At the end of February I started A Course in Miracles. I had heard about A Course in Miracles over the years but never really paid much attention to it. Then in February Oprah was talking about it and a friend of mine brought a copy to my house and told me I had to read it. And so, I took the hint.
My very first response to the Course: "This is crazy!" According to the Course, that is the ego speaking, trying to get me to stop because study and application of the Course leads to it's destruction.
My next reaction: "If none of the people in my life are really real, and it is just me and God, then this must be a very lonely place, no wonder it created all this." Ego again! And the Voice of the Holy Spirit comes to me in the form of the famous Geoge Michaels song, "You've got to have Faith, Faith, Faith. You've got to have Faith." And so, I'm perserving, and having Faith in the process. I've had enough spiritual experiences in this life to know that sometimes you just have to jump in with both feet and see what happens.
I'm finding the text very hard to follow. However, when I went to Amazon to order A Course in Miracles, another book caught my attention, "Your Immortal Reality" by Gary R. Renard. Thank God I bought that book. He brings clarity, simplicity and understanding to the Course that would otherwise have taken me a very long time to gain. And so, I am reading Gary's book, picking at the text here and there, and trying to do one workbook lesson each day. Well actually each night/day. I ready the lesson before bed at night, ponder it as I nurse my daughter in the middle of the night and read it again in the morning. It works for me.
This brings me to my first realization, or perhaps I should say, re-learning. I've learned this concept before but now I get it on another level. There is a Mayan saying "I am another yourself." However, I decided this is much easier to understand if I rearrange the words a little bit to, "You are another myself." The meaning is the same but the second one I find easier to relate to. You are another myself. According to The Course, this is a dream world which I have created and everyone in it are projections of my unconscious mind and what it thinks of itself. And deeper than that, since we are all One with God, the Holy Spirit that is the real part of each of us is all one in the same. So you are are on one level my own projection of myself, and on a higher level, a part of God and a part of me. So You are another myself and I am another yourself. And that brings me to the Golden Rule, "Do unto others as you would have done unto you." Because when you do unto others, you are really doing unto yourself. Ready for the deeper level, "Think about others as you would think of yourself. Think of yourself as you would think of other."
It is amazing what happens in a week! I'll have to start writting down my lessons and realizations when they happen because now I'm having trouble remembering them all. But I'll do my best, because maybe the way I learn a lesson will help someone else come to an understanding too.
Next came the concern that if I and everything I "know" is not real, then what is and will I like it. Hello Ego! I've had spiritual revelations before. I've had that small experience of the Oneness with God, the perfect wholeness. But in a flash it is gone, and so far it has been hard to hold onto that memory. But from those little experiences, I know it is well worth loosing anything that can be found here on earth. And the "Voice" of the Holy Spirit, which does not always come across as a litteral voice, popped in again to support me. I found another quote which I have learned and even written about before. From "Zen Its History and Teachings" by Osho, "And when you take the jump the first experience is that you are disappearing. The last is that you have become the whole." And right next to that quote was one from the Bible, Matthew 16:25, "For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me [Jesus] will find it." And so, one day at a time, I am disappearing and I am determined to be ok with that because I know what comes next is far better.
Now that I am prepared to lose my self in order to find my Self, it is time to accept that this world in which I live is a dream, my dream. So being a pragmatic sort I again open myself to messages from the Holy Spirit and cast around in my vast learning and experience, for something else to back up this idea so I know I am not being lead astray.
Well, Gary Renard quotes Shakespeare's The Tempest, "We are such stuff as dreams are made of, and our little life is rounded with a sleep."
But I would like to recite for you one of my altime favorite nursery rhymes because deep down, I always knew it was true.
Row, Row, Row your boat
Gently down the stream,
Merily, Merily, Merily, Merily
Life is but a dream.
Well, there you go, what more do I need? I've always understood that physical life is impermanent and that my true identity was in my immortal spirit. But I always thought that physical life was a teaching tool for the spirit, but according to the course it is trap made by an errant thought of separation from oneness, not a pre-requisit class in a divinely designed school. So this new concept will take a bit of adjustment. If I'm caught in a dream wouldn't I know it? Well thanks to two nights of very vivid dreams, I have a point of comparision. In my night time dreams, everything was what I'd consider crazy and illogical when awake but while asleep everything in the dream was completely real, and I accepted it even if I knew it didn't make sense because it was "real" what else was I to do. And so if I apply that same understanding to life, I think everything here is real and there is nothing beyond it because I don't know any better. Some people have learned how to control their dreams or have lucid dreams. And that is what I need to learn how to do while I'm awake, control the dream of my life.
Oh wait, I learned about that last year. This is really starting to come together. Around this time last year, I followed a few other hints, and learned "The Secret." It is the guide book to lucid dreaming your life. Well, if the world, solid and stable, is ephemeral enough to be altered by our thoughts and intentions, it suddenly takes on a more dreamlike quality doesn't it? I've been practicing The Secret intentionally for the last year and have noticed some dramatic effects. Sometimes, I can even see immediate results on small things. The Secret and the Course are not the only places to find this idea. Confucius said, "The more man meditates upon good thoughts, the better will be his world and the world at large." Go Confucius for being ages ahead of the rest of us.
Speaking of ages, according to the course, everything that has ever occurred or will occur in this world all occured in one instant. Time is not linear. Time doesn't even exist. It is just our perception of time that creates a past, present and future. And each of the bodies we've thought we've been born into, and each of the lifetimes we've thought we've lived, including this one have occured similtaniously. And so rather than picturing all my former lifetimes (of which I actually have memories of many) as stretching out behind me, I now envision them as stretching out all around me with my higher Self asleep in the middle dreaming each one at the same time.
