Glossary of Terms
Being the whole of the Teaching
In Transformation work are several words used with different meanings than are usually understood. There are also a few words that have been created in order to fill in gaps in meaning in English vocabulary. Below are the ones I am at present able to remember.
Adult: A human who, through having learned the effects of the consequences of choices made, is able to be responsible for her/him self.
Child: A human who, lacking the knowledge of the consequences of choices made, is unable to be responsible for her/him self.
Agreement: Essentially a business contract with equal sides; that is, each side or person is both a contractor and a contractee. Agreements are the only means of communication between humans. There is currently a popular confusion between the concepts of Agreement and Commitment. To erase this confusion, see Commitment below.
There are only three responses anyone can have to an agreement already made: 1) Keep it; 2) Change it; 3) Break it.
The consequences of each response is:
1) When you keep an agreement, there is increased trust in yourself to keep your word and your sense of self-esteem is increased. Also, the other party now has an increased ability to trust your word, as well. As a consequence of that increased trust in your word, your reputation in the world (think collective consciousness) ratchets upward.
2) Changing an agreement shows respect for oneself and for the other(s) involved in the agreement. Again, the result is increased self-esteem all around and your increased reputation in the world.
3) Breaking an agreement breaks the relationship with the other person(s) involved in the agreement. An agreement is a bridge between one and another. Breaking the agreement blows up the bridge. The cure for this is to build another bridge by a) acknowledging that the agreement was broken; and 2) offering an amendment to the other as a token of self-responsibility and an asking for forgiveness.
An aside here: the first time there is an observed behavior in another is an indication that that pattern exists as a possibility in the future. The second time the behavior is observed indicates the probability the pattern will repeat in the future. The third time the behavior is observed is a statement that this particular behavior WILL repeat in future as it is an ingrained pattern and there will be no escaping it. When this occurs, tell the truth to yourself and carefully choose your response. Your truth and response may very well include exiting stage left ASAP.
Belief: A thought, repeated again and again, eventually forming blocks to perception and comforting walls of limitation. Beliefs are the boxes in which we live and from which we construct our lives.
By the bye, there IS no ‘out of the box’, as there is no way to operate outside our beliefs. There simply is no There there. What happens when pushed ‘out of the box’ is that suddenly our beliefs expand and our box, sometimes suddenly, becomes larger.
Balance: When things are completely in balance, any issue regarding the ‘thing’ disappears and the ‘issue’ returns to the originating information in the Flow.
When we are unhappy, in order to project away from our unhappiness, we select aspects of the original information and put a wobbly spin on them through imbalanced thinking. The aspects, now out of balance, separate out of the Flow as a kind of particulate matter. The information stays in pieces that way until we release the imbalance through some kind of letting go, at which point the pieces rejoin the whole.
They talk about this in Christian Science as the way in which when healing occurs; the whatever-it-was that apparently required healing simply disappears as if it never was. As, in Truth, it never did; we just made it so for a time.
We humans constantly forget this. It’s probably too simple and too profound for the RM to handle. So, having forgotten it again, when we relearn this it always appears as a revelation.
The Universal Solvent is Forgiveness, which is a special function of Love. It’s also the Key to the Kingdom, and we, each of us, hold this key in our hands and hearts.
This is the whole of the Law of Healing.
Commitment: Commitment is NOT a fancy, false-ego-stroking synonym for Agreement. An agreement is a tit-for-tat contract between two or more parties. Commitment is a State of Being.
Decide: Idea-cide, or the death of ideas. As with genocide, it’s the attempt to kill off all possibilities but one. Then we can be dramatic and say, “I just don’t have any other choice.”
Description: Description is the ability to make unemotional (meaning ‘unattached’) observations and to describe those observations.
Discrimination: Out of the smorgasbord of choices available here in 3D, we get to choose freely. Also freely chosen, although perhaps invisible at the moment, are the resulting consequences of any given choice. Through experience, and over time, we learn to choose with more discrimination those consequences that suit us better than other choices/consequences. In this way we learn to customize our life experiences according to our desired outcomes.
Discrimination is not a synonym for Judgment. Judgment projects opinions/points of view out into the world and pins them on something/someone that we perceive as outside one’s self. Discrimination is able to say, “This is this.”, and “That is that.” Another term for this ability is Description. Discrimination is, eventually, able to use Description, understanding there is a consequence to every choice.
Ego: a term adopted from psychology that is often incorrectly used, or is used in a too-inclusive manner, resulting in confusion. ‘Ego’ basically means Identity and has been re-translated in Transformation work to refer to two distinctly different functions of the larger human Mind. (By the way, Mind and Ego are not synonymous. Pay attention here.)
