On Course

Wean Yourself by Rumi

noreply@blogger.com (Aileen) — Sat, 18 Jun 2011 20:38:00 +0000

Little by little, wean yourself.
 This is the gist of what I have to say.
From an embryo, whose nourishment comes in the blood,
 move to an infant drinking milk, 
to a child on solid food,
 to a searcher after wisdom,
 to a hunter of more invisible game.
Think how it is to have a conversation with an embryo. 
You might say, "The world outside is vast and intricate. 
There are wheatfields and mountain passes, 
and orchards in bloom.
At night there are millions of galaxies,
and in sunlight the beauty of friends dancing at a wedding."

You ask the embryo why he, or she,
stays cooped up  in the dark with eyes closed.
Listen to the answer.
  There is no "other world." 
I only know what I've experienced. 
You must be hallucinating. 

I just found this poem by Rumi that I'd never read before. What comes to mind when you read it? To me, it's about not getting stuck in my beliefs and continuing to allow the mind to stay open.
It reminds me of Plato's Allegory of the Cave. As long as we believe the shadows on the wall are real, we can't conceive of the beings that project them. This poem reminds me to notice when I'm stuck believing that something is "it." Notice how the belief that I know something keeps me from knowing beyond it.

The Guest House, by Rumi

noreply@blogger.com (Aileen) — Sat, 29 Jan 2011 15:12:00 +0000

This insightful poem by Rumi talks about accepting our thoughts as they come. I've been increasingly aware of how important it is to fully accept myself as I appear in the moment: happy, sad, depressed, guilty, ecstatic, amused, nice, angry, loving; all states met without resistance. By meeting our thoughts with laughter, understanding and acceptance we begin to love all of ourselves as we are; not just the part we like. Then we are free to be ourselves; to drop the facade that we put on for others. By not resisting unpleasant thoughts we become free from fear and we begin to see that each one is the key to our freedom.

The Guest House

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they're a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

~ Rumi ~

(The Essential Rumi, versions by Coleman Barks)

Perception lies

noreply@blogger.com (Aileen) — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 19:06:00 +0000

I used to pride myself on my understanding of the metaphysics of the Course, which I got from years of listening to Ken Wapnick. Now I'm realizing that the experience has to come first and the intellectual understanding follows; not the other way around. Many concepts that I took for granted before, are losing their meaning. For example, I used to write that the Holy Spirit is the "memory of God within our mind." That was helpful to me because I couldn't see the Holy Spirit as separate from my own mind. But now as I think of "Holy Spirit" I don't really know what that is beyond a name that we use to symbolize healed perception.

My experience is that there is only me. There is nothing external. It was me identified with the ego before and now it's still me, but a lot less identified with the ego. That force within me that used to oppose has somehow been replaced by this other force that accepts. Attachment to outcome is replaced with awe of how perfect things are as they are. A desire to control, replaced with no desire to control or manipulate and trust that life goes on with or without my control and without it, it's a lot happier. Concern with the body, replaced with little concern with the body. Attachment to rules replaced with freedom from rules. This shift is internal. I act the same; I speak the same; only the purpose behind what I do is different.

I'm not equally clear every moment and I'm not sure why or how that works. I still notice ego reactions come and go. They are few and far between and as they are looked at in real time, they seem to lose their power quickly. The underworld of negativity that used to surface once in a while does not seem to be there now. There is more space in my mind so I can see the ego clearly and a gentle forgiving attitude accepts my state of mind as it is in the moment and offers no resistance to it.

I've been more aware of how our experience lies. For example, my experience is that I feel guided all the time. I seem to know exactly what I'm doing in the moment. All I have to do when an invitation to do something comes (an external invitation or my own thought that invites me to do something) is ask myself: "is this what I'm doing?" And I actually "feel" at that moment if this is an "honest" action for me, or not. An honest action is an action that requires no sacrifice. It's action that is consistent with the love that flows freely when the ego is not there; it's actually and simply, what I want to do at that specific moment. A dishonest action is an action that I would do with the ego's motives of seeking love, giving to get, manipulating or impressing others, etc. This "guidance" that I could swear comes from some higher power, is an illusion. A part of me knows there is no one out there to guide me, yet somehow; my experience is that I "feel" guided.

I was over at FACIM over the weekend and Ken (Dr. Kenneth Wapnick) said something that resonated with me. He said, as I've heard him say many times, that "the Holy Spirit does not send you messages…." (Basically, the HS does not tell you what to do; it doesn't guide you. How could it? It would have to first validate you as a separate self if it did.) Those messages that we experience, (or in my case the feeling that I am guided) "…….are just a metaphor for acceptance of what is." When we are in harmony with what is, everything "seems" perfectly orchestrated as if a higher power had its hand in it. The reality is that it's our perception that determines our experience of the world. When we perceive without judgment, the world appears to be perfect and we can't see a problem with anything. But even healed perception is an illusion. It's just a stepping-stone.

Lesson 169 says that "Grace is acceptance of the Love of God within a world of seeming hate and fear. By grace alone the hate and fear are gone, for grace presents a state so opposite to everything the world contains, that those whose minds are lighted by the gift of grace can not believe the world of fear is real. (W-169 italics and bold mine)

As we look at the world with total acceptance, we come to see that every situation is perfect because it's for us. The right minded way of looking at the world is that it's for our use. Its only purpose is to help us become aware of our true nature. We can use every situation to lead ourselves out of suffering or root us further into it. So divorce, disease, war, loss, death, don't happen to us; but for us. We also understand that for others so when things happen to our loved ones, we see them as opportunities and not catastrophes. By looking at the world with a clear mind, we empower everyone we come in contact with to make the choice for peace for themselves. By our own acceptance of what is, we let others know that they also can choose to rise above suffering.

W-135:18-1 reminds us of this, "What could you not accept, if you knew that everything that happens, all events, past, present and to come are gently planned by One Whose only purpose is your good?" And that One is you!

Resistance and Listening to One Voice

noreply@blogger.com (Aileen) — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 14:36:00 +0000

Since I came back from the School for the Work, I haven't experienced resistance. Resistance is that heavy feeling I used to feel when what I was doing did not match what I thought I should be doing. I felt resistance often. If I had chores to do or a project to complete, I thought about them often during the day and I felt badly because I wasn't doing them when I thought I should. Some things I never did at all and the thought that I should have weighed me down.

For the last three weeks, my days have been flowing effortlessly. I wake up in the morning and wait. I may have a thought about what I will be doing during the day. There may even be a plan or a schedule; but plans, schedules, and ideas are just images that pop into my mind. My mind now understands that they are not real. I don't expect anything to happen until I'm actually doing it.

I notice I'm getting up. I stand and start walking. I follow my body to where it is going. If it's morning a thought may say "you're going to brush your teeth," and it seems likely that that is what I'm going to do, but I don't know for sure until my hand picks up the tooth brush and I'm brushing my teeth. I hear plans: "You should go to the grocery store," or "you should go to your yoga class." To these ideas my mind automatically responds: "that's a nice story…," because I know that ideas about what I should be doing are just that; ideas. I only know they are true when I'm pushing the cart into the supermarket or I'm laying down my yoga mat on the floor. My mind is in a perpetual state of not knowing.

There is a force within me that guides every move I make from the moment I wake up until I go to bed at night. I'm being lived. My only job is to trust that everything will happen as it should without my control. That trust increases daily as I witness how everything is taken care of perfectly and at exactly the right time.

I have somehow surrendered what I used to think was my own will and I'm living in harmony with the script as it comes. It's like watching a movie in which I'm temporarily identified with one of the characters. I'm looking at the script from a particular point of view, but I have no choice as to what will happen in the movie. The scrip with all its possible variations has already been written. The movie has been filmed. I'm just a spectator. The idea that I could have ever believed that I wrote my own script as I went along seems crazy now. I'm pretty sure that most of my suffering came from that one belief.

Experiencing no resistance means that whatever I'm doing is what I want to do. There are no "shoulds" or "shouldn'ts" and no wishes or regrets. Occasionally, there is a thought that opposes what I'm doing, or a judgment thought that creeps in, but it has so little glue that it doesn't stick. These thoughts remind me of how painful life use to be when I believed in them. For these thoughts, I carry a notebook where I write down the thought as it happens and later inquire into its reality using the The Work or, I simply watch the thought as it passes through my mind with a smile on my face as I've been doing for years through my practice of A Course in Miracles.

Thoughts and stories are beautiful! They keep me company. I thank them as they pass for keeping me entertained, but it is clear that they are just stories. I sometimes daydream about how much I might actually get accomplished in this life now that there is no resistance. But then I laugh because I have no idea what it is that I will accomplish. How can I know what I will be doing in ten years when I don't know what I will do in the next five minutes? I laugh because so far this unending source of energy has kept me organizing closets and letting go of bags and bags of stuff I don't seem to need anymore. I wouldn't trade my daily work in the house for anything. I'm having the time of my life. One day I re-potted all my house plants and planted a vegetable garden. I get excited about cooking new things and mixing foods I never knew could be mixed. I enjoy every minute I get to spend with my children. I don't seem to get tired. I yawn and lie down at times, but I haven't yet felt that feeling I used to get when I couldn't wait another minute to take a nap or to go to bed at night.

As I look back at my life prior to this shift, I see that I always did exactly what I was supposed to do in the exact moment I should be doing it. The anxiety I frequently felt was caused by my mind being at odds with what I was doing. My mind had its own ideas of what was right or wrong. It offered constant commentary on everything. If I was tired and slept in, my mind threw a fit because it thought I should be getting up and being more 'productive.' If my back hurt, it was upset because it thought it shouldn't hurt. If I ate too much, it felt guilty because it thought I shouldn't be eating so much. If I was depressed, it thought I should snap out of it.

What happened in my life was my path and though at the time I didn't always realize it, I followed it perfectly. Even what seemed like setbacks to my judging mind; was all necessary and part of a perfectly crafted curriculum. Every problem, every upset, every shred of anxiety and all the resistance I felt were gifts. They reminded me to forgive. Without them I couldn't be where I am.

My only function is and has always been to be in harmony with what is. As long as we argue with reality, we will experience resistance. If we fight resistance we reinforce the false suffering self in us. When we plow through resistance what we are saying is that we know better. And as long as we think we know better, we can't hear the true voice of our integrity.

This does not mean we don't take action; it simply means we don't get invested mentally in avoiding what is. Our purpose is to find joy in whatever it is that we are doing. Sometimes that is not available. The practice that led me to the shift I experienced was that of looking at resistance without judgment. That is forgiveness. It's forgiving yourself for reacting to your thoughts. It's forgiving yourself for making what is illusory, real.

A new beginning

noreply@blogger.com (Aileen) — Sat, 03 Apr 2010 15:45:00 +0000

Long before I found A Course in Miracles, I followed Howard Roark. From the moment I imagined him at the edge of a cliff about to jump, I fell in love with him. I was in my early twenties, and no character in literature has made more of an impact in my life than him. Here's a guy who has just been kicked out of the most prestigious school of architecture for refusing to draw buildings using design guidelines from the past, and yet he is serene, focused and unaffected. He doesn't think about what the future will be like for him without a title. Instead, he goes for a swim. He gets butt naked, climbs up to a cliff and jumps into the lake.

One of Ayn Rand's purposes in writing her novel "The Fountainhead" was to portray the "ideal" man. Howard Roark is the ideal man. He is a man who consistently acts, speaks and designs for himself. He never gives to get or acts to impress. When he speaks, he says what he wants to say. Words for him are tools for communication; not manipulation. He acts consistently with what he wants and needs for himself. Ayn Rand calls him "selfish," and in her world that is the ultimate compliment.

Yet Howard Roark is one of the kindest men in literature. Because he doesn't need anything from anyone, he also expects nothing. When he helps, he demands no gratitude because he helps for his own sake. His integrity can never be sacrificed. As a result, he offers the highest form of help possible, which in Ayn Rand's words is to recognize other's "own independent value."

Howard Roark cannot be hurt by people or circumstances because he gives them no power to make him happy. His happiness comes only from his personal achievement; from doing what he is born to do. The first line in the novel is: "Howard Roark laughed…….He laughed at the thing which had happened to him that morning and at the things which now lay ahead." From that point on until the end of the 727 page novel, he keeps on laughing and smiling as he faces adversity because no matter what happens to him – and a lot does – he is free.

After his swim in the lake Roark goes into the world to practice architecture. In early twentieth century New York City he is way ahead of his time. He is labeled a "modernist" and throughout the novel he is abused and condemned by a society that is not ready for him. Yet, no matter how difficult the situation gets for him – several times in the novel he loses everything - he cannot suffer because his core belief is that nothing can hurt him. He knows that his body might be hurt or inconvenienced; he may become poor or even be thrown in prison; but he understands that a man can only hurt himself by giving power to the world to hurt him.

At one point in the novel he says to his friend Steven Mallory: "I don't think a man can hurt another, not in any important way. Neither hurt him or help him. I really have nothing to forgive…." Roark understands that he can't forgive another man because a man can't hurt him in the first place. How can he forgive someone for something he didn't do?

Over the last eighteen years, I have struggled to reconcile my love of Howard Roark with my practice of A Course in Miracles. I understood partially and only for brief moments what one had to do with the other. Last week I had a revelation which took me back to Howard Roark. I awoke to the realization that there is nobody out there to do things for. There is only one and that one is me. For the first time in my life I felt deep love for myself and as a result, for everything I see. I experienced this will rise within me that allowed me only to speak and move for myself.

This force that directed my actions made it impossible for me to do anything with the ego's motive which is to seek love, approval or attention from others. For two days I couldn't speak, move or even smile for other people's sake. Speaking or moving outside of this new found integrity felt like deep betrayal and I wouldn't dare betray it for the sake of others. Following this Will that guided my words and actions, I understood, was the end of suffering.

When this happened I was in a program called "The School for the Work," by Byron Katie. People noticed me and interpreted what they saw as a sign of grief. They were kind to me and offered me food, water and comfort. They tried to hug me. They asked me questions. They smiled at me. But I couldn't answer to please them, or to make them feel better. I could only move for myself, speak for myself even write for myself. Those first few hours after my mind cracked open, I was so moved by the freedom I felt, that I cried. I felt drunk with Joy that came from feeling complete. If I had a fear, it was only that somehow, I would choose to go back to doing things for others.

Little by little over the past week I've learned how to act normally again. I look the same and sound the same; the only difference is in purpose. My words and actions are honest because their purpose is not to manipulate. The blessing to others is that if I am with them, I am fully present and not calculating consciously or unconsciously what I might get in return. I'm no longer seeking approval. I have become Howard Roark.

I understand now what Ken Wapnick meant when he said that ultimately you realize that the Holy Spirit is you. When your mind lets go of its identification with the ego you become what you are in reality. Without the ego, you are that mind, which A Course in Miracles calls the Holy Spirit, which knows its true nature. Everything you do with this mind is honest because it does not need anything. This means you no longer reinforce the ego with its dream of separation in yourself or others. The "Secret Vows" which the Course talks about are off. Without the ego's motives, your purpose is only to extend love. And with love you can only be truly helpful.

Dreams and the practice of A Course in Miracles

noreply@blogger.com (Aileen) — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 02:42:00 +0000

A few nights ago I had a dream that upset me. I was in Buenos Aires, in one of the nicest avenues, except that in the dream it was grotesquely fancy. The street was lined with designer store fronts that were gilded with gold leaf and the side walk was tiled with white Carrara marble. It was crowded with shoppers carrying Christmas bags. I had just parked my car and I walked carefully carrying two stacked trays of ham and cheese croissant sandwiches and a fruit platter on top. I was taking the food to a meeting at the goodwill offices which were right up the street.

A woman accidentally swung a shopping bag over my trays and they fell to the ground. The croissants and fruit scattered all over. Within seconds, a half a dozen orphan children dressed in rags were diving for the sandwiches and the grapes which still rolled every which way on the crowded sidewalk.

