Patricia Pearce

Helping You Be the Change

Setting Aside Our Human-Centricity

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The haze of our ignorance is beginning to lift.

There was a brown-gray haze cloaking the city skyline, and the sun was rising red when I went up to our roof deck early this morning to do my morning journaling. I had already seen on my weather app that the air quality was “Unhealthy,” but I decided to go up anyway. After all, all I was going to do was sit and write. Nothing strenuous.

But when I saw with my own eyes what “unhealthy” air quality looks like, I thought, “I can’t be up here today.” Much as I love to start my day outside. Much as I enjoy being surrounded by the flowers that are blooming spectacularly right now in the pots lining the deck.

So I gathered up my journal and my pot of tea and was just about to go back inside when I noticed the chimney swifts flying overhead.

“They have no place to go,” I thought. No indoors they can retreat to. No N-95 masks they can don. They have to endure the smoke that is pouring down from the wildfires in Canada. They live their lives completely vulnerable to what we humans do or don’t do in response to the climate emergency.

Watching them, I wondered: If air quality like this can cause respiratory illnesses in humans, what does it do to the tiny lungs and body of a bird?

That’s when I decided not to leave. I decided for that one hour to set aside my privilege as a human with a house and have myself breathe the air that all the other creatures have to breathe day in and day out.

Our Human-Centricity

The news is filled with reports about the over four hundred wildfires burning in Canada right now, and they all focus solely on the air-quality risk to humans, which in itself tells us all we need to know about what has led to this climate crisis.

Our human-centricity has been our unique form of ignorance, and it has overshadowed by far any fantastical misinformation that has ever flown across the internet. This idea that we exist as a separate and superior species, exempted from what befalls the rest of life on Earth, is the lie to end all lies.

And I mean that literally. It is the lie that has brought us to this moment of reckoning when are being forced to abandon our illusions and accept that we exist, and always have, interwoven into a vast and intricate web of life.

Opening to Other Ways of Knowing

Every morning before I begin my journaling, I read a poem by Mary Oliver. I cycle through her books poem by poem, year after year. Today’s poem was “The Dipper.”

In it, Oliver shares an experience she’d had fifty years before while in Colorado. She was beside a river, and there she encountered a bird she’d heard about called a dipper.

In her desire to take in the essence of his language-less song, she found she had to “bend forward” into his frame of mind. The experience changed her forever.

. . . since that hour I have lived

simply,
in the joy of the body as full and clear
as falling water; the pleasures of the mind
like a dark bird dipping in and out, tasting and singing.

It made me wonder how I might be changed if I could bend forward into the frames of mind of our kindred species. What wisdom would open up within me? How would the encounter transform my mind? What fierce and loving lengths would I go to to protect the chimney swift overhead who just wants to feel its body dipping and swooping in the clear air of a cool June morning?

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Love’s Default

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The default setting is Love.If you have followed my work for any period of time, you’ll know that I sometimes look at global events through the lens of dreamwork. It is a helpful way to understand at a deeper level what we are experiencing collectively, because this human drama is a type of dream in which we are playing out an utterly implausible scenario, namely, separateness.

In this dream of separateness we are unaware of our eternal union with Love. Asleep to the interconnectedness of all Being. Oblivious to our own divine nature. You could say we humans are on this planet dreaming our impossible dream.Continue Reading

The Global Hurricane

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One of the family stories I grew up with was the tale my father told of living through a massive hurricane that hit his native land of British Honduras, now known as Belize, when he was 10 years old. He, his parents and siblings were staying at his grandparents’ house on St. George’s Caye to celebrate a national holiday.

They were just about to sit down to his favorite dinner—chicken and green peas—when outside the wind began to pick up, whipping and slashing at the palm trees. The sky turned angry, the sea churned.

My father’s grandfather was certain that their house, sturdily built and having weathered many storms, could withstand anything. But my dad’s father was adamant that they needed to get out of the house quickly and take refuge behind the water vat, the storage tank where they collected rain water.

