How many of you have ever succeeded at figuring out how to control someone or something that was a problem to you? Raise your hands. We’ve all managed at times, haven’t we? And what freedom did you win? I’ll tell you what you won. You won more servitude, because now you’re dependent upon the conditions that you cultivated in order to achieve that control. And where you have dependency upon anything, you have fear, and fear feeds attachments. And as attachments grow, the fear escalates and one is driven through a cycle of trying to find new ways to control what? To control a set of conditions that their mind has created, that they never saw taking place until they had become the slave of the thing they thought would free them.
It’s very beautiful to see this. Because, you see, nothing I’m going to tell you is anything other than what is true. And the way that we can know it’s true, is that we can actually see for ourselves how it is that our present mind – our present level of consciousness – is asleep in itself; that it’s divided. And being divided, it is always against itself, but never knows that it is itself that it’s against. And because it’s divided, always finds someone or something outside of it to either attack or figure out a way to cultivate, to achieve a reconciliation.
Can we see that both of these acts are actually acts of resistance? Please listen. You cannot move away from whatever pains you through resistance to it. You cannot move away from anything through resistance. Those of you that know Scripture: Resist not evil, the original meaning of evil – just to throw this in, because it bears saying it – has to do not with some moral creed, but rather with temptation to complete oneself. To complete oneself through what? Through the ideas and images, the plans and imagined powers by which, when you do that, you will at last be a whole, free, sane human being.
What you really want is freedom from the mind that believes that the solution can be thought of. No solution to what causes us pain can be thought about. We can only directly experience the solution, through what? Through learning to embrace what we are, in the moment that we are that. Have you ever heard of the word, “atonement?” It’s a widely-used religious word, isn’t it – a fairly religious word? But the word, “atonement” means really, what? It means to be at one. Not that something happened for which there is an atonement, but atonement means that one is at one. One is one in that moment. This is atonement.
So I want you to understand the next idea, that any form of resistance is the refusal of atonement. See, we’ve got it so backwards. We’re all trying to figure out how to be one. Aren’t you? I want to be one. I don’t want to hate. I don’t want to be greedy. I don’t want to live in the past. I don’t want to fear. And I believe that I can reconcile whatever it is that’s causing this disturbance in me by imagining a path to it, so that I feel like I’ll be one when I get there.
But there is no getting to oneness. It’s a deliberate act of consciously letting go right now, while I’m speaking to you of that which is dividing you. Everything that happens to us, everyone we meet, every situation past, present, and even those things that we can imagine, without exception, every one of those events produce in us a necessary and corresponding energy. The arising of this energy in us, we have never understood how to use, because the mind starts to register the experience as a disturbance. How many of you would agree with me that 95% of stuff is disturbance, 5% is good? At least half of our lives is spent wishing that what just happened hadn’t happened.
No more refusal. I make atonement now. I don’t resist what I’m feeling, neither my own thoughts and feelings about something that isn’t present, or you, or this or that. I’ve seen beyond the shadow of a doubt that the only transformation that’s truly taken place as a result of resisting through one of these known paths, is merely to produce a moment in which I will meet a similar situation, and actually be less empowered to deal with it than I was the time before. Isn’t it true? We don’t become more patient, do we? We become more impatient.
And this is what makes the real spiritual work so challenging and beautiful and difficult all at the same time. Because, you see, when a person starts to understand that these thoughts and feelings that come up in us as they do, that the reason that we’re so quick to have our attention directed to something to blame it for, is because we don’t want to feel those feelings. “I don’t want the feeling.” Please, this is the whole point now: What can possibly happen to a human being who has a feeling that he or she doesn’t want, except be misdirected to pursue conditions that they’ll find feelings they do want, and then those conditions will become the ground of what they don’t want later? Isn’t that true?
So I’m trying to get you to look at this with me with unerring eyes. That all we’ve ever known our whole lives, is when something comes to us, and it rocks into us, we rock it back. And now we’re saying the unthinkable. Not this path of resistance, not that path of resistance. But inwardly we must learn to embrace everything that moves through us, regardless of what our mind tells us about what is moving through us.
Because in that – listen closely – in the awareness of what is passing through us, the Light of that Awareness from the Kingdom of Kindness changes what it touches. And it is the Light from the Kingdom of Kindness touching the Land of Blindness (the darkness that we presently don’t understand), the Light turns the darkness into a new kind of Light. The negative states that formerly held us captive are discovered to be states through which we discover whole new aspects of ourselves. What aspect? That we don’t have to be slaves to our own negative states. We can actually learn to use everything that happens.
PJ Perkins 
Lady Shiya