Our Personal Matrix: A Landscape of Illusion

        I hope and pray to God that I can do justice to these next two topics.  They are vital to understand because they can be the origin of so much illusion and distraction on the path.  So, let me here and now ask God to be the origin of these communications so that I am not so much in the way as the subjects are covered.

        I am first going to discuss our own personal matrices.  We need to understand that our judgments are based on our ego’s interpretation of the world around us and how that keeps us from letting go and letting God.  Then I want to talk about God’s matrix concerning each of us – what I call the real ‘Immaculate Concept’.

        I have been told in many ways by many teachers not to judge others for we cannot know their experience.  Jesus, we are told, forgave even those who were nailing him to the cross, saying “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.”.  We hear that and we think to ourselves that they didn’t know that it was God that they were nailing to the cross.  But that isn’t all there is to it.  The nature of that forgiveness and the understanding behind it was far deeper and much more profound.

        Those of us who have seen the movie “The Matrix” often use it to express what many believe to be true in one fashion or another.  We think of ourselves as being subjected to a matrix environment that we can neither directly perceive and certainly not prove yet we use the mythos to express that ‘intuitive thing’ we cannot directly grasp.  On one hand I do believe that the physical realm is, in a very real sense, a matrix.  I believe that the etheric realm, (heaven to Christians), is the ‘real’ world and that the physical is an illusion.  It isn’t, after all, the matter in an atom that keeps us from passing through it.  Essentially there isn’t any - matter, that is.  Most of us can’t walk through walls, not because atoms are solid material but because of the force that holds them together both individually and as clusters of molecules.  Those forces are quite real but are not solid in the way that we think of the physical world as being solid when we are moving about in it.  But that isn’t the conceptual matrix that is my subject today.

        We each have a personal matrix as well as the one we as humans in the physical plane share.  It is a personal paradigm that filters everything that we perceive – how we perceive, what we perceive, what conclusions we allow ourselves to come to.  This personal matrix rules our lives, often completely.  My wife and I have seen through experience how much this colors our conclusions about others when we discuss people and events in our lives.  And, when we see how trapped others are by their matrices, how they are trapped in Maya, we realize that we cannot judge them for actions which have causes that they are unable to see or understand clearly.  Then, when we are done with our moments of realization and we go on with our lives we fall back into our own matrices and go right on judging others with impunity.

        Here is the crux of the situation.  We cannot judge others.  This is so true on so many levels.  We can’t judge them because they often aren’t guilty of the level of intentional behavior, or mis-behavior, that we attribute to them.  We assume, by their behavior, that, within their personal environment, they must be able to reach the same conclusions about given situations as we do.  This assumption is incorrect.  If they are guilty it is because they are at a level at which they lack the clarity of spiritual understanding, such that they are incapable of escaping from or reforming their own matrix.  Usually, it is because there is a lack of understanding, of awareness of the true reality of God’s Personality and Presence.  People find themselves trapped within cages of perception and we find ourselves judging them for not acting outside of those cages.  Further, most people are incapable of even knowing that they are in those cages.  Once we are aware of that, can see it even if only vaguely, we cannot help but completely redefine our relationships, both with God and with those around us.  The lack of that awareness leads to the construction and retention of our own personal flawed matrices and each of these matrices takes on a life of its’ own so that each of us struggles within our own warped reality and we attempt to judge others by the confines of the environment in which we live, the cage we, ourselves, inhabit.  But they don’t live there. 

        If we see someone doing something that we judge as being out of alignment or ‘not like God’ we cannot know that we are right in placing blame on them as though their actions were purposefully evil.  We can only say, with Jesus, ‘Father, forgive them for THEY KNOW NOT WHAT THEY DO.’.  We might as well say, "Father, forgive me for I know not what I do.".

        No others experience our reality and we experience no other’s reality so how can we judge with any clarity at all?  At its’ most basic the lesson here is to begin the work of letting go of your own matrix and accepting God’s matrix into your life.  This is a process more than it is a decision.