His father-in-law finally agreed, and they hurried out of the house as the storm raged around them.

As the water began to rise, they huddled in the small edy behind the vat. The wind roared like a locomotive. My dad stuck his head out once to look into the storm, but quickly withdrew it when the driving rain pelted his face like bullets. His father grasped him fiercely. In his later years he would remember the experience. “The first time I knew how much my father loved me was when he nearly strangled me during the hurricane.”

They sang hymns.

O God, our help in ages past,
our hope for years to come,
our shelter from the stormy blast
and our eternal home.

The roof of the house flew past them.

Then, suddenly, everything grew absolutely quiet. Still. The sky overhead turned blue. They were in the eye of the hurricane.

They’d made it halfway through and were thankful that the house was still standing. Hopefully they would have a place to shelter overnight.

But when the backside of the hurricane hit, they saw the entire house swept into the sea. That was the moment when, young though he was, my father realized with a shock how fleeting life actually is.

Eventually the storm subsided. They and their neighbors were able to salvage a few boats that had gotten snared in the mangrove behind the island and they set sail for the mainland, one of the boats carrying the body of a young neighbor girl who was killed when her family’s vat fell over and crushed her.

Pummeled by the Storm

I read a channeled message this week, the Cosmic Times, that said if we could see Earth’s energy field from afar it would look like the entire planet is enveloped in a hurricane.

Don’t we know it. Although we may not be able to see the storm that is pummeling us, we can see its effects. We are watching in disbelief as the institutions that we thought were so sturdy, structures that had weathered every storm in the past, are beginning to fly apart before our very eyes.

People are terrified. Some are running toward the bunker of authoritarianism, believing that a strongman can keep them safe. It is completely understandable. And completely naive.

Because Kali is on the loose, and no human institution built on a false foundation—the foundation of separateness, the foundation of domination, the foundation of illusion—can withstand the tempest of Truth that has been unleashed on this planet.

Quickly now, abandon your allegiance to the small self you thought you were, its flimsy certainties and the shabby world it had built.

Give your allegiance only to your Divine Luminous Self and the new Earth it knows.

Above all, take refuge in your Heart. It is the eye of the storm that sees clearly and shows you how fiercely Love has you in its grasp.

It is there, in your Heart, that you can hear the angels singing their hymns of praise for this blessed cataclysm that has come to set you free.

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The Queen’s Funeral: A Waking Dream

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I had the most extraordinary dream yesterday that I’d like to share with you. Dreams, of course, can symbolize many things, and their meaning depends on the associations and experiences unique to the dreamer. My version of this dream is titled “Pomp and Servitude.”

Pomp and Servitude

I am watching the processional taking Queen Elizabeth’s coffin from Westminster Abbey to Windsor Castle. It is a majestically choreographed event, cinematic and mythic, and I am spellbound. The carriage. The horses. The pipers. The rows upon rows of guards and royals, all stepping together in unison.Continue Reading

If This World Is a Dream, What Does It Matter?

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This article was originally published in the January-February 2022 edition of Miracles Magazine. You can hear me reading the article on my podcast.

The gap between reality and dreams lies not between the dreaming of the world and what you dream in secret. They are one. The dreaming of the world is but a part of your own dream you gave away, and saw as if it were its start and ending, both.

~A Course in Miracles T-27.VII.11.4-5

“WE ARE IN A DREAM!”

That was the breathtaking realization I had at the culmination of a very intense awakening experience years ago. In that instant the curtain was yanked back, allowing me to see the hidden mechanisms behind what we experience on this physical plane. I could see how this world is generated by the stories playing out in our minds, and that those stories are based on a singular fallacy: the concept of separateness.

From this illusory concept has arisen a world plagued by warfare, racism, misogyny, poverty, environmental exploitation—a world that reflects and reinforces our belief that we are on our own, cut off from Source, from Earth, from one another, from our true Self—all of it a fantasy that bears little resemblance to the Reality of Love.

