Patricia Pearce

Helping You Be the Change

Collapsing Time

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Stepping into No Time, we know our oneness with the infinite, loving, ever-present Now.

Last month I went to New Mexico for my annual retreat, and while I was there I experienced some strange synchronicities having to do with time.

As soon as I got to my room and was unpacking, I noticed that the alarm clock on the nightstand wasn’t plugged in. I investigated and discovered that the cord was too short to reach the outlet behind the bed.

No worries. I had brought my wrist watch with me so that I wouldn’t have to use my cell phone to tell the time, and since the watch has a button that illuminates the face in the dark, I realized I could just put it on the nightstand when I went to bed. But then I noticed that the light was very dim, and later that day the battery went dead. Then, the next morning, I discovered that the clock on my rental car dashboard wasn’t keeping time.

“Hmm,” I thought. “This is interesting.”Continue Reading

Our Make-Believe World

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We built a whole world on one wildly imaginative idea.

The other day I was out for a walk in our neighborhood, enjoying the extroverted exuberance of the daffodils and pausing now and then to breathe in the mind-altering fragrance of a grape hyacinth. Along the way, I passed by a man and his young daughter who were headed in the opposite direction. As we passed one another, I heard the little girl telling her father about the things that were falling from the sky of Middle Earth.

My immediate response was delight at the imaginative capacity of children. They can create whole worlds in their minds, and their spirits haven’t yet been straightjacketed by the realities we adults have to manage.

But in the next instant I almost burst out laughing as I recognized that we adults dwell in our own fantasy world, one that we take so seriously that we have brought it forth in the dimension of form—and perhaps ours is the greater imagination, because we are utterly convinced that our fantasy is the “real world.”Continue Reading

Ukraine: An Invitation to Love

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This article will be published in the upcoming edition of Miracles Magazine

As I sit down to write this article, the war in Ukraine is in its fourth week. As we witness the horror and brutality being unleashed in that country, many of us are asking ourselves: How can we contribute to the healing that is so obviously needed in our world right now? What does it mean to offer a miracle in this historic moment?

It is helpful to remember that what we are witnessing is nothing new. It is but one more graphic display of the mind’s original error of separateness that has been playing out for millennia. Once the mind embraced the fallacious idea of separateness, it became inevitable that it would attempt to divide reality into good and bad, us and them, enemies and heroes, perpetrators and victims, conquerors and conquered.

But this attempt to divide reality, no matter how violently enacted, is and always will be futile. Reality cannot be divided. Love cannot be destroyed; and it is this understanding that enables us to hold all that we are witnessing with equanimity and compassion.

Going to the Headwaters

I had a dream a few weeks ago while I was on retreat that has continued to linger with me, especially in light of what we are witnessing in Ukraine. In the dream I am walking along an old, cobblestoned city street. Walking in the opposite direction was a large group of people who were participating in some sort of action or demonstration, I think having to do with the climate crisis.

As I walked I realized that what I wanted to do was not to focus on the manifestations of the climate crisis, but to go to its headwaters, to the point where it originates in consciousness. There, I know, is where healing and transformation will happen.

The same could be said for the crisis of war, or any of the global crises we are facing. They are all expressions and outgrowths of an erroneous idea that found its way into our consciousness; and the only true resolution of these crises will occur when the underlying error has been abandoned. As the well-known Vedic saying states: “War begins in the minds of men.”

Going to the headwaters is something each of us can do. When we notice that place within our own mind that is harboring the patterns that we see playing out in this war—thoughts of division, of sides, of enemies, of attack—and dissolve those thought patterns in love, we make a lasting contribution to a world of peace.

We are the original victims of our own mental warfare, and so this stance of love begins within ourselves. We inflict tremendous suffering on ourselves when we judge ourselves and engage in self-loathing. This inner violence towards ourselves is the same violence that ripples out into hostilities in the world.

