We live in a world of duality. For me, the extreme is obvious. It has been my insanity and sanity. There is no one that is completely bad and no one that is completely good. There is only becoming…
We strive to know what is good, but what is good? Your version of good might be completely different than mine. Since the beginning of time, we have been trying to understand what is good. Exiled from a perfect garden where we walked alongside God, our Creator; we are only trying to find our place with Him again.
Look how far we have come. You are over there and I am way over here. We are seemingly separate. What stands in between us is Him.
We are finding our way home. Our home is in the middle. The middle ground is the balance of both our extremes.
The other is our helper.
I have always thought that I was bad. I had always been a failure. I was always told that I was not good enough and that I would never amount to anything. These phrases kept me stuck in myself. I was always failing. When would I ever stop failing? Why don’t I just give up?
We commit ourselves to a death sentence. Our mind imprisons us.
I was a prisoner of myself — I was my worst enemy.
Life is a Game
When we know we are playing a game, it becomes fun. The object of the game is to know your enemy. See the duality and become deeply aware of it.
There is only good and bad within the self. We come to learn that we are physical but our struggle is the spiritual experience between what is good vs what is bad. Physical is one — It is the individual. Spirituality is divided into two. Spirituality is the choice our mind believes is either good or bad but how do we decide?
When we were a child, we were told not to touch the stove. But we want to know more than to be told not to touch the stove. What did we do? We touched the stove. Now our brain knows. We know it is not good to touch the stove.
Our brain and our heart work together in tandem. Our brain says don’t do it but our heart wants the experience. Our heart wants to know why — we need to experience that bad is bad and good is good.
The Duality to Oneness
The other is here to help us become better. We are our brain and our heart. Learning to become balanced in our physicality is learning to overcome the challenge of the fight within the individual self. Sometimes our brain is right and sometimes our heart is. How do we learn to trust ourselves to make better choices?
Know the Enemy
The enemy is yourself. The game of life is between you and God only. No one else really matters because you are playing the game with God. The others are like pawns that are there to help you succeed in reaching the level of becoming the best player.
Always know their next move.
Know your opponent to predict the outcome. We are here to understand what is good so we must also understand what we don’t know — we need to learn what we have been told is “bad”. Our heart says, “What could happen that might end up burning me in the end?”
God is revealed in an image. The image is the opponent and who you play the game with the best. The opponent is either masculine or feminine. Masculine and feminine is who we all individually are but none of us are completely balanced within the self. We are either more masculine or more feminine. We need to really understand who we are to understand the opponent, to understand the duality that we are playing in.
Jew and nonjew is like masculine and feminine. Within each of ourselves is Jew and nonjew. In the world, the Jew thinks the non-jew is bad and the nonjew thinks the Jew is bad. We do not accept that we are the same but are living in two opposing realms. Really, it is a reflection of our battle within the self that is between religion vs spirituality, brain vs heart, and control vs freedom.
The conflict begins within the individual self but the more we see the other as someone who can make us a better player, the more we can understand the next level of who God is. The more we understand the game is between you and God in the world, the more we all become one mind that is balanced together with God — we know what is truth.
Darkness vs Light
What is inside matches what is outside, but, today, we all have different ideas about what is good, so most of us don’t see the duality. Mostly, the world does not believe in God, therefore, their only focus is on one chaotic mess.
God is not who we are — God is who we aspire to become. We only see God as being outside of ourselves, so believing in Him means we desire to see Him in our image.
The way to win the game of becoming is to become the other. We need to know the other (Genesis 4:1).
There are two obvious worlds. The world we are born into is darkness but we strive to know the world that is light. The world that knows what it can trust. We strive to understand who God is. We understand that God is what is good. What is good is what is good in our opposite — The good that we know, we can identify in the other. What is good can only come from God, so once we know, we can 100% trust it.
We are always making mistakes. We are like children. We are God’s children, first. When we don’t know any better it is a mistake. As well, we cannot look at the outer world and say they are playing the game wrong — They have their own game that they are playing with God. Focusing on controlling how the other plays the game is not how you win. Whatever is happening around you is only a distraction. If you focus too much on the distraction, you might make a move that will give the opponent an advantage.
God is our power and our strength. Information is abundant. We are no longer in ignorance. We can make good moves that will get us out of this place of chaos — We do not have to be oppressed by our darkness anymore.
You are not in a prison and God is not your enemy — He is your helper. Learn the relationship and see that He is in control when you allow Him to be. Be empowered by the good that you see in the world to realize that with God, YOU CAN DO ANYTHING!
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Shannie Alvarez — A Gentile with a Jewish Heart
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