I went up to a little boy of about six who was collecting green grapes in between the people's feet. I helped him pick up a few that had landed under a mail box. I said, "Sweetie, can you wash them before you eat them?" He looked at me with his big sad brown eyes; his face smeared with dirt, and nodded, then kept reaching for more. As I looked up, the shoppers wearing nice clothes and carrying bags with expensive gifts, walked by as if the children did not exist. Some walked around them; others pushed them to the side avoiding eye-contact. Nobody wanted to notice the children. It was as if the integrity of their perfect lives could be preserved ONLY if they didn't look.

When I woke up my eyes were wet. I had a feeling of helplessness that stayed with me even though the dream was over. My instinct was to move away from the pain, just like the shoppers in the dream, but I stayed with it for a few minutes and as soon as I became fully awake the pain left me, instantly.

It is tempting to believe that the circumstances within a dream can have an effect on us. Dreams can be convincingly real and while we sleep, they seem to be the cause of our suffering. For a while, I really believed I was sad because I felt sorry for the orphan children. But once I woke up I realized that in reality, there is no posh street with stores gilded in gold leaf; there are no croissant sandwiches, no indifferent shoppers and no orphan children. Even the character with which I identified in the dream, while she looked like me, in reality, does not exist. The real source of my pain is that I forgot I was dreaming and I got emotionally involved in a non-existent situation.

In the same way, what causes us to suffer in our lives is not what happens to us, but that we believe we are someone we are not. We believe we are separated selves living in the world apart from our Source. In Lesson 5 in the workbook we practice repeating that: "I am never upset for the reason I think." I think I'm upset because some circumstance made me upset, but the real reason I'm upset is that I believe I'm a character in a dream subject to the conditions of the dream.

The practice of A Course in Miracles is about remembering that we are the dreamer and not the character in the dream. Only the dreamer who caused the dream can choose to awaken. The goal of our practice is to get back to the mind of the dreamer because only he can choose to be whole again. But day in and day out instead of learning that we are the cause of the dream and not the victim of it, we give the world power over us by making it the cause of our pain and suffering. Every time we suffer, we demonstrate that the world must be real because it had the power to cause us pain. Only what is real can cause an effect.

The daily practice that can help us decrease our identification with the character in the dream is quite simple. Whenever something upsets us, we stop and look at it. We don't run away from the anxiety or the pain. If we do, we give the dream power and a reality it doesn't have. We first recognize that if we are upset, it must be because we are looking at the problem from the perspective of the character of the dream. The character of the dream believes the world is real and can have an effect on her. The character in the dream is identified with a vulnerable body she thinks she needs to protect. It's pretty scary being a character in a dream and believing the world can strike at any moment. So we look again, but this time instead of looking at the problem from the point of view of the character of the dream, we look at it with the part of our mind that knows our real identity. The Holy Spirit, which is the memory of God within our mind constantly reminds us that we "are at home in God, dreaming of exile but perfectly capable of awakening to reality." (T-10.I.2:1) And while the situation that upset us may not change, the anxiety and pain associated with it will fade because we will, at least temporarily, become aware that we are dreaming and that dreams can have no effect on our true identity.

It's very easy to become invested in the situations of our lives and to believe that by changing the circumstances we can have peace. This is nothing more than a trap. If I knew that waking up would instantly heal all suffering, why would I try to ease the pain by focusing on changing the circumstances? Had I been lucid in my dream of a couple of nights ago, I could have given every orphan child a loving adoptive parent. I could have clothed them and showered them with beautiful Christmas gifts. That would have made the dream much happier. I might have found a temporary feeling of peace and wellbeing like we have in our lives when we get what we want, but that peace is not the perfect peace of God which can only be experienced by knowing who we are in reality.

The practice of ACIM is not concerned with making the dream more pleasant. If the world is an illusion created by the ego to keep us mindless, why would we invest in changing it? As we obsess over global warming, war, poverty and we fear that we might catch the next flu virus, the ego is fulfilling its purpose of keeping us identified with the character in the dream. The Course doesn't tell us what we should or should not do. When we are called to help others, or if we want to champion a cause that we believe in, we should do it, but without joining in the suffering. We can use any activity we choose within the world for the purpose of overcoming the dream. All professions, causes and activities are equally suitable for that purpose.

What we don't want to do is focus on changing the circumstances because as long as we do, our investment will be on keeping the dream real rather than on waking from it. What we are here to demonstrate is that the dream can have no effect on the peace of God in our mind. Whenever I feel stress or anxiety, I look at my investment in the dream which shows up as attachment to outcome. Do I 'need' for a situation to be resolved in a certain way for me to experience peace? Whenever I notice a need, I can be sure I am looking at the situation from the perspective of the character in the dream whose happiness depends on the circumstances of the dream.

Once we make the shift from identifying with the character in the dream to looking at the world from the perspective of the mind, everything changes. If someone attacks me, I don't blame her because in the attack I recognize that like me, she is just trying to hold on to her false identity. I begin to realize that we are all the same. We all fear awakening from the dream. We all cling desperately to our false identities because they are all we know.

But the more we practice looking at our guilt and fear, which show up in the world in symbols such as orphan children, suffering victims of natural disasters, war, etc., and we recognize that what we are seeing is just a picture of the fear in our minds, we begin to awaken to our true identity. Progressively we experience more and more of the peace that is our natural inheritance.

From the section entitled "The Hero of the Dream." T-27.VIII.9: 1-8 In gentle laughter does the Holy Spirit perceive the cause, and looks not to effects. How else could He correct your error, who have overlooked the cause entirely? He bids you bring each terrible effect to Him that you may look together on its foolish cause and laugh with Him a while. [You] judge effects, but [He] has judged their cause. And by His judgment are effects removed. Perhaps you come in tears. But hear Him say, "My brother, holy Son of God, behold your idle dream, in which this could occur." And you will leave the holy instant with your laughter and your brother's joined with His.

Notes from Ken Wapnick’s S-11 Workshop “Anger is a game children play” November 8, 2009

noreply@blogger.com (Aileen) — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 03:38:00 +0000

I attended this workshop a few weeks ago at the Foundation for A Course in Miracles in Temecula, California. What I transcribed is only less than half of the first hour and a half. It was incredibly difficult to condense this workshop and I apologize in advance because the only way to really do it justice would be to print the whole thing. I hope you will visit http://facim.org/ where you will find a huge amount of material compiled from Ken's writings and lectures.

The title is taken from the latter part of the text. The ego is a game that children's play. At the end of the section "What is sin?" in Part II of the Workbook, Jesus says, "Shall we not put away these sharp-edged children's toys?" (W-P-II.4.5:1,2) . It's very helpful to see that the ego-thought system is a game and the defenses that the ego employs are simply toys. Sin, guilt, attack, pain… are all aspects of special relationships.

What has kept the ego going for billions of years is that we take it seriously. The text says that, "Into eternity, where all is one, there crept a tiny, mad idea, at which the Son of God remembered not to laugh." (T-27.VIII.6:2) We all remembered not to laugh at the tiny mad idea that we are separate from our Creator and our Source. We took it seriously. The seriousness with which we took it led to "its accomplishment and real effects." The accomplishment is that the ego thought system actually happened, the separation from God is now a fact, and we are separated from our Source and what seemed to be the real effects, is this world. The whole universe, the entire Cosmos is the effect, not of the tiny mad idea of being separate, but taking the tiny mad idea seriously.

By using the symbols of the toys and the metaphor that all these are games that we play, what Jesus is trying to do, is have us not take the ego thought system seriously. We take our body seriously; we take the body of our loved ones seriously. Within the dream bodies should be taken seriously, pain is not a laughing matter within the dream, but outside the dream it's a silly game, a toy.

Our experience is like that of children playing in a sandbox. The problem is that you are playing with all the little kiddies and you're throwing sand at each other's faces. All you have to do is stand up and the sand will never reach your eyes. The problem is not what the little kids are doing; the problem is you think you're one of them. All you have to do is stand up. That is the key to being defenseless which is the key to forgiveness. You can't be forgiving if you feel you've been attacked. You can only be defenseless when you realize no one is doing anything to you.

What we are asked to do in this Course is stand up in the sandbox with Jesus so we can be spiritual adults.

What does it mean when we get angry? Why is anger a children's toy? Anger says I've been hurt by the sand thrown in my face. So now I'm justified in getting angry. Anger is a way of pointing an accusing finger that says that you deserve to be punished for what you've done to me. Jesus tells us in the text that "Anger is never justified. " He doesn't say not to be angry. You can't be in a body without getting angry. He tells us that the reason there is sand in your face is because you stooped down to play with the kiddies. You forgot this is a game children play.

There is always a reason why we stoop down and play with the children in our lives. We do it so we can blame our misfortune of them. Anger is a lethal game as long as you think you're in the sandbox. It's a silly game if you stand up and realize you're not part of it.

Using the language of the course, standing up in the sandbox, means I'm above the battleground with Jesus, realizing I'm a mind and not a body. Playing in the sandbox is identifying with the body, living in the world as if there were a world, as if my survival depended on what my body does and not accepting responsibility for crawling around the sandbox. The problem is not what these children did to me, but what I did to me. Nobody dragged me down into the sandbox. I willingly went down. The Course helps us recognize why we go down; why we choose to play.

We don't want to be told that our lives are not important and that God and Jesus don't know about us. We want them to be a personal physical psychological self that we call by name that is real and therefore is serious. We don't want to be told that Jesus is only a thought in the mind that represents a thought that we are. We don't want to be thoughts, we want to be bodies. And we want the body to be taken very seriously. That is why we made bodies, with an elaborate sensory system. We made them with pain receptors, not only physical but psychological. Pain screeches: the body is real, my ego is real and I should be taken very seriously.

We all know to bodies pain is very serious, but that doesn't make it real. It makes it seemingly real within the dream. We forget that the purpose of this Course, is to lead us along so we one day awaken from the dream; not to live more happily, not to live pain-free as bodies within the dream. That will get you nowhere. It will get you somewhere, but within the dream, it won't get you out of the dream. The ultimate purpose of this course is to lead you outside the dream.

When we are asleep at night and we dream, we think the characters in the dream are real people and we respond to them as if they were real people. When we awaken, we recognize that the dream figures are symbols; they are representations of thoughts. They are not real. Nothing happened in my bedroom last night when I was dreaming. It's a dream; a dream that we take very seriously.

We take everything very seriously. We let it get to us, we let it affect us, disturb us. We let it make us happy, give us pleasure, bring us pain. We are always running back to Jesus saying "look, this world is not an illusion. Look at the pain, the suffering, look what's going on in the world. Look at the torture, the war, and the natural occurrences that wreck such havoc in people's lives. Don't tell me this world is an illusion." We are all doing that. Every time we take any aspect of our life or anyone else's life seriously.

A line in CH 27, discusses the way out of suffering: "All that is needed is you look upon the problem as it is, and not the way that you have set it up." (T-27.VII.2:2) You don't have to change anything. You don't have to judge what you do; just look at it. Look at the seriousness with which we approach our lives and other people's lives.

What if you recognized this world is an hallucination? What if you really understood you made it up? The you, is not the person sitting in this room. The you, is the decision making mind, the dreamer, the author of your script. If you knew this world was an hallucination, would you take it seriously? How could you take it seriously unless you were psychotic?

Jesus' problem is that he is dealing with psychotic boys and girls who do not want to set free their hallucinations. That's why we ask him to fix things for us. We ask him to fix our broken relationships, our cars, our jobs. We tell him there is a problem in the Middle East. Fix it for us! We ask him to join in our psychotic delusion.

We believe there is a world that has to be saved; a body that has to be healed and we miss the whole point of this Course. What if we recognized this world as an hallucination? That is the question we should ask ourselves all the time. When you look in your bathroom mirror you are looking at an hallucination; a projection of the delusional thought that says that the tiny mad idea not only happened, but is a serious event.

This Course is not asking you to deny your experience in this world: physical or psychological. But it is asking you not to take it seriously. Hallucinations disappear when they are recognized for what they are. This is the healing and the remedy; recognize them for what they are. Look at the problem as it is and not as you set it up. The problem is not what your eyes see; not what you experience, but that you believe in it. It's your belief that's the problem.

The problem is not what the kiddies do with the sand they are throwing at you, but that you believe there is something is going on and you stoop down to play in it. The problem is not the ego thought system, or the tiny mad idea of being separate from God. The problem is not the whole Universe that arose from that tiny mad idea. The problem is we believe it. They are hallucinations that are the projections of a delusional thought system that says the tiny mad idea is real and serious and I am the effect of that reality and that seriousness.

I believe that as long as I can persuade God, the Holy Spirit or Jesus to join me in my hallucination I'm fine. That is why people love to ask Jesus for help. And we think they are doing a noble, spiritual, wonderful think and what we are doing is perpetuating a thought system that never happened. The real Jesus, as a symbol of the purity of right minded thinking, is the Atonement thought that says nothing happened so nothing has to be done. Just learn to smile at the seriousness with which you approach life.

And all you need to do is recognize that you did this. The you is not the you that is reading this book ; not the person you call yourself. The you, is your decision making mind.

If all this is an hallucination, why would Jesus address an hallucination? Unless he shared in your delusional thinking, in which case, he is of no use to you. The Jesus of the Gospels shares in the delusional thinking that wrote it. Please don't confuse the Jesus of the gospels, or the Jesus of the Christian tradition with the Jesus of this Course. The Jesus of this course is a symbol. It never existed because we never existed.

The Jesus you want to relate to is a living symbol of the love that is in your mind. So when you grow up you realize that there is no Jesus and there is no you. It's the top of the ladder which is a metaphor for the journey. At the top of the ladder there is no individual self. Jesus is a very important and helpful symbol that will help you get to the top of the ladder. But if you keep insisting he's real, and you keep insisting you are real, you'll never make it to the top, which is what the ego wants.

All you need do is recognize that you did this. Once you accept the simple fact and take onto yourself the power you gave away, you are release from it.

Lesson 132 is one of the most important lessons in the Workbook: "I loose the world from all I thought it was." It's in that lesson that we find the line "There is no world! This is the central thought the course attempt to teach." If you truly want to solve the problems of the world; If you truly want to be helpful to the people you love, you must recognize that there is no world. Without these underlying metaphysics, you do not have A Course in Miracles.

If you think Jesus wrote A Course in Miracles, then you don't understand symbols. Our collective right mind wrote this book, but because we think we are individuals, we have a mythology of a person named Helen, a person named Bill, a person named Jesus and the whole story. This doesn't mean that the story is not true in the dream, but it's a dream. We're not ready to understand the reality beyond the dream. So we need symbols. We need the indirect learning that chapter 14 talks about. We need the indirect learning until we are ready for the direct learning which happens at the very end. The direct learning is that there is no world. There is no body, there is no wrong mind; it's all made up. That's the acceptance of the Atonement. The Atonement is the Course's principle that says the separation from God never happened. We need to accept the Atonement for ourselves. That is our purpose in being here, that is saying there is no world that affects me. Before I can truly know that the world is really an hallucination coming from a delusional thought system, I still identify as a body, but now I can identify as a body that knows it can't be hurt by anyone outside.

Yes, my body can be hurt, but I now realize I'm a mind. I'm a dreamer dreaming a dream in which my body is hurt by someone else or something else. Whether it's a microorganism or another human being. Bodies can be hurt; bodies can be killed. Bodies can be tortured, but it's the thought you want to correct. If you really want to help people, you can't help them by being part of the problem that you are trying to help them escape from.

Once you accept the simple fact that we did this, the beginning of Chapter 27 says "The secret to salvation is this, that you are doing this unto yourself," you are released. Even if you are not yet ready to truly accept that you are not even here, you can begin the process of indirect learning of not giving power to what has no power.

