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Enjoy another wonderful text by Rev. Phil Smedsted, minister Emeritus of Oasis Rising Center

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Phil Smedstad's texts are one of the ways Oasis Rising Center supports members.

A Positive Path for Spiritual Living

Oasis Rising Center Spiritual Center
Oasis Rising Center 8125 West Sahara Avenue
Las Vegas, NV 89125
(702) 804-8189
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“Awakening to Who You Are”
`By Rev. Phillip Smedstad

What we at Unity call the “inner Christmas experience,” or “the birth of the Christ in us” is all about waking up from a bad dream.

Imagine for a moment that you are asleep and having a nightmare.  In this nightmare, you just lost your job, your house is being repossessed, and you were just diagnosed with having three weeks to live.  Finally, there is a man chasing you with a very large knife.

You wake up drenched with sweat, your heart is pounding, and you feel terrified.  As you awaken more fully, you realize that none of this is real.  But it sure felt real while you were sleeping.
In the dream, you thought there were many solutions.  Maybe you needed to get a new mortgage.  Maybe you needed to find a new job. 

Maybe you needed to find a new cure.  Or maybe the solution was to take a self-defense class.

However, now that you are awake, you realize that none of those measures would have done you any good or solved the problem.  There was actually only ever one problem, and only ever one solution.  The problem was that you were asleep, and the solution was to wake up.

Mystics throughout the ages have said, “The problem with people is not that they are bad.  The problem is that they are asleep.”  They have also said that our “normal” waking state is one of sleep-walking, that we are on a kind of auto-pilot.

One of those mystics said, “Even when we are awake, we are asleep, and we are having a very bad dream.”  In this dream, we feel separate from God.  In the dream, lack, fear, and death all seem very real.

Also in this dream state, we believe what I sometimes call “the great lie.”  This lie has two parts:  First, we believe that there is something missing in us.  Then we believe that what will fix this is to find whoever or whatever will fill up the empty space in us.

None of this is true.  We are not incomplete beings, and we will never fill up what seems like a lack in us with anything outside ourselves.
John Bradshaw once famously said, “We are only as sick as our secrets.”  I completely agree, and the very biggest secret we have had – especially from ourselves – is that we are the very presence of God, and that everything we want is already within us.  Our job is to wake up to all that we are.

Are you willing to awaken to the Truth of your magnificence?  If so, what follows is a powerful way to do it.

Many of you have heard me say that our critical thoughts of others are reflections of unloving thoughts we have had about ourselves and then disowned.  Especially if we are upset with someone, that person is definitely our mirror.
Of course, it is the same with people we admire.  That person is also our mirror.  Maria Nemeth, in one of her workshops, has people make a list of those they most admire.  It could be people from the present, people from the past, or even fictional characters.

Then, the workshop participants are to list three things about each person that they most admire.  The next step is to circle those traits which show up more than once.  This list of traits is “who we have come to planet earth to be.”

So, think of someone you admire right now.  Then say, as you think of that person, “What I admire about you is also in me.”

The Russian mystic Gurdjieff once said, “Most of the time, it takes a shock for us to wake up to our divinity.”  These shocks might be unconscious, such as an illness, a loss, a financial setback, etc.
However, the shock can also be a conscious one – like realizing that everyone in our life is our mirror, including everyone we admire.  Shocking, yes?

(By the way, a famous psychologist once said, “If we knew that everyone we meet is our mirror, none of us would ever need therapy.”)

In A Course in Miracles we read, “With love in you, you have no need except to express it.”  In another place, it says that we only have two emotions – love and fear.  Of those two, only love is real.  Fear is not.

So, either we’re expressing love or we’re asleep.  Either we feel at one with God, or we’re having a bad dream.  Everyone is our life is either expressing love, or they are asleep and asking for our help in waking up.

The Holy Spirit in us is constantly supporting us in waking up, by showing us our mirrors, and asking us to love them.  The more we accept and practice loving the parts of ourselves we had disowned, the gentler our awakening will be.