If, as these posts have been suggesting, we are one, not two…
When I mistreat you… I mistreat me.
That’s why it doesn’t work. Mistreating folks does not work with reality as reality is. You and I are expressions of the same Divine reality; a oneness… not a two-ness.
When spouses… or sisters… or friends… get so irritated with one another that they want to hurt each other, it never goes well. It’s like jabbing a stick in our own eye.
Our emerging reality tells us that we are connected. Our fortunes are linked to one another. Our well-being is linked to one another.
– The idea that I can defeat my wife in an argument…
– The idea that I can get the win; and her the loss…
– These are fallacious ideas. They’re just not true.
If Denise (my wife) and I are one, the only viable solution is to work for what is good for her – and – what is good for me. Anything less than a whole-system approach is like my hand poking my foot with a knife because it got irritated with where the foot took me.
That’s just silly.
But laboring under our illusion of separateness…
That’s exactly what we do to one another… every day.
In our illusion, it feels OK for me to be comfortable and satisfied in my nation of easily-afforded groceries, while people in Western Africa face a broken political-social system that keeps them from the same. I can only be comfortable with this arrangement, if they are “them,” and I am a separate “me.”
But if we are one, it doesn’t work at all.
You start to get the picture that Jesus was working in a different world than we are.
Jesus was working with a different set of assumptions than we are.
Jesus was working with a different God than we are.
…and so, Jesus came to different conclusions about how to live than we do.