Seeing Together

Since the pandemic first began over two years ago, I have been intrigued by the fact that Covid, were it a word, would literally mean “to see together” (co- together; vid- to see). For me, that sums up this remarkable moment in our collective dream. We are “seeing together” things that in the past we couldn’t see, or simply refused to see.

Now that technology that has connected us globally, we are seeing together the virulence of racism, the dire consequences of our alienation from the Earth, the vast inequalities of wealth. We are seeing together how eagerly we divide ourselves into camps of us-versus-them, and how enthusiastically the mind embraces falsehoods that reinforce its narrative of division. And now, with this war in Ukraine, we are seeing together the shocking insanity of war.

This is a time of great reckoning for us as a human species. Seeing the mind’s insanity so clearly manifested in so many distinct yet inter-related forms, many of us are experiencing a deepening commitment to awaken from this illusory dream of the ego. That awakening dawns fully within us when we not only see the insanity that our minds have been harboring, but also realize that we are not and never have been judged because of it.

An Outbreak of Love

So what does it mean to offer a miracle in the case of this war?

It is the same as in any scenario: to allow our own perception to be corrected so that we are able to see and stand in the divine essence of all the players in this conflict. As A Course of Love states: “. . .  social causes, environmental causes, political causes. The cause of all these issues is fear. The cause and effect of love is all that will replace these causes of fear with the means and end that will transform them along with you. You are means and end. It is within your power to be saviors of the world. It is from within that your power will save the world.” (A Course of Love, D:Day 10.37)

It is to recognize that no matter how extreme or violent humankind’s expressions of separateness may be, they can never achieve the impossible. They can never make illusion real. They can never destroy our divine nature. They can never sever us from love.

As A Course in Miracles says, everything is either an expression of love or a cry for love. What we are seeing playing out right now in Ukraine is a tremendous cry for love. What if we then allow this outbreak of aggression to be the impetus for an equally stunning outbreak of compassion? What if we see this war as a calling for each of us to express love in new and creative ways—not only toward those who are experiencing the direct effects of this conflict, but with every one we meet? And what if we begin that outbreak of love with ourselves—accepting, finally, the eternal and inviolable beauty of our own divine nature?

The only replacement that can occur that will accomplish what you seek is the replacement of illusion with the truth, the replacement of fear with love, the replacement of your separated self with your real Self, the Self that rests in unity.  (ACOL, C:9.24)

This war, if we let it, can be a catalyst for our hearts to open as never before. This can be the moment when we commit ourselves fully and unequivocally to choose only love no matter what illusions the egoic mind is enacting. And because all is interconnected, each and every expression of love diminishes the energy of fear on this planet and hastens our collective awakening to the truth of who we are.

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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

The Promise of an Awakened World

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This is a talk and guided meditation I presented for Unity Church of Albany on June 27, 2021.

Transcript

I’ve been looking forward to this talk and this opportunity to bring you a message ever since Roger reached out to me several weeks ago, and invited me to speak to you all and he shared with me the vision statement that you adopted last summer, “a world transformed through spiritual awakening of all.”

And when I saw that, that vision statement, I knew that. something’s afoot here. Like this is meant to happen. So it’s really my delight and my honor to be with you all today to talk about the promise of an awakened world.Continue Reading

Orientation for New Guardian Angels

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You will long for your human to be able to see their splendor

Thank you for attending this orientation session, and thank you for your willingness to serve as a guardian angel to your assigned human during their Earthly sojourn. In preparation for your service, we wanted to give you a bit of information to orient you and prepare you for this assignment.

First of all, as you accompany your human, you will find that the human mind excels in its ability to embrace and believe falsehoods. You will be astonished that your human has the capacity to believe things that, from our angelic perspective, are ludicrous, and to devote their lives to manifesting these falsehoods.

Chances are, for example, that your human will believe in something called “separateness.” They will believe they can be cut off from Love. They will believe they can be unlovable. They will believe they are responsible for proving and establishing their worth. They will believe they can construct an entire world founded upon these erroneous beliefs, and they will be remarkably successful in doing so.Continue Reading

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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