Purpose is the single most important theme in this course. Once you understand purpose you understand why you are here and why you react the way you do. "Only two purposes are possible. And one is sin, the other holiness. Nothing is in between, and which you choose determines what you see. For what you see is merely how you elect to meet your goal. " (T-20.VIII.9:1-4)

What is your goal? What is your purpose? If your purpose is to remain within the dream, to remain a special individual, with special talents, special suffering, abilities, special inadequacies, then you adjust everything in your world to meet that goal. And that goal is very serious.

In this Course Jesus is knocking gently in our minds saying: what you are upset about is not there; it's a projection of your guilt of your having chosen the wrong teacher. Of having chosen the ego instead of me. That's all it is. No matter what the form of our distress or problem, his loving presence is the symbol of our healed right mind that is saying that this is not the case. The secret of salvation is this that you doing this unto yourself. All you need to recognize is that you did this. Look at the problem as it is and not the way you set it up.

Play with your children's toys, just don't think they are reality. Don't' think that anything you do that involves your body is a spiritual activity. It's not. The only spiritual activity possible in this world is forgiveness.

Once you accept this simple fact and take unto yourself the power you gave the world; the power you gave a virus, bacteria, a government, a person at work, a person in your family, the weather. Once you take the power back, you are released from all the pain. The pain does not come from anything external. There is nothing external. How could it give you pain? Pain comes from your belief there is something external, form the belief that you are something external i.e.; a body.

It's very helpful to understand our resistance. The way to make progress in this course is to recognize our resistance to it without beating ourselves up for it. I do not want to let go of who I am and my specialness. That doesn't make you a bad person. Recognizing that gives you an A+ for the day. I want a happier dream on my terms not on the courses' terms. Recognizing that without judgment is very helpful.

We want to be in control of our life and of this course so that it says what we want it to say. Instead of our going to where it is, we bring it down to where we are. It's very helpful to be aware of that need to bring this Course to our level rather for us to go into its level.

The ego’s sense of ‘self’ and the need to defend

noreply@blogger.com (Aileen) — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 01:52:00 +0000

"You're a liar. You say one thing and then you say the opposite to someone else. You are the biggest fake," she says to me.

My reaction is instantaneous. Outrage. I feel misunderstood and I notice the strong 'need' to defend myself. I'm not a liar! I want to say. It's actually just the opposite. I may not be consistent in form (what I do and say) but that's because I try to act consistently with the content of my mind. Whenever I'm conscious, I try to respond from a loving space. Love inspires you to say what is most helpful and sometimes the most loving thing to do is to talk in their language and at their level; even if that means that what you're saying is not necessarily what you would believe.

I want to correct her, but I don't speak just yet. I pause instead.

I remember this section in ACIM:

When you correct a brother, you are telling him that he is wrong. He may be making no sense at the time, and it is certain that, if he is speaking from the ego, he will not be making sense. But your task is still to tell him he is right. You do not tell him this verbally, if he is speaking foolishly. He needs correction at another level, because his error is at another level. He is still right, because he is a Son of God. His ego is always wrong, no matter what it says or does. T-9.III.4:2-10

I realize that the goal of this interaction with my daughter is to tell her she is right, not necessarily verbally, but mentally. I remind myself that the goal of communication is never what is being said! The purpose of any conversation is either to join or to separate; to reinforce the dream of separation or to undo it. If you talk with your ego you will be unconsciously seeking separation. The opposition that you feel will be telling them they are wrong and you will be reinforcing the differences between you. It won't matter what you actually say, even if your words sound patient and loving, mentally, you will be telling them that they are wrong.

If I respond to my daughter out of a desire to correct her image of me, I will be doing it as an ego. This doesn't mean that I should never explain to her the way I think and act; it just means that I can't do it out of a 'need' to defend my 'self'.

As egos, our goal is to develop and protect our sense of self. We depend on our self-concept because as long as we believe we are unique separated selves, we remain safe from the knowledge of who we are in reality. The ego's strategy is to keep us focused on the question "Who am I?" As long as we look for the answer in the world; in what we look like, what we do, what religion we practice, what language we speak, who our friends are; we are effectively hidden from the knowledge that we are not a body, but one with our Source.

I see that my daughter's claim about me is just a temptation to react in a way that will reaffirm my identity as my separated self. But the situation has the potential to be an opportunity to release myself from my identification with the ego. The choice is mine. The ego's knee jerk reaction is to oppose and protect my 'self', my group, my country, my beliefs, my version of A Course in Miracles, or whatever it is that defines me as different.

But if I am able to just notice what is going on; if I can see the ego's purpose in every interaction, then I can do something about it. The truth is that I'm being played by my own hidden desire to remain separate. I'm not really upset because of my daughter's accusation. I'm upset because I believe I'm an ego that needs to maintain its sense of individuality by opposing everything and everyone.

Having identified the ego's purpose for this interaction with my daughter, I am free to choose again. As I notice my desire to oppose her, the interaction becomes a classroom in which the goal is to learn that I am a mind and not a body. As I join with the forgiving part of my mind, the opposition melts away. The desire to protect my 'self' disappears because I'm no longer identifying myself with the body who has an ego that needs to protect itself.

Through forgiving eyes, I realize her accusation is true. I search my mind and in less than five seconds, I find several examples in my life where Aileen has lied, or been inconsistent. Now that the desire to protect my ego has dissolved, I can wholeheartedly agree with my daughter.

"You're right, honey," I say. "I'm trying to be consistent, but it doesn't always work."

Her face fills with understanding.

There is such freedom in releasing myself, even for a moment, from a limited, defined sense of "self!" All that energy spent in defense and opposition is released and I feel light, happier. I remember that phrase from the Course "Do you prefer that you be right or happy?" and I definitely prefer to be wrong and "happy."

Notes from Ken Wapnick’s S-9 Workshop “A Qualified Entente” September 12, 2009

noreply@blogger.com (Aileen) — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 05:56:00 +0000

I was at the Foundation for A Course in Miracles yesterday for a workshop and I thought I would share my notes with you.

The title, "a qualified entente" comes from the section entitled "The Closing of the Gap," at the beginning of Chapter 29 in the Text.

The word "Entente," comes from the French and means agreement. Ententes are unofficial treaties. It's a limited agreement we make with each other to limit love within the special love relationship.

Formal religions make an agreement with God. It's a way of telling God I will love you sometimes and express my love in certain ways.

One thing that is very clear in this section (T-29.I.) is the distinction between mind and body. We don't give God our total mind, we give Him our bodies. We tell him we will love Him by keeping his commandments, but if we don't, he is entitled to punish us. This is why we think love is fearful and we don't trust it.

The very fact that we're in this world in a body is telling God "I don't love you," because the body was made as a limitation on love. The world where the body inhabits was made as a limitation on God.

This section also makes clear that in the back of everything we do as a body, is a fear of losing our self – our individual, unique, special, autonomous self - also called the ego. The ego is the belief that we are on our own, self-created instead of God-created.

In "The fear of redemption" section in Chapter 14 Jesus says you are not afraid of crucifixion, your terror is of redemption. Because if you let God in then you and the world you made would disappear. In the presence of Love there is no "I'; no self. This is the self that we cherish and protect by being in a body.

The body is the embodiment of the thought of separation. The body is the proof that we are separate. The body screams to God "I hate you".

If we found God and expressed our love to him, if we let go of our ego, our self would be lost. When we limit the love, we keep something to ourselves. We're always withholding something and we are not realizing the hate.

How many people can read this Course with the full awareness that they are not bodies? That is the qualified entente we make with the Course. I will study the Course, but I will never give up the fact that it is "I" am the one who is reading and practicing this Course.

That's what we do with God and ACIM. Jesus doesn't ask us to let go of our sense of self, but be honest about it. Jesus tells us not to hide anything from him. Don't hide your ego from him, just be honest about it. That is the only way you will eventually learn to let it go.

It's very helpful to realize that you have forged a qualified entente with Jesus and this Course, just as Christians, Jews and Muslims have done for millenniums.

There is a reference to this in CH 28, the "secret vows" that we make with each other. We make a pledge to make sickness and the body real. We are all doing the same thing with each other, hell-bent on preserving this individual self.

We meet in order to separate. We meet not to join and remember we are, first all the same, and then One, but we meet in order to separate.

I want to learn this Course as a body. I want to distort it so Jesus knows my body is here and he answers me in a very specific voice; the voice of the person that the Bible says lived 2100 years ago. He is telling me what I should do. What job I should take, what relationship I should enter, what I should do and say? And we actually think that is what this course is saying!

The course has us recognize that the body is literally nothing. What makes us so afraid in this Course is not God's love – because this is not a Course in God's love – what makes us so afraid is that the body is nothing.

This Course will help us find God by helping us to undo all the other places that we look for Him. But we are terrified of losing the self, so this qualified entente with A Course in Miracles is that I want to learn it as long as I can retain my sense of "I."

I want to keep the dream figure real, when the whole function of the Miracle is to get us back to the dreamer, which is the mind. That is what the Workbook lesson means, "God is in everything I see because God is in my mind."

The memory of God is in my mind. The purpose of God, which is forgiveness, is in my mind. So we all walk around with this right minded thought of Atonement that would remind us who we are, at which point the world would dissolve into nothingness. So I do everything possible to avoid getting back in touch with that right minded thought of Atonement. We all have subscribed to the ego's strategy.

We first make a wrong minded thought system that says separation is real and the Atonement is a lie that conceals the right mind. And then we make a world to conceal the wrong mind, which means we become mindless. If I am mindless, it's because I'm in a body.

It's all about making the body real. T-29.I.4:3 "It is the symbol (the gap that the body represents) of a promise made to meet when you prefer, and separate till you and he elect to meet again." It's always a promise with each other to uphold the body's secret vow, that the separation is alive and well. I reinforce that for you and you do it for me, and it doesn't matter if we do it in what the world calls love or in hate. Either way, there is still a body.

T-29.I.3:9 says "Thus you and your brother but shared a qualified entente, in which a clause of separation was a point you both agreed to keep intact."

In our contract with each other, that clause is real, and bodies are what prove that the separation is real.

This is why we hate this Course. And anybody who says they love this Course is a liar. You hate it because it violates the treaty. Why do people love the Bible or love to hate it? Because it does not violate the treaty. It says the body is real.

That's why nobody likes this Course as it is. What they like is when they change it, so it reads the way they want it to read. This is not about having a happier body. This is not about living more happily or peacefully in the dream. The Course's term the "happy dream," does not mean living in this dream as a body. The term happy dream comes from being a "happy learner," when you learn the Holy Spirit 's lessons of forgiveness. That's what makes you a happy learner. It has nothing to do with the state of your body or what goes on in your life.

You must really recognize that this Course violates the treaty. The Jesus who lives in your mind violates the treaty. How could you love Him them? He is betraying the sacred trust you put in him to uphold your body and individuality.

What are you? If you think you are a body, you are a projection of the thought system of separation. When you recognize that there is something very wrong with that identification, then your body becomes a classroom. It is still an illusion, but now its purpose is changed. Instead of being a limitation on love, it becomes a way of unlearning the thought that is a limitation on love. That's why Jesus tells us that the body is neutral. "My body is a wholly neutral thing," the lesson says. It can either be seen as a limitation on love or as a way of unlearning the limitation on love. At that point it is neutral.

What would really help is if you don't take yourself and the world so seriously. What are you defending? What are you upset about? What are you planning for? What are you protecting?

You want to use your body and your experiences here as a way to get back to your mind. That is meaningful. Otherwise, there is no hope. So what the ego tells us is a violation of the treaty - a violation that has to be punished - is merely a recognition that there is no treaty. There is no clause, nothing can be violated when nothing exists. What are you violating? You are violating an illusion.

But to the extent that we identify as a body; to that extent, we will defend this experience. And we will go so far in defending this experience as a person, as to change what this Course says. Rather than grow into where this Course is leading us, we bring this Course where we are. And we think this is ACIM.

Jesus tells us to take little steps. Practice. You have to re-train your mind because the fear is so great. It is terrifying to be told that you are not here.

We are terrified of being found, so we hide. So in order not to be found, we make up a body and a world in which we can hide.

In the Course, purpose is everything. It doesn't matter if I use my body to feel pleasure or pain. It makes the body real. That is the purpose. That is what keeps me from being found.

You can't grow up as a body. You have to grow beyond the body. The way you know you are making progress in this Course is when you cross one rung of the ladder. Beneath that rung is your experience as a body. Above that rung is when you finally recognize that the 'you' that Jesus addresses in the Course is not the you you see in the bathroom mirror. He's talking about the decision making mind. When you realize that's what he is talking about, you begin to read this Course differently. It's not about bodies.

Withdrawing support from the dream

noreply@blogger.com (Aileen) — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 19:31:00 +0000

I usually shop for vegetables at a market that sells local vegetables at a very reasonable price, but in a hurry the other day; I ended up in a regular chain supermarket. Looking for fruit and vegetables I came upon my favorite tomatoes in the vine which I usually buy for 99 cents a pound, but to my surprise and outrage they were $2.99 a pound! Five feet to the right I saw pineapples for $1.39 a pound. I weighed one of them on the scale and calculated that each pineapple was at least $6.70; more than double of what I usually pay. The half gallon of organic milk that I pay $3 dollars for was $3.89 and so on and so forth….

As I walk up and down the aisles picking up what I need, there is a part of my mind that is noticing every opposing thought and laughing. I notice my mind throwing a mini tantrum over the quality of the produce, the prices, the layout of the store; almost everything about being in this store at this moment seems wrong. All these conflicting thoughts seem magnified and I realize how little it takes for a mind to react. I don't need the big issues like health care reform, or the war to get me going – an afternoon shopping trip at the 'wrong' store will do.

The practice of A Course in Miracles encourages us to watch our mind for all the little reactions. These reactions, or grievances, are what stand in the way of our experience of perfect Love and by noticing them we take away their power over us. That part of our mind that observes as the ego reacts to the world is our right mind. The right mind holds the memory of our true identity as one with God. Being in our right mind is watching ourselves react with the ego, but without judgment.

I am reading a book called "I Am That," about the teachings of Sri Nisgardatta Maharaj, an enlightened guru from India who lived in the 20th Century. He says that it's not by searching for truth that we awaken, but rather by understanding ourselves, or the ego we think we are.

He says: "What you are, you already are. By knowing what you are not, you are free of it and remain in your natural state," p. 26. And, "Study the prison you have built around yourself by inadvertence. By knowing what you are not, you come to know your Self," p.5.

The prison walls, which are made of judgment, fear, and even our most subtle opposition to what is, begin to crumble as we notice the ego's purpose operating within our mind. The ego's existence depends on our believing that the dream is real. It's by our reacting to the dream that we keep it real. So it's our not reacting, or for a while consistently watching ourselves react without judgment that undoes the ego and the "tiny mad idea" that according to the mythology of A Course in Miracles is the cause of the separation.

The Course says that "Into eternity, where all is one, there crept a tiny, mad idea, at which the Son of God remembered not to laugh." (T-27.VIII.6:2)

The tiny mad idea is the impossible claim that separation, time, and space can take the place of perfect Oneness. It's the suggestion that an illusory world, however convincingly serious, can take away our peace. It's what's behind the outrage over the price of tomatoes, the grief over the loss of something we cherish, or the belief that we are all different from each other. All reactions to the dream keep us equally focused on the world and make it real for us. The Text says it's the Son of God's reaction to the tiny mad idea - his taking it seriously -that gave birth to the thought of separation that caused the world as we experience it.

In his forgetting (to laugh) did the thought become a serious idea, and possible of both accomplishment and real effects. (T-27.VIII.6:3)

In my early days of studying the Course, I often felt trapped. I understood intellectually that this existence is just a dream, but I didn't know what to do about it. I imagined the tiny mad idea happening a long time ago and I thought of myself as suffering the effects of a choice I had no control over. But it's our present choice to accept and reinforce the thought system of separation that keeps it real. Every time we mentally oppose a thought, a person, a feeling, or a situation, what we are inadvertently doing is reenacting the moment when we took the tiny mad idea seriously.

