You are currently browsing the monthly archive for February 2008.
This morning, as I’m sitting here at my laptop drinking some coffee, I am suddenly struck by another metaphor I find very helpful in terms of how to think about the Course’s brand of radical forgiveness.
The image that came to me was that of a mural painting. Imaging a huge mural that’s been painted on the side of a building, and its theme is “People in life”. It’s a painting of all sorts of different people, doing what various types of people do in life, being the various ways that people can be. Some are painted to look like happy people, some like angry people, some look like “good” people, some like “bad” people, etc..
Now imagine that one day while walking by, the artist of this mural stops to look at his painting and admire it for a few minutes before moving along. Perhaps he painted this mural not too long ago, and he enjoys coming to look at his work of art from time to time. His eyes first rest on all the “good” people he painted – the people who were painted with smiling and happy faces – and it makes him happy.
Then his eyes move to some of the people whom he painted to look like “bad” or even “evil” people – those who have sinister looks on their faces who perhaps are portrayed as committing crimes and being cruel to others. Suddenly, the artist starts getting very angry at these people in his painting. Standing there on the sidewalk before his mural, he starts yelling at these painted people, shouting obscenities, and telling them to “Go to hell, you bastards!” He then gets so worked up that he starts picking up rocks and throwing them at the “bad people” in the mural, screaming at the top of his lungs that they are not worthy to be in his mural!
Sounds like the artist isn’t exactly playing with a full deck of cards, right? Lol…
Yet, we are all like that insane artist. If you’ve studied the Course for any length of time, I’m sure you can see how this is a metaphor for what we are all continuously doing here in this “mural painting” called the physical world. The moment we chose to betray our Christ Self by taking the ego’s thought of separation seriously, we felt so ashamed by our choice, fearful that God would exact revenge on us, that we suppressed this shame and “painted” a whole fantasy world we could hide from God in. Then we went even further into denial by suppressing the fact that we were the “artist”, so we could blame God and all the fake “people” that we had painted for all the horrible ways we now feel.
So as I go about my day today and everyday, my overall lesson is always to remember that I’m living in a fantasy world of my own invention. I’m full of fear for no other reason than that I’M LITERALLY HALLUCINATING EVERYTHING I SEE. This is the meaning of Lesson 6: “I’m upset because I see something that is not there” (W-pI.6). Unless I’m willing to admit that I am the “insane artist” of this fantasy world I see and ask my Therapist to help me reinterpret it, I will see no other choice than to continually make it real and try to make it “better”.
Did you ever see any episodes of Star Trek where they go on the holodeck? If not, the holodeck was this area of their starship where they could run “simulation programs” of real life situations, where all the “people” were just holograms but would SEEM completely real. For example, you could run a simulation program of a “restaurant on some foreign planet” in order to learn another race’s customs and learn how to interact with them properly. Very cool science fiction stuff…
Well, part of the Holy Spirit’s curriculum for me is to learn that the people I see in my hologram are not real people. They are like fake people in a holodeck. They are images I made up, and they cannot have any effect on me, nor can I have any effect on them, despite appearances to the contrary. Hologram images can seem to fight against other hologram images, but it’s all just a meaningless illusion that is completely fabricated in our split mind.
I learn this by asking my Therapist to remind me of the Love that is waiting for me outside this insane hallucination of a holodeck. I learn this by letting Him show me how miserable this hallucination is making me and how pointless it really is. I learn this by practicing true forgiveness, until my mind learns that I’m not really guilty and that it was just a bad dream…
God is waiting for us to wake up. Our Therapist will not fail. When We wake up from our hypnotic sleep, We will realize that we never left Heaven, but had merely had a bad dream. We will then celebrate in God in utter relief and happiness… laughing and playing in the ecstasy of Heaven’s Playground as the Innocent Child of God We Are…
Why wait? Heaven is available Now…
I think that one of the most important teachings from A Course in Miracles is that this world was not the creation of a loving God, but just an insane dream made up by an unloving ego. “The world was made as an attack on God” (W-pII.3.2:1) the Course teaches, and it is nothing but a “dry and dusty world, where starved and thirsty creatures come to die” (W-pII.13.5:1).
