We Hold This Truth to Be Self-Evident: We are ALL Created Equal

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”

– Declaration of Independence (US, 1776)

The Divinely-inspired sentence above was straight outta Heaven. As a manifestation of Spirit, the idea encompassed all citizens of the Universe, not just those people in the 13 American colonies to whom it legally applied at the time it was crafted, which included neither people of color nor women. No judgment, the evolution of our consciousness catching up to reality in Truth is a slow-ass process, because progress is impeded by the ego’s “translation” of our inspired thoughts. We are clearly still working on correctly interpreting the word “men” to mean all beings, regardless of race or gender.

This week on July 4^th we celebrate Independence Day in the US as our country’s birthday and an honoring of our freedom, which began as a revolution against oppression. Oppression in any form is the ego’s attempt to further its agenda of separation by coercing our minds to believe that one brother is capable of being superior to, inferior to, or having power over another.

In light of this week’s sentencing of former police officer Derek Chauvin for the 2020 taking of the human life of George Floyd – which  ignited awareness of the Black Lives Matter Civil Rights movement – this blog is dedicated to the unalienable right of freedom from the oppression of the belief in separation for every bro everywhere in the universe of time and space.

 We are all indeed created equal, as one Son of God, despite how desperately the ego mind does not want us to recognize and embrace that Truth.  

We Hold This Truth to Be Self-Evident: We are ALL Created Equal

The fear tactic that it uses to ensure its survival and our unconscious allegiance to it is to constantly reinforce the idea to us that we are separate – from our Creator and from one another. What makes this strategery work is that we keep choosing to not really look too closely at it, so that we don’t see the obvious Truth of our Oneness shining through the cracks of its decaying façade. We look instead at the differences, rather than the sameness.

The following paragraph is excerpted from my 2020 New Year’s blog:

“Seeing with Perfect Vision is not being afraid to look with Spirit upon whatever I have going on in my so-called life – which is just a projection of whatever is going on in my mind. I have been in denial about and afraid to face a lot of things – which often then resulted in a more painful outcome or consequence than if I just dealt with my sh*t in the moment it appeared to be happening… I offer you an opportunity to take on 2020 Perfect Vision with me as your New Year’s challenge. To be willing to see clearly, to be shown where your own blind spots are. What in your life are you afraid to look at, to bring out of the darkness and have the light of truth illuminate?”

I had no idea when I wrote those words just what would be rising up in our collective consciousness to be looked at, but within about ten weeks, the world was in a f*cking pandemic. A month and a half later the volcano of racial discrimination against black people blew up in the US.

A Course in Miracles teaches that the way to awaken from our dream of the world is not to pretend we aren’t having it or avert our eyes from the ugliness and hatred inherent in it. 

It is also not to look at it with guilt and identify with it as an expression of who we really are.

What Jesus is asking us to do is the same thing he’s always asking us to do with our thoughts. To look with him.

Why is that? 

Because when we look at stuff with Christ vision instead of with the ego / body’s eyes, we see completely differently. 

If we are willing to look, what the COVID experience and the Black Lives Matter movement have been showing us is that the way things were was not working. In so many ways. It was not sustainable. We had lost sight of what was important. We have not been looking, or willing to see. It was not who we are. We have been minimizing love and being ruled by fear. In our fear we have been mindless, turning our eyes, hearts, and minds away from situations in the world that we need to be looking at.

We could not breathe. 

That is not a judgment – it is a statement about the way in which we have been suffocating under the oppression of the ego’s belief in separation. In refusing to see, we were in tacit agreement with the ego’s credo of “seek and do not find” – which is its version of looking. It is not life-giving. It is life-taking. For all of us.

That’s what we have been doing for like 400 years with regard to racial discrimination, and for millenia in the myriad of other ways we have made the idea of separation our God. 

It’s also what we are doing every day in any area of our lives that is not aligned with love. It is what we are doing every time we judge a brother as not our brother – and not equal to us because of any reason. When we withhold love from them and condemn them with whatever egoic instrument of torture by which we are measuring their inequality.

In any area of our lives where love does not rule – we’re looking away, averting our gaze, choosing voluntary blindness.

 We’re not taking responsibility for sight. And by sight I mean Christ vision – seeing all others with love.

The way in which our collective belief in separation has recently outed itself may have been focused on the issue of racial inequality and discrimination, but our problem is not racism. That is a symptom of the one problem we have – our belief that we are or ever could be separate from God and each other. That is the sickness we need to look at – our perception that any one of us as a creation of God can be unequal to or apart from any other creation of God. That is the only thing holding our experience of racism in place.