Each reaction says the world is real because it can be the cause of our upset. If the world is capable of causing a reaction in us, it must mean it is real. Illusions can't cause real effects. The only way to undo the tiny mad idea is to laugh at it now. We laugh at it by looking at the world through the lens of the miracle which reminds us that there is no cause in the world. The images in front of us, however compelling and enticing, are not real and they can have no effect on us unless we give them power over us. A situation can affect our body, our financial situation, our property, but we it cannot take away our peace unless we identify with the dreamer in the dream. As the Chapter 27.II.7 says: "The miracle establishes you dream a dream, and that its content is not true."

It is important to understand that the forgiveness work that we do is always mental. It has nothing to do with the actions we take in the world. Not reacting doesn't necessarily mean that we don't react verbally or physically if we're attacked. What it means is that our focus is always in our own mind. We watch our ego involvement in every situation. We notice how much we want things to be different than they are and how much we believe that if things were different then we would be happy. We watch how when we feel anxious, our instinct is to leave our mind where the real solution is, and instead we put our full focus on changing people or situations so that we can regain our peace. For a while noticing is all we may be able to do.

As we become more aware of the ego in our mind we begin to see that it always responds with knee-jerk thoughts and reactions, but it's not who we are. We can watch it react all it wants with our right mind and still remain at peace. We don't have to attach ourselves to its drama. I like this quote from Sri Nasgardatta Majarah. He says: "My life is a succession of events, just like yours. Only I am detached and see the passing show as a passing you while you stick to things and move along with them," p.4.

The only way to begin to walk back up the ladder that separation led us down is to become conscious of how we support the dream in our daily lives. Watch your mind. Notice the thousands of reactions you have each day. Each one of them says the world is real. Through forgiveness we can begin to withdraw our support of the dream and increasingly, we will begin to see that the prison walls that seemed so solid, are nothing but a thin veil that cannot stand in the way of the Love and Peace that is our true nature.

What waits in perfect certainty beyond salvation is not our concern. For you have barely started to allow your first, uncertain steps to be directed up the ladder separation led you down. The miracle alone is your concern at present. Here is where we must begin. And having started, will the way be made serene and simple in the rising up to waking and the ending of the dream. When you accept a miracle, you do not add your dream of fear to one that is already being dreamed. Without support, the dream will fade away without effects. For it is your support that strengthens it. (T-28.III.1:1-7)

“…do not attempt to judge forgiveness, nor to set it in an earthly frame”

noreply@blogger.com (Aileen) — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 13:29:00 +0000

It is easy if not unavoidable to look at A Course in Miracles through the lens of another spirituality or religion. Just because the language seems familiar, we assume we know what it says. I spent many years straddling between two paths unaware that I was doing it. There's nothing wrong with that except that it's difficult to make progress, especially if the goal of the two paths is conflicting.

There is enormous resistance to the message of A Course in Miracles because its practice threatens the existence of the ego that we think we are. Practicing forgiveness as taught by the Course is asking the ego to choose a though system that will result in its undoing. From the ego's point of view, true forgiveness equals death. As egos we are consciously or unconsciously terrified of losing who we think we are, so as a defense we practice forgiveness in a way that looks like forgiveness, but instead of fulfilling its purpose which is to undo the separation, it reinforces it. This kind of forgiveness doesn't aim to heal the cause of separation. Instead, it makes the error real and reinforces our identification with our separated self.

The Song of Prayer supplement uses pretty strong language to describe this ego-centered practice of forgiveness. It calls it "forgiveness-to-destroy." It is forgiveness as interpreted or judged by our "earthly frame;" our body. This practice, while it may bring us some relief within the world, won't take us home. In fact, it will keep us firmly rooted in the dream of separation.

Forgiveness is the means for your escape. How pitiful it is to make of it the means for further slavery and pain. Within the world of opposites there is a way to use forgiveness for the goal of God, and find the peace He offers you. Take nothing else, or you have sought your death, and prayed for separation from your Self. (S-2.II.7:3-7 Bold mine)

Forgiveness-to-destroy has many forms, being a weapon of the world of form. Not all are obvious, and some are carefully concealed beneath what seems like charity. Yet all the forms that it may seem to take have but this single goal; their purpose is to separate and makes what God created equal, different. (S-2.II.1:1-3 Bold mine)

It is very easy to slip into forgiveness-to-destroy. We fall into the practice whenever we are afraid of God's perfect Love in which we cannot exist as individuals. The most obvious form of forgiveness-to-destroy is forgiveness as understood by the world. As bodies or egos, we believe there are other guilty bodies that have to be forgiven. We blame people for disturbing our peace and then decide to overlook their sin and forgive them. This kind of forgiveness does nothing to undo the separation. Instead of joining, it creates differences between ourselves and others by establishing that we are innocent and they are guilty. In contrast, true forgiveness shines a light in our mind that shows us that what we experience in the world is nothing but a senseless dream and that the only reason we are ever upset is because we believe that the dream is real and can have an effect on us.

The miracle establishes you dream a dream, and that its content is not true. (T-28.II.7)

Similar to Forgiveness-to-destroy, "false healing" or "healing-to-separate," makes the separation real and increases our identification with the ego. False healing is concerned with healing the body and not the mind that projects the body. The Song of Prayer says that healing, "… can be false as well as true; a witness to the power of the world or to the everlasting Love of God."

False healing merely makes a poor exchange of one illusion for a "nicer" one; a dream of sickness for a dream of health. This can occur at lower forms of prayer, combining with forgiveness kindly meant but not completely understood as yet…. False healing can indeed remove a form of pain and sickness. But the cause remains, and will not lack effects. (S-3.II.1:1-3,5)

We practice false healing whenever our intention is to heal or to change anything in the world. For something to need healing, it has to be real first. Having established that the body, the world or a situation we are in are real, we then use prayer, or the power of our mind to try to change the situation to what we think is better. Whether we want more money, success, a healthy body, peace in the world, our wanting establishes that there is an "I' that needs things to be different in the world in order to experience peace. Many spiritual paths use this approach. It has become very popular to use affirmations, repeat mantras or pray to God for solutions to our problems. There is nothing wrong with that and it may even work; our health may become better or we may demonstrate abundance, but what we are actually doing is trading one dream for another while we root ourselves further into the dream of separation.

In false healing, having established that we are separate, we then ask God or the Universe to help us or tell us what to do. Instead of taking our illusions up to Him and asking Him to dispel them, we define the problem from the point of view of our body; our 'earthly frame' and ask Him to validate it. What we are doing is asking Him to acknowledge the separation.

In contrast, within the practice of A Course in Miracles our focus is never on healing or changing anything. Instead of trying to manipulate effects; the body or the world, we deal with cause, which is only in the mind. As we notice lack of peace within ourselves, we realize that we must be believing the dream is real. So all we do is forgive so that the Peace of God is restored to our mind. Forgiveness shows us that we are the dreamer of the dream and that a dream can have no effect on us. This doesn't mean that at this level we have control over what we see. Our eyes may still see injustice, sickness, or a poor economy, but through the lens of forgiveness, we will not experience lack of peace.

A miracle is a correction. It does not create, nor really change at all. It merely looks on devastation, and reminds the mind that what it sees is false. W.pII.13.1:1-3

We undo the dream of separation by withdrawing our support to it. It's our reaction to the dream that makes it real. Our lack of peace says that there is cause in the world so it must be real.

Without a cause there can be no effects, and yet without effects there is no cause. The cause a cause is made by its effects; the Father is a Father by His Son. Effects do not create their cause, but they establish its causation. (T-28.II.1:1-3)

All spiritual paths serve a purpose. They meet us where we are at and we should not judge them. As we become less afraid, we begin to see A Course in Miracles for what it is and not through the lens of another spiritual path. We begin to read it from the point of view of the mind that can choose again, rather than the body. But while we experience ourselves as a body, we don't try to change our thoughts because that makes them and the ego real. Becoming aware of them is enough.

Very often I notice myself falling into old thought patterns. I notice forgiveness-to-destroy and healing-to-separate prevalent within my thinking. It's automatic for me to deny error, for example. And I can't help but affirm truth when I'm hurt. I feel pain and the thought "There is no pain in matter," shows up almost as fast as the pain. I see myself trying to manipulate my situation by exchanging limited thoughts about myself for unlimited ones. But there is a calm forgiving presence in my mind that just watches it happen and does nothing. By not reacting to what happens in our lives (I mean mentally!) what we are saying is that nothing is happening in reality and that we are still in perfect Love as One with Him.

Forgiveness… is still, and quietly does nothing. It offends no aspect of reality, nor seeks to twist it to appearances it likes. It merely looks, and waits, and judges not….. Do nothing, then, and let forgiveness show you what to do, through Him Who is your Guide, your Savior and Protector, strong in hope, and certain of your ultimate success. He has forgiven you already, for such is His function, given Him by God. Now must you share His function, and forgive whom He has saved, whose sinlessness He sees, and whom He honors as the Son of God. (W-pII.1.5,4)

Seeing with forgiving eyes

noreply@blogger.com (Aileen) — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 15:05:00 +0000

A friend shared this sweet poem about what it feels like to be seen through forgiving eyes. It really touched me, and I hope you find it helpful as well.

XOXO Aileen

To know
that I can sit
with you and that you
will hear my sorrow;
my excitement, self-
pity and fear;

To know
that you will lift
my most awful
delusions out
of my mouth and fold
them in a soft pile
by your side;

To know that even then,
you will still be looking
at me, seeing us,
with your forgiving eyes,
is worth everything.

SN

Teaching and learning. What will you teach: Peace or Conflict?

noreply@blogger.com (Aileen) — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 15:55:00 +0000

A Course in Miracles makes it clear that we can't help but teach. Most of us don't teach in front of a group or classroom, or write books or make movies that teach, but whether we are aware of it or not, we always teach.

….teaching is a constant process; it goes on every moment of the day..... To teach is to demonstrate. There are only two thought systems, and you demonstrate that you believe one or the other is true all the time. From your demonstration others learn, and so do you…..Any situation must be to you a chance to teach others what you are, and what they are to you." (T-Intro.1.6;2.1)

What we teach -- the content of our lessons -- is who we think we are at any given moment, not what we say or what we do.

We may be teaching a child how to tie his shoe, or we may be giving directions to a stranger on the street, or we may be listening to a friend who is in need. In all three cases it appears as if the goal of the interaction is to help, or to convey some kind of information. At the level of the body, this is true. But at the level of mind, there is an underlying purpose to every interaction and that is to either teach peace or conflict; we either support the dream of separation or undo it.

When we identify with the right mind, which is the memory of our perfect oneness with God, we identify with Spirit and Love. As One, we can't help but teach the Peace of God. When we choose to identify ourselves with the ego, we believe we are separate bodies with individual personalities subject to pain and suffering. When we choose the ego, we can't help but judge. Judgment separates us from others. It creates hierarchies that stand in the way of our perception of Oneness. By judging others, even in our most casual conversations the ego actively seeks to reinforce the dream of separation.

Even at the level of the most casual encounter, it is possible for two people to lose sight of separate interests, if only for a moment. That moment is enough. Salvation has come. (M-3.2.6)

Whatever you teach; peace or conflict, you teach also to yourself because you are strengthening it by sharing it with others.

"Everything you teach you are learning. Teach only love, and learn that love is yours and you are love." (T-6.III.4.8)

We can't hope to be helpful to someone who is in pain while we are identifying ourselves with the ego. As egos we harm instead of heal. Instead of looking at the problem from 'above the battleground,' we identify with people's problems and make them real for them and for ourselves. Our most loving attempts at being helpful will fail because the underlying message we give them is that the world of separation is real and therefore their pain is justified.

The simplicity of this very basic message from the Course became clear to me about a year ago when an old friend called me late one night. We only speak a couple of times a year and it's usually when he is hurt and depressed. Stephen suffers from depression. He takes antidepressants which, as he describes, only take the edge off the pain, but help him stay alive.

As we began to chat, even though he did not say it right away, I could tell that he wasn't well. I've told him to call me when he feels he's at risk of killing himself. The feeling I had was that this was one of those nights where he was considering whether he should stay or go. When he gets into these episodes, the pain feels so intense and real, he sees suicide as the only way to end it.

Stephen's problem is that he feels alone. His relationships seem to fail over and over again and he is tired of feeling lonely. He looks at the world through a thick layer of pain and suffering and the world proves to him on a daily basis that love is not real, and that people are not dependable. He is convinced he will never be happy. Every time we chat he offers proof that suffering is real. He will tell you with a straight face, that if he found the right companion who loved him, life would be different for him and he would have a chance to be happy. His misery has become a part of his identity and he is not willing to let it go.

As I listen, a part of me would love to 'fix' him. I would like to share what I've learned over the last seventeen years of practicing A Course in Miracles. I would love to shake him up a bit and impress on him that his life is just a story that he is making up. I'd like to explain how his feelings come from his interpretations and not from what is actually happening in his life. I'd like to share with him that happiness comes from within and that no circumstances can bring him lasting joy and peace. And while I'm at it, I would love to teach him the forgiveness of A Course in Miracles because it would really turn his life around. More than anything, I would like him to know that he has a choice.

The problem is that the "I" that wants and needs so desperately to help Stephen stay alive, is my ego. Over our twenty year friendship, I have to admit that I have tried to throw hints at him. Of course nothing I say ever seems to help. Only now do I understand why. The ego is not capable of helping because masked behind sweet well-meaning words; the only gift it can offer is separation. Stephen is not happy because he feels separated. So how could I possibly be helpful if I mentally reinforce his dream of separation?

There is NOTHING wrong with helping people in need, or joining a cause, or whatever it is we feel inclined to do in the world to help others. The problem comes when, for example, we join a cause because we feel an investment to help. Through the ego's eyes, we must have decided first that the world is real, and that suffering is real. Real help is not possible from the standpoint of separation. While we may be helpful at the level of form, we won't be offering the only lasting kind of help, which is the help that withdraws identification from the dream of separation. As long as we help with the ego we will be doing what the Course calls 'forgiveness to destroy.' The only way we can help is by teaching peace to ourselves first and then extending it.

As I listened to Stephen a year ago, having noticed the subtle ego involvement in my listening, I somehow let it go. As I let go of my ego I become fully present with him. Because there is no movement in my mind, no need to be helpful, no chatter, I can actually hear what he's saying. He tells me about another failed relationship and of the pain he feels. But beyond the story, I hear a call for love. As judgment ceases the perfect love that is always there, becomes manifest. There are no reactions, no judgments, no comparisons, and no investments. His words pass through my mind unobstructed, as flour through a sifter. There is nothing real to hold on to. I see him as he is, without his story.

He tells me he's thinking about killing himself. I hear him say it, but there is no pain; no desire to keep him here because it's so clear that he is not that body. He is Love.

When I speak, the words are not measured or calculated to produce an effect. Love inspires the words and what comes out of my mouth feels natural. I ask him if he thinks killing himself will really end the pain. He doesn't know that, he says. What if it doesn't?

We talk for over an hour. I allow him to take the conversation where he wants to. My ego's agenda is not manipulating the conversation. Finally, he says that he feels good now. He's tired and should go to bed. "I really feel good," he repeats.

As we hang up I feel Joy. This is what the practice of this Course is about. I'm beginning to see what it means when it says that "my only function is to accept the Atonement for myself." It's not with words that we teach, it's not with hands that we heal. All we do is ask for help to see things as they are in reality and having made the choice for what is peaceful and permanent, we demonstrate that the Christ is real and that there is a real alternative to the dream of suffering.

