Before beginning today’s reading, it will be helpful to spend at least 5 minutes watching awareness. As you watch awareness, do you find any human concerns in awareness, or are the human concerns in mind? Do you find guilt, anger, worry, or any other human emotions agitating awareness? If you do, look again. Is the emotion agitating awareness or is awareness aware of the agitation?

If you look at a human emotion (or the memory of an emotion, if there isn’t one present now) and compare it to awareness, which one is more intimately you? Are you the emotion or are you awareness?

Once you feel clarity about the previous questions, you are ready to continue with today’s reading. If you read from the state of clarity, it will be easy to see what NTI means when it refers to guilt, fear and denial as foreign purposes. After all, guilt, fear and denial have nothing to do with awareness. Guilt, fear and denial are mental activities only.

In his book, The Transparency of Things, Rupert Spira wrote, “Ego is not an entity. It is an activity.” Another way to say this is that the false self is not an entity. It is an activity, a mental activity. This is why many masters call the false self, “mind”.

Most people believe they are the body-personality-mind they appear to be. When they feel guilty, they believe they are guilty; when worry thoughts mull around in the mind, they believe they are worried, etcetera. However, mental and emotional activity are not the beingness. They are activity within the beinginess. The human is the beingness itself.

Please read today’s reading in this way:

1 – Practice the brief awareness-watching-awareness exercise in this tip.

2 – Read Matthew 27:1-37 in the Bible.

3 – Read today’s reading from NTI.

Just as the scribe was coached directly in yesterday’s reading, the scribe is coached directly in today’s reading. When I was the scribe of NTI Matthew, I had Jesus on a pedestal. Because of that, it was hard for me to see him as imperfect (in my eyes). It was hard for me to read about people mistreating him. All of these ideas came from conditioned thinking—from the way I had been taught to think during my upbringing—so all of this thinking had to be let go.

As you read today’s reading, it is okay to keep in mind that I was being coached directly. Since your mind was conditioned differently, you may not need the exact same coaching that I needed as I read the story of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane and as I read the story of his arrest and trial. Look to see what is helpful for you in today’s reading. For example:

• Do you dislike it when people point out your mistakes? Look at the story Peter’s denial.

 

• Do you think forgiveness should be easier than it is? Look at the story of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane.

 

• Do you get angry with people who act sweet when you perceive them as devilish underneath? Look at the story of Judas’ kiss.

 

• Do you have a habit of defending yourself? Look at the story of the disciple who grabbed a sword.

 

Ask inner wisdom to guide you through today’s reading so you can find conditioning that needs to be seen and undone in your mind. If the coaching in the reading is not perfect for your needs, journal with inner wisdom and receive your own coaching.

If you are not familiar with the stories from the night of Jesus’ arrest, please read those stories in the Bible.

Today’s reading opens with, “Now you must choose where you will decide to look. Your decision will show you what you will see.”

Judas is a symbol of one who believed his thoughts and then saw what his thoughts told him to see. According to NTI, Judas turned Jesus in for arrest simply because he did not have the wisdom to see his thoughts as meaningless.

How often do we act from belief in our thoughts? Are we ready to learn from our brother’s mistake? Are we willing to let Judas’ mistake be a precious gift that leads us to make a different choice?

When I was the scribe of NTI Matthew, I was not able to see Judas as giving us a gift by showing us what not to do. I saw Judas as the evil betrayer. I still believed in betrayal at that time, so my scribing of this section is not as pure as it could have been. You’ll notice that inner wisdom coaches the scribe directly by saying, “… it is attack and hatred you see and feel through this scripture. Remember what I have told you. Fear will keep you from Me. Trust that these feelings of anger are intended only to hide your fear of Me. …. Choose now to let your anger, attack and hatred go. They serve you not. Rest with Me in faith instead.”

After reading verse 25 in the Bible—which reads, “Then Judas, the one who would betray him, said, ‘Surely you don’t mean me, Rabbi?’”—I got it. I saw that in that very moment, I believed my thoughts just as Judas had believed his. I hated Judas for the same reason that Judas distrusted Jesus; we believed our thoughts.

This was a ‘eureka’ moment for me, and I have been madly in love with Judas ever since. I now see his ‘betrayal’ of Jesus as a great gift to us. He demonstrated just how bad things can get when we believe our thoughts, and that provides us with the opportunity not to make the same mistake.

Here is one of my favorite songs. I have listened to it many, many times over the years. It reminds me not to believe my thinking. I listen to it with gratitude and with love for our brother, Judas. I think it’s funny that the song begins with Judas singing, “My mind is clearer now.” It shows that we can be deeply deceived by our own thinking.

If you are not familiar with the story of Judas’ betrayal, please read it in the Bible.

Today’s reading interprets three Bible stories. I recommend reading the stories in the Bible before reading the interpretation in NTI. Each story provides an opportunity for self-examination and self-honesty.

Jesus did not tell these stories so that we would chastise ourselves and decide that we are not good enough. There would be no forward movement if we understood the stories that way. The stories are provided so we can look, see where we are not in harmony with the calling of our heart, and then make adjustments. These stories are gifts to help us notice where we are still operating based on old conditioning, so we can retune ourselves.

With that said, a question you might ask yourself as you read The Parable of Ten Virgins and its interpretation is, “Where do I look for peace of mind? The marketplace, which is a symbol for the world, or within?”

A question you might ask yourself as you read The Parable of Bags of Gold and its interpretation is, “Do I trust the unknown or fear it?”