So if this world is simply a dream playing out an illusion in the mind, what does any of it matter? Why should we even care about what is happening here on planet Earth?

Dreams’ Relevance

My own experience doesn’t allow me to dismiss dreams so easily. In fact, dreams have played a key role in my own spiritual evolution.

I began having “big dreams” when I was in my twenties in seminary. I knew I needed to understand what they were telling me, so I began to study and practice dreamwork.

Dreams are consciousness expressing itself. They are the canvas of the mind, and they have many functions. They bring to light erroneous beliefs held in the deepest parts of the psyche. They serve as portals for divine wisdom to break into our awareness. They are our teachers and guides, and when we begin to pay attention to what they are telling us, our spiritual growth leaps into warp speed.

Over the years I have had dreams that revealed how deeply the misogyny of the religion I was raised in had bound my spirit as a woman. I have had dreams that revealed the rising of a new consciousness on the planet. I have had dreams in which I have encountered the resurrected presence of Jesus who, it was explained to me, was the guru assigned to me by the circumstances of my birth.

In other words, for me dreams matter a great deal. Not because they are Real, but because they are revelatory.

The Dream of the World

So what of this dream we call the world? What is it attempting to reveal to us? How might it be a portal for divine wisdom to help us awaken to the Christ consciousness within us?

A Course of Love defines Christ consciousness as “the consciousness of unity for unity is what is” (T4:12:23). Yet when we look at our collective dream, especially as portrayed in the media, what we see playing out on the public stage is the amplification of its opposite: separateness. Political polarization, wealth inequality, disregard for Earth’s intricate ecosystems, disenfranchisement of people on the margins of society, all of this is a vivid depiction of the illusion of separateness.

With the rise of disinformation and breakdown of consensual reality we are also witnessing the mind’s growing confusion about what is real. While this may seem troubling, this confusion in the collective dream indicates that the mind is beginning to question itself, a necessary precursor to letting go of its original conspiracy theory: the ego.

In this collective dream we also see, in movements such as Black Lives Matter and the #MeToo movement, the mind beginning to reckon with the trauma it has inflicted on itself because of this fundamental error called separateness.

All Dreams Serve Us

The person I studied dream work with, Jeremy Taylor, always said that all dreams come in the interest of health and wholeness—including nightmares, which come with such important information that they will jolt us awake to get our attention.

That is what I see happening in this current world dream that has become a nightmare for so many. It is placing before us the full implications of our illusion of separateness in order to startle us awake to the irrefutable truth of interdependence and the absolute nature of Love.

All of the tumult taking place in the collective dream is actually a sign that our awakening is underway. The idea of separateness is intensifying not because it is getting stronger, but because, like a star that goes supernova when it has spent its fuel, dying in a sudden flash of energy, the story of the ego is in the throes of its dramatic death.

We Are the Dreamers

You are the dreamer of the world of dreams.
~A Course in Miracles T-27.VII.13.1

Now, a caveat.

Those of us who understand the dreamlike nature of the world may be tempted to dismiss all that is happening on the world stage as other people’s fallacy, other people’s erroneous dream.

But that is just another instance of the mind perpetuating its illusion of separateness. The fact is there is no “other.” Consciousness is a whole, and one of the first principles of dreamwork is to understand that every character and every element in a dream represents an aspect of the self. As master explorer of dreams, Carl Jung, once said, “Who looks outside, dreams. Who looks inside, awakens.”

 

It is not difficult to change a dream when once the dreamer has been recognized. 

~A Course in Miracles T-27.VII.14.2

So if we truly want to support the awakening of Christ consciousness in ourselves and the collective, this dream is here to help us if we’re willing to work with it.

For instance, when we see a video of a Black man being murdered by a white man on the street of a major city, the dream is imploring us to examine our own mind. Where does the fallacy of racism still dwell in me? Where in my own mind do I still sanction coercion or violence? Where in my own mind do I believe another’s wellbeing has nothing to do with me?