False Ego: This is what I call the Johnny One Note, the Me-Me-Me-Me-Me. Its Purpose is to establish, “What’s in it for me?”
True Ego: Our connection to the Divine, this is the I Am. Its Mission is to ask, “How may I serve?”
Overview of the Egos: In everything that we do, or think about doing, both the Johnny One Note and the I Am come along – neither can be eliminated nor should be. They, together, provide balance for us here in 3D as humans. And, just a reminder, we are the local site of a warm animal in partnership with the Divine. We walk in two worlds, Left Right, Left Right, to create and hold the balance.
Judgment: A process of consciously or semi-consciously declaring something ‘good’ or ‘bad.’ The good or bad is in the eye of the beholder and not innately so. The Reactive Mind (RM) serves up good/bad judgment as a response to its evaluation that something perceived is good for our survival or bad for our survival. That’s it.
Listen Up: In magic(k) work there are two basic precepts: First, Control your thought. Second, Guard your tongue. Our reality is created by the thoughts that we think and the words out of our mouths. Simple? Yes. Easy? No. It’s a discipline and a treatise for another place and time but, to repeat, Listen Up.
One of the things we learn from the Course in Miracles is that objects/situations/people come into form with no meaning tags attached. The human individual, as a meaning-making machine, will supply her/his own meaning to each and every object/situation/person encountered or heard about existing somewhere other than in the immediate field of observation.
Why then ’tis none to you; for there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.
_______Shakespeare
This form of the function of Judgment is a filter of perception that, if absent, would allow us to see with clear eyes and minds, and to stay in Present Time. This function of Judgment throws us either into the past (usually) or into the future. That’s the purpose for which the RM uses Judgment, to keep us out of Present Time in which we would be present to the encounter.
When in Present Time, a state seldom achieved for most of us most of the time, we are in the flow of energy/communication that occurs naturally between Self and Other. When we are in Present Time we are naturally in this flow. We then naturally and automatically experience peace, bliss, wonder, and love.
This is our natural state of Being.
Guilt: The currency with which we pay in order to do what we are going to do anyway. Also see Guilt/Pleasure in articles for January 2010.
Healing: When things are completely in balance, any issue regarding the ‘thing’ disappears and the ‘issue’ returns to the originating information in the Flow. When we are unhappy, in order to project away from our unhappiness, we select aspects of the original information and put a wobbly spin on them through imbalanced thinking. The aspects, now out of balance, separate out of the Flow as a kind of particulate matter. The information stays in pieces that way until we release the imbalance through some kind of letting go, at which point the pieces rejoin the whole.
They talk about this in Christian Science as the way in which when healing occurs, the whatever-it-was that apparently required healing simply disappears as if it never was. As, in Truth, it never did; we just made it so for a time.
We humans constantly forget this. It’s probably too simple and too profound for the RM to handle. So, having forgotten it again, when we relearn this it always appears as a revelation.
The Universal Solvent is Forgiveness, which is a special function of Love. It’s also the Key to the Kingdom, and we, each of us, hold this key in our hands and hearts.
This is the whole of the Law of Healing.
Mind: All elements and degrees of consciousness. Part of the New Thought statement is, “There is One Mind. That Mind is God.”
Objective/Subjective: All experience, by definition, is the experience of the subject of the experience and therefore ‘subjective.’ Objective means the experience of an individual from a detached (not emotionally attached to outcome) point of view. Subjective means the experience of an individual from an attached (emotionally concerned with outcome) point of view.
Point of View: One’s life experience is focused through the lens of a Point of View (PoV). PoV in its natural state is fluid and changes with any movement from here to there, either externally (using the body) or internally (through having another thought about the thing observed).
PoV is inevitable. There’s always a place where we stand and from which point we view whatever we are looking at or for.
However, there is a danger here in that any given PoV can seem to be the Only One, or the Only Right One. That is, the PoV of all Right Thinkers. Here PoV intersects with one’s set of Beliefs. That is, one’s individual PoV, already a filter on Reality (whatever that is!) is again filtered through a Belief System, so that PoV can appear(!) to be The Way Things Are, and that’s that. Whoo! Can we all pronounce Mind Control?
Reactive Mind: a part of the human level of Mind used by the False Ego. The RM only knows survival of the body of the warm animal that we are. This is the extent of its perception. The RM also has no sense of humor, meaning it takes everything literally and therefore has no balanced perception within itself.
Responsible: Able to respond in Present Time.
Self-Esteem: The measure of the individual’s Self Love, which determines everything else in the experience of life.
Speculation: When you know, you know. Until then, it’s all speculation. Speculation is all fantasy and projection of something within the personal self onto another person or situation.
Sandra Dean Copyright (c) 2010 All Rights Reserved