The more I contemplate these things, the less I feel that heavy, burdensome obligation to “be productive”, “be responsible”, or “make something of my life”… all of which have been false ideals I’ve tried to live up to for far too long.
I’m no longer going to let myself get sucked into the ego’s playground. I’m no longer going to play those games. There’s a great book called “How to Win by Quitting” by a spiritual teacher named Jerry Stocking. How freeing that idea was for me.
There’s another great book I read recently called, “Busting Loose from the Money Game”, by Bob Scheinfeld which teaches a similar idea.
The game of physical life cannot be won. The game of trying to make money cannot be won. The game of trying to be responsible and make a good life for yourself cannot be won. It can be played for a long time, but have you ever noticed how there never seems to be a clear winner? And what would winning look like?
As far as I’m concerned, the game is won by quitting, which means realizing that the world is the ego’s playground, and that the only “game” worth playing is that of learning the Holy Spirit’s thought system. To others, it may still looks like I’m playing the worldly game, but that’s only because of Erik’s external behavior still being normal. On the level of the mind, however, I am playing an entirely different game called “waking up”. The only usefulness of this world in the waking up game is in being able to see that which is in my mind appearing as external symbols that I can practice true forgiveness with.
Earlier today I was sitting on my couch meditating, and since I haven’t really done much of anything that my ego would deem valuable today, I started feeling guilty. One of the thoughts I had, for example, was, “Hmmm… maybe I should start working on recording my hypnotherapy CD’s” but I really didn’t feel like it. I just kept sitting on the couch, and as soon as I noticed the guilt, I started thinking, “Okay, what’s a good spiritual idea I can use to remind myself of the truth.”
This is a trap also. Sometimes I’ll get caught in trying to overcome my guilt or heal it myself by thinking of a spiritual idea. It’s like the idea in my last post that there is a spiritual solution to every problem. That’s true, but I’ve noticed that when I start frantically searching my memory for such an idea, it often just increases my anxiety. It’s only when I “quit” and simply ask the Holy Spirit or Jesus to help: “Please help me learn the truth. What is this? How do You look at this?” that I start feeling the peace wash through me.
So as I was sitting on my couch feeling guilty for not being motivated to do anything, this was the process I was going through. Then I was reminded by the Holy Spirit of one my favorite thoughts which comes from a section in the text entitled I Need Do Nothing (T-18.VII).
Now, I realize that Jesus is never talking about behavior in the Course, and it’s really meant to be applied at the level of the mind, YET… if its helpful, this idea can be applied to the body. In truth, it really wouldn’t matter if I just sat on my couch for the rest of my life. Why? Because this life isn’t important. It’s not my real life. It’s a parody of my real life in heaven which is eternal, unchanging, unthreatened, and infinitely blissful.
I just re-read some of that section in the Text (“I Need Do Nothing”) and read these lines in the second paragraph:
“There is one thing that you have never done; you have not utterly forgotten the body. It has perhaps faded at times from your sight, but it has not yet completely disappeared. You are not asked to let this happen for more than an instant, yet it is in this instant that the miracle of Atonement happens. Afterwards, you will see the body again, but never quite the same. And every instant that you spend without awareness of it gives you a different view of it when you return.” (T-18.VII.2:1-5)
Mmmm… such freedom. In the moment that I completely forget about my body (I like to visualize it as a hologram, and then imagine it flickering out of sight along with everything else…) I have accepted a miracle of Atonement, and perfect peace returns, if only for a second.
But this second is enough. It shifts my entire awareness. It heals guilt from my mind that I can’t even see that would otherwise have played out in many painful ways. This one holy instant may have collapsed years of suffering for me – allowing me to skip over lots of ego scripts that may have included painful accidents, diseases, and problems that I otherwise would have had to learn from. In the holy instant, I see that there’s nothing I need to do to save the world… I simply see that there IS no world. Salvation already is.
THIS… is the only game worth playing.
This (or something close to this) was the title of a Wayne Dyer book he wrote several years ago. At the time I saw this book in the bookstore, I thought it was a nice idea, but I was much more into using “mental” solutions to every problem. I considered myself to be spiritual, but I was far more attracted to things like hypnosis, NLP (neuro linguistic programming – a “cousin” to hypnosis), emotional freedom techniques, and other self-development tools.
