This is an extremely powerful message. I invite you to check in, and be aware of your breath as you read. :)
I am a Cohen. A direct descendent of the High Priests, from the lineage of Elisheba, and Aaron: Moses’s brother.
And, in a way, I feel that I am a high priestess too. I see myself as a guardian of Oneness: the highest perspective of all. Because although I am very human and totally imperfect, I somehow have a mysterious access to that perspective, and when it comes to me, I now choose to share.
Oneness, what is it briefly? Can't be put into words, but a pointer would be that at the core, we are all One, everything is One, comes from One Source, and disappears into the same Source. As I see it, and I write about it in a French blog post, this is what monotheism is originally about: One God, One Source creator, within everything and everyone. Which is why to me this God, God, is all encompassing: all gods of all faiths are an aspect of The god. There’s no fight or competition here. Only different facets of the same diamond. That is why I do not believe in the need to follow one holy text rather than another. They all say the same thing in different words. And I see the beauty in all of them. In addition, the original meanings of the holy texts have been so distorted over the centuries that I do not follow any religion at all.
Although I am part of the Jewish people, I actually truly love Jesus/ Yeshua’s message, for example.
He talks a lot about forgiveness.
Recently, it was Yom Kippour. The day of Atonement, in Judaism.
Yes this day is about forgiveness. But to me this day is very different from “asking to be forgiven”.
To me this day is about remembering we already are forgiven, and it's about attuning ourselves to that fact.
Yeshua’s message is exactly this also. His message is that atonement IS. Intrinsically.
His message, and Kippour’s true message in my eyes, are that no living being has ever not merited forgiveness, in truth. The message is that every single being is already forgiven and always has been. The message is that believing we are wrong and are unworthy of Life’s abundance IS precisely the Mistake (the sin) that causes all the others. Quite fascinating to see how much guilt and shame has creeped into the Church and any dogma really, supposedly in the name of Jesus, or God.
The message is exactly the opposite of this puritan righteousness (that honestly makes me quite nauseous).
Life is precisely an opportunity to experience the relief and bliss of knowing our inherent non-wrongness-ever to the fullest possible, as a human being.
What a blessing!
Moreover, unlike what is deeply engrained in the collective, not even death is a punishment, or an abandonment of God. Even then we eternally and divinely belong. We are always atonement embodied.
Yeshua was an example of that fact in the flesh. He wasn’t more the son of God than any of us, he simply was a Jedi Master of that knowing. He knew we were all the children of one same source. He embodied and integrated it so much and so deeply, with the help of other Jedi Master: Mary Magdalen, that he managed to transcend even death. He went through it and reappeared, just to show us how already forgiven we all already are. How divine and powerful we all already are, if we choose to Know it. His embodiment of that fact, and his showing of it to the world, IS how he « saves »: he shows what is possible and confirms the truth of the scriptures.
By the way, just so you know, several humans have managed to do it since then. Just very few people talk about it. Still a little hard to swallow for the human collective. ;)
Yom Kippour's concept is very similar: we pray that we be written in the Book of Life.
But praying is so misunderstood these days. Praying is not about asking for something we do not have. Praying is about bathing in the frequency of knowing we already have it.
It’s a meditation. An embodiment practice. We Are written in the book of life, just because we exist.
Question is how deeply do we know it? How embodied is this knowing?
How do you speak to yourself? How do you see yourself? Have You forgiven yourself for your actions? For your existence? Do you Know you have never done anything wrong? Not in the slightest? Do you really know it? How deeply? Can you go deeper?
That is Yeshua’s « good news ». That is the reason why all the psalms and prayers of all religions are about celebration and praise!
The true definition of « sin » is the forgetting / not knowing of this fact. To sin is to think your wrongness is real. To sin is to believe something within you isn’t deserving of the deliciousness of life.
How could you go against the creature that you are and say there is something wrong with it, when you are here as you are? Who are you to say it’s wrong when God created it? Wrong according to whom?
The thing is, more scientifically speaking, when one bathes in the frequency field of wrongness, one indeed takes actions that are what we call today: sins. But only by quantum law! Not because we are wrong and worthless but because when we live in conflict with ourselves, the actions we take usually harm others, too! And if you're willing to go even higher in the fractal beauty of this: life will simply reflect what we believe to be true. Our inner dialogue is full of words, of sounds, of frequencies, that resonate with, ripple into, and impact the world we experience.
In fact, we don't harm others and "do wrong things" because we are intrinsically wrong and worthless but precisely because we are nothing less than pure Love itself. Indeed, you know how Love operates like a magnet? Like it glues elements together? We magnetize what we believe to be true about ourselves - into our lives. Our beliefs and our reality are magnetized together by the power of Love: who you are.
In other words, we are the ones creating our reality, only with what we deeply believe to be true about ourselves.
It's not about being right or wrong, it's about seeing what's there and choosing to Know we are loved all the same. That is what is called shadow work.
And that is why ALL we are left - and invited - to do now is to look at all of these shadows in the eye, and choose to shift our beliefs to “I am forgiven”, as deeply as possible, to choose love, to relate with extreme gentleness & forgiveness to ourselves, to this moment, and to all the memories, thoughts, sensations and emotions that this moment is filled with. So that our reality - through the power of the magnets that we are - becomes one that we love too.
And when we can’t seem to be able to forgive an action, let us forgive that we can't forgive, ask a higher Truth to do it for us, and forgive our own rage, forgive our own tears: what does it mean? Let them be seen. To feel that we are breaking apart is the hugest gift as humans. We get to reach through the cracks by letting ourselves cry it out and be witnessed. That, too, is forgiveness.
When we dive deeply enough into ourselves we realize we actually never have done anything wrong. We, at one point in life, were simply very very very very frightened.
We can do it. There is no other way. Love is who we Are.
Rafaëlle Cohen.