Matthew 19:26 Meaning Looking at Them

To the mind that still believes it is a separate self, its own healing looks impossible, and rightly so, for no ego can lift the guilt it was made to carry. Left to its own strength it will always conclude the door is shut. This despair is honest; it simply mistakes its own limits for the truth of things.

With love as teacher the impossibility dissolves, because the change was never the ego's to make. A mind that stops trying to save itself and lets a gentler vision look through it finds every wall was only a thought, and thoughts can be undone.

With men this is impossible names the limit of the personal self: the small, separate identity built out of thought, which can plan and strive but which runs into walls it cannot get past on its own. Anyone who has tried to force an inner change through sheer effort of will knows this limit well.

With God all things are possible points past that identity to the deeper aliveness underneath it, awareness that is not bound by the same walls because it was never a separate, struggling self to begin with. A closed door only stays closed to the part of you straining against it from a fixed, limited position. Let a wider awareness meet the problem instead, and the strain that made the door feel closed is simply no longer there.

Men measure what can happen by what has already happened, so most things look barred to them. The higher power named here is a man's own awareness, the I within that says of itself I am. Nothing it can imagine and accept as done stands outside its reach.

The split runs not between a person and a distant deity but between two ways of looking at the same self. From the facts, a thing is impossible. From the wish assumed, the same thing is already granted. The power that turns one into the other is imagination, held in the feeling that the desire is fulfilled. What consciousness accepts as so becomes the range of the possible for the one who accepts it.

The lower man, the ordinary earthbound self reasoning from its own limits, meets a wall it cannot climb. Salvation by effort of the flesh is a closed door, because the personality cannot lift itself above its own nature any more than a hand can grip itself. What is sealed to the outer man opens without resistance to the God-power seated within, the higher consciousness that operates by a different law than striving. Men here names the whole apparatus of the mortal self, its willpower and cleverness, all of it insufficient before the change being asked. God names the divine spark buried in every person, the I AM that acts through and not against the natural order and therefore finds nothing impossible.

The transformation refused to human effort comes freely through the higher power already living inside the one who cannot manage it alone.