I finally see, after 4 years of studying the Course, how true that title is. For every wrong-minded belief I hold in my mind that is causing me to see problems “out there”, there is a right-minded idea to correct it.
For example, as my life seems to be moving in the direction of being a spiritual teacher in the formal sense, there is one ego pitfall that I seem to continually fall into: trying to figure out what should I say at my seminars. You see, the problem that I perceive when I’m hypnotized by the ego is that it seems like there are all these people out there who are suffering but who all are suffering from their own separate illusions. Some of these people are more open to radical ideas such as what the Course teaches, and others are less open to ideas like that. Some already believe they are only spirit and that the body is an illusion, while others very strongly believe that they are an innocent victim of the world at large (and they are not open-minded about this). Therefore, in a mixed crowd, what can I possibly say that will be helpful to everyone??
When I conduct a hypnotherapy seminar to help people stop smoking, for example, a part of me wants to tell them that they shouldn’t concern themselves with their physical health, but only with their spiritual health. I want to tell them that they are not bodies, that this world is an illusion, and that the only way out of their suffering is to start practicing true forgiveness. I want to tell them that it ultimately doesn’t matter whether or not they stop smoking, keep smoking, lose weight, gain 100 pounds, start smoking crack, etc… regardless of their behavior, they are still perfectly innocent in the eyes of God.
But the problem I see with saying all this is that these kinds of “spiritual” ideas are not necessarily what these people came for, especially if its just at one of my regular hypnotherapy seminars for smoking cessation and weight loss. And I mean that in two ways. Not only did they not come to my seminar in order to learn spiritual truths (rather, they came to get help with their smoking and eating addictions), but they didn’t come to this world for that either! We all came to this world because we wanted to perceive ourselves as innocent victims. We are here because we want to remain asleep and hypnotized by the idea of separation and individuality.
Now of course the part of me I call my “spiritual ego” could certainly argue with that logic, and it could turn into a lot of “Yes, buts” between my “spiritual ego” and my “practical ego”: “Yes, but more people are now wanting to wake up.” “Yes, but there are no people – it’s just my dream.” “Yes, but in my dream, I still have to decide what to say at my seminars and I want to express my highest truth!” “Yes, but if you just connect with the Holy Spirit and let Him speak through you, you’ll say whatever is most helpful for everyone.” “Yes, but what if I still am afraid of just trusting the Holy Spirit to speak through me – I need to know what I’m going to say in advance… I need a script!” Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah…
So what’s the spiritual solution to this problem of what to say?
Well, when I simply quit trying to find the answer myself and ask the Holy Spirit, the Answer I get tells me this: there IS no problem. It’s just a movie. Stop worrying about such trivial things. There are no people to “enlighten”! They are merely your hallucinations which may LOOK like real people, but which are just meaningless images. It’s completely senseless to try teaching enlightenment to images you’re seeing in a dream…
It makes me think of the following analogy. Imagine a clinically psychotic person at a mental ward who believes he is a “messiah” with many “followers”. Imagine that you work at the mental ward as a psychologist, and you regularly see this man having conversations with people who aren’t really there, preaching spiritual platitudes, and trying to “enlighten” these imaginary people he seems to see so they will become enlightened like him!! If you saw this kind of behavior as a psychologist, what would you think or do?? You could try to convince him that their is no one there and that he’s only hallucinating, but that would just piss him off. He would say, “No, YOU’RE hallucinating! Can’t you see these people need my help!?? I am their messiah, and I must enlighten them!” And you’d walk away shaking your head…
Well, I’m starting to see now that I’ve been like that psychotic man. I believe I am some kind of gifted spiritual teacher, and that I have “followers” who I must enlighten with my words. Otherwise, why would I be writing this article… ;-)
The funny thing is that when I truly realize how insane I am and ask Jesus or the Holy Spirit for help, I suddenly feel bathed in the peace of God. I no longer see any point in trying to heal anyone “out there”… but only to let my mind be healed by Love. That’s the only thing that will save the Sonship, for the Sonship is one, and I’m It.