When you accept a miracle, you do not add your dream of fear to one that is already being dreamed. Without support, the dream will fade away without effects. For it is your support that strengthens it. T-28.III.1.6

Becoming a symbol of love and peace

noreply@blogger.com (Aileen) — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 16:10:00 +0000

If you have 15 min watch this great short! Though this is not related to ACIM, it reminded me that by choosing our right mind, we can become a symbol of love and peace within the world.

Tennis and the choice for Peace

noreply@blogger.com (Aileen) — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 18:22:00 +0000

A few months ago, during a league doubles tennis match, the ladies I played against got angry at my partner for calling a ball out which they thought was clearly in. I also saw the ball land about five inches outside the line, so when they questioned me; I confirmed my partner's call. One of the women got even angrier and continued to make disparaging comments and accusations throughout the match. A part of me was focused on my own mental reaction. I always try to watch my mind as I listen to people because by my feelings I can tell if I'm responding to a situation with the ego or the right mind. If I feel upset in any way, that's a clear sign that I'm interpreting the situation with the ego.

As I watched my mind, surprisingly this time (I am not beyond reacting to one thing or another when I play tennis), all I felt was love and compassion because as Kenneth Wapnick quotes from (I think,) Plato, "we are all fighting a hard battle." The battle, of course, is with our own ego who works diligently at preserving our sense of individuality. (see: Be Kind for Everyone you Meet is Fighting a Hard Battle )

Seeing my opponents' anger, I recognized that they were no different than I am. Though at that moment they were angry and I was not, I certainly had the capacity to be angry. As long as we perceive ourselves as living in a body, we all feel the same pain and suffering associated with dealing with the ego's thought system of separation, guilt and attack. When we get angry at someone, all we are doing is acting according to the ego's plan, which involves projecting our anger onto others, so we can live the illusion that we are innocent and somebody else is responsible for our suffering. Anger is always the result of interpretation.

Perhaps it will be helpful to remember that no one can be angry at a fact. It is always an interpretation that gives rise to negative emotions, regardless of their seeming justification by what appears as facts (M-17.4:12) .

As I looked at these women and recognized that they were no different than me, it was easy to feel compassionate toward them. Their only mistake was that they had chosen to look at the situation through the ego's lens of separation.

By choosing not to react to their accusations, I was able to respond with kindness. My words, inspired by love, were unclouded by judgment or resentment. I experienced an amazing sense of freedom and peace as I talked with them. They eventually lost the match, but toward the end they had relaxed. They smiled more and they looked as if a weight had been lifted off their shoulders.

I've been listening to Ken Wapnick's workshops on tape about A Course in Miracles almost every day for the last three years. Through them, I'm beginning to see how simple the practice of A Course in Miracles can be. He often talks about how when we are faced with an attack, by our reaction, we either reinforce the attacker's choice for the ego and make the dream of separation real; or we undo the ego and its dream of separation by demonstrating that there is another way to look at the world.

When we react to an attack by feeling hurt, angry, or unfairly treated, by our pain, we send the message to the attacker that his attack must have been real because it had an effect on us. By suffering, physically or emotionally, we establish that the attacker is guilty of causing us harm and by doing so we reinforce his choice for the ego. Had I reacted to the angry woman with anger, even if my words had been civil, I would have mentally given her the message that her attack was real because it had an effect on me. If attack is possible, then separation must be real because one is against another.

When we don't react to an attack, by showing no signs of having been harmed, we tell people mentally, that their attack had no effect on us. That can only mean that in reality they have done nothing. Without the dark lens of blame clouding our vision, we are then able respond from a loving place, as if literally nothing has ever happened between us. Giving people the message that they are innocent is the most loving thing we can do. Not only will they be blessed, but the love that is extended through us will reflect back on us.

Within the practice of A Course in Miracles, every encounter is an opportunity to undo the dream of separation by demonstrating peace. We don't have to say a word. Even as we face the most vicious attack, simply by choosing not to suffer, we demonstrate that attack is impossible and therefore the separation never happened.

In Chapter 14 the section called "The Decision of guiltlessness," makes this point very clear:

Teach him, that, whatever he may try to do to you, your perfect freedom from the belief that you can be harmed shows him that he is guiltless. He can do nothing that can hurt you, and by refusing to allow him to think he can, you teach him that the Atonement, which you have accepted for yourself, is also his. There is nothing to forgive. No one can hurt the Son of God. (T-14. III. 7:3-6)

As I stood by the refreshment table after the tennis match to get a drink, the woman who had been the angriest during the match approached me and began to talk to me as if nothing had happened. She appeared to have completely forgotten her attacks on me. I listened to her, always keeping tabs on my own reactions, and soon, she was telling me about how difficult her relationship with her teenage son was and how stressed she was about it. She had learned through another player that I have three teenagers and she was asking me for advice. I sat with her for over a half hour and mostly listened. I saw clearly that her anxiety was caused by her unconscious choice to perceive the situation with the ego, but I didn't try to explain that to her. Instead, I comforted her in the simplest way. I knew that my own choice for peace was letting her know, louder than any words could, that there is an alternative to perceiving the world with the ego and that she could also make that choice.

Listening, joining, and the Holy Instant

noreply@blogger.com (Aileen) — Thu, 25 Dec 2008 03:36:00 +0000

About ten years ago I went to the zoo with my daughter's Kindergarten class. All the moms were split into small groups and I shared my chaperoning duties with a mom who had just moved to town. Though I had never talked to her before, in our four hours together, she told me her sad story which ended with her husband cheating on her and a nasty divorce. It seemed random at the time that she would tell such a story to a stranger, but I've since realized that no interaction is ever without purpose. If you're not aware of its purpose, you can be sure that the ego is using it for its purpose of reinforcing the separation. Judgment is its key tool.

Over the years of practicing the Course and looking at my own mental activity as I interact with people, it has become clear that in any interaction there are simply two options: we offer peace by choosing to mentally join or we offer conflict by choosing to separate. Joining serves the right-minded purpose of awakening and judgment serves the ego's purpose of separation.

Thinking back on the way I listened to my new friend at the zoo ten years ago, I can't help but cringe. Though I was not aware of it at the time, my listening was laced with judgment. As my friend talked, my mind intuitively did what minds are designed to do; continue the belief in separation by finding differences. I had a good marriage and she didn't; she was unstable and I was stable. She was suffering and I was not. A mental inequality developed in my mind. I became the superior one in the area of handling love and marriage.

If we truly want to be helpful to someone in need, it is imperative that we notice these blocks that stand in the way of our listening. That day at the zoo, though I sounded kind, concerned and loving, I could not have really been helpful. By not being aware of the judgment in my mind, the gift I offered was that of separation, which is the source of all pain to begin with. Though on the surface the interaction seemed to be helpful, at a deep level it must have left us both dissatisfied.

In order to join, we must be aware of the obstacles that stand in the way of joining. As we listen to people, the first step is to notice the judgment in our own minds. This means that as we listen, we watch our own thoughts. We carefully take note of our reactions to what we are hearing. Notice your mind's attraction to opposition. Watch your reaction when someone is telling you something you don't agree with. Watch the anger rise. Or if you hear of a sad story, watch your outrage; your desire to protect the victims and your harsh condemnation of everyone you perceive as guilty. Watch yourself feel superior, inferior, right, morally justified, more spiritually advanced. All these reactive feelings make the separation real for you.

The second step is to forgive. As we notice the ego's agenda of separation in our own minds we forgive ourselves – we simply look and don't judge. To have an ego is no sin. As long as we see a face in the mirror, we have an ego like everybody else and it speaks loudly (even louder as you start to notice it more!) There is no reason to feel guilty about that. If you feel guilty. Notice yourself feeling guilty without judging yourself for it.

For a long long time noticing your ego as it seeks its purpose of separation is all that you may be able to do. Notice how it takes a stand for or against anything anyone says. Watch it send the senses out to look for evidence that differences are important. Watch how much you want to be right, how you want to blame, share your point of view, make a case that shows you in the most favorable light. Notice how much you want to be innocent; how you always must feel superior or inferior --- NEVER equal. Watch how you think you know better, how much you don't want to tolerate other people's view, or their habits.

This noticing becomes a kind of open-eye meditation where you progressively become fully aware of your mental activity as you interact with the people in your life. I found this excerpt from the writings of Pema Chodron that clearly describes this phase.

The first thing that happens in meditation is that we start to see
what's happening. Even though we still run away, and we still
indulge, we see what we're doing clearly. One would think that
our seeing it clearly would immediately make it just disappear,
but it doesn't. So for quite a long time, we just see it clearly. To
the degree that we're willing to see our indulging and our
repressing clearly, they begin to wear themselves out. Wearing
out is not exactly the same as going away. Instead, a wider, more
generous, more enlightened perspective arises.

As we notice the ego do what it does and do nothing about it, we begin to unmask it. Its movement in our minds becomes more and more obvious and it begins to have less of an effect on us. We are slowly releasing our identification with it. We begin to see it clearly in all its hate and ugliness. But still, we do nothing. We don't try to change it or fight it. It's reacting to it that perpetuates the belief in separation. However vicious it may appear, it can have no power over us if we don't identify with it.

When you least expect it you'll be listening to a friend, or even somebody you dislike and as you listen, you'll become aware of the ego's judgmental voice in your mind looking for differences that you can react against. You'll see clearly the ego's activity in your mind, but you won't be impressed with it. Then for just a second these barriers will disappear and a gentle, all-inclusive sense of love will take over. For an instant you'll lose track of the differences your ego was keeping tabs on and you will perceive only shared interests. All the differences in form that seemed so important will become meaningless.

A sense of joining in love and true compassion will bless the moment and you'll be experiencing what the Course calls the "Holy Instant." At that moment when you stop perceiving differences, you will have a glimpse of who you are in reality; beyond the body. You will understand the meaning of Matthew 18 verse 20, "Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them." (replace the word "joined" for "gathered.")

You will see that in reality you can only interact with yourself and that who you thought was a separate brother is nothing more than a projection whose only purpose is to help YOU go home. You will know who you are without your judgment, your defenses and your fear. That feeling, however fleeting, will have you so hooked that you will want to practice joining frequently – every time you have a seemingly casual interaction. And when judgment creeps in and you inadvertently offer separation, it will hurt so much that you will instantly choose against the pain.

The Course says "If you would let the Holy Spirit tell you of the Love of God for you…… you would experience the attraction of the eternal. No one can hear Him speak of this and long remain willing to linger here." (T15 IX 5: 1,2.)

Your choice to join will transform your relationships and in your loved ones' faces you will see your own progress. By choosing peace in every situation you will become truly helpful to those around you. You will be letting them know, that they can also choose that peace and love that you feel. Your choice for peace will speak louder than any words. It will be informing everyone around you that there is a 'real alternative' to their suffering and just as you are making the choice for peace, they can make it too.

Since it's Christmas Eve I wanted to share with you the Christmas message on T-15 X. which encourages us to join in celebration:

" Let the Holy Spirit teach you, and let me celebrate your birth through Him. The only gift I can accept of you is the gift I gave to you. Release me as I choose your own release. The time of Christ we celebrate together, for it has no meaning if we are apart.

The holy instant is truly the time of Christ. For in this liberating instant no guilt is laid upon the Son of God, and his unlimited power is thus restored to him. …. And to see me is to see me in everyone, and offer everyone the gift you offer me."

Let us release our brothers from our judgment and join together in celebration. Merry Christmas.

Forgiving our parents: revisiting our self-concept

noreply@blogger.com (Aileen) — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 17:28:00 +0000

I had a very helpful dream about a month ago. I was having lunch with a friend when I noticed my father and his wife entering the restaurant. He saw me from the distance and rushed to greet me. He was visibly happy to see me. From a bag he pulled out a photo album and handed it to me. “This is for you,” he said and walked away.

The album was filled with photos that captured a moment from every encounter we’ve had since I was born until I moved out of Argentina when I was seventeen. It wasn’t very thick since my mother and father separated when I was 10 months old and I didn’t see him at all between the ages of two and sixteen.

As I leafed through the photos, what stood out was the love that I saw in my father’s eyes as he looked at me. As a child, though I tried not to think about it, the feeling I had was that if he loved me, he would make the effort to see me. Even though I had a happy childhood with an excellent mother, a part of me felt abandoned.

At the back of the album there was a scrapbook where my father had pasted articles that appeared in the paper about him including a very favorable eight page biography with photos highlighting his accomplishments. As I began to read, he appeared next to me. Looking into my eyes with a sweet, innocent smile he said: “Can you see me from this perspective?”

The thought that occurred to me as I woke up was that for most of my adult life, I didn’t know who my father was. All I was intimately familiar with were my thoughts about him. For a long time I looked at him and interpreted his actions through a thick layer of beliefs that I had developed about him as a child. Once we have a belief about someone, unless we are willing to re-examine it, it colors our view of them.

His actions only confirmed what I thought I knew about him. Our mind has a way of only noticing what validates our beliefs. Everything else, we literally don’t see. The Course points this out early on in the preface:”What perception sees and hears appears to be real because it permits into awareness only what conforms to the wishes of the perceiver. (Preface X.)”

Though I had a fairly good relationship with my father, a part of me blamed him for having abandoned me and assumed that his having done so had a damaging and permanent effect on me.

Sometime in my middle twenties I began to notice what I thought was the effect of my father abandoning me. I saw that though I outwardly appeared confident and outgoing, I was dependent on people’s love and approval. I needed to be noticed and appreciated and it was difficult to open up to people. I unconsciously feared that once they knew who I really was, they would reject me, just as my father had rejected me as a child. I blamed my father for the fact that physical touch from people I didn't know well felt uncomfortable, almost painful.

It is not uncommon to blame our faults, our reactions, and behavior to the way adults in our lives treated us when we were children. Many other factors like order of birth, social situation, education, religion, also seem to have an effect on who we become. This is obviously true at the level of form – we appear to be; both physically and emotionally, the product of our genetics and our upbringing.

But as long as we blame our parents, or the environment we grew up in for our feelings, defects, shortcomings or our unhappiness, we are tying ourselves to a limited self-concept that roots us in the ego-thought system of separation. The gradual building of a self-concept is the ego’s purpose. The Course tells us that “The building of a concept of the self is what the learning of the world is for.” (T-31 V.1:5) From the moment we are born, we learn who we supposedly are. It’s that identification with the self that prevents us from ever knowing who we are in reality. As long as we continue to ‘learn’ who we are by looking at our past and blaming others, we will strengthen our identification with a false sense of self and continue to live in an illusion. As long as we think we know who we are, the ego is safe.

Forgiving our parents is a first step in the direction of letting go of deeply rooted self-concepts that color the way we see. In the dream, my father urged me to look at him from a different perspective. Forgiveness always involves looking at a person or at a situation from a different perspective. As adults we have the opportunity to re-visit every assumption and interpretation we made as children and look at it through more mature, forgiving eyes.

After a fairly insignificant event, anger which until then had been masked as mild annoyance, surfaced one day in 2002. Before then, I thought I had a good relationship with my father. All the beliefs that I had been unconsciously holding about him rose to the surface and poured out. The pain felt like an open wound that keeps bleeding and does not scar. I knew exactly why I hated him. A trial took place in my mind. My interpretation of every one of our encounters was used as evidence against him. The verdict was that he did not love me and he was responsible for the way I was. If anyone cared to listen, I was able to come up with all the evidence that would prove him guilty beyond doubt.

For a while I paid lip service to wanting to forgive, but the resistance was like a granite wall. A part of me did not want to let go of the pain. That was the first time I became aware of how the ego wants and needs to suffer.

Eventually, I noticed a tiny desire to choose against the pain and the process of forgiveness began. I prayed daily for a change of perspective. I asked the Holy Spirit, which is the memory of God in our minds, for a new interpretation. A six year journey began in which I looked at every assumption, interpretation and story I had made about my father and let it go. I began writing this blog one night last year after one of the many opportunities I had over the years to practice forgiving him. http://forgivingeyes.blogspot.com/2007_09_01_archive.html

Over time, it became clear that the reason I felt abandoned was not because my father left, but because I interpreted his leaving as irrefutable evidence that he did not love me. Through the forgiveness process, I saw that the reason my father chose not to see me was not that he didn’t care about me, but that he was dealing with his own set of difficult emotional problems that prevented him from being there for me when I was a child. I understood that he was doing the best he could. He himself had had a very difficult childhood.

