of fear, of exclusion, of attack, regardless of whether it is enacted in the world of form, is illusory.

What has played out on the world stage for millennia is the outward enactment of the human mind’s story of separateness. But now the jig is up. Our eyes are being opened to see the absurdity of it all, and more and more of us are coming to realize that nothing we ever do or believe can change this one simple fact: only Love is real.

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When the People Lead

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It’s time to direct our energy and attention toward The New.

I feel like I should write something about Donald Trump’s impeachment hearing this week, but the truth is, I’m tired of Donald Trump. I’m tired of the drama. I’m tired of the vitriol, the division, the delusions.

I’m just plain tired. This political drama isn’t where I want to focus my energies anymore. It’s like an energy vampire that feeds on the very thing it seems to demand of us: our attention.

I know that what is ready to arise on this planet isn’t going to come from you or me or any of us focusing on how screwed up the existing system is. That’s obvious. We get it. We don’t need to obsess about it.

The time has come, instead, for us to turn away from the ego’s addictive drama—whether that drama is playing out on the political stage or in the recesses of our own mind—and be willing to turn in a new direction, toward the truth of Love and its embodiment in the world.

Before Trump arrived on the scene, I wrote very little about the political landscape. I was much more interested in the inner landscape, because that’s where true transformation happens.

But when Trump erupted on our national political stage I felt drawn to speak to the phenomenon we were witnessing, because it was so obvious to me that there was much more to it than most people were recognizing on the face of things.

From the outset I saw Trump as someone who is exemplifying the egoic consciousness of separateness that humans must now leave behind, if for no other reason than that the wellbeing of the ecosystem we are part of requires it of us.

I saw that Trump was serving an important purpose, quite unintentionally I might add, by helping us see so clearly how the ego mind operates and the kind of world it fashions so that we could choose differently.

That’s really what the impeachment is all about: giving those in Congress the chance to choose differently. Whether or not they do, though, won’t have any effect on the bigger picture. Unitive consciousness is emerging, even more quickly now because of the excesses of ego that we have seen of late. (As the Tao te Ching says, “If you want to shrink something, you must first allow it to expand.”)

Here’s something for us to remember: it is often the “leaders” who are the last to get on board with big change, and the current shift in consciousness is perhaps the biggest change this planet has ever experienced.

I’m reminded of the story of Jonah, the prophet in the Hebrew Scriptures, who was commanded by God to go to Nineveh and tell them they needed to repent because otherwise they were headed for catastrophe.

Jonah didn’t want to go. He probably had no interested in saving the Ninevites, who were, from his vantage point, the enemies. In fact, he so didn’t want to go that he tried to flee his calling, ended up (long story) getting swallowed up by a big fish and then vomited out on dry land, at which point he finally went to Nineveh to fulfill his function, albeit reluctantly.

Much to his consternation, upon hearing his message the Ninevites repented and their catastrophic fate was averted, which made Jonah exceedingly unhappy.

But the thing that has always intrigued me the most about that story is how the Ninevites ended up repenting. As Jonah walked across the city preaching his message of doom and gloom, it was the people who proclaimed a fast and put on sackcloth. It was the people who turned toward a new way (which is what repent actually means).

It wasn’t until the king got word of what was going on that he too put on sackcloth, sat himself down in ashes, and decreed a time of national repentance, making what the people were already doing a “public policy.”

We get all worked up when the leaders don’t lead, when they don’t have the vision or the guts to forge a new society, or prepare the way for a new world. But the thing is, transformation is never going to come from the Oval Office or the halls of Congress. It is going to come from us, from We the People.

And true transformation, the transformation that will give rise to a world that reflects the Reality of Love, originates within each of us. It is a shift in consciousness that, as I have said before, is an inside job.

It is toward The New, not the old, that I want to direct my attention and energy now. As Buckminster Fuller famously said, “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”

I don’t expect the Senate to convict Donald Trump in these proceedings. They might surprise me, but I think there is way too much fear in that body to defect from the ego and its ways. The “leaders” are scared, which means we are the ones who will need to be bold enough to repent, audacious enough to choose differently, radical enough to align ourselves inwardly and outwardly with the truth of Love. And when we do, you can be assured the “leaders” will follow.

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The Ego’s Last Stand

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Are we willing to walk off the battlefield of the mind?

As I look out over our political landscape this week, I see what is happening from two levels. One is the literal level of a democracy under siege, in which a minority faction is attempting to overturn the will of the majority and commandeer the mechanisms of power.

The other level is the symbolic, the mythic, the story of our journey toward awakening. On that level I see an epic drama playing out in which the mind is coming face to face with the ego of its own making and wrestling with the choice before it: to continue to live in allegiance to the ego and adhere to its ways or to claim its freedom and step into the Reality of Love, into the unitive consciousness that is its true nature.

In this unfolding drama the mind is beginning to recognize the ego for what it is—a “separate self” that is itself an illusion—and is seeing how ego operates behind the scenes, relentlessly asserting its own “reality” and sustaining that “reality” through blame, attack, coercion, division, intimidation, threats.

Shocking though it may be, this is an important step in the mind’s awakening, because it must first see the illusion it has believed in in order to leave it behind.Continue Reading

Yielding: The Way of the Christ-Bearer

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By yielding to the Reality of Love, Mary births Its expression in form.

Ever since Donald Trump appeared on the political scene I have seen him as symbolizing the ego patterns that we must now leave behind if we are to survive as a species on this planet. By depicting in such an overt manner how the ego mind operates, what it believes, and how it plays out in the world, Trump has precipitated a jump into warp speed of our awakening process.

Recently, there have been reports that his mental health is deteriorating due to the loss of the election and his waning ability to bend circumstances to conform to his will—something that in the past he has always seemed to manage.

Symbolically, this is showing us the ultimate impotence of ego. Other than within the confines of its own fabricated alternative world, it has never been able to alter Reality, which is Love. The attempt to do so—to fracture Reality, to overturn Love—has been the great egoic escapade humanity undertook, and we have failed. Not for lack of effort, but simply because it can’t be done. Continue Reading