LOL… God help me! I’m like a mad-hatter…
Perfect stillness. That is the experience I’m having as I realize that this movie I’m watching is completely empty and meaningless. My whole life I thought I was this character named Erik, and I thought that the other characters in the movie were significant. What they thought of Erik was important, and what “I” as Erik did was important. As Erik got more “spiritual”, he thought it was his job to help the other characters in the movie.
Now, as the silent observer of this movie, I realize how ridiculous all of that was and how deeply I was hypnotized by the movie. There’s no one in the movie to save or help. They don’t exist… literally. There is just this Infinite Awareness observing a movie about a guy named Erik, and I have no control over what Erik does or thinks. Nor do I need to.
I realize this is a movie that I wrote the script for. Somewhere in my unconscious mind, I know what is going to happen in the movie because I wrote it. “The script is written.” I’m just watching an old re-run, like an old nostalgic movie I’ve been addicted to for a seemingly loooooong instant. Finally, however, I’m seeing that there’s nothing to get from this movie, nothing to obtain, and nothing to learn except the single lesson of the Holy Spirit which can be expressed in many ways: the movie isn’t real. There is no world. It’s just a hallucination. A bunch of meaningless images. I’m not really here. No one is. God’s Love is waiting patiently for me.
I see now that the entire goal of A Course in Miracles and of practicing forgiveness is to get to this point where the movie is seen as a bunch of meaningless images. Oh my God… such peace. The experience is one of being truly One with the Allness. No fear. Simply the wholeness of Infinite Mind. God, what a ridiculous movie I was hypnotized by.
I know that it’s very likely within the next few minutes, few hours, or definitely within the next few days… I’ll forget this Vision and get sucked back into the plot. Doesn’t bother me. My mind is in the habit now of letting the Holy Spirit interpret things for me most of the time, and very soon I feel, I won’t see any value in the drama of this movie.
It reminds me of people who are addicted to watching soap operas or catching every episode of their favorite show. They are addicted to the drama, in the same way that I am still addicted to the drama of “Erik’s life”.
But more and more it’s losing it’s ability to suck me in. I see now that everytime I get sucked into the movie and get concerned about what might happen to “me”, I’m sacrificing the Call of God. I’m sacrificing Bliss.
Even now, I can feel my ego starting to get vicious. “Okay now, let’s finish this article and do something fun like check my email,” it says in my mind, posing as my own thoughts. It still attracts me, but not as much as it used to. All the guilt in my unconscious mind is being healed by the Holy Spirit, and my fear of God is diminishing. Great peace is returning, and I’m falling into such sweet surrender….
Thank you.
The last couple days I’ve been hanging out with a good friend of mine who I would say has attained a high degree of self-realization. I wouldn’t say he is completely enlightened, but he definitely lives in a timeless realm a good deal of the time. Ha…
At his place, we often sit out on his back deck conversing about metaphysical truths and the higher realms of understanding. Over the past couple of days in our conversations, I started becoming hyper aware of “his flaws” in understanding. He understands deeply the philosophy of Advaita Vedanta and lives it quite well, but because ACIM teaches something quite distinct although similar to Advaita, I noticed my ego-mind reacting a bit.
The temptation I was falling into was one of being the “holier-than-thou” teacher to this friend. I started getting a bit smug and thinking, “Well, if he thinks he’s so enlightened then he’s just living in denial. Too bad for him. Perhaps someday when he’s meant to, he’ll finally realize how much he could have learned from me and will then come knocking.” Ridiculous, right?? But only in hindsight unfortunately… ;-)
Fortunately, I’m learning to catch my ego in its act sooner than later, thanks to my almost constant daily practice of forgiveness for the past few years.
After our conversation had ended and he walked back inside, I was left sitting on the porch alone feeling guilty and anxious. I hadn’t expressed my inward irritation too overtly (perhaps in my facial expressions and tone of voice), yet I’d tried to suppress it and it was now a perfect opportunity to silently learn another forgiveness lesson.
As I sat in my guilt and anxiety, allowing myself to feel them fully and knowing it was due to my own ego attacks, I asked the Holy Spirit for help. After a few minutes of sitting patiently and listening I received a powerful thought that radically transformed YEARS of my erroneous ego thinking. The thought was this:
“Nothing YOU do or say to another person will ever help them to awaken. There’s no sense in trying to wake up a movie character. It’s like trying to teach the figures in your dream that they aren’t really there. Instead, join your brothers OUTSIDE the dream. Then the Truth will speak through you to your Self. But the dream characters will never awaken. They aren’t really there in the first place.”
Wow. All these years I’ve held myself in such high-esteem because I thought I was such a great teacher. And yet, as I’m now learning, there’s no one to teach. I am an eternal student, and never should I try to believe that teaching is my function. To the degree that I give up my own specialness as a Course teacher, I will make way for the Holy Spirit to speak through me… not for the purpose of waking up images, but for the purpose of teaching me to trust Him. That is what leads to Joy.
Ahhh, what humility. What peace. What gratitude…
I thought I’d share a little mental technique I like to use when going about my day. I like to try thinking of everything in this world as being like a virtual reality video game, where the bodies I see are just the characters in the game.
I’m sure you’ve heard of those internet games (I think ‘Warcraft’ is one of the more popular ones, or used to be) that people play from all over the world, where they battle people who are all playing the same game from their home computer. I’ve never played any of these internet games myself but I kind of understand how it works. As I understand it, you sign on to the internet site where the game is, you login, perhaps choose a character, and start playing. You’re character fights other characters in the video game and your goal is to get as many points as you can or whatever…
But now imagine that instead of just watching your computer screen, you actually put on a special headset that makes it seem like virtual reality. So now, it actually seems REAL. It is as if you are looking through your character’s eyes, hearing through their ears, and perhaps in the future they’ll have virtual reality “body suits” where you actually feel physical sensations that mimic what the character would be feeling.
So let’s suppose that you and a bunch of friends all over the country start playing one of these virtual reality video games, but then you get so addicted to it that you actually FORGET that it’s just a game! You totally forget your real identity and start thinking that you’re actually the character in the video game!
Well, that’s what this world is like! We are all like these perfect, infinite Spirits (you could even picture us as glowing bodies of light if that helps) who have all collectively agreed to play a video game called “Life as an Innocent Victim”. We all then forgot we were just playing a game, and now we get really scared when our character is being threatened.
Another similar metaphor that I sometimes find even more helpful is this: Imagine that you and all of your friends go to a movie and then when the movie starts, you each start identifying with a different character in the movie. You then all get hypnotized by the movie, forgetting that it’s just a movie. You and your friends’ faces are transfixed to the screen, each thinking and feeling along with one of the characters in the movie.
Suddenly, you yourself wake up from the hypnotic state and realize it was just a movie. You look around the movie theater, and in the dim light from the screen you see all of your friends who you totally had forgotten about. You had been so caught up in the drama of the movie, but suddenly lost interest in it and now are looking at your friends who are still into the movie. From the look on their faces, you can see they are completely tranced out on the movie, and having all the emotional reactions that they’re character is having.
You see they are experiencing a lot of negative emotions, so you want to help them. You want to go over and wake them up and say, “Hey man! Wake up! It’s only a movie – it’s not real!”, but they don’t want to be woken up. Without coming out of their hypnotic daze their arm just pushes you away, their face still transfixed to the screen.
You might see that one of your friends is identified with a character in the movie who’s about to die. You see your friend is frightened, but you yourself know that he’s not really going to die himself – it’s just the movie character who’s being threatened. You hope that after that character dies, your friend will wake up and stop watching the movie, but no… after that character dies, your friend quickly finds another character in the movie to identify with.
I’m sure you can see the parallels with the Course’s teachings that I’m pointing toward.
The helpfulness that I see in these types of metaphor is that it can help you relinquish all of bodily fears and concerns, both for your own and others bodies. When you see a body getting hurt or even killed in the world, you can possibly remember that that body is actually just a character in a movie, one that your brother has identified with and is hypnotized by. It wasn’t really your brother/friend who got hurt, just the dream/movie/video game character.
And yet, your brother is YOU! There’s no one else out there that you need to wake up but yourself. Going back to the movie theater analogy, it might be more helpful to actually say that when you wake up from the movie, all of your friends wake up simultaneously! You and your friends are really One Mind. It’s kind of like saying that everyone you see is really your Self, but in a past life!
Think about these ideas, and practice seeing things this way. I think you’ll find, as I have, that seeing this way makes forgiveness SO much easier to practice.
I love this idea. The Course teaches that we see only the past. And if everyone we see is really just a thought that we projected, then each “person” I see is “me”, living in a past life. This points towards the truth, yet we rarely think of it that way because we are so addicted to identifying with the person we think we are in this lifetime, or even to the “soul” that has lived many lifetimes.
To flesh out the metaphysics of this truth, and understand it on a deeper level, consider the following teachings of the Course…
In that original, insane moment of seeming separation, the Son of God splintered into billions and billions of fragments, each fragment becoming housed in a body. It doesn’t matter whether that “body” is one that we’d call “animate” or “inanimate”. Within this dream, every fragment of the Christ is seemingly housed in some form.
Also in the original unholy instant, all the scripts of time and space were written. We as the decision making part of the mind, joined with the ego and wrote a COLOSSAL movie full of separate “lifetimes” for each of these bodies. At the same instant, the Holy Spirit corrected all of these scripts, providing the Atonement principle that the separation never happened. We, then, as the one Son of God would always have a choice as to whether to watch these movies with the ego and stay in “hell”, or with the Holy Spirit and return to where we never left in Heaven.
Now, it SEEMS, as if the one Christ Mind splintered into billions of fragments and that each of these fragments would identify with a particular body. For example, I (referring to the fragment of the Christ Mind that I am) at this point in the dream, am identifying with a body named Erik. When Erik dies, if I haven’t forgiven all my unconscious guilt yet, then I will be reborn into another body (and this other body will likely be human, but not necessarily. It could be a rock for all I know…) And before Erik, I was identified with probably hundreds, if not thousands of other bodies in my so called past lives.
But the point I’m getting to here is that even though it seems like I’ve only identified with a particular string of bodies (all my past lives), the truth is that my True Identity as Christ has identified with ALL bodies at one point or another. Therefore, everyone I see is one of my past lives. The reason why everyone is a past life as opposed to a ‘present’ one is because as the Course teaches, everything we see is in the past. The dream has already been corrected. It’s long since over, but we still cling to an old memory because of our fear of the Present.
So perhaps you’ll find, as I have, that it can be VERY helpful to keep this idea in mind as you go about your day. Everyone you see is YOU in a past life. You’ll be more inclined to forgive and be kind, which is the true measure of progress with this Course.
Peace…
I had a humbling realization a few minutes ago. It wasn’t an entirely new realization; I’ve had it before, but each time it occurs it seems brand new, as if it never had occurred to me before.
The realization I’m speaking of is this: All I’ve ever done from my own intellect has merely gotten in my own way.
This is something that must be clarified. It would be easy to contest this idea, but in the moment of Truth, it becomes quite evident that all my past intellectualizing was truly nothing more than hallucinating. In fact, I think the two words are synonyms. Intellectualizing = hallucinating.
In the state of true Awareness, what the Course calls the “real world”, and which could also be called “enlightenment”, it is clearly seen that there was no “I” or “me” to begin with. There is only an experience of an “I”, but that experience is simply the hallucinations. Therefore, anything that the “I” does to try to enlighten itself meets with failure. It is simply spinning its wheels.
The moment of enlightenment comes when the “I” simply gives up and says, “I don’t know.” Instantly, the Holy Spirit can then shine through the mind and shine away all the illusions.
I’ve had this experience many times, but the ego still attracts the mind. I think that enlightenment can occur in any moment that we choose against choosing, or decide against deciding. In that moment, the “I” that we identify with sees its own illusory nature, gives up, and the experience of enlightenment is had by the impersonal awareness.
Yet, this doesn’t mean that the person is now enlightened. I would never say that I am enlightened, because number one, that would be impossible – persons do not become enlightened… they just disappear in awareness. Secondly, until ALL of the unconscious attraction to the ego’s guilt has disappeared through the process of forgiveness, “personhood” still returns again and again.
So while “I” continue learning and enjoying books like A Course in Miracles and talking about it, I now have yet one more experience of realizing that none of it matters. It SEEMS like it’s my intellectual understanding of the Course’s nondualistic metaphysics that is what’s waking me up, but deep inside, I know that’s another illusion. The only difference is that this illusion was a helpful one. It was an illusion that I gave myself in order to make the awakening process less fearful.