If we do not heal that belief, all of the demonstrations and marches and laws and policies will not change anything, not really. If we’re not eradicating the problem at its source, our efforts are going to be short-lived. 

It is critical that we as students of A Course in Miracles understand that we need to remain vigilant of what the truth is – that we are all one son of God. God is the ocean, we are the waves. God is the Sun, we are the rays. We are the light of the world – God is the Source of the light.

Did you know that light is made up of all colors in the rainbow? That what unifies us in Truth instead of separating us in the ego world is that we as light beings are literally made up of all colors?

In healing any separation wound, we need to do what we would do with a physical injury: look at it, see what is really happening – assess it, in other words, and then treat it with the best medicine we have access to so it can heal. 

With regard to looking honestly at the issue and assessing it, there has been a great deal that has been eloquently written and spoken about by many black people in the media and on social media about the ways in which we are asked to look at our own underlying hidden racism and white privilege. 

My suggestion is to listen to them, and for each of us to do so with Spirit, in order to avoid the ego’s guilt and projecting it back outward onto the world again in an endless cycle of reinjury.   

I have been looking with Spirit and unearthing my racial misperceptions – even as closely as in my own family. I have a nephew and great-nephew who are black, and yet until recently I have been completely unconscious to my niece and her family’s  experience of racism. I am being schooled in the inequality of simple things I take for granted. “DWB” or Driving While Black, for instance – the phrase used to describe the racial profiling and disproportionate stopping of black drivers. It’s a thing that people I love experience, just for being out driving around – and I had no idea.

I am not looking at this with guilt, I am looking with Spirit – asking that He be the Physician here. 

As with any injury, be it physical or otherwise, the focus can’t stay on the wound. It has to shift to the treatment – the healing.

Love is the medicine.

Two of the most powerful forms by which love can be administered for healing the wounds of racism are forgiveness and gratitude. 

A Course in Miracles teaches us that the medicine of forgiveness is the cure for our belief in separation. Specifically, forgiving ourselves for believing in the dream, and thus making it real. This means forgiving our experience of the world, and everything that happens in it – including racism and the wounds caused by it. Forgiving our looking away and averting our eyes. Forgiving our ignorance, and our ignoring. Forgiving our mindlessness and unconsciousness. 

As we practice forgiveness of all of our judgment of self and others around all aspects of racism, we shift our perception from fear to love – and thus change our experience of the world. 

We then take whatever action that we are guided to take, which can be thought of as the therapy that helps the healing to progress.

With regard to the powerful medicine of gratitude – when you stand in the awareness of appreciation for a brother, you become the healing balm. Its light dissolves darkness in all forms.

I have been allowing myself to connect with the immense gratitude I feel for the rich, abundant and priceless contributions so many of our black brothers and sisters have given to the world – blessings far too numerous to count.   

In this gratitude, I connect with the light of our shared oneness, and in doing so, I heal them and am healed in true freedom.  

In the spirit of blessings, as an expression of this gratitude, my Happy America’s Birthday gift to you is literally one of true Freedom. 

It is an amazing interview with one of my good friends and very favorite teachers of A Course in Miracles, my gorgeous sister Freedom Cartright. 

The interview with Freedom was conducted by Emily Bennington, Executive Director of The Circle of Atonement, and includes Robert Perry, founder of the Circle of Atonement and lead editor of the CE edition of the Course – aka “the purple book”.

Freedom, who is such a gift to the world in her role as teacher and as abolitionist, narrates a beautiful and amazing tribute to another black woman – a “hidden figure” named Idabel, whose life was deeply intertwined with that of Helen Schucman, the scribe of A Course in Miracles. 

Helen described herself later in her life as an atheist, which is hilarious, considering that she took down the entire Course and totally had a straight-up, full-on, Big-Bro relationship with Jesus. Seriously, what atheist does that?

But in Helen’s early life, she was a seeker. In her autobiography, Helen gave credit to Idabel for some of her earliest and most meaningful spiritual experiences during her early teens. It was Idabel who introduced Helen to reading the Bible, and took her to attend lively, joyful services at Idabel’s black Baptist church in Harlem. The two women maintained a life-long friendship.

Thank you Idabel, for being a guide for Helen.

I am so grateful to you for joining with me today in embracing Freedom, Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness for the Brotherhood that we are!

I hope there has been some Love Medicine here that heals a perception of injury for you, and if so, I’d love to hear about it. Please leave me a comment below. 

Baby, you’re a firework! 

I love you.

Kelly Russell, The Rock Your Joy Coach

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