Today’s reading reminds me of the children’s nursery rhyme:
Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall;
All the king’s horses and all the king’s men
Couldn’t put Humpty together again.
The wall we sit on is belief in our thoughts. It is a very shaky wall, crumbling at its foundation. If we sit on this wall, “a very great fall” is destined. The fall results in a break from clarity; we see from a separated, biased point-of-view instead of from reason and wholeness. We also make the mistake of believing how we see—we think we are right—and so, “All the king’s horses and all the king’s men” cannot help us see rightly again.
In today’s reading, Jesus gives us a prayer to pray whenever we find ourselves on that shaky wall:
Father, it is not Your Will that I be separate from you, so it is not my will that I be separate. I rejoin with you by letting go of my attack [or fear, judgment, guilt, unworthiness, etc]. I give this to you, that you may do with it as it is Your Will. I ask for nothing of you but peace.
This prayer, or one like it, helps us let go of thinking that is about to cause “a great fall.” When we surrender thoughts in this way, we let them go and leave them in God’s Hands. We don’t continue to think with those thoughts. We don’t speak from them, and we don’t act upon them. We step outside that loop of thinking. We willingly let things be as they are and as they will be.
If we follow the prayer up by thinking, speaking or acting with those thoughts, we have not surrendered them. Our wall remains shaky, and a fall is eminent.
Today’s reading also points toward true perception. We can place our attention with this pointer instead of with our separation thinking, if we want to. The pointer that Jesus shares is “the innocence that is found within our Lord.” Jesus also uses a small child as an example of his own innocence, which he calls “one innocence.”
In order to understand this pointer, we need to understand “innocence.” In this case, innocence isn’t the opposite of guilt. Innocence is “lack of knowledge.” (From Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary.) Or said another way, it is the opposite of the I-know mind.
Again, believing our thinking is the problem. When we accept, “I don’t know,” we disengage from the thinking mind and open up to intuition, which comes from consciousness.
Twice in today’s reading, we are told that Jesus “opened his mouth, so that the Holy Spirit could pour forth.” We aren’t told: Jesus knew the man who was speaking, and he knew this guy had a grievance against so-called-Messiahs. He also knew that he had to prove this man wrong, or many people might stop trusting him. And so, he tried to get the man to see another way, so that the crowd would not turn away.”
Opening his mouth without any ideas about what he would say is an example of innocence. Believing thinking, like the thinking in my made-up example above, is the opposite of innocence and a fall from clarity.
Each day, I read from NTI. When I feel to stop and be with a particular sentence or paragraph, I do. However, when I finish reading and pick up my laptop to begin writing the tip, I always wonder, “What will I type today?”
My daily tip is a surprise to me. It unfolds as I write. Until it is done, I don’t know what it will say. Today, the idea about Humpty Dumpty came after I put my hands on the keyboard. In fact, I originally wrote, “Today’s reading is about how we separate ourselves.” After I typed that, the idea of Humpty Dumpty came, so I deleted my original opening sentence and followed Humpty Dumpty to see where it would go.
Innocence is lack of knowledge. By following that pointer, we experience true perception. By believing our thinking—by thinking we know—we keep climbing up and falling off of a wall, over and over and over again.