A question you might ask yourself as you read The Sheep and the Goats and its interpretation is, “Am I guiding myself towards unity consciousness or am I still interested in self-centeredness?”

It might be helpful to see yourself as a musical instrument. Are you playing the melody you want to play, or are some of your strings out of tune?

I found this comment online about tuning a harp:

There are people who will tell you that one key is “better” or “worse” than another. Like with many harp-related things, it is not so much a matter of right and wrong, but is rather very subjective and individual, and depends on a number of factors, including: what type of harp you have, how much musical experience you have, what style of music you want to play, and how much theory you know. It can even depend on things such as, how much improvising and/or transposing you want to do, and how much you rely on sheet music. So instead of trying to tell you the “right way” to tune a harp, I’ve presented some of the more common tunings, with explanations as to why some people choose them and others don’t.

I thought this comment was helpful, because we can get caught up in ideas of right and wrong whenever we engage in self-examination. It isn’t a matter of right and wrong or good and bad. It’s a matter of, “What do I want?” and “Is my way of being in support of that or hindering it?”

Here is a quote from Nisargadatta Maharaj that we can contemplate along with today’s reading:

You do and undo at every step. You want peace, love, happiness and work hard to create pain, hatred and war. You want longevity and overeat; you want friendship and exploit. See your net as made of such contradictions and remove them — your very seeing them will make them go.

Remember, we are in Messiah kindergarten. Remember, “Messiah” means, one in whom God’s plan for humankind is being brought to fruition. It is an evolution, of sorts, and in this evolution we are baby Messiahs. Since Messiah is a very important role, we need to give all of our attention—our whole heart, our whole soul and our whole mind—to the lessons we are learning now. (Ref: Mark 12:30)

Today’s lesson is a key lesson for Messiahs, although it is not the easiest of lessons to learn. In fact, it is a lesson that some students of non-duality deny entirely. They say this teaching isn’t what it appears to be; it means something other than what it says. However, the masters do not deny the teaching. Only some students—those who do not yet know—deny it.

The teaching  I speak of is that the world is not real. It is an illusion.

First, let’s look at the dictionary definition of “illusion”. An illusion is “a thing that is or is likely to be wrongly perceived or interpreted by the senses. It is a deceptive appearance or impression.”

One mistake that we make is not questioning our senses. We believe that if we see it, it is true. But is that entirely correct? We see the sun rise and the sun set everyday. The earth that we are on looks stationary, as we observe the sun moving across the sky. But is that true?

The earth that we walk on seems horizontal. Is that true?

Moonlight lights up the night sky. But is there such a thing as moonlight?

If our senses are not reliable some of the time, can we be sure that they are reliable the rest of the time? Is it possible that we see with our brain, a brain that has been conditioned to see in a self-centered way, a way of seeing that is entirely faulty?

Here are some quotes to consider before beginning today’s reading in NTI:

“Vision consists of your eyes detecting light and converting it to electro-chemical impulses in neurons which are then given meaning by your brain.   Hence, the real ‘seeing’ occurs in the brain with the interpretation of the impulses. ~ Debbie Hampton, author of Beat Depression and Anxiety by Changing your Brain

“… bear in mind that your own sense of vision is carried by nothing but millions of nerve signals that just happen to travel along different cables.  Your brain is encased in absolute blackness in the vault of your skull.  It doesn’t see anything.  All it knows are these little signals and nothing else.  And yet you perceive the world in shades of brightness and colors.  Your brain is in the dark but your mind constructs the light.” ~ David Eagleman, author of Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain

“What we perceive as our physical material world, is really not physical or material at all, in fact, it is far from it. … Quantum physicists discovered that physical atoms are made up of vortices of energy that are constantly spinning and vibrating, each one radiating its own unique energy signature. Therefore, if we really want to observe ourselves and find out what we are, we are really beings of energy and vibration, radiating our own unique energy signature -this is fact and is what quantum physics has shown us time and time again. We are much more than what we perceive ourselves to be, and it’s time we begin to see ourselves in that light. If you observed the composition of an atom with a microscope you would see a small, invisible tornado-like vortex, with a number of infinitely small energy vortices called quarks and photons. These are what make up the structure of the atom. As you focused in closer and closer on the structure of the atom, you would see nothing, you would observe a physical void. The atom has no physical structure, we have no physical structure, physical things really don’t have any physical structure! Atoms are made out of invisible energy, not tangible matter.” ~ Arjun Walia, author of Nothing Is Solid & Everything Is Energy – Scientists Explain The World Of Quantum Physics, an article published in CE—Collective Evolution (an e-magazine)

“It is because the thoughts you think you think appear as images that you do not recognize them as nothing. You think you think them, and so you think you see them. This is how your ‘seeing’ was made. … It is not seeing. It is image making. It takes the place of seeing, replacing vision with illusions.” ~ A Course in Miracles Workbook for Students, Lesson 15

“There is no body, nor a world to contain it; there is only a mental condition, a dream like state, easy to dispel by questioning its reality.” ~ Nisargadatta Maharaj, Indian sage.

“If one is able to remove the ego-sense by means of one’s awakened intelligence, he cleanses from his consciousness the impurity known as world-appearance.” ~ The Yoga Vasistha, an ancient Hindu text.

“After Realization, the supposed seeing ends and what is known will be known and what was supposedly ‘seen’ will be ‘seen’ no more.” ~ Floyd Henderson, author of The Advanced Seekers’ Series