Acceptance is about letting others bring their heart gifts no matter how they are wrapped. If the wrapping offends your perception of how the person should look, speak, feel, act, or worship, then you will need to make a choice. The choice is deciding which is most important to you—the unity of hearts or the strict preferences of your lower mind.

Most of us say we want unity but often that means we want others to hold the same perceptions about things that we do. This anti-unity programming starts young. For instance, I was taught that all religions except that of our family were inferior. This was very troublesome to me since one of my best girlfriends went to a different church than I did. It made me feel like it was wrong to like her as well as I did.

My sister was sent to a college that my parents believed would support our family values (perceptions). My parents just assumed that my sister would be a carbon copy of them. Of course, she wasn’t. Thankfully the philosophy teacher at that college believed in matching the qualities of your true self with what you hold in your lower mind rather than letting programmed perceptions define you. While this college course was a highlight in my sister’s maturing, she went through agony in throwing out the things that no longer fit.

Unless you are courageous enough to look under your wrappings, you won’t be able to do that with the offerings of others. So self-acceptance is the first step. Because my sister took that first step, she is now able to accept her daughter who is a missionary in Russia, her son who holds no religious beliefs, and another son who is very spiritual but not at all religious. The perception wrappers no longer get in her way.

Most of us like to think we are open-minded because we have been able to free ourselves from a few hand-me-down perceptions. But the process of acceptance must be ongoing if the goal is to be true to ourselves. Being true to ourselves creates realness. And only realness can resonate with realness.

Acceptance is more than a way of thinking; it is a way of life. It not only takes off the illusionary wrappers held in our lower mind, but it throws them away. Acceptance is the key to bringing harmony to our divided, war-torn world.