An untrained mind can accomplish nothing

When I first started A Course in Miracles’ workbook lessons six years ago I have to admit my mind glazed over every time I opened the book. I could barely absorb the meaning of a single phrase before I started mentally making grocery lists, puzzling solutions to a work project, worrying about what my daughter was or was not doing, rehearsing a conversation I knew I needed to have with a troubling colleague, reviewing the details of an argument I’d had with my husband, or slipping into an overwhelmingly sleepy trance.

 

I recently started the workbook lessons again with a class I am teaching and am amazed anew at how much these early lessons stir up the ego and bring me face to face with my ongoing resistance to the truth of what we are. I have done the first part of the workbook designed to undo the ego thought system maybe nine times, because I at least recognize that my investment in the ego needs undoing before I can even begin to fathom the revelatory, comforting messages of the second part of the workbook.

 

A Course in Miracles invites us to begin to view our lives as a classroom, our experiences and relationships as a curriculum, and the part of our mind that failed to take “the tiny mad idea” of separation seriously—that forgotten, sane part of our mind–as our new teacher. These early lessons meet us where we think we are here in the world of perception, ingeniously directing us to focus on and begin to question the distracting information our senses transmit to our brains—the ego’s “proof” that we pulled off the impossible and exist as separate entities. They remind us, for example, that nothing we see means anything, that we have given everything we see all the meaning that it has for us, that we are never upset for the reason we think, that we see only the past, and that our thoughts do not mean anything.

 

The ego recoils from these messages because they overlook its erroneous existence. If the ego mind does not exist, if nothing outside the one mind exists and the world and the body exist outside the mind as A Course in Miracles claims, then I, Susan, the self I think I am with all my special needs and problems, talents and handicaps; do not, in truth, exist. No wonder our minds wander, we grow sleepy, and we can’t remember the title of a lesson for more than thirty seconds. No wonder you don’t see people stampeding to bookstores to pick up their very own copy of this big, blue book, but you do see people buying up books teaching us how to manipulate, fix, improve, and attract in an illusory world of form.  It’s much easier to just keep denying our negative feelings, projecting them on others, and showing everyone how loving, happy, and spiritual we are. But it’s an exhausting charade that offers only temporary fixes. At some point we exceed our tolerance for pain and pretense and cry out for a better way. A Course in Miracles offers a better way. 

 

As Ken Wapnick enjoys reminding us, however, this is a teaching for spiritual infants. The exceedingly rare enlightened individual has no need for this teaching. Those of us who believe in and value our individuality over the one, whole, indivisible love we have never in truth left on the other hand must first unlearn everything the ego has taught us before we can welcome the love of our true, non-dualistic nature.

 

We who believe in and value our separate physical and emotional bodies and personalities above truth have bought the ego’s bizarre myth that we destroyed our eternal creator, deserve punishment, and must continually repress/deny responsibility for what we have done through the habitual, unconscious process of blaming other people and situations for our problems. In this way we magically hope to avoid the punishment we believe we deserve while simultaneously experiencing the rewards of playing here in the world of form. But no matter how much fun we may have on the playground, someone always gets hurt. No matter what a blast we have on the monkey bars, children always grow up, age, and eventually sicken, and die. This is what we’ve traded for eternal love, peace, wholeness, and creativity. This is how deluded we are. This is why we need a workbook to unlearn what we have willingly taught ourselves in an effort to keep the one love we have come to fear away.

 

Our one mind has been so well trained by the ego it has completely forgotten it has a mind outside the waking dream of separation we call life. Love in our current state is literally beyond us. Enter the role of the Course’s workbook lessons.

 

“An untrained mind can accomplish nothing…The purpose of the workbook is to train your mind in a systematic way to a different perception of everyone and everything in the world. The exercises are planned to help you generalize the lessons, so that you will understand that each of them is equally applicable to everyone and everything you see.”

 

Every workbook lesson shines the same wise light on all our experiences, illuminating the truth that lies beyond our illusions. As we apply our learning to our experiences we begin to see all our problems and difficulties from minor annoyances to major catastrophes as mere demonstrations of the only real problem—our belief that we could have separated from our indivisible source. We begin to spiritually mature and our split mind begins to heal. By learning to accept responsibility for our mistaken perception and observe it from the viewpoint of our enlightened inner teacher our faith in the ego’s lies erodes and we experience glimmers of the eternal light that lies beyond the façade we made to block our awareness of love’s presence. As we learn to look with our inner teacher, to alter our perception of everyone and everything through the Course’s forgiveness, our investment in the meaning and value of our singular identity slips away.

 

Despite our unconscious resistance the workbook lessons work to correct our mistaken perception if we apply them. We all resist, we all forget, our minds wander and become preoccupied with meaningless thoughts. We grow distracted and sleepy. Sometimes we experience a full-blown ego attack, projecting all that bottled up fear and guilt on the first poor sucker to cross our path. Regardless of the form it takes, it helps to recognize resistance for the fear of love it represents, gently forgive ourselves for our mistaken perception as we would a terrified child, and return once again to the lesson for the day.

 

As the workbook introduction points out:

 

“Some of the ideas the workbook presents you will find hard to believe, and others may seem to be quite startling. This does not matter. You are merely asked to apply the ideas as you are directed to do. You are not asked to judge them at all. You are only asked to use them. It is their use that will give them meaning to you, and will show you that they are true.”

 

The workbook lessons teach us that when we resign as our own teacher, when we turn away from the ego’s 24/7 rant of competing interests and unfair treatment, the deeply comforting memory of completeness returns and we find ourselves in the miracle of the wholly instant, the eternal present. The place outside time where we pause a moment before rejoining the infinite love we have never really left.

 

Of course, we grow frightened again of disappearing into the primoridial broth the ego has taught us means death. We grow frightened again by the ego’s fairy tale of a God intent on punishing us for running away from home. But as we journey through the workbook, applying the lessons to the content of our lives with the help of our new inner teacher, our belief in the ego’s lies weakens without any additional effort on our part. We need only suspend our disbelief and follow the lessons’ directions.

 

“Remember only this; you need not believe the ideas, you need not accept them, and you need not even welcome them. Some of them you may actively resist. None of this will matter or decrease their efficacy.”  

 

  

My mind is preoccupied with past thoughts

Our new puppy Kayleigh had been whimpering in her crate off and on all night. She normally cried a few minutes after I put her to bed before settling down but we had only adopted her a week-and-a-half ago and “normal” was still a moving target. All the experienced dog owners I talked to swore by enforcing the crating routine and so I tossed and turned all night, awakening to her soft cries, alternating between annoyance and worry, fighting an overwhelming urge to liberate her.

At four-thirty I’d had enough. Without turning on the light I swaddled her in a towel and took her back to bed with me. Deep sighs shuddered through her tiny frame. I held her tighter as she burrowed into the folds of the towel before finally falling asleep. We lay like that a long time waiting for the delayed autumn sunrise, a week short of setting our clocks back. Finally in the milky light of dawn I discovered the cause of her upset. She had soiled her crate, clearly a victim of some kind of intestinal distress. She gazed at me with sad eyes, trembling as I tried to comfort her, issuing those same forlorn sighs I now recognized as a mantra of canine shame.

Guilt over failing to rescue her earlier washed over me as I called the vet to get her in  that morning and cleaned up after her new accidents, all the while trying to reassure her that she was just sick, not a bad dog, it would be OK. I had recently started A Course in Miracles workbook again with a class I was teaching and attempted to focus on today’s teaching: “My mind is preoccupied with past thoughts,” but couldn’t really concentrate, distraught over our puppy’s state and distracted with regret over having left her all night sick and alone in her crate.

At the vet’s she lay listless in my arms as the nurse explained they would test for several infections and make sure the distemper inoculation series she had not yet completed had delivered the necessary protection. When they carried her off to perform required tortures behind stainless steel doors I teared up, mentally admonishing myself to get a grip. This was not a child after all, but a puppy I had known for less than two weeks and yet. She weighed less than two pounds and had already become my adoring shadow; dependent on me for her every need; wholly trusting in my good intentions.

The nurse returned with the vet. The good news? They had eliminated the most serious possibility and hoped the lab work would deliver more information in a day or two. The bad?  Kayleigh was seriously dehydrated. It doesn’t take much for a dog closer in size to a hamster to deplete itself. They would need to start her on an IV. With any luck, I could pick her up about 7 p.m.