When we see a nation divided and turned against itself, the dream is asking us to look within and notice. How do I harbor partisanship within myself? How am I still choosing to see others as adversaries, enemies, opponents to be vanquished? What are all the ways I continue to I deny my union with the whole?

When we see fires raging in the West and hurricanes pummeling the East—planetary imbalances driven by human “progress”—the dream beckons us to take a clear look at ourselves. How do I perceive myself to be separate from the rest of life on the planet? How do I, as a human, see myself as special, more significant than the other species that are my kindreds here on Earth?

This clear honesty, engaged in without judgment, enables us to see how we ourselves have been dreaming the dream of separateness. And as we envelop this awareness in Love, we begin to awaken. We become lucid: in the dream but not of the dream.

As we embody Christ consciousness in the midst of this present nightmare of fear and division, the dream is able to transform, becoming what ACIM calls a happy dream. Then this material world is freed to fulfill its divine purpose as a place in which Love matters.

 

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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.

How egoic “reality” is sustained

Yesterday’s hearing focused on how Trump continued to promote the narrative that there was widespread election fraud even though all of the key players in his inner circle were telling him that was nonsense. But because he so desperately wanted to stay in power, he relentlessly asserted that falsehood over and over and over again until people came to believe it. The revelation here, at least for me, is how egoic “reality” is sustained through the mechanism of repetition. It isn’t the veracity of a story, but its sheer repetition that leads the mind to embrace it as real. Thanks to this congressional hearing, we can see how naive the human mind really is. Furthermore, we can see that once the mind has embraced a story, no matter how absurd, it begins to give that story shape in the world of form. If we ever doubt that, all we need to do now is remember how an aggrieved mob attacked the Capitol because of a lie.

The Real Big Lie

Trump’s assertion that the election was stolen has been labeled the Big Lie, but for me that is an exageration. The actual Big Lie is the one we tell ourselves over and over and over again in our own minds: that we are unworthy, that we are not enough, that we are separate and alone. This is the Big Lie that has caused us so much suffering. This is the Big Lie that has directed the dream we are dreaming and shaped the world we are creating. This is the Big Lie that has left us feeling alienated from Earth, from the Source of our Being, from our very Self.

Hearing an angelic perspective

I’m deeply grateful for the congressional committee that is conducting these hearings and giving us a look under the hood at how the ego-mind actually works and how readily we play along. And as I watch these hearings I am also imagining another parallel proceeding happening on the non-visible plane: a select angelic committee conducting their own hearings. I can imagine this angelic committee, without any judgment whatsoever, lovingly pulling back the curtain to help us see how we have been duped by our own minds. I can imagine them compassionately breaking the news to us that we have been living inside a fabricated “reality” based on a colossal lie. I can imagine them tenderly and tenaciously repeating to us—over and over and over again so that we might finally come to believe it—the Big Truth: that we are, each of us, luminous beings embodying the Divine and inseparable from Love. I can also imagine them trying very hard to hold it together while they lay out before us all the nonsense we have fallen for. And I can easily imagine them finally losing it and busting out into the most glorious laughter at this whole tale we have spun for ourselves about how we are unworthy, not enough, on our own. Because, really. With a story this far-fetched what can one possibly do but laugh?

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Sacrificing to the Gun God

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Our version of human sacrifice

This is a message I emailed out to my subscribers on May 25, 2022

Dear Friends,

In the wake of the recent mass shootings, yesterday’s at an elementary school in Texas and last week’s at a grocery store in Buffalo, I wanted to briefly share what is mulling around in my mind today. It is this: our society practices human sacrifice.

We don’t call it that. We think we are so much more advanced than the civilizations that practiced ritual sacrifice. But it is human sacrifice, and it’s time we get clear about that and call it what it is rather than pretending it’s something else.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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