As I forgave my father, I became free from the belief that I needed him to appreciate me and love me in order to be happy, self-confident, or at peace. It became clear that neither his words nor his actions could have an effect on me. It was always my choice to give him that power over me.

Sitting at dinner last week with my father, his wife and their three adult children, I experienced freedom for the first time. We had a delightful evening. My mind was quiet – there was no reaction to anything my father said or did. On the contrary, I felt this gentle loving sense take over me which felt almost impersonal, but thoroughly loving and compassionate. When I spoke, the words came out of this love so I spoke kindly and without effort. I was uncharacteristically interested in what they were saying. I was in the moment, celebrating every story, every joke. We sat around the table having the best time until after midnight. It was as if time stood still.

I was aware of the incredible freedom that comes from being in the presence of someone from whom you don't need anything. As I sat on a stool in the kitchen watching my father cook and later at the table seeing him laugh and talk, I saw only love in his eyes. There were no interpretations, no second-guessing. The fog had lifted and I saw him as he is.

My actions were natural and free. I didn’t need to impress him or do anything to earn his love. I felt loved, not because he loves me, but because love was in me.

“Salvation is nothing more than an escape from concepts” (T-31 V. 14:3)

The perfect set-up

noreply@blogger.com (Aileen) — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 04:38:00 +0000

“Everyone you offer healing to returns it. Everyone you attack keeps it and cherishes it by holding it against you. Whether he does this or does it not will make no difference; you will think he does. It is impossible to offer what you do not want without this penalty. The cost of giving is receiving.” (T-13 III. 5:4-7, italics mine)

Lying in bed unable to sleep a couple of nights ago I noticed myself getting increasingly angry as I thought about my daughter and a situation at school that I’ve been dealing with for over a week. At my daughter’s request, I’ve been trying to set up a meeting with her teachers so that we can look at ways in which she can improve in their classes. My daughter has ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder), which makes it difficult for her to focus and keep on task. It has been my experience that with a little willingness on her part and some minor accommodations from her teachers, she is able to compensate and do fairly well.

The problem is that her teachers have been unresponsive to my request for a meeting. A week and a half after my initial request, I was feeling powerless and frustrated; a victim of the circumstances. I blamed the teachers first for not caring enough and the public school system for offering me no real recourse. There are almost no consequences to a tenured high school teacher who doesn’t do his or her job. I know the system fairly well since I was employed by a public high school district as a teacher for over 10 years.

As I considered the magnitude of my anger, it seemed disproportionate with the size of the problem. Compared to the financial hardship that some people are going through right now, or some of the ongoing atrocities that happen in the world, my pity party over three unresponsive teachers seemed pretty trivial. It was tempting that night to just turn off the light and force myself to sleep, forgetting everything about it.

But having been in this path for a while, I know that covering up anger is not the way to go. Lesson 5 of the Workbook, “I am never upset for the reason I think,” encourages us to practice looking at all the forms of upset, as the same, regardless of their seeming magnitude. To help us prepare for the exercise, the lesson suggests we repeat: “There are no small upsets. They are all equally disturbing to my peace of mind.” Though it appears that it’s the form, or the specific circumstances, that make us upset -- in my case I believed I was upset because my daughter’s teachers didn’t seem to care about her -- in reality, the only real cause of all our upsets is that we are choosing to perceive ourselves as separate from our Source.

By perceiving ourselves as separate bodies – cut off from our Creator -- we live the illusion that we are in exile living in a cruel, dangerous world. The pain and guilt that the separation has caused us is barely hidden below the surface in our unconscious mind waiting for the right opportunity to erupt. In a way, we are looking for excuses, big and small, to project that anger or pain onto others.

Whenever we see the world as threatening, or as the cause of our upset, what we are looking at is nothing more than a picture of our unconscious mind where the guilt and pain over the separation reside. This is why the Text urges us to “See no one, then, as guilty, and you will affirm the truth of guiltlessness unto yourself.” The world provides us with an opportunity to look at our guilt, which is otherwise hidden in our unconscious mind. We see it in our interpretation of the events that we witness or in the people with who we become in contact.

As we recognize that we are not upset because other people make us upset, but because we are looking at them through a thick veil of guilt, we have the opportunity to hand over our faulty perception to the Holy Spirit (the memory of God within us) who through forgiveness will transform it. As we forgive others what we are doing is forgiving the guilt in our own unconscious mind and getting closer to the awareness of who we really are.

By looking at the situations in which we are upset as a mirror of the guilt in our unconscious mind, we begin to recognize that nothing external has the power to take our peace away. One of my favorite quotes in the text is "The secret of salvation is but this: That you are doing this unto yourself," (T-27.VII.10.1)

The Course tells us unequivocally that our anger (frustration, fear, sadness, annoyance, distrust, etc.) is NEVER justified. That does not mean that we should deny our feelings or ignore them or try to stifle them. When we feel them, we simply notice that we must be perceiving with the ego and we forgive ourselves for it. After all, that is what egos do and our goal is not to make our ego better, but rather to withdraw our identification from it.

The reason we don’t justify our anger is that when we blame somebody else for our unhappiness, our frustration, our anger, what we are doing is reinforcing the belief that the world real. For somebody to be guilty, he first has to be real. A character in a dream can have no power of its own to hurt us. If we experience any pain it is undoubtedly because we have given that character power to hurt us within the dream.

So every time we turn on the TV and allow that politician to push our buttons; or when our best friend, our spouse, or our child says something that hurts us; or when we become desperately frustrated because the environment is falling apart; or when we allow our child’s teacher to take away our peace; we are making the world real. We are choosing to believe that there is a power outside of God; that the separation is real, and that the world can have an effect on us.

As seen through the eyes of the ego, the purpose of all problems, no matter how big or small, is to create a perfect set-up for us to fall into the trap of believing that we are separate bodies, subject to powers beyond our control. The problems will come in whatever the most compelling form is for us to believe them. Our kids, our work, our loved ones, our beliefs, the environment, politics, all are suitable subjects and will provide us with plenty of perfect set-ups. Once we fall for the set-up – and we know we have when we feel anger, annoyance, frustration, sadness, confusion, fear, etc – we have fulfilled the ego’s purpose of reinforcing the separation. The ego’s only hope of survival is that we believe the set-up is real and that we react to it. As long as we fight, the ego will remain alive and well.

Forgiveness looks at the set-up, recognizes it as such and does not buy into it. It recognizes it as a dream that can have no effect on reality. The Workbook says that “Forgiveness recognizes what you thought your brother did to you has not occurred,” (W. PII. 1. 1) By forgiving the guilt we see in others, what we are really doing is undoing the guilt in our own unconscious mind. The Course entreats us to “See no one, then, as guilty, and you will affirm the truth of guiltlessness unto yourself. In every condemnation that you offer the Son of God lies the conviction of your own guilt. (T-13 IX. 6: 1,2)”

When we forgive others, we take responsibility for the interpretation we give to what we see. And while the situation may not change immediately, or at all, all the mental effects that we suffered as a result of it – all the anxiety, the anger, the frustration, the sadness – will dissipate and we will experience peace instead.

As I forgave the situation with my daughter’s teachers that night, a sense of love and compassion replaced my anger. I was able to see that these teachers are doing the best they can at the moment and even if it appears as if they are not interested in helping my daughter, it is still my choice to suffer. In reality, nothing has happened except in my mind.

When we met with my daughter’s school counselor yesterday morning, being free from all sense of blame, anger and frustration, I was able to listen to some options I hadn’t considered before. Every decision came easily, inspired by love rather than anger. We were able to come up with a solution that gave my daughter a huge sense of relief. Later yesterday, one of the teachers sent me an email agreeing to meet with me and my daughter today. During the meeting, unclouded by my previous judgment of her, I saw her as she is. Without the past to cloud my judgment, I saw her as loving, helpful and encouraging.

For all I know, this teacher was always the way I saw her today. I may have completely misinterpreted her emails of the past week. What I’ve come to realize is that it does not matter who is right or wrong, or even what happened. Every problem exists first and ONLY in our mind and only there can it be solved.

These ego set-ups when given to the Holy Spirit, their purpose changes. As we recognize them and we pass them over to our right mind for forgiveness, we begin to see people and problems as they are in reality and not as the ego set them up by projecting them into the world (T-27.VII.2:2). Given to the Holy Spirit these set-ups become holy opportunities to inch our way back home.

"Can you imagine how beautiful those you forgive will look to you? In no fantasy have you ever seen anything so lovely." (T-17 II. 1,2 Italics mine)

A Course in Miracles and the Spiritual Experience

noreply@blogger.com (Aileen) — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 21:01:00 +0000

On Sunday before Labor Day as I was going to bed, I plugged my cell phone to its charger and was about to turn it off, as I do every night, when I sensed I needed to leave it on. The thought crossed my mind that as long as my older son is in college (I had dropped him off three weeks before) I was never going to turn off my cell phone at night again. I’m sure you can relate to these small intuitions we sometimes get. They are not that significant, just little previews of the script the Course describes as already past and which we are simply reviewing.

A little after 2:00 AM the phone rang and I wasn’t surprised to see my son’s name on the screen. He has never called me in the middle of the night, but it seemed fitting.

I picked up the phone and right away I noticed that he was excited about something. His first words were “Mom, I know what Love feels like.” He then proceeded to tell me this story.

He was particularly awake that night and had nothing to do so he picked up the copy of ACIM that I gave him two years ago for his sixteenth birthday. (I gave it to him on impulse. I am pretty well aware that the study of ACIM is not particularly suited for young people. At the time, I told him that he could keep it in his bookcase and one day, maybe he would feel inspired to open it.)

As he lay in bed, he opened it and began to read Chapter 1. Though he had never read from it before, it seemed familiar to him. As he read he began to notice his body felt strange. Though he felt his legs on the bed, they didn’t seem to be his legs. His head felt very heavy and when he got to the passage quoted below on p. 10 of the text in the section called “Revelation, Time and Miracles,” he suddenly lost awareness of his body and felt surrounded by total, unconditional Love.

Spirit is in a state of grace forever.
Your reality is only spirit.
Therefore you are in a state of grace forever.

He felt safe and loved, as he has never felt before. He was moved beyond words - he now knew what being in God’s Love feels like. Then he noticed his hands. They seemed very far away and at that point he knew that if he chose to stay in that love, he couldn't be in his body anymore. He felt his heart beat racing with panic and the experience ended abruptly. For a few moments he couldn’t move his body and he had difficulty speaking. He wanted to say something to his roommate, but the words wouldn’t come out coherently and it took several minutes before he could function again. At that moment, in tears, he picked up his phone, went outside his dorm and called me.

As we spoke, he was shaking, but at the same time, was elated by the experience. He asked me: “Do you remember what you wrote as a dedication?” I admitted to him that I didn’t. He said that I wrote, “I love you more than you can imagine.” He said to me: “Mom, I know what that love is – a love that includes everyone and everything.”

We stayed in the phone for a long time. I comforted him as best as I could, trying to get myself (my ego) out of the way. I noticed my mind’s reaction as he spoke and forgave myself for it. By noticing the thoughts that crossed my mind as he spoke, I was able to listen without the ego's agenda. I was conscious of allowing my words to be informed by love rather than the ego.

A passage in the Text came to my mind and I shared it with him: “Fear not that you will be abruptly lifted up and hurled into reality. Time is kind, and if you use it on behalf of reality, it will keep gentle pace with you in your transition. The urgency is only in dislodging your mind from its fixed position here.” (T.16.VI.8:1,2,3) I assured him that he was safe and that he was not required to give up anything. The transition is gentle and gradual.

As I listened to him tell me his experience, I had the feeling that all the work I’ve done over the years to progress on a spiritual path was for that moment -- so that I could be ready for his call.

He drove home from college this past weekend and we spent all of Saturday together. He seemed very calm and introspective. He told me the story again in more detail. I asked him if the experience had had a lasting effect. He said that things didn’t seem as serious anymore. He’s an athlete and results have often seemed important. He said that he didn’t need people’s appreciation as much because he knows “where love comes from.” He also mentioned that in the past two weeks he has often had the impression he’s “seeing from somebody else’s eyes.” He feels more detached. Certain things like having money don’t seem so meaningful anymore.

I’m not sure my son will continue to read or study the Course. If he does, he will someday realize what its practice involves -- a commitment to undoing the ego-thought system one situation at a time. The experience he had may prove to be helpful in that he will have had a glimpse of what the end looks like. But it’s the systematic practice of forgiveness that diminishes our identification with our body and undoes judgment so that we can become aware of the love that is.

The introduction to A Course in Miracles clearly states the purpose of its teachings. It tells us that its purpose is not to teach the meaning of love, but rather to help us identify the blocks that stand in the way of our awareness of love’s presence.

Introduction 1:6 The course does not aim at teaching the meaning of love, for that is beyond what can be taught. It does aim, however, at removing the blocks to the awareness of love’s presence, which is your natural inheritance.

It’s through the practice of forgiveness that we identify those blocks that are hidden in our unconscious mind; and with the help of our right mind we remove them one by one until we become aware of the presence of love that was always there.

Forgiveness is looking at the ego without judgment

noreply@blogger.com (Aileen) — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 13:19:00 +0000

As most of us who’ve studied A Course in Miracles for a while know, forgiveness is its central teaching. It is this practice which helps us, one situation at a time; withdraw our identification with the ego thought system so that we can become aware of our true Self as one Son of God.

As we become committed to the practice of forgiveness, we gradually begin to see everything through its lens. Forgiveness does not require us to do anything differently; it's simply an awareness that looks on what is happening and gently reminds us that what we’re seeing is not real. As Kenneth Wapnick often says, forgiveness is “looking at the ego without judgment.”

For the longest time as a student of the Course I didn’t know how to do this or what it meant. The intellectual understanding of it is helpful to a point, but it’s the practice that brings us the Peace which is our goal as students of the Course. I recently had a day in which I became especially aware of how forgiveness was operating in my mind.

Flying home from a workshop, I wrote in my journal about healing as a shift in perception. I wrote that to be able to experience a healing perception, it’s imperative to let go of the desire to be healed because if we allow the disease or the pain to take our peace we give it power over us by making it real.

As the plane begins its descent a strong feeling of nausea takes over me. In an instant it takes my sense of well-being and peace away. ALL I want is to get rid of this awful feeling.

For a second, I mentally laugh at myself. I realize that I’m not practicing what I just wrote in my journal. I’m feeling sick and I find it impossible to let go of my desire to be well.

When the flight attendant walks by, I call her attention and beg her for a diet coke. I don’t usually drink soda, but in my mind, that coke is going to settle my stomach. (My mother used to put it down a clogged drain, so it has to work on my stomach.)

As I wait for the coke I breathe in and out slowly noticing the nausea and praying I don’t lose it on the guy next to me who is engrossed in a bestselling thriller, completely oblivious to the colorful possibilities. Though I’m not at peace and I have not been able to let go of my attachment to the desire to feel well, I notice that I’m not condemning myself for it either. A part of me has been watching myself indulge in full body-identification without guilt. I’m not trying to change anything. I'm simply watching my ego act like an ego, but I'm not judging. I’m forgiving myself.

It’s as if I were watching the situation on a movie screen. The script has already been written. What’s going to happen is inevitable. Or maybe it’s one of those movies with several possible endings………but all of them have already been filmed. Will drinking a cup of coke help Aileen? Will she or will she not lose it on her seat? How will her neighbor react?