As they whisked her away I wandered out to my car struggling to keep from sobbing, plagued by the thought that she might die on a cold table among strangers. Driving home memories of my daughter’s hospitalization for a serious bout of pneumonia at three months old came boomeranging back. Sixteen years ago I had been so numb and clueless in the emergency room, insisting on holding my infant through every procedure save for the X-Ray during which her screams pierced my heart. As a young, frightened mother I don’t think I actually allowed myself to entertain the possibility of losing her over the three-week ordeal that ensued. But Kayleigh’s precarious state seemed to have resurrected that long passed possibility. I drove home in a fog of emotion completely forgetting about A Course in Miracles, the classroom of my life, and the value of applying the content of the workbook lessons to my current curriculum.

Worried and distracted, I showered, alternating between trying to check in with my right mind and focusing on a work project before calling to check on Kayleigh’s condition. She had eaten and gotten feisty, even chewed through her IV. “That’s my girl,” I thought. The phone rang. It was my human daughter this time, crying with such conviction I could not make out a word she said. I steadied my voice even as my stomach turned in fear.

I talked to her for a few minutes faking that same, sure, calm Mama voice I used with the dog until the bad news finally gurgled forth. She had gone to a study session at a nearby coffee house on her off period and gotten a speeding ticket on her way back to school. Remorseful and terrified of her father’s reaction as well as having to appear in court, stressed out from midterms, and still suffering a severe sore throat despite having just finished a round of antibiotics for Strep she spun out of emotional control. I continued to talk her down until I felt she could drive home. It would be OK, I told her. It was a bad mistake and a big lesson that would have consequences but fortunately no one had been hurt. We would talk about it.

As I waited for her to drive home from school I tried to become still enough to access my right mind and return to the workbook lesson but could not shake my worry over my daughter and puppy or the all too familiar urge to blame someone or thing for my downwardly spiraling mental state. Nothing that had happened since I closed the door on Kayleigh’s crate the night before had complied with a single plan I had made. Instead I found myself reluctantly fielding an unrelenting series of expertly pitched curveballs. Actually, the entire week had fallen far short of expectations, the ego quickly pointed out. My writing projects had been severely disrupted by the rigors of caring for a new puppy. The house was a mess. And the novel I had finally finished and started querying agents about had so far only elicited rejection. An organization with which I was involved continued to take a philosophic turn with which I disagreed, my back was out again, and now my puppy’s life hung by a thread and my daughter had broken the law. Before I could turn away from the ego’s increasingly dramatic arguments and invite the voice of reason my daughter walked in.

I brewed tea and spoke with her calmly as the ego mind also activated in her presented its tragic case. She did not try to defend her behavior but did offer a coherent explanation for why she decided to exceed the speed limit to pass a truck carrying loose lumber and other debris she feared might fall out and hit her. In a raspy voice she also expressed the stress she was under at school and the fear that certain friends had inexplicably turned their backs on her. After offering lots of reassurance about the nature of school and friends, and discussing the possible consequences for the ticket, I felt her forehead, peered into her throat, and decided she, too, should see a doctor.

Impersonating Supermom while also internally complaining that this seriously had to be one of the worst days in recent memory we drove to Kaiser to learn she still had Strep, picked up another round of antibiotics, and rushed to the vet’s to pick up the dog, prescription food, and medicine. Driving home as the front pushing in a much publicized pre-season snowstorm descended, I phoned my husband to see if he would stop for some plain yogurt with active cultures the vet had recommended for Kayleigh. When he later appeared swinging a six-pack of flavored yogurt with added vitamins and fiber my fragile grip on sanity further relaxed. I am sorry to say the ego pounced. Why couldn’t he ever listen to me?     

“I asked for plain yogurt,” I said.

“It’s just vanilla.”

“She’s a puppy. She can’t have flavored yogurt. She can’t have extra fiber.” What was not to get about this?

“You want me to throw it out? You want me to take it back?”

I turned away. We had been here before.

Licking my imaginary wounds I carried our puppy upstairs, got ready for bed, put her back in her crate, and listened for the dreaded crying but the exhausted animal had instantly fallen asleep. I, on the other hand, lay awake reviewing my frustration with the series of events that seemed to have hijacked not only the day but all shreds of my fragile connection with inner peace. The title phrase of lesson 8, the words that had been eluding me all day, at last returned:

“My mind is preoccupied with past thoughts.”

I recalled sitting at the vet’s that morning, waiting for them to return with my puppy, sitting in the emergency room all those years ago waiting for them to finish X-raying my screaming baby. I recalled waiting for an array of bodily test results over the years, waiting for people to die, waiting for clients to get back to me, waiting for agents and publishers to accept or reject my writing, affirm or destroy my self-worth, waiting for my daughter or husband to call to let me know they had arrived at their destination safely, waiting for my daughter or husband to comply with my requests. Waiting, waiting, waiting; preoccupied with past thoughts.

“The one wholly true thought one can hold about the past is that it is not here.”

This sounds sophomoric, on the surface, taken literally. But when understood according to A Course in Miracle’s revelatory thought system, when taken on the level of the truth we are, the truth the Course teaches us abides outside this dream of self-imposed exile, it offers an absolute albeit slippery reality we who believe we reside in differentiated bodies find almost impossible to grasp. The one, whole truth we are resides in the eternal present, the non-dualistic, indivisible love without beginning or end we believe we shattered in exchange for a differentiated, traumatic past and a future of competing interests and derailed days. The present completely eludes the ego because in its eternal wholeness the finite, illusory ego disappears. The present means death to the ego, death to the individuality we fight so valiantly to protect at the cost of infinite, invulnerable, sanity. As we go about our days reacting on the basis of our past traumas or triumphs and anticipating something better or worse we unconsciously preserve and reinforce the ego thought system, mindlessly projecting our underlying guilt over turning our backs on our one wholly loved and loving self onto someone or thing “outside.”

“Very few have realized what is actually entailed in picturing the past or in anticipating the future. The mind is actually blank when it does this, because it is not really thinking about anything.”   

All day as I “endured” the problems seemingly confronting me out of nowhere I completely forgot I am the dreamer of this dream, responsible for inventing its characters and plotline, for writing yet another fiction to convince myself I am a living, breathing, individual interacting with other living, breathing individuals. Trying to solve an array of random problems the part of our one mind that took the tiny mad idea of separation seriously specifically created to keep us from ever getting back to the decision maker in our one mind. The part of our one mind capable of watching the ego’s theatrics, recognizing them for the defense against the truth they are, and choosing again even as we deal with them on the level of form to overlook them with the part of our mind that knows we are only dreaming.

“Recognizing that your mind has been merely blank, rather than believing that it is filled with real ideas, is the first step to opening the way to vision.”    

As I lay listening to the soft rise and fall of our puppy’s breath emanating from her crate on the floor the day’s frenzied, fearful drama receded and my judgments waned. All my past regrets, all my wishes and fears dropped away in the stillness of our joined breath. Our breathing seemed to expand to envelop the whole sleeping world and for an elongated grateful moment before I slipped from the waking into the sleeping dream within a dream I paused between breaths, allowing myself to enter the eternal present we have never left, truly resting. Open, healed, and complete in God.

For the love of God

As a child I would sit in church trying to feel God’s love. From what I had gleaned so far, hell and our church of the Immaculate Conception shared a lot of common attributes. Both were temperature-challenged. In winter, the furnace clanked and wheezed like a train anxious to pull away from the station as we sat sweltering in our winter coats atoning for our many transgressions. In summer sweat on the priests’ foreheads rained into the communion chalice and stained the armpits of grownups’ garments.  Like the inferno I feared spending eternity in if I didn’t manage to pull myself together, church stank from all that comingled incense, sweat, and guilt. People suffered there, the living, breathing variety as well as the ornamental. From a statue of Mary mashing a snake with her bare feet–which, despite her beatific expression could not have felt good–to Jesus nailed to a cross above the altar, crowned with thorns, bleeding for our sins, and peering down at us with beseeching eyes I could not bring myself to meet.

 

As a child I would sit in church trying to feel God’s love despite its similarities to our Catechism’s hell. Sometimes I felt it for a moment, on my knees, fist to heart, transported by the rhythm of a Latin phrase. More often I only felt the rage rising in me again at the injustice of my brother fiddling with the hymnal beside me, swinging his feet, making those little sucking noises by drawing spit through the whole where his front teeth used to be. Our mother staring straight ahead between us, her hand a vice closing on both our wrists as if I, too, had misbehaved. He was wearing that stupid clip-on bowtie; my brother, making that face like Stan Laurel in Laurel and Hardy in his efforts to cajole our father into cracking a smile, our mother’s hands on our wrists to cut off our circulation. I was not a bad child, all things considered, even saintly at times, but who could expect any reasonable person to feel the love of God through the haze of such completely justifiable hatred?

 

I have been thinking about the early years I spent trying to feel the love of God sitting on a hard pew in a hot church surrounded by my family, and the decades that followed searching for that elusive condition in one venue after another. Obediently following the ego’s orders of “seek but do not find.” Only recently–nearly six years in to practicing A Course in Miracles–have I begun to glimpse what I am learning cannot exist outside my mind. Although I still catch myself wanting the external form of what passes for love in this world, I have trained my mind to recognize my mistake as it arises from moment to moment, and, in so doing, begun to understand, accept, and allow my only purpose in this dream: healing my mind about where love really resides.

 

“The real world is the state of mind in which the only purpose of the world is seen to be forgiveness…The value of forgiveness is perceived and takes the place of idols, which are sought no longer, for their “gifts” are not held dear. No rules are idly set, and no demands are made of anyone or anything to twist and fit into the dream of fear. Instead, there is a wish to understand all things created as they really are. And it is recognized that all things must be first forgiven, and then understood.”

 

This latter statement echoes A Course in Miracles early workbook lessons that invite us to suspend our disbelief and embrace the possibility that nothing we experience, none of the information our senses so obediently transmit to the ego’s brain, has anything to do with our true nature. Our experience in the world of form can never deliver the love we continually seek, fleetingly find, and forfeit again and again in this trippy dream of exile we continue to feed to prove our uniqueness. We must learn to allow the undoing of all we know to experience fear’s opposite, the indivisible, eternal love we remain.

 

Lately as I practice forgiveness, allowing that old mistaken rage at my brother for keeping me from winning God’s love to surface and asking for help from the part of my mind that knows we remain one despite the seeming solidity of attacking figures in the dream, an acute awareness of my buried desire to push away God’s love, the one love we are, has also surfaced. I am noticing as I go through my days, allowing people and events to either enhance or diminish the self I think I am; something interesting about what I really want. Even when love’s reflection genuinely arises, even when my husband or daughter extends the one love we are to me in the holy instant, I often turn away. Real love, love you can count on, the eternal, whole, unalterable, unconditional variety we have never left but secretly believe we destroyed still scares the hell out of me! That is where I am at this moment in my journey home. Even though the part of me that always watches now, the decision maker in my mind; is learning from experience that it will feel better if it chooses again for truth I continue at times to choose for pain by turning away from the presence of love that forever lingers in our mind.

 

I believe in the Course’s radical form of forgiveness, I have experienced its benefits, I continue to teach it to learn and yet I am still at times unwilling to forgive myself for my reluctance to allow the peace my whole mind offers. Sometimes I am still that little girl on her knees in church beating her chest and wishing she could instead use her fist on the kid beside her who actually deserves it. I still at times oscillate between blaming others and blaming myself for a crime that never really happened. That’s how afraid I am of disappearing into the void. That’s how convincing and appealing this individual body still seems, navigating a world that means something, a world in which having loved and fought, won and lost, lived and died, means something.

 

A Course in Miracles does not ask us to look at how loving we are, but to begin to notice  how unloved and unloving our thoughts, how ultimately futile our efforts to find stable, permanent peace in an unstable, impermanent thought system that arose from the unstable, impermanent idea of separation.  Fortunately the Course offers us an internal guide that meets us where we think we are in this illusion. A guide that knows our every fear but also knows we have nothing to fear. A guide that remembers what never happened, and what has always been.

 

The author of A Course in Miracles knows we in bodies can’t believe this by ourselves. It speaks to us as a loving older sibling to a small child writhing in her bed, enduring a nightmare, on her knees and beating her chest to stave off the punishment she has coming for her murderous thoughts toward her brother. Our inner teacher metaphorically rests his hand on our feverish forehead, quieting our torment, whispering to us from outside the dream that we are, have always been, and forever remain safe, whole, loved, and loving despite the erroneous information our senses continue to propagate. Resting to the music of our guide’s voice our trust in the forgiveness process strengthens, our horrific nightmare gradually morphs into a peaceful dream, and we come a little closer to opening our eyes for good.

Recalculating forgiveness

It has been a slow few days here on the forgiveness front, a little lull in the attack-defense cycle during which I have reveled in actually reading the Course again while the ego cooks up its next oral argument for some thing or one “out there” intent on destroying or enhancing the self I consistently forget I am not. In the meantime, I am savoring A Course in Miracles workbook lesson 71: “Only God’s plan for salvation will work,” and considering the idea that we have a direction in this life, some preordained destination; destiny, fate, call it what you will. The idea that the self I think I am has somewhere special to go, some special plan to fulfill, some grand, special scheme in which to fit, my special piece in the puzzle of the universe to deliver. That tiny mad idea.

 

I am thinking about the tantalizing (to the ego) idea that we have a direction in this seeming life, and how I have spent a good deal of my time on this planet both figuratively and literally in the driver’s seat of a vehicle getting lost, frantically worrying about getting lost, and secretly rejoicing in getting lost. Although I pride myself on an intuitive sense of direction that has helped me navigate ancient European cities and the warren-like back streets of medieval Italian hill towns on foot I have been known to disappear for hours on straight country roads in Colorado. Desolate stretches interrupted only by bobble-headed prairie dogs and imaginary, lunging Indiana Jones-scaled rattlesnakes whizzing by in my peripheral vision.

 

When I lived in California in those pioneering days before cell phones, I would head out on the highway to interview someone outside city limits only to end up hours later feeding dimes into a phone booth while struggling to get my bearings from a set of oil rigs perched like grazing dinosaurs on a bald hillside somewhere in that great valley that still supplies most of our nation with year-round produce. (Wherever, I came to think of it, in true valley girl vernacular.)  I attracted similarly handicapped companions. My friend Beth and I once headed out of town to a yoga retreat in the Sonoma Valley–a reward for another successful bout of quitting smoking–and ended up somewhere outside Sacramento after following a sign to a stand selling almond-stuffed olives we just had to try. (A wrong turn we only discovered when run off the road by a trucker, rudely interrupting another of our scintillating conversations.)

 

But I digress the way I do. I am thinking about the idea of getting lost and not getting lost and the many forgiveness opportunities it has offered me in my marriage of nearly twenty years. My husband is a man who believes in maps. I am a woman who believes in following my muse and, when she fails as she inevitably does, driving until I find a gas station and someone to ask. Maps have a purpose, of course. Early American and old European versions make frame-worthy art. But, although I am perfectly capable of reading them I find doing so at best a terrible distraction and at worst, a life-threatening obsession. In a driver’s seat the map-dependent sacrifice safety in their fixation with arriving at a pre-ordained destination, struggling to unfold, read, and re-fold said maps while balancing a steering wheel between their knees, refusing to listen to verbal directions from well meaning passengers. They do not speak the language of “left and right” and “probably just around that bend” with which I am content and fluent. Even on a hike, the map-dependent will stop every few yards on clearly marked trails to verify their location like newly arrived aliens, driving their map-adverse spouses to constantly climb and return, climb and return, like loyal albeit bored-to-tears dogs.

 

But I digress the way I do, on roads and trails and on the page. Enter the handy little device that has transformed our family’s road trips over the last couple years: the Garmin GPS portable navigation system, a gadget I resisted but have come to embrace as a metaphor for releasing to the Holy Spirit my belief that I know where I am going on any level. For those of you unfamiliar with the wonders of this contraption, you attach it to your windshield and type in the address of your destination. You select a voice from an array of international male and female possibilities (my favorite is a Brit who sounds like the actor Colin Firth but my husband prefers a woman with a French accent we call Fifi) and off you go. The device offers those of us with auditory preferences the verbal cues we crave to prevent interrupting our ruminations on passing views while appeasing the map-dependent with a depiction of their vehicle traversing the route on a tiny screen, the opportunity to star in some kind of twisted, virtual road trip game.

 

Although I admit I initially met the introduction of this latest toy into our vehicle with a fair amount of skepticism I eventually recognized its value on a symbolic level and have come to–if not entirely revere forfeiting control of my journey—at least understand that I may be better off deferring to an outside guide privy to information I do not have. Like the right mind A Course in Miracles constantly encourages us, the decision maker, to choose for, our Garmin knows things about where we are going we do not, and would never lead us astray, on purpose anyway.

 

Far from a perfect analogy, of course, because there are times when the Garmin is wrong, a victim of mistaken programming. The Holy Spirit on the other hand is never wrong, and, unlike the ego, never the victim of anything. The Holy Spirit in our mind holds the memory of our true direction: returning home to the one, indivisible love we never left by awakening from this dream of separation. Still, I have come to admire the Garmin’s manner in patiently leading us back when we have once again deluded ourselves we know better. Should we fail to take its advice, it never scolds but simply tries to follow our latest mistake in the dream, to make itself once more available. “Recalculating,” it says, scanning to find us where we think we are in this world headed nowhere, and adjusting the route accordingly until we choose again for the path that will take us home.

 

All destinations I have sought and continue to seek in this world reflect my wish to make the ego’s plan for salvation real. The plan depends on always seeking outside myself for some person, place, or thing to make me whole, an impossible plan designed to fail us. “According to this insane plan, any perceived source of salvation is acceptable provided that it will not work. This ensures that the fruitless search will continue, for the illusion persists that, although this hope has always failed, there is still grounds for hope in other places and in other things.”

 

Despite their celebrated differences, the map-dependent and the map-adverse both blindly follow the ego’s plan of seek but do not find, always hoping the next destination will deliver the thrill of a lifetime and only becoming more and more lost in an illusory world. “For what could more surely guarantee that you will not find salvation than to channelize all your efforts in searching for it where it is not?”  The ego cherishes both the notion that it knows where it is going, and the secret, denied desire to become hopelessly lost in an external, combative reality designed to keep it permanently unaware that it has a mind able to choose again for the Holy Spirit.

 

Like the Garmin the Holy Spirit in our mind knows things we do not. Like where we think we left and where we’re really going. It doesn’t beat us over the head with this information but, like our handy little Garmin, waits for us to ask and then suggests another way. Like the Garmin the Holy Spirit encourages us to catch ourselves when we have run amuck, to recognize our error could not have occurred outside the mind in a hallucinated world, and to recalculate, returning the error to the source of the mistake in the mind and choosing again for a corrected route home, the only place we really want to go.

Forgiving the unforgivable

In a startling turn of events, my 16-year-old daughter invited me to chaperone a field trip with her IB history class.

 

“Who are you and what have you done with my real daughter?” I asked.

 

“Funny,” she said.

 

“Do I get to talk to your friends? Do I get to talk to your teacher? Do I get to ride the bus and bring a sack lunch?”

 

“Don’t push your luck, Mom,” she said.

 

Of course I was secretly thrilled. And I got to do all of the above. Still, in my haste to bond with my daughter and her world I hadn’t even bothered to ask where we were going. Turns out, we were headed for a new museum in downtown Denver called The Cell (Center for empowered living and learning) and its debut exhibit: “Anyone, Anytime, Anywhere: Understanding the Threat of Terrorism.” The exhibit purports to “explore the many facets of terrorism, its threats and impact on the lives of people in Denver, the United States and around the world.”

 

The teacher had assigned students particular questions to consider based on interactive, multimedia displays. Like the Spy Museum in Washington, DC, you take on the identity of a real person (in this case a terrorist or victim) as you enter and discover your fate at the end. Out of 56 students, only a handful survived. But as chaperone, I was there to merely observe, keep the kids out of trouble, answer the occasional question, and consider my own questionable identity in relation to the continual stream of frightened voices and horrific flashing images of civilians being taken out by people all over the world intent on martyring themselves for the “greater good;” an extreme demonstration of the ego thought system’s madness.

 

The students surveyed a wide array of innovative weapons crafted from ordinary objects used to accomplish violent acts. Small TVs streamed children’s programs created to coerce young kids into joining the cause. People in a lovely anonymous town square sipped coffee at outdoor cafes, bought flowers, and rode their bikes before a backpack bomber put an end to an otherwise idyllic autumn afternoon. Another exhibit offered clues to the labyrinth of terrorist funding sources. On one wall, in excruciating slow motion, the twin towers crumbled, rose, and crumbled again. Talking heads from Homeland Security advocated staying alert to the signs of terrorism and preached steps we can all take to recognize and report suspicious activity.  

 

“Why do they hate us so much?” one student asked. “Maybe because they’re poor,” another answered. But she sounded doubtful. The exhibit not only provided no real answers; it did not even embrace the most obvious question: why? But it seems to me A Course in Miracles provides the answer. The mind on ego we all share carries a brutal burden of unconscious guilt over the mistaken belief that it not only separated from its source but destroyed the kingdom on the way out the door. According to the ego’s insane albeit unconscious scenario, God will nonetheless rise from the dead to punish us unless we can convince him we are innocent victims of another. Intent on proving our bogus individuality no matter the cost, we reenact that original thought of murder on an individual level and we reenact it on a collective, cultural level hell-bent on pinning our unconscious guilt over having severed perfect, unified love on someone else to demonstrate our relative innocence. A Course in Miracles trains us to bring the problem we perceive outside ourselves back to its source/cause in the mind. When we recognize it as another example of the one mind’s projected guilt and choose again for the part of our mind that recognizes the unreality of the cause of our attack, we experience a shift in perception, a change of mind that holds no one prisoner.

 

On the level of form, however, when confronted by the ego gone mad on a nauseatingly massive scale, I find myself severely challenged to practice forgiveness A Course in Miracles style. The process of recognizing the reflected guilt in my projection, taking back responsibility for my mistaken interpretation, and asking for another interpretation from my right mind can seem impossible in such circumstances. But when I break it down, when I look at it with my inner teacher display by display, frame by frame, I am able to see that we all experience the same miserable impulse toward martyrdom in our relationships.

 

Of course, I, Susan, the false self I still think I am, did not cause these terrorist attacks. But the cause lies in the mind and the Course tells us again and again there is only one mind on the level of truth. One mind that believes it destroyed God to claim its independence, one mind crippled by the burden of that guilt, one mind intent on projecting it on someone else, one mind that has nothing to do with a body’s brain. The Course also tells us over and over that the life we believe we experience through our bodies is not real. We have imprisoned ourselves in a dream of our own making designed to protect us from punishment while preserving the impossible notion of individuality. The Course’s forgiveness, then, always begins with the reminder that we are forgiving what never really happened.

 

“Forgiveness recognizes what you thought your brother did to you has not occurred. It does not pardon sins and make them real. It sees there was no sin. And in that view are all your sins forgiven.”

 

With help from the part of our mind that does not believe in the horror of human experience but remembers only the one love we keep pushing away in our fear we recognize that at some point we all feel misunderstood, misrepresented, unfairly treated; financially and psychologically exploited. We all indoctrinate our children in a history of our particular individual, family, and cultural suffering. The ego thought system was hard-wired from the beginning to reflect irreconcilable differences. Believing it launched the most horrible of all attacks in the first place it continues to compulsively attack and defend. We cannot escape from or fix this vicious cycle of attack and defense by acting within it. We can only heal the cycle by first accepting the healing of our one mind. And because minds are joined unless I include you in my healing, I remain in perpetual combat in the dream unable to awaken to truth.

 

“There must be another way,” psychologist Bill Thetford told his colleague, Course scribe Helen Schuman more than 40 years ago. Forgiveness A Course in Miracles style is that better way, the loving answer to Bill’s plea for healing the conflict in his relationships.  Workbook lesson 134, “Let me perceive forgiveness as it is,” contrasts the world’s view of forgiveness with the Course’s version. According to the world’s version, what the Course refers to as “forgiveness to destroy,” I enhance my ego by taking the high road in forgiving your heinous attack. This strengthens and perpetuates the ego’s story of persecution designed to conceal its unconscious guilt over separating from its source by projecting/blaming it on someone/thing “outside.” Thus I avoid all responsibility for my state of mind. I am the innocent victim I tell myself and everyone else I can convince to listen (hopefully including God); secretly rejoicing in every seeming affront that once again proves my relative virtue. But even though I have been clearly wronged, I will forgive what you have done because that’s just the kind of saintly ego I am. Forgiveness to destroy protects my projection while celebrating my benevolence. The problem? It never works for long. The underlying guilt in my mind remains unscathed as the weary world winds on, constantly resurfacing and demanding I once more perceive myself unfairly treated to reestablish my innocence at another’s expense.  

 

Forgiveness A Course in Miracles style au contraire undoes my guilt over a sin that never happened by returning my judgment of you to the decision maker in my mind and inviting another interpretation of my skewed perception. It releases my repressed guilt over my desire to experience autonomy in exchange for eternal love/wholeness. Over time, practicing forgiveness by recognizing my projections and their secret purpose, observing my identification with the ego thought system, and actively choosing again for the part of my mind that remembers our original state of infinite oneness, my belief in competing interests wanes along with my addiction to individuality and I begin to awaken to the peace of our true, non-dualistic nature. Forgiveness A Course in Miracles style has given my life new meaning and real purpose: the healing of my split mind.

 

When I, the decision maker, choose the Holy Spirit as my teacher instead of the ego, I can perceive the terrorism of the ego’s thought system without believing in it. But first I must look at my investment in the ego’s version of forgiveness that has kept the attack/defense cycle in play, the peace I have traded to preserve a false identity that has only brought me pain, preventing me from experiencing the one love we are and have never left. A non-specific, abstract love beyond our current understanding we can nonetheless recall when we choose a different vision of the world that seems to spin with such drama, purpose, competing interests, and, ultimately, terror.

 

Forgiveness requires us to honestly look at the world we have created to both hide and reinforce our secret wish to live as individuals at God’s expense, our fear of punishment, and our continuing reluctance to awaken from the ego’s dream of denial we have accepted as our earthly reality. What motivates us to change? Bringing our projections back to the light of our one mind where the Holy Spirit’s memory of perfect wholeness has never stopped shining and experiencing the deep comfort of our true nature.

 

But how do we forgive the unforgivable? How do we find common ground with those who seem wholly evil? To forgive those responsible for human atrocities given the traditional definition of forgiveness would be pure folly. But forgiving under the Course’s definition always first recognizes we are forgiving the unreal illusion of guilt in the mind. It also recognizes what happens on the level of truth when the murderous thought of original separation is taken to its extreme. Terrorists feel wholly justified in martyrdom that proves their greater innocence as opposed to their enemies’ greater guilt, with an ego-invented, vengeful God as their witness.

 

It is helpful to look at my desire to distance myself from so-called “inhuman acts” with the gentle help of my right mind that reminds me that deeply buried beneath the appearance of mass murder I would condemn lies the desire to push the love of God, the one love we are, away. I have moments, the Course calls them “holy instants,” in which the Holy Spirit’s interpretation dawns on my mind and I am healed, but most of the time, I still want to draw lines in the sand between the forgivable and the unforgivable. But the Course’s form of forgiveness is a journey, the path I have chosen to lead me home. And so I once more turn my judgment over to my right mind, hoping as we are told again and again that the awakened mind is “so close to you we cannot fail.”

 

Ultimately I forgive and forgive again because I am learning to accept that I can’t make it home without you and I want to go home more than I want to continue to play in a dream gone bad. Minds are joined because there is still only one mind, despite our hallucinated “reality” of dueling personalities, viewpoints, and special interests. Heavily fortified by the vision of my inner teacher I learn to look beyond even the most horrific demonstrations of the ego’s mantra of “kill or be killed,” to recognize  them as reflections of the one mind’s denied guilt over a crime that never occurred, and to exchange them for the state of whole, uninterrupted innocence we remain. A state I finally realize I want more than I want this autonomous self always seeking to triumph at someone else’s expense. I did not make this up. I have come to know this because practicing forgiveness helps me realize that siding with this special self keeps me on a roller coaster of painful conflict relieved only by moments of fleeting happiness, while choosing for wholeness brings stability and deep comfort.  

 

We go home together or not at all, as this beautiful section from “The Lifting of the Veil” at the conclusion of “The Obstacles to Peace” reminds us:

 

“This brother who stands beside you still seems to be a stranger. You do not know him, and your interpretation of him is very fearful. And you attack him still, to keep what seems to be yourself unharmed. Yet in his hands is your salvation. You see his madness, which you hate because you share it. And all the pity and forgiveness that would heal it gives way to fear. Brother, you need forgiveness of your brother, for you will share in madness or in Heaven together. And you and he will raise your eyes in faith together or not at all.”

I loose the world from all I thought it was

 

A few months ago I got hooked on the Dish network’s Earth Channel broadcasting a 24-hour feed of earth images taken by a camera mounted on the EchoStar 11 satellite and set to a soundtrack of 60’s, 70’s, and 80’s tunes. Trippy classics like Jefferson Starship’s Miracles, Yes’ Roundabout, and Jethro Tull’s Aqualung that transported me back to a former life decades before I had any intention of forgiving anyone by traditional or radically alternative means. Back to when I was merely an ego in a boom cycle thrashing its way through the minefield of attack and defense we call living, dodging imaginary incoming shrapnel and firing off a few highly justified and targeted grenades of my own.  

 

My husband and daughter couldn’t quite fathom my enthusiasm for the new cable channel; and even expressed mild concern over my growing obsession.

“So what does it do?” my husband asked.

“It’s not so much about it doing anything,” I said.

“OK.” He backed away; disappeared into the vault of his office.

“The stoners at my school watch that channel all the time, Mom,” my daughter said.

“And yet I grasp it without the aid of any mind-altering substances,” I pointed out.

Her brows shot up the way they do. She assumed the maternal impersonation she sometimes adopts which can seriously creep me out if I let it, hugging herself and leaning back against the kitchen counter, patiently enduring yet another opportunity in which to suffer fools.

 “Don’t you have somewhere you’re supposed to be?” I asked.

 

I soon learned that if you hit the pause button while cooking dinner and then hit play a half hour later you can train yourself to spot infinitesimal changes in the pattern of swirling gasses etched across our planet’s face that usually resembles the profile of a woman emerging from the gnarl of an ancient tree, her expression subtly morphing throughout the day and evening, exhausting the gamut of human emotions. This got me thinking about the purpose of this world and its exhausting emotions according to A Course in Miracles, which got me thinking about a meditation I read or heard somewhere, possibly Buddhist. You visualize your living space and those you live with and mentally state: “May everyone in this house be well and happy.” Gradually moving outward you go on to bless everyone in your neighborhood, your city, your country, the earth, the solar system, and finally the universe. The idea seems to be to envelop all that exists in the wellness and happiness you visualize for yourself. It’s a sweet meditation all too easily abandoned, I found, once I opened my eyes, uncrossed my legs, and headed back out into the jungle of this world.

 

I am thinking about the Dish Earth Channel’s version of our planet viewed from outer space because it symbolizes the world to me, a world I can no longer view for long in the same way I used to thanks to A Course in Miracles. Despite its occasional, seductive entertainment value whether viewed from a satellite or the seemingly flat ground I appear to traverse my understanding of the world’s purpose and my own has begun to shift despite my formidable resistance to doing what our inner guide asks us to do: withdraw our belief that an illusory world of form can in any way affect our state of mind.

 

A Course in Miracles workbook lesson 132, “I loose the world from all I thought it was,” compares and contrasts our perception of the world based on which inner teacher’s viewpoint we have chosen to believe, the ego or the Holy Spirit’s. The Course tells us again and again that the world of perception we find ourselves navigating is an ego-generated illusion, a literal projection of the guilt in our one mind over our belief that we have pulled off the impossible by dividing the eternally whole and indivisible. The ego’s plan for our salvation then involved casting our guilt outward into a fragmented universe in which we could both hide from God’s wrath and act out our fantasy of autonomy by projecting that repressed but continually resurfacing guilt onto others in a perpetual cycle of attack and defense.  A cycle intended to prove our relative innocence compared to another’s greater sin.

 

“The world is nothing in itself. Your mind must give it meaning. And what you behold upon it are your wishes, acted out so you can look on them and think them real.”

 

Our wish to blame others for our loss of peace of mind while avoiding responsibility for the original “crime” of separation keeps a world of conflict, opposites, and opposition spinning. It also keeps us so busy fighting imaginary battles seemingly “out there” that we forget we have a decision maker in our mind that chose for the ego but can always choose again for the memory of wholeness, the reflection of the eternal, pure, united love we never left symbolized by the Holy Spirit. A Course in Miracles teaches us to recognize our mistaken perception by catching ourselves in the act of holding others responsible for our suffering and realizing that we have chosen to suffer because it at least proves our individuality real. As we learn to practice forgiveness A Course in Miracles style, recognizing our projections as mere attempts to get rid of the painful guilt in our mind, taking them back to our mind and choosing again for the Holy Spirit’s truth we never really left, our one mind begins to heal. In this way the Holy Spirit offers the antidote to our mistaken perception. How? By using the very projections the ego invented to prevent the memory of the one true love we are from ever resurfacing in our minds to undo our error. Applying forgiveness in our relationships over time we gradually awaken from a dream that can at best offer only fleeting pleasure, and always ends in the body’s death, the ultimate unfair treatment.

