Know ThySELF
or
“Who Do You Think You Are Anyway”

By Reja Janaki Joy Green*
~*~*~*~*~*~

Socrates – (469 – 399 B.C.) of course, was the famous Greek philosopher who is attributed the quote, “Know Thyself” and was forced to drink poison for his transgression. Such is the fear and trepidation of his teaching.

What is this fear; where does it come from; and how do we dispel it?

The Course in Miracles teaches that we project outside of ourselves that which we disown and wish to get rid of and that this projection always perpetuates our sense of separation and isolation. I am not that. That is bad. That must be destroyed.

Yet in order to project something beyond ourselves we must first ‘identify’ the something, which is separate from who we are. And to do that we must first think we know who we are. Ah, and there’s the rub:  Who Are We?

Know ThySelf! [Or “Who do you think you are, anyway?” ]

Every thought we have, each belief and every action we take, are all intimately related to who we think we are. If we think we are an ego, living in a body having the experience of coping in a world with other bodies, and trying to make the best of it until our time is up and we die, then this is what we will experience.

But what if we are wrong. What if we have been following a curriculum that has blinded us to the Truth of Where we Are and What we Are.

The journey to God is merely the reawakening of the knowledge of where you are always and what you are forever.
It is a journey without distance to a goal that has never changed.
Truth can only be experienced. It cannot be described, and it cannot be explained.
I can make you aware of the conditions of truth, but the experience is of God.
Together we can meet its conditions,
but truth will dawn upon you of itself. CH 8 Sec VI, 51

It only makes sense that if we have been following a curriculum that has not brought us happiness and contentment, we need to make a change. And do we have the courage to make that change and to go in a totally new direction.

If that direction threatens who we think we are, we will project our fear onto it and we will refuse to go there. But if we get a glimpse, a hint that maybe we have been wrong about who we truly are, we may just have the courage to make the shift. And this shift is as dramatic as the people in Plato’s cave who only had to turn around to see the light and not the shadows.

What if, in making that shift, there were a power available to us that were ALL Powerful. It sounds fantastic and unreal and yet what if this were truly Reality, the ultimate Reality Show and we had only to open our eyes to its Truth.

When this Power has once been experienced, it is impossible to trust
one’s own petty strength again. Who would attempt to fly with the tiny wings
of a sparrow when the mighty power of an eagle has been given him? And who
would place his faith in the shabby offerings of the ego when the gifts of God
are laid before him? What is it that induces them to make the shift? Manual for Teachers, Trust, 4

There are those who have gone through near-death experiences and have shared, as best as words could describe, their experience of who they truly ARE. Afterwards, their fear of death is non-existent since they know, first hand, there is no death. They know they are not separate and that life is Eternal.

Do we need to wait until we no longer have our bodies to come to the knowledge of who we are or can we choose now, in this incredible instant, to know ourselves as the Will of our Source.

‘Thy Will, not mine, be done’ is not a sacrifice and merely becomes a statement of truth. There is no ‘mine’. There is only the One Will, in truth. We have dreamed a dream of separation and have been wrong. We have never separated from our Source and never will. We Are the Will of God.

When we come from that Knowledge, we release all the strange beliefs in sin and separation. There is only one thing going on: Mind – You within it and it within You. What joy there is to realize the nightmare is over. You are no  longer a captive in your cave. The Light has come.

And what if all we had to do to realize this power were to do nothing at all.

“A Course in Miracles” teaches us to relinquish the BLOCKS to love’s awareness. We don’t create Truth or Love, we merely uncover them. Truth isn’t something we bring to the situation. It IS the situation. Love is, God is – when we do nothing and instead choose to accept our Reality.

Some of us may remember the Erhard Seminar Training [EST] created by Werner Erhard that had a major impact on thousands of people and helped increase their conscious awareness.

In one of the exercises of the EST Training, the men were asked to pretend they were women, change their voice and recite something only a woman would say; and the women were asked to do likewise; they needed to pretend they were men.

If the person were attached to their identity as a ‘man’ or ‘woman’ they had great difficulty in doing this exercise. They became angry and embarrassed. But if the person knew that they were not their body, they delighted in putting on an outrageous performance with glee!

Another exercise was called the TRUTH PROCESS, the rumor of which terrorized the participants beforehand. During this process, there were those who fainted, or cried, or laughed uncontrollably. Some people trembled and sweated profusely. And others were filled with Bliss.

What was the process? They were asked to stand on a stage and look out into the audience
and just………. BE. That was it. No other instructions. Just BE with nothing added.

It appears that in order to just BE, you need to be clear on who you ARE. If you think it’s up to you, you may become frightened, or embarrassed; ashamed or terrorized. And yet if you KNOW that you Are pure Being itself celebrating in that knowledge, you will only know BLISS. You will look out into the audience and see only yourSELF!

In a similar seminar, the participants were asked to sit in a circle and look into the eyes of the person across from them and just be with that person, with nothing added. Many people would soon find their eyelids becoming heavy and they would fall asleep, sitting up! The mind took protective maneuvers. It went to SLEEP.

And that’s where we find ourselves: Asleep and afraid to awaken to our Joy.

Give up gladly everything that would stand in the way of your remembering,
for God is in your memory, and His Voice will tell you that you are part of Him
when you are willing to remember Him and know your own reality again.
Let nothing in this world delay your remembering of Him,
for in this remembering is the knowledge of yourself. CH.9.IX.69  

* Janaki Joy Green [Reja-Joy] is one of the founding members of the Course in Miracles Society [CIMS]; She has facilitated Course in Miracles study groups since 1983 and currently resides with her husband Chris Green in Omaha, NE.