Though the script will unfold as it must, I become aware that though I don’t have control over the ending, I do have one choice. My choice is who I invite to sit next to me to watch the movie with me. It’s either Jesus (or the Holy Spirit), as a symbol of my right mind, or the ego.

Whenever we watch our movie with the ego, we're not really watching it anymore – we're in it, fully identified with the character on the screen. We’ve completely forgotten this is a movie and we think it’s all real and VERY serious. When we identify with the ego, we are the ego. There is no longer that forgiving perspective; we just react to the events of our lives. There is no space or awareness between what happens and our reaction.

It’s only when I watch my movie with Jesus that I gain this forgiving perspective. He’s the one who tells me…. Don’t take it so seriously, it’s just a movie…. and you’ve made it all up because you’re afraid of my Love…….

The coke comes. I drink it slowly and magically the feeling goes away as if it never happened. It served its purpose and now it’s gone.

Just a couple of hours later, I’m at my son’s last high school baseball game. He bats fourth, and it’s his turn to bat. After a couple of practice swings, he’s ready.

He has had a tremendous season. He’s ranked in the county, first in his league. Every at bat counts. There’s a guy in first base and two outs and as he swings, I mentally take a step back and I become aware of how much I want him to hit the ball. I can taste the elation of it flying high above the third baseman for a double. My peace and happiness at that moment are totally dependent on his hitting the ball – not for me, but because I want him to be happy.

He swings in the air and misses the ball completely. I feel it in my gut.

My son is ready to hit again and again I notice how much I want him to hit the ball. I’m totally attached to the outcome of this at bat. I WANT to see him running to first base. If I could will him there, I would.

Yet, I’m still watching my movie with Jesus next to me and I’m fully aware that this desire, like any want or desire in the world is costing me the Peace of God.

He swings and misses again.

He swings a third time and for the first time this season, he strikes out. I see a brief wave of disappointment cross his face and a part of me sinks.

As he’s walking back to the dugout, I mentally ask for a change in perception. I can feel how much this desire has cost me. But as much as I ask for a shift in perception – as much as I’m paying lip service to wanting peace – I know that on this day at this moment, I don’t really want it. I notice it in my body. It’s subtle, like drizzle slowly showering my skin. It’s fear. It has a soft paralyzing effect – like the inset of a panic attack.

It’s fear of not having a body that can go to baseball games. This is fun, I tell myself. It’s also insane! And I sort of see that, but having emotions is fun. I’m addicted to the uncertain, to the ups and downs of life. I see clearly how we are all confused when we believe we are enjoying what is really the excruciating pain of being separated from Love.

This fear we all encounter as we progress in the practice of this Course, is what the Course calls resistance. It's the secret wish not to make progress. It's resistance to the Love of God which we think will swallow up our individuality. This fear is inevitable because while our right mind is committed to the Course, the ego is terrified of our progress. To the ego our success is its demise.

Chapter 30 tells us that if we find resistance strong we should not "fight it.” So I don’t fight it. With Jesus still at my side, I simply watch myself not want the peace of God. Forgiveness is stepping back and watching ourselves choose the ego without judging ourselves for it. Jesus says that forgiveness “is still and quietly does nothing….It merely looks and waits, and judges not.” (W-pII 1: 4:1-3)

Through the lens of forgiveness we can look at ourselves with kindness, compassion and love because with Jesus at our side we are able to see that none of the feelings we’re feeling through our temporary identification with the ego are real. No situation has had any effect on Who we really are. We remain One innocent Son.

With Jesus holding my hand, I watch Aileen on the movie screen suffer because she loves being a body watching her son on his last high school baseball game. I watch her fear – her resistance to Love. And I forgive her for wanting this human experience so much.

Beyond Pain

noreply@blogger.com (Aileen) — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 12:21:00 +0000

I’ve been in one kind of pain or another for most of the last two years. Most of it is sports related. It started with a condition called "tennis elbow," which lasted for about four months. When I recovered, I then I stretched a tendon on my left shoulder. Once that healed, I hurt both my Achilles tendons, then had plantar fasciitis, and the most recent one, since last October, is a intermittent lower back/hip pain that seems to move from one place to another.

I dropped off my son at school last Friday -- I’m in Buenos Aires and he’s taking Spanish classes for three weeks – and decided to run some errands before I picked him up. I had a lot of walking to do and as I walked, I noticed a burning feeling in my lower back and my left knee.

When this sequence of injuries began two years ago, I was frustrated and often made myself miserable thinking that this should not be happening to me. Until then, I had never experienced any chronic pain. Naive as it may sound, I thought I was invulnerable to it or that if I ever had to deal with pain, that because I'm mentally tough and prepared for it, I would be able to heal right away.

The more I fought the pain mentally, the more conscious I became of it, and before I knew it it was interfering with many of my activities. My days became colored by the level of pain I felt.

Looking back, I can say the experience has been most humbling and helpful and I wouldn't have it any other way. If I’ve learned anything over the last two (painful) years is not to fight pain. My purpose is no longer to heal the body, but rather to withdraw my identification from it.

While I may or may not, according to what I feel at the moment, take material steps to alleviate the pain (this is what the Course calls “magic”), mentally, I’ve learned that I feel less anxiety and less pain when I accept it as it is. After all, I am identified with a body. Discomfort, whether it's physical or psychological, comes with the territory. Watching the pain come and go without resistance or judgment is the key to diminishing our identification with the body.

As I walked through the narrow streets of downtown Buenos Aires, the pain became particularly intense. Both my lower back and my knee throbbed. I walked slowly and with difficulty. I felt crippled. Unable to finish the block I went into a cafe and sat down.

I watched my mind fight the pain and become lost in it and then become conscious again as I let go. Eventually, I settled into peaceful acceptance. I remembered one of my favorite lines in the Workbook Lesson 135:18-1, “What could you not accept, if you knew that everything that happens, all events, past, present and to come are gently planned by One Whose only purpose is your good?”

A non-dualistic God doesn’t really have a Plan. The Course often comforts us with the use of anthropomorphic language to describe god, but it’s meant to be taken metaphorically. It's the way by which the Course is able to reach us at the level we are at. There is, however, an atonement path for each of us. That path is exactly what happens in our lives. Each situation is a lesson in a perfectly crafted curriculum. There are no mistakes. As students, our job is to forgive, not to argue with the lessons as they come.

Sitting at a table now sipping a nice cup of coffee with milk, I watched the pain come and go. If you’ve ever watched yourself think or feel, you know that once you begin to watch yourself do something, you can’t be fully identified with it. You’ve become the conscious observer. As I looked at the pain without judging it (that's what forgiveness is), for a moment, I felt who I am beyond it. It became clear that this aching body was not who I am. I laughed out loud.

In the middle of the worst pain I’ve had in a while, I was suddenly happy. The pain didn’t stop, but it ceased to be the focal point of my awareness. My mind was no longer consumed with it. As I looked around the cafe I had the feeling I was seeing through a veil. The images beyond the veil didn't seem so real and important anymore. The Joy I felt came from the awareness that I wasn't there. I remembered Ken Wapnick's seminar entitled "Finding Joy in a Joyless world," where he quoted this line from the Text CH6-II:6 “How else can you find joy in a joyless place except by realizing that you are not there?"

I walked out of the cafe and continued with my original plan -- the pain there, but my mind completely clear of it. I walked around for a whole hour until I picked up my son.

I came away from the experience with a deeper understanding of what acceptance is. It’s simply allowing the body to feel like it will, but mentally withdrawing my identification with it. It’s knowing that my body can feel as it pleases, but it does not have power to cut me off from my source of joy and peace.

Leafing through “A New Earth: Awakening to your life’s purpose,” by Ekhart Tolle last night, I found this on p. 78 “What is spiritual realization? The belief that you are spirit? No. That’s a thought. A little closer to the truth than the thought that believes your are who your birth certificate says you are, but still a thought. Spiritual realization is to see clearly that what I perceive, experience, think, or feel is ultimately not who I am, that I cannot find myself in all those things that continuously pass away.”

Yesterday, I woke up free of pain. I can’t say the pain won’t come back, but right now, it doesn’t seem as important. The lessons will come and they will stay for as long as I need them. True healing is always of the mind.

Living for enlightenment

noreply@blogger.com (Aileen) — Thu, 22 May 2008 13:32:00 +0000

I was in a workshop on listening earlier this month and during one of the discussions, the facilitator mentioned that when he plays golf, he doesn’t play for scoring; he plays for enlightenment. Instead of focusing on the score, he uses the game for the purpose of awakening. (Golf for enlightenment is the title of a book I haven’t read by Deepak Chopra)

As he was speaking, the thought came to me: “This is what I do: I don’t live for scoring, I live for awakening.” At some point during my years of practicing A Course in Miracles, I experienced a shift in purpose: from the ego’s purpose of separation, to the right minded purpose of forgiveness. As we practice and study ACIM, this shift is inevitable. When we practice forgiveness throughout our day, our purpose will eventually shift from trying to solve situations to our advantage to using the situation as an opportunity to undo the ego thought system with which we identify. Under the guidance of our right mind, we stop scoring and our purpose becomes awakening.

The concept of purpose is central to the teachings of A Course in Miracles. The word “purpose” appears 667 times; twice as many times as the world “miracles.” The Course says that the only question we should ask of any situation is “What is it for?” Only when we understand the underlying purpose for everything, can we use it for awakening.

Most of us begin our lives living for scoring. As we face new situations, we measure, compare, assess, categorize, evaluate, and then we solve the situation in a way that protects our best interest. We judge our worth by how successful we are at solving problems to our advantage and we are totally attached to results. Our purpose is do ‘do well,’ ‘to make it,’ ‘to get ahead.’ Our sense of self-worth depends on how well we score and our peace and happiness depends on our results. The purpose of our life becomes to score higher for ourselves, or for our group – our family, our church, our cause, our political party, our country and someday maybe even our planet. Scoring is based on judgment and it’s a full-time job that keeps our mind busy, completely unaware of our true nature in oneness with God. That is the ego’s purpose.

When we live for scoring, we define success by how close our results match our expectations. We are happier when we get what we want; we are unhappy, disappointed, sad, fearful, angry, apprehensive, annoyed, when what we see in front of us does not match what we think our lives should be. We are constantly arguing with reality. If what we are experiencing is not what we expect, we focus on changing our experience because we believe that we can only be happy when we get what we want. We drive our lives according our own judgment, unaware that we are serving the ego’s purpose.

At some point, if we continue to practice our forgiveness lessons, we may become subtly or overtly dissatisfied. We may begin to question the purpose of our life. Is life really about getting our way? We begin to notice that the happiness we experience when we get what we want is temporary. The next obstacle always seems to be around the corner. Or maybe we are getting what we want and we are still not happy. As long as we believe we know what life is for, the Holy Spirit’s purpose of awakening remains dormant in our minds, but as soon as we begin to realize that maybe we don’t have a clue what life is for, it surfaces.

Sometimes this shift is abrupt and can cause temporary confusion.

Chapter 17 talks about the effects this shift in purpose has on relationships as the Holy Spirit’s new purpose replaces the ego’s purpose.

When we offer a relationship to the Holy Spirit to use for His purposes the Course says (T CH 17 V 3:2) ….. “At once His goal replaces yours. This is accomplished very rapidly, but it makes the relationship seem disturbed, disjunctive and even quite distressing. The reason is quite clear…….In its unholy condition, your goal was all that seemed to give it meaning. Now it seems to make no sense.”

As the Holy Spirit's purpose takes over, we may become confused because suddenly all the goals we held dear for so long, are no longer appealing to us.

I experienced something like this three years ago. I was studying and practicing the Course more than ever before, but the more I practiced, the unhappier I seemed to be. It didn’t make sense at the time that as I increased my commitment to the Course, my interest in living decreased. While in the past I had been a doer, always enthusiastic about the next project or idea; I now couldn’t find fulfillment in any of my accomplishments. I was no longer enthusiastic about finishing projects, making money, raising kids, traveling, etc.., I still did everything that was required of my role – nobody noticed anything different about me -- but, I wasn’t happy. I felt trapped in the illusion and all I thought I wanted was to awaken from the nightmare.

A very perceptive friend suggested a Workshop called “Leading With Mastery.” “It’s a four day workshop where you are called to articulate your life purpose,” she said. Without asking any questions I bought a ticket to St. Louis where it was offered, and enrolled.

I won’t describe the workshop because it’s beyond the scope of this post, but I’ll share that I came away with a strong, lasting, sense of purpose that has kept me going until this day. By becoming aware of my purpose, I found my Joy again. There’s not a day that I don’t wake up looking forward to the opportunities for growth that it will bring.

I learned that purpose is the lens by which we filter our experiences. Purpose is what gives meaning to our life. As we face any situation in the world, we can choose to see it through the ego’s lens or the Holy Spirit’s. T CH 26 VII 8:5 says that “Forgiveness is the only function here, and serves to bring the joy this world denies to every aspect of God’s Son where sin was thought to rule.” When we choose the Holy Spirit’s purpose of forgiveness, we can use our life as a means of overcoming the illusion. Every adversity looked at through Holy Spirit’s lens of forgiveness, becomes an opportunity to let go of our identification with the ego thought system. We begin to see that whatever is happening in our lives has no effect on who we really are. Through our adversities we find our way home.

Since scoring is no longer our goal, we don’t focus on solving situations. Through the Holy Spirit's eyes we see there is nothing to solve -- because what's in front of us is just a screen; a projection of the guilt that is the result of our belief that we are separate. Our job is to forgive every problem or person that shows up is our lives so that one situation at a time, we forgive ourselves and awaken to the knowledge that we are One.

This shift in purpose is one hundred percent at the level of mind. It’s only concerned with our focus, not with our behavior. We are not doing anything differently than we would normally do. We are not required to change jobs, relationships, activities, hobbies because one situation is just as good as any other to forgive. One activity is not holier than another. It's our purpose that makes everything we do -- whatever it is -- holy. We can be taking out the trash, or waiting in line with the Holy Spirit or with the ego. That is our only choice.

Any time we focus on changing the form a lesson takes, we give it power over our peace and happiness and by doing so we fall back into the ego’s purpose which is to root us further in the dream.

When we are anchored in the Holy Spirit’s purpose of forgiveness, our actions become inspired by the Divine. Our life appears to be easier, more relaxed. It feels as if we're hitting from the sweet spot. Problems still show up, but we don't take them seriously because they have no power to take our peace. The solutions we come up with are led by the Holy Spirit's Love that we are beginning to identify with. We experience peace of mind because our mind is no longer busy seeking to separate. Through the Holy Spirit’s purpose we see an underlying connection between all people as we recognize that we all share a common interest.

Instead of a battleground, the world becomes a classroom. We see each encounter and every situation as a lesson that can lead us out of the illusion. We accept the lessons in the form that they appear because we know we have chosen the curriculum to suit our needs and we trust that there can be no mistakes.

This quote from Ch 24 VI: 4 sums it up. Note that whenever the Course refers to “healing,” it’s the healing of the mind that thinks it’s separate, not the body.

"Forget not that the healing of God’s Son is all the world is for. That is the only purpose the Holy Spirit sees in it, and thus the only one it has. Until you see the healing of the Son as all you wish to be accomplished by the world, by time and all appearances, you will not know the Father nor yourself. For you will use the world for what is not its purpose, and will not escape its laws of violence and death. Yet it is given you to be beyond its laws in all respects, in every way and every circumstance, in all temptation to perceive what is not there, and all belief God’s Son can suffer pain because he sees himself as he is not."

For another post on the subject of purpose click on the following link: http://forgivingeyes.blogspot.com/2008/01/living-on-purpose-egos-or-holy-spirits.html

Finding Joy in the way things are

noreply@blogger.com (Aileen) — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 23:17:00 +0000

Our kids are out of school this week so we drove up to Park City for a week of snowboarding. I used to ski, but two years ago I decided to join the rest of the family and try snowboarding. I LOVED it. After three days of snowboarding school I was doing it – not fast or with total confidence, but I could ride slowly down the mountain turning both ways and falling only occasionally.