 

“Perhaps you think you did not make the world, but came unwillingly to what was made already, hardly waiting for your thoughts to give it meaning. Yet in truth you found exactly what you looked for when you came.”

 

The world we think we navigate always delivers exactly what the mind on ego has secretly asked for, proof of our martyrdom at another’s hands. Tampered-with evidence designed to convince a vengeful, dualistic God created by the ego in its own image that we should go to heaven, while those who wronged us go to hell. But we are already living a hell of our own making, the hell of conflict and competing interests we call this world. The good news?

 

“There is no world! This the one central thought the Course attempts to teach…There is no world because it is a thought apart from God, and made to separate the Father and the Son, and break away a part of God Himself and thus destroy His Wholeness.”

 

To free ourselves we need but change our mind about the world. That means we first need to see it clearly for the defense against truth it is. We begin by tuning in to the 24/7 broadcast of our projected judgment and recognizing it for the moving, morphing external image of an internal state it represents. We will never find peace and happiness in a world designed to conceal the murderous thought of separation from eternal, whole love. Searching for salvation in such a world will never work. But recognizing our attraction to keeping a world of separation intact, realizing how much pain our mistaken judgments cost us, and choosing to release our erroneous interpretation to the memory of wholeness we share our one mind begins to heal and an earth intent on irreconcilable differences seems both less awesome and less threatening. We experience release and relief from the enervating attack/defense cycle that keeps this world and its soundtrack of sin, guilt, and fear spinning and return to truth.

 

“I who remain as God created me would loose the world from all I thought it was. For I am real because the world is not, and I would know my own reality.”    

Above the battleground

"Mad" Anthony Wayne

The town I grew up in has long staked its reputation on a revolutionary war battle waged by Mad Anthony Wayne; leader of a light infantry that stormed British fortifications camped out on the Hudson River under cover of darkness. The victory has long symbolized a psychological turning point for American forces, the beginning of the end of the war. Many townspeople so revere the general’s courage and audacity that they reenact the hillside ambush each year in period garb before engaging in festivities designed to further commemorate our eventual autonomy from the tyranny of Mother England.

 

As a little girl, I would join the boys in the woods to reenact the famous battle; although we knew very little about it save that it involved people called red coats versus people called colonists. “Give me liberty or give me death,” we shouted. (We drew straws for who got to play the red coats.) The boys let me impersonate a soldier because they were short on men; I wore my hair short, and despite my lack of heft, threw a mean punch. Later, when we reenacted World War II, however, they forced my girlfriend and me to play Japanese prisoners, a role I quickly tired of. And I soon enough discovered that no matter what historical conflict we attempted to emulate, we always ended up fighting each other, loyalties blurred, betrayals mounting, hurt feelings running rampant. Sooner or later everyone started crying or screaming, someone got a bloody nose, someone else called in an adult, and we all found ourselves banished in shame to our private quarters. My mother would lower us into a hot bath, as if trying to scald away our baser natures.

 

I have been thinking about battles and battlegrounds lately—children’s and adults’–and what A Course in Miracles means when it talks about “rising above the battleground.”  I have been thinking about battles and battlegrounds because I have been engaged on the perennial battleground like everyone else on this planet since my arrival, striving to prove my innocence relative to everyone else’s greater guilt; attempting to triumph over everyone else’s efforts to usurp my authority.

 

Applying A Course in Miracles’ forgiveness process to the seeming battles that arise in my everyday life—from apparently trivial traffic encounters to monumental-seeming issues in my closest relationships–has helped me begin to generalize the undoing of my belief in competing interests. I am beginning to see that the Course means what it says when it tells us “there is no hierarchy of illusions” and “no order of difficulty in miracles.”  The former statement means that everything I experience outside my mind without exception is merely a projection of my belief that I have separated from my source/the one love I forever am. The latter statement means that the change of mind realized when I choose to shift from the ego’s perception of competing interests to the Holy Spirit’s message of perfect unity corrects every seeming misperception that appears to disturb my peace. But I must learn to apply forgiveness to all my encounters, and some still seem more real than others.

 

“… for your forgiveness of your brother is not complete as yet, and so it cannot be extended to all creation.”

 

This is not a path in relativism. What’s true is true, according to the Course; while what’s false is false. Only knowledge/heaven/perfect, eternal love is true. Everything outside that truth is false. Since I am dreaming a dream of exile from truth, everything I experience within this body and without this body is false. Sounds simple except that we have no memory of our awakened state, unless we actively choose for our right mind/Holy Spirit, the part of our mind that holds the memory of waking wholeness for us in the dream.

 

As the teaching tells us again and again, we experience the undoing of the ego as a process in which we learn to apply forgiveness to everything that appears to arise to upset us, everything we believe interferes with our ability to preserve our ultimate autonomy and relative innocence. As we turn our frightening, dark illusions over to the light of our right mind we experience deep relief/the return of endless comfort. By learning to watch the ego from the perspective of the decision maker in our mind with help from our loving inner teacher, we begin to realize how much pain the ego thought system’s dynamic of attack and defense (designed to keep our guilt over the belief that we destroyed our creator alive by blaming it on someone else while avoiding responsibility for it) really costs us. And yet, as a new form of attack appears to arise, a vicious, unprovoked assault seems intent on destroying us, we may find ourselves once again clinging to our self-imposed bondage and plotting to break free. The belief in our invulnerability our right mind holds flies out the window as we turn once more to the body’s eyes for clues to what’s happening to us this time, and what we must do to protect ourselves/retaliate.

 

The belief that we pulled off the “crime” of separation runs deep in us. So does our intoxication with the original “tiny mad idea” of experiencing individuality. Our repressed fear of punishment is as great as our attraction to what the Course calls our “specialness.” No wonder it sometimes seems that the more we forgive and experience the transformative peace of mind forgiveness brings, the more inventive the ego becomes in generating complicated, confusing, and traumatic dramas. Fictions that enable us to act out our secret wish to be unfairly treated; a wish that keeps the battleground intact, the game in play, and the fabrication of individuality preserved.

 

And yet, the Course tells us, regardless of the size, scope, or seeming severity of the circumstances we perceive ourselves embroiled in, we can learn to rise above even the bloodiest battleground. I am reminding myself again of this idea because I need to hear it. I have felt victimized by a person and situation in my seeming world for a while now. I keep watching my ego’s attachment to that idea, and asking for help in looking beyond the illusory form to the content beyond the dream. When I do I realize I am simply witnessing the ego thought system we all share on a rampage. When I don’t, specifically directed anger and fear raise their ugly heads, and I am once more catapulted into believing I am forgiving something real, rather than the antics of the split mind on ego. The ego’s assaults at times have seemed so fast and furious I can barely catch my breath long enough to remember I have a mind that can choose to witness its projections without judgment, a mind that perceives the battle but recognizes it for the simple reenactment of the original battle it represents. A battle that never took place, rendering its reenactment ultimately impossible.

 

“This is your part; to realize that murder in any form is not your will. The overlooking of the battleground is now your purpose.”

 

The Course makes no distinction between minor irritation and murder because every loss of peace stems from the original thought of claiming our independence at our creator’s expense. Whatever the problem on the level of form, the solution remains forgiveness, bringing the problem back to our mind and choosing again for the vision of our inner teacher that sees the illusion but does not take it seriously. But how do we overlook the battleground even as we take necessary steps on the level of form to address a potentially threatening situation? I have been asking this question these last few weeks as I feel the constant pull to defend the little self I think I am and the little selves around me I love and befriend. A Course in Miracles tells us we can rise above the battleground by paying attention to the way we feel.

 

“There is a stab of pain, a twinge of guilt, and above all, a loss of peace. This you know well. When they occur leave not your place on high, but quickly choose a miracle instead of murder.”

 

I have gotten pretty good at choosing my right mind when confronted by a stab of pain or twinge of guilt but not so much when confronted by an apparent slanderous attack or unprovoked act of cruelty. In this situation because a part of my mind still upholds the childish notion of a hierarchy of illusions I can’t seem to catch myself in time. I am back on the battleground before I know what hit me. But when I take a moment and pause as I have trained myself to do, I can retrace my steps back to my original decision to choose separation over eternal peace at the root of all subsequent reenactments from trivial to catastrophic. I can call on my awakened mind for its interpretation, allowing it to softly rain down on my mistaken awareness, washing away the hurt battling illusions always brings.

