Month: January 2020

Lesson 31: I am not the victim of the world I see.

Pick up any newspaper, visit any news site, heck, spend five minutes on Facebook, and you’ll find a lot of victims in this world. Everyone feels victimized by something whether it’s the government, their family, their friends, their enemies, their leaders. Some even feel victimized by technology and impersonal algorithms.

The ego loves for us to think we’re victims of somebody or something. If we feel that way, we’ll project our pain and blame out into the world, which creates more feelings of victimization and often makes us feel downright smug, seeing others who are far more victimized than we believe we are. Or the opposite – we feel that our suffering is worse than others.

It’s easy to find evidence out in the world that we’re all victims of something, which is why today’s lesson begins with the outside world, advising us to look around us and repeat, “I am not the victim of the world I see.”

We are then invited to “apply the same idea to your inner world. You will escape from both together, for the inner is the cause of the outer.”

Continue reading “AYoMW: Jan. 31, 2020 — Drop the knife”

Lesson 30: God is in everything I see because God is in my mind.

After my first round through the workbook of A Course in Miracles, I decided to try an experiment. If it’s true that God is in everything I see because God is in my mind – and there’s really only one of us here anyway – I decided to go to my local Walmart.

I don’t know about you, but I hate going shopping, especially in Walmart where folks seem to be bound and determined to block the aisles, saunter slowly with their carts and leave you no way around them and generally be obstacles and a nuisance as you attempt to get to the dairy department or the dog food.

This time, however, I was determined to see God in everything at the Walmart – because God is in my mind and if God is my mind, I can project God out here and experience the love of the Holy even in Walmart.

It was a surreal and amazing experience. As I passed each person, I noted to myself, “There’s God in the Walmart.” (I suppose, for all the weird things I’ve seen in Walmart, I could have said this aloud and attracted very little attention!) It felt a little odd at first, but as I continued to do that – silently greeting each person that passed me as God in flesh – my vision truly began to change. I stopped seeing other people as obstacles and began to sense a Holy presence right there in that blocked aisle.

Continue reading “AYoMW: Jan. 30, 2020 — Squinting at the Divine Light in Walmart”

Lesson 29: God is in everything I see.

Some critics of A Course in Miracles call it “spiritual bypass” or “New Age woo-woo,” but fail to understand that many of its concepts and ideas are quite old and are actually nothing new under the sun.

Today’s idea: “God is in everything I see,” harkens back to the concept of “panentheism” which was coined by German philosopher Karl Krause in 1828. He was seeking to distinguish the differences in philosophy at the time between Spinoza, Hegel and Schelling over pantheism.

Pantheists believe that God is composed of all things in the universe, is not personal, and reality and divinity are the same.

Panentheists believe that while God is the soul of the universe and its spirit is infused into everything within it, God still transcends this physical time and space and remains, in many senses, separate.  

The Course leans more toward the panentheistic idea, positing that while God infuses everything in this physical realm – including tables, politicians and tax collectors – God remains outside of our ideas of time and space. God is here and not here – within us and without us.

Continue reading “AYoMW: Jan. 29, 2020 — To everything, Namaste”

Lesson 28: Above all else I want to see things differently.

We live in a world where everyone has a point of view. Everyone has an opinion. Often those opinions become our identity. You identify as “liberal,” or “conservative,” or “independent,” or whatever other label you can contrive.

Your perception has not only become your reality – but your fixed identity.

This has to do with a psychological phenomenon called “confirmation bias.” We have what we believe to be a fixed set of beliefs about the world and we reject any evidence that contradicts it (even if that evidence is factually provable) and embrace evidence that confirms our beliefs (even if that evidence is demonstrably false).

Two studies from Stanford University back up this idea. When students were told a set of what they believed were facts about suicide and a firefighter’s performance, they remained convinced in their original beliefs even after those beliefs were totally refuted by the researchers afterward.

Our reactions are linked to the primitive communities we formed way back in our evolution, according cognitive scientists Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber who wrote a book a few years ago called “The Enigma of Reason.”

Continue reading “AYoMW: Jan. 28, 2020