My budding confidence collapsed when I took a bad fall snowboarding on a very crowded day at our local mountain last February. I got distracted as someone passed by me going fast and fell hard on my left shoulder. The fall left me with a stretched ligament, and for over two months I wasn't able to swing a tennis racquet using my left arm.

At Park City, I had decided I was going to stay at the condo while everybody else went snowboarding. I was looking forward to some quiet time. But as I watched my husband and the kids getting ready on the first day, a part of me wanted to be there, so I decided to go with them.

Going up the lift I noticed fearful thoughts creeping up. Thoughts like “You're crazy,” “You don’t even remember how to do this,” “You'll hurt yourself," "You should go back to skiing,” took over my mind.

I got off the lift okay, but as we were ready to begin our first run, I slid forward a couple of feet and fell. I lay down, mentally paralyzed – all knowledge of how to ride, erased from my mind. The fearful thoughts came again “You can’t do this. You’ll break a bone and ruin your tennis season. You’re too old to learn something new….” In the distance, our kids expertly rode down the mountain, but my husband waited for me. I told him to go ahead – I would manage eventually, but he wouldn’t leave me, so I had to deal with it right away.

I’ve been reading “A Thousand Names for Joy,” by Byron Katie. I love the subtitle: “Living in Harmony with the Way Things Are.” Progressively, over the past year I’ve been moving into the space of acceptance. Rather than trying to change and control my experience, which is what the ego wants to do, I’ve been practicing accepting the way things are. I've noticed that when I let go of my desire to manage the outcome of every situation, there is a certain order that surfaces and as I'm in harmony with the way things are, I feel more peaceful and happier. This doesn't mean I don't take whatever actions are needed. It's just that mentally, I don't desire things to be different.

On p. 44 Katie says "When you have what you want - when you are what you want - there's no impulse to seek anything outside yourself. Seeking is the movement away from the awareness that your life is already complete, just at it is. Even at moments of apparent pain, there's never anything wrong or lacking."

In her book, Katie teaches how we can put an end to our feelings of fear and anxiety by questioning the thoughts which produce them. By questioning our thoughts, they lose their power to cause us pain. As we live in harmony with the way things are, we tap into the underlying joy that exists beyond all the stressful thoughts. This Joy is always available to us no matter what experience our life brings. This Joy is who we are.

Sitting on the snow it was easy to see that the feelings I felt: fear, anxiety, stress, apprehension, remorse, were all caused by thoughts which I believed were true about me. I could clearly see that these thoughts were not helpful so I decided to question them. I stood up and let myself slide down a few feet. The fearful thoughts came back instantly: “I’m out of control; I don’t want to get injured.” I felt my body tighten as fear seemed to shoot up through my blood. I fell again.

I tried Katie’s four questions and "the turnaround," “Is that really true?” I asked. “Can you absolutely know that it’s true?” And then, “How do you react when you believe that thought?” Followed by “Who would you be without the thought?”

Was it really true that I was out of control? What is control, but an illusion that I am separate and in control of my own life? Can I ever really be separate or in control?

I’m afraid of falling. Is that really true? I’m only afraid because I have judged falling as bad and undesirable. What if I lived in harmony with the way things are? And like a child, I enjoyed the feeling of tumbling in the snow. How would I be without the thought of fear? I’d be relaxed and unafraid. I would know that my joy does not depend on my staying upright.

I stood up and continued. I focused on the beauty of the snow and trusted that even if my mind seemed to be caught up in insecure thoughts, my body remembered how to ride. I rode down gracefully turning one way and the other.

As the sun peeked through a cloud, the thought came: “It’s too bright and I can’t see the variation in slope or texture of the snow. If I can’t see well, I will surely fall.” Again, I felt the fear tensing up every muscle. I questioned again. Can you absolutely know that it’s true? Not really, if I focus, I can see well enough. It’s the fearful thoughts that are taking my focus away. What if I chose not to believe that thought? How would I feel? I would accept the conditions as they are and not feel the stress that thinking about them is bringing me.

Again I felt free. And then it got steeper – Ah! A blue run. I can’t do blue runs, I’m a beginner. Is that really true? I asked. Not really…… Oops, I’m going too fast! Can I absolutely know that it’s true? I can’t. What is ‘too fast’? It’s a judgment based on my own perception. There are dozens of snowboarders passing me who ride twice as fast. Who would I be without the thought? I might actually be free to explore going at increased speeds without the limiting thoughts holding me back.

I continued down the mountain questioning every thought and as I discredited the stressful ones, I noticed myself becoming grateful for the experience as it came. I was no longer expecting the experience to be a certain way in order for me to enjoy it. I stopped judging how well I was doing, or how good the conditions were. Instead, I noticed the snow in all its radiance and the view in front of me appeared more majestic than it ever seemed before. I felt present in my body and my muscles did what they needed to do without my micro-managing every motion. Free from distressful thoughts, I was able to enjoy the experience more fully. A feeling of joy began to rise in me.

I reached a flat area at the bottom of the hill and unexpectedly caught an edge and fell. As I was falling I smiled and welcomed the experience. There are no accidents. We always are exactly where we need to be, ready to learn what we need to learn. I took a deep breath and enjoyed the rest for a few minutes. Even if I injured myself, could that experience to take away my Joy? Can I really forget who I AM?

As a student of A Course in Miracles my purpose is to use every situation that comes my way as a means to regain awareness of who I am. It is always my choice to allow a situation to keep me trapped in a mindless, painful state of mind. Alternatively, we can all choose to look at our situations with our right mind and while the situation may not change, our stressful thoughts about it will be replaced by a deep, abiding, sense of peace.

I went up and down with the kids many more times and had a blast. I can’t say I didn’t fall. I fell a few times, but by questioning the thoughts that suggested falling could upset me, I didn’t experience it as traumatic.

Throughout the day as I encountered many new situations: increased speed, flat surfaces, moguls, a daughter yelling “Mom;” from the lift as I’m concentrating on riding on the run under it; a group of teens zipping by too close and splashing snow all over me, etc. etc, the fearful thoughts kept popping up, but as I questioned them, their power over me diminished and as I was no longer subject to them, what was left was pure Joy.

A lesson in listening

noreply@blogger.com (Aileen) — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 13:09:00 +0000

I am so humbled by an experience I had recently.

Thinking I was being helpful, I offered feedback to a dear friend which turned out not to be helpful at all. My comments were based on my understanding of A Course in Miracles. As Kenneth Wapnick would say, I hit my friend over the head with the Course, deluding myself into thinking that I was acting out of love.

The knowledge that I had acted inappropriately threw me into one of the biggest episodes of guilt and self-condemnation I’ve had in a long time. The idea that I could have caused somebody else harm, hurt more than if somebody else had tried to hurt me. For several days all I could do was watch myself feel guilty. My biggest question was: how could this have happened to me?

I was mentally stuck reviewing the situation in my mind wishing I had acted differently. Through my insanity I could see how I had succumbed to the ego’s purpose, which is to keep us always focused on external situations. Eventually, though I was still tearing-up every time I thought about the situation, I was able to recognize that at least I could turn this into a useful lesson.

Listening to one of my favorite workshops on tape by Kenneth Wapnick called “Healing: Listening to the Melody,” I saw that what was hurting me was a judgment I had made on my friend. Instead of listening to him, my mind had been busy analyzing what he said. I was filtering his words through my own understanding of the Course. I was so concerned with his getting what I thought was the right interpretation, that I failed to remember that if I saw a lack in him, it was only because there must have been a lack in me. What we perceive in others is always a mirror of our own state of mind.

In the workshop Ken talks about learning to listen for the melody of Love which we all share. It becomes audible only as we are able to see others past our judgment. When we are busy reacting to what people are saying or doing; when we focus on our differences, or we contrast their beliefs and understanding with our own; we are listening to the ego’s discordant notes which become barriers to our perception of the underlying melody of Love.

A pre-requisite for listening is to let go of all our needs and attachments. As I looked back at the situation with my friend, I noticed that I had a huge investment in having him see the Course the way I do. I was so focused on what I perceived as his gaps in understanding - and I so wanted to help him see what I'm seeing - that I failed to notice how I was giving power to my incorrect perception of him to take away my peace. Instead of listening for the melody of Love that unites us, I was actively looking for differences between us.

A sure sign that I was acting with my ego was the guilt I felt. The Psychotherapy pamphlet on p. 17 says: “Guilt is inevitable in those who use their judgment in making their decision. Guilt is impossible in those through whom the Holy Spirit speaks.”

In "Healing: Listening to the Melody," Ken Wapnick points out that the way we teach in this Course is not by explaining it to others, but by our own choice for peace. As we choose not to allow situations in the world to take away the peace of God from us, we are demonstrating that there is a real alternative to the conflict and pain of the world.

I spent the day in Temecula last Tuesday at the Foundation for A Course in Miracles at a workshop by Kenneth Wapnick. Ken suggested we not give advice based on the metaphysics of A Course in Miracles. He said to do it based on the Love of A Course in Miracles. Whenever we are in a situation in which we are called to help someone or give advice, we don’t have to worry about the form that our response will take; once we connect with the Love in our right mind, that Love will flow through us and translate into the specific help that is most appropriate and at the level that the recipient can understand.

As we listen to our family members, friends, co-workers without the ego’s agenda of comparison, separation, blame, and conflict, we will hear the melody beyond the discordant notes. The Psychotherapy Pamphlet says “Who then decides what each brother needs? Surely not you, who do not yet recognize who he is who asks. There is Something in him that will tell you, if you listen. And that is the answer, listen. Do not demand, do not decide, do not sacrifice. Listen.”

Healing and Prayer

noreply@blogger.com (Aileen) — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 14:59:00 +0000

It is natural for me to turn within for healing. I was brought up to believe that sickness is not of the body, but a decision made by the mind. I first became aware of this at Christian Science Sunday school as a young teen in Buenos Aires.

To most people who are not on a metaphysical path, the idea that sickness is mental may seem radical; after all, all evidence suggests the contrary. What hurts us always seems to come from outside of us. But the world is a manifestation of thought. This means that whatever beliefs or thoughts we hold, consciously or unconsciously, make the world as we experience it. Similar to a dream, where the dreaming mind is the source of what occurs in the dream, as a collective ego, we project the world we see. Mary Baker Eddy, founder of Christian Science, taught in the late 1800s that the universe is “the outward condition of your inward thinking.”

Last February, I went to Hawaii with my sister to visit my brother. At the beach one day, my sister noticed a cyst in my lower back. I put my hand to it and noticed there was a protruding mass of some sort. It wasn’t huge, but definitely noticeable.

Back home, I developed an obsession with it. It was the first thing I looked for as I woke up in the morning. My hand could reach back and touch the exact spot where it was. I noticed it in the mirror and also caught myself thinking about it several times a day. After a few months a few fearful thoughts began to creep into my mind.

I tried praying, but I fell into the trap of believing in what the Course calls “order of difficulty in Miracles.” It’s the erroneous belief that there is a hierarchy of illusions, making some harder to heal than others. While I was sure I could heal from a cold, or a sore throat, a growth seemed too solid and permanent.

So I decided to see a doctor. It felt a little vain for wanting the thing removed and awkward, especially because I hadn’t seen a doctor since my last child was born 10 years before, but I went anyway.

After measuring the growth and taking copious notes, the doctor said he could remove it and agreed to submit the request to my insurance which, of course, declined to pay for the surgery unless I went through more tests.

I’m not opposed to tests. Someday, I may decide that I want them and it won’t make a bit of difference. We are all heavily identified with our bodies. Just as our bodies need water, food, oxygen, warmth – all external things we believe we need to survive; one day, I may decide that I need medicine to live just a little longer.

But as I looked within for guidance on that particular day, I couldn’t see myself going through it. I remembered this passage from the Manual For Teachers page 18:2:5:

“Who is the physician? Only the mind of the patient himself. The outcome [whether the patient heals or not] is what he decides that it is. Special agents seem to be ministering to him, yet they but give form to his own choice. He chooses them in order to bring tangible form to his desires. And it is this they do, and nothing else. They are not actually needed at all. The patient could merely rise up without their aid and say, "I have no use for this." There is no form of sickness that would not be cured at once.”

So when I got home that day, I knew I needed to take a stand. I was either going to go back to the doctor and follow his recommendation, or I was going to handle my thought.

Re-reading the “Song of Prayer” Pamphlet, I realized that I was bound by my desire to see my body free of the cyst. I was basically believing that in order to have peace the cyst needed to be gone. Page 2 of the pamphlet says: “The secret of true prayer is to forget the things you think you need.….Also in the same way, in prayer you overlook your specific needs as you see them, and let them go into God’s Hands. There they become your gifts to Him, for they tell Him that you would have no gods before Him; no Love but His. What could His answer be but your remembrance of Him? Can this be traded for a bit of trifling advice about a problem of an instant’s duration? God answers only for eternity. But still all little answers are contained in this.”

I had heard Gary Renard talk about this “True Prayer” mentioned on the pamphlet at a seminar once. He had suggested we practice it for 30 days and see the change in our lives. Though God is not aware of our material experiences in the world; he only sees us Perfect and in His image and likeness, when we connect with Him, it is inevitable that our experience of the world will change.

Gary instructed the group to get into a meditative state and then imagine a bright welcoming warm light. He said it might be useful to think of Jesus, as a symbol of our joining with the right mind, leading us to an altar where we place one by one all of our desires, needs and attachments. (If I were to do this right now, I’d be placing on it my family, my tennis racquet, my work, my copy of A Course in Miracles, this blog, my laptop and the story I think I want to write.)

The altar, which is mentioned in many places in the Course, is the symbol for the decision maker -- the part of the mind which moment to moment chooses to identify either with our right mind, also called the Holy Spirit or Christ, or our wrong mind, the ego. As I place all my desires and attachments as gifts on the altar, what I'm saying is that I am willing to let go of all idols which stand in the way of my experiencing God. The altar then disappears as does Jesus (if we choose to take his image with us) and all that is left is our desire to experience ourselves as one with God. We then wait in quiet until He appears. (In reality he doesn't appear, He is always there. We just become aware of His Presence in us.)

In practice, it’s not as easy as it sounds. Some days, I notice huge resistance in the form of aggressive distracting thoughts. It might take an hour in the morning just to achieve a few seconds in the Presence of God. Most days, I never get to that place, but that occasional day when I do, makes all the others worth it.

After the mind is quiet and I’ve invited Jesus to join me, I place my attachments on the altar, and then he leads me to Him. I wait in quiet focusing only on my desire to feel His Presence. Suddenly, I become aware of an overwhelming sense of total release; like rest after a hard, arduous journey. I feel light as the veil of judgment dissipates and for a second, I know I am loved. The joy brings tears to my eyes. It’s a kind of joy that has no equivalent in human experience. It’s suddenly clear how much effort it was to be separate and how natural it is to be One. I feel an enormous sense of compassion and forgiveness that starts with me and embraces everything I’ve ever come in contact with and then all images and words fade and for a few seconds, I AM.

On the days where resistance is strong and I can’t get past it, I’ve learned to succumb to it. Resistance is fear of awakening. To our ego, oneness with God is equivalent to death, so instead of fighting resistance, which would only make it real, (anything we think we have to fight has to be real,) I just forgive it. “I must not want to experience the Love of God today,” I tell myself and just stop there. Other days, it seems natural to want to let go and I do.

Practicing True Prayer changed everything. As I became more in touch with His presence in me, the urge to look at my back gave way to a trusting feeling of peace. I didn't look because I was no longer attached to having a particular result. On occasion, I would notice the cyst, but it didn’t seem as important anymore. If I had to live with it for the rest of my life (or as bizarre as this may seem, if it killed my body,) it didn't matter too much. My peace came from myself and not from my body.