 

I have chosen the Course’s forgiveness process to lead me home. I only need to keep practicing and choosing again to experience the miracle of changed perception. This situation has offered me an extraordinary lesson in healing my mind by demonstrating just how invested I am in preventing my own healing by believing in the circumstances of my unfair treatment. But as I have continued to ask my right mind to remember my true purpose I find myself growing weary of my role in this reenactment. I feel much calmer today. Almost ready to grow out of this, perhaps even ready to shed this period garb with our inner teacher’s gentle smile and let the ego find another seeming actor to play out its wishes, peacefully aware that we all grow out of it in the end.

Another blissful conversation with the ego

It’s been a rough few days here in forgiveness land. Ever since I wrote about making the peace of God my primary goal, the ego has been relentless in its request for equal time from the decision maker (DM), the part of our mind that chooses between the ego’s story of separation and the Holy Spirit’s memory of unity. Of course the DM can always choose not to grant it. But as I’ve mentioned before, attempts to censor the ego only seem to exacerbate its inevitable backlash. A Course in Miracles reminds us that you have to truly recognize the “enemy” and its ugly albeit nonsensical ways, before you can recognize you never really had one.  So I am allowing the ego to speak with the DM, what’s left of it, at least. After all it has chosen not to access the Holy Spirit/right mind in days and is once more beginning to forget it has a mind.

 

Ego: “Above all else you want the peace of God?” Seriously? Have we even met?

 

DM: OK, I’ll admit I may have overstated things a tad.

 

Ego: A tad?

 

DM: Alright, currently as it turns out, I do not want the peace of God above all else. I want fame, fortune, flourless chocolate cake, and revenge, not necessarily in that order.

 

Ego: Damn straight. I saw the way you looked at your husband this morning. And you sat at that computer until midnight the other night drafting responses to those emails you were too chicken to send. That person deserves everything you wrote, by the way. No one in this universe can blame you for defending yourself from a complete maniac.

 

DM: Can I quote you on that?

 

Ego: Pock, pock, pock, pock.

 

DM: Right.

 

Ego: Better than happy, I always say.

 

DM: You are still quite quotable.

 

Ego: Well, that’s one of the biggest understatements of all time.

 

DM: I seriously doubt that.

 

Ego: Really, Ms. “above all else I want the peace of God?” So let me just ask you then why you’ve been in such a little hissy fit for the past five days?

 

DM: OK, you win. Currently, as it turns out, I definitely do not want the peace of God. I want to sit here engaging in this inane conversation because at least it allows me to keep this puny special identity intact.

 

Ego: Could you repeat that, I couldn’t quite hear you.

 

DM: Currently, as it turns out

 

Ego:  No! The part before that–the you win part. Music to my ears—I could listen to that tune the rest of my life…

 

DM: God only knows.

 

Ego: Ha! OK, so, sorry to interrupt you on such a sweet roll. As you were saying, you currently do not want the peace God.

 

DM: Correct. Currently, as it turns out, I want pointless conversations with imaginary beings, judgment, exclusion, sarcasm, moral superiority, self-loathing, and self-righteousness. Sounds contradictory, I know, but that’s the mind on ego for you.

 

Ego: Hey, when have I had anything but your best interests at heart?

 

DM: You don’t really want me to answer that do you?

 

Ego: Hold on just one cotton picking minute, Susan.

 

DM: That’s DM.

 

Ego: Yeah, right. Look, I’ve been doing my damndest to keep this from you but you’re clearly getting pretty freaking smitten with this whole waking up delusion so I suppose you leave me no choice. Repeat after me. I DO NOT want the peace of God. GOD IS NOT MY FRIEND. God wants me seriously wacked. Why wouldn’t he; I wacked him. Coming back to you now? It was a blood bath, I’m telling you.

 

DM: So you’ve mentioned a few billion times. God a la Tony Soprano. But the right mind has a different version.

 

Ego: Oh, let me guess: It never happened. Is he like a broken record or what? I mean, is that not the most childish, moronic argument in the universe? Sticks and stones may break my bones but words. That dude hasn’t had an original thought in how many years?

 

DM: Hmmm. Original thought. Interesting choice of phrase coming from you.

 

Ego: What’s that supposed to mean?

 

DM: Just that I hear lusting after originality is what started this whole mess of separate interests in the first place.

 

Ego: You’re a mess of a separate interest.

 

DM; Why, thank you. I’d like to believe that if only it didn’t make me feel so queasy.

 

Ego: I’ll tell you what’s making you feel queasy. The guilt over what you did, that’s what. And what he wants to do back. But I’m telling you, if you’ll just stick with me down here and forget about listening to that other crybaby that’s just a figment of your tortured imagination for a minute you’ll be fine. Trust me.

 

DM: Wow, déjà vu.

 

Ego: What?

 

DM: “Trust me.”

 

Ego: You got to trust someone, kid.

 

DM: Now that’s good advice. Maybe it’s time to once again start trusting that still small voice within.

 

Ego: Now why in hell would you do that?

 

DM: Because it makes me feel better; I remember now.

 

Ego: Don’t do it, DM!!  It’ll strike you dead; I’m telling you! Don’t go there, I’m warning you, you’ll be sorry, I’m just trying to save your butt, I’m just trying…Can you hear me?

 

DM:

Ken Wapnick: Don’t play in the sandbox

 

Sitting in my office this morning pondering an ongoing conflict here in  dreamland and asking for guidance from our right mind, wise words spoken in this article I wrote based on an interview with Ken Wapnick emerged like the answer to a question posed to one of those Magic 8 balls:

 “Don’t play in the sandbox. You don’t attack it, you don’t judge it, but you don’t play in it.”

 These words reminded me that the projected ego thought system will continue to do and say what the ego thought system does and says with or without my participation or attention. Despite my attraction to its drama, it has only brought me pain. But when I turn away and ask for help I can once more hear the Holy Spirit’s message that “nothing real can be threatened.” Our one mind’s invulnerability prevails forever despite the brutal antics on the playground.

 I hope you find Ken Wapnick’s wisdom as comforting as I have.

 

Ken Wapnick: Don’t play in the sandbox

Growing up in Brooklyn, NY, and turned off by organized religion and the messages of his family’s Jewish faith, Ken Wapnick nonetheless suspected something beyond a world of bodies. “I grew up in a family with a lot of sickness and it became very clear to me that sickness had nothing to do with the body; that it happens in the mind.”

His exposure to classical music as a teenager confirmed his suspicions. “That was my opening and then my window,” he says. “It allowed me to know that there was something more than you could see, than you could study, than you could understand. It was my entrée to spirituality.”

His interest piqued, Ken studied various spiritual teachings while earning a PhD in psychology and went on to become chief clinical psychologist at a mental hospital, all the while fielding an increasing pull toward a monastic life. After deciding to enter a monastery and converting to Catholicism, he met Course Scribe Helen Schucman and Collaborator Bill Thetford, who exposed him to Helen’s book and altered his life’s direction.

“I recognized that Helen and Bill were my family and I belonged with them and the Course,” he says. “I knew the monastery, though I was very happy there, was not going to be my home. When I started reading the Course it became very clear that this was a perfect integration of spirituality and psychology. I could feel as close to God as I had in the monastery and still retain my psychology in terms of the work I would do. The Course gave me a way of being in the world but still not being of it.”

Ken, Helen, and Bill became fast friends. With Jesus’ guidance, Ken worked closely with Helen in preparing the final manuscript of A Course In Miracles. Ken has written extensively on the Course and taught its message for 30 years. He and his wife Gloria established The Center for A Course In Miracles on the East Coast and later relocated their burgeoning teaching institution to Temecula, California.

“It started as an organization to support my teaching,” says Ken. “I never saw myself heading a large organization, teaching to large groups, doing all the writing I’ve done, or anything formal. That just naturally evolved. At this point I’d be hard pressed to say what a teacher of the Course is. It’s so amorphous and idiosyncratic and between the person and the Holy Spirit. The Course says what establishes someone as a teacher is they don’t see someone’s interests as separate from theirs. So it has nothing to do with anything in form or on a formal level. The idea of giving certificates for example would be anathema.”

His message has never deviated from the Course’s purpose: to heal individual minds. “It is a spiritual path for individual people,” he says. “Problems come in when people try to make it something more than that and want to do something with it rather than use it to help them live their own lives fully. It’s a way to help people get in touch with their own inner voice and follow it to become as kind, loving, and forgiving as they can be. If people did that and worked on themselves the world would be a much different place and the Course would have fulfilled its purpose.”

Ken believes ACIM students become confused when they fail to accept the Course’s foundation. “When the Course says the world is an illusion it means that literally,” he says. “The implications elude people simply because they don’t recognize how profoundly identified with the body we are. We see the Course through the lens of our body and we think Jesus is a body talking to me as a body telling me I should forgive you as a body. It has nothing to do with that since there is no body; it is all done in the mind. It’s the misunderstanding of the mind and the body, which in Chapter 2 is called Level Confusion.  All misunderstandings—the role of the Holy Spirit, the purpose of the Course, hearing guidance, hearing a voice—stem from not understanding that there literally is no body, no world. Once you understand that, everything falls nicely into place.”

The Course asks us to turn our illusions over to the Holy Spirit, another bit of advice Course students often misunderstand. “The purpose of the Holy Spirit is simply to be the correction of our mistake. And the mistake has nothing to do with behavior. Use that loving presence in your mind to look at your decisions for the ego and see where those decisions take you. My problem is not with you; I made the wrong choice. There is only one special relationship and that’s with the ego; there is only one holy relationship, and that’s with Jesus or the Holy Spirit. Once that relationship is healed all your other relationships become holy.”

Looking with the Holy Spirit’s eyes also means directly confronting the guilt our ego thought system would have us deny. Ken’s word for students who refuse to acknowledge that guilt? Blissninnies.

“A blissninny doesn’t want to look at guilt or what the world is really like,” he says. “A person will say, oh, the Course is changing my life, it’s going to change the world without really looking at the guilt the Course is trying to undo. A blissninny does not have a proper understanding or respect for the ego in terms of how ugly it can be and how attracted to it we are. If you don’t look at guilt, everything you do with this Course is going to be guided by that decision and you will totally misunderstand what the Course is saying.”

As for why the ego so often rears its ugly head in Course circles, Ken waxes philosophical. “You should have been around thirty years ago,” he quips. “People don’t want to look at their own guilt; it’s easier to project it out. It’s like children in a sandbox. It’s been like that for thirty years with the Course and two thousand years with Christianity and its in Judaism, it’s in Islam, it’s in every formal religion. That’s why it’s so much better not to see the Course as a religion, a movement, or anything like that. It’s just a spiritual teaching to heal your mind. If people used it like that you wouldn’t have groups fighting with groups and if you had a group you wouldn’t take it seriously, you’d just be a group of people hanging around together like family or friends. It wouldn’t be taken as a thing with an expectation.

“Once you start to make something formal you get into churches and we all know what churches do,” he concludes. “Don’t play in the sandbox. You don’t attack it, you don’t judge it, but you don’t play in it. That’s the answer, I think.”

 Kenneth Wapnick, PhD, a clinical psychologist, has been working with A Course in Miracles since 1973, and worked closely with Course Scribe Helen Schucman in preparing its final manuscript. He is president and co-founder of The Foundation for A Course in Miracles in Temecula, California. This article first appeared in the Spring 2007 issue of the Rocky Mountain Miracle Center Miracle Messenger, a newsletter I wrote and edited for several years.

 

 

Let me recognize my problems have been solved

“Don’t take life too seriously. You’ll never get out alive!”
-Bugs Bunny

 

 

The persona I keep forgetting I am not is such a drama queen. My father used to call her Sarah Bernhardt after the silent film melodrama star. My junior high friends called her Crusader Rabbit after the vintage cartoon character and sometimes, Susan of Arc for her impassioned pleas on behalf of truth, justice, and the American way. Fortunately I have no idea what choice terms her enemies came up with.

 

The thing is; I have always taken everything so freaking personally. We all do, of course, it is the ego’s way, but throughout my time on this planet I have perfected the art of suffering on behalf of myself and others to the level of fine art. (How “special” is that? ) I am a shining star in a galaxy of glowing orbs that have laid their hearts on the line for love and goodness temporarily believing their darkness effectively eclipsed. But I am so tired of the whole celestial lie.

 

Let me recognize my problems have been solved.

 

The persona I keep forgetting I am not awoke this morning overcome with the problem of its secret, enduring unworthiness, unloved and unloving, fluttering its empty sleeves as in a Wallace Stevens poem I have long admired. But the decision maker in my mind that almost always now watches these bodily theatrics did not choose to indulge it. It remembered it wanted the peace of God, a goal it has identified only after years of mindlessly choosing its opposite, and, with the Course’s help, finally learning it had another choice and a mind outside the dream capable of choosing. And so it cried out for help. And the Holy Spirit answered. “Let me recognize my problems have been solved,” it (metaphorically) said, quoting workbook lesson 80. Reminding me again that there is always only one problem: our belief that we have separated from our source. And always only one solution: recognizing the preposterous nature of this belief with our inner teacher.

 

Later, after seeing my daughter and husband off I sat down at my desk and took a moment to once more connect with that light in my real mind and ask again for guidance. Then I randomly opened A Course in Miracles as I often do and read these words:

 

“Let me recognize my problems have been solved.” I am not making this up; there it was again. One problem, one solution. The separation from the one love we are the ego would have us believe we pulled off never happened! In the instant the thought of running away from home arose in the one mind it was immediately corrected. You cannot fragment whole love, this seemingly endless dream in which we find ourselves notwithstanding. None of it is real and the problem is already solved. We can continue to wage our ultimately defeating cartoon battles or we can open our eyes. And so, I decided to suspend my disbelief long enough to embrace this possibility. Because while the pull of the tear-jerker movie of Susan is strong, let’s face it; I know only too well how it ends. Besides, the decision maker’s growing commitment to realize the peace of God in an eternal identity beyond Susan is stronger. 

 

“You are entitled to peace today,” I read. “A problem that has been resolved cannot trouble you. Only be certain you do not forget that all problems are the same. Their many forms will not deceive you when you remember this.”

 

Despite my problems’ many masks their nature never deviates. The underlying content of guilt over a separation that never happened remains the same. If I am feeling anything other than peace of mind I have chosen to believe the ego’s lie of competing interests in which someone always wins and someone always loses, just as it believes it triumphed at our creator’s expense. Recognizing the one problem and allowing the one solution completely simplifies, orders, and brings meaning to an otherwise meaningless, chaotic existence.

 

“Yeah, right,” the ego (metaphorically) said, emerging onto the screen of my perception seemingly out of left field, rolling its eyes like Bugs Bunny in the old aptly named Looney Tunes. A long, largely one-sided argument about the maddening characteristics of a particular individual currently making things exceptionally difficult for the persona I still at times believe I am and the personas I still at times believe my loves ones are ensued. But I am finally learning that arguing with the ego is no more productive or sane than conversing with animated rabbits. And I am learning that I cannot find the peace of God if I forgive everyone and everything else in my current dream except this particular individual, however tempted I am to make an exception based on his over-the-top, apparently unwarranted behavior.

 

The Course is not asking us to excuse or deny bad behavior. But it is asking us to recognize the reflection of the over-the-top, apparently unwarranted idea of separation when it arises in the classroom of our lives. It is asking us to recognize there is only one ego/wrong mind and only one Holy Spirit/right mind on the level of truth. My attempt to exclude this seemingly more difficult person or situation from the one love available when I choose my right mind prevents me from experiencing that love. I am merely reenacting the original decision to exclude God that got me into this illusory mess of a world to begin with.  And it hurts.

 

Salvation lies outside the dream. So does the truth of what I am. So does the truth of this particular, irrational, at times even frightening personality. I am finally learning that I cannot awaken if I draw a line in the sand between myself and anyone else. I must recognize the fear and hatred emanating from this seeming nemesis as my own, remember what I really want, and choose again. With the Holy Spirit’s help I learn to look past the content of his behavior in this illusion we seem to be navigating to the one love we share. If I deny its presence in him, I deny it in myself and continue to feel secretly unworthy, unloved and unloving, despite the crusading mask I present to the world. In that moment of recognition of the one self I am I remember and receive the endless comfort of true love. I am relieved of the backbreaking burden of my personal resentment, undoing a little more unconscious guilt in the process. My grip on the ego thought system loosens. And I recognize, and, at least for a while believe, that my problems have been solved.

 

Now I am able to take whatever steps may be needed on the level of form to address the behavior while simultaneously recognizing with our inner teacher that the ego’s vicious attacks can, in truth, threaten nothing real. And that nothing the ego has seemed to pull off can ever truly alter the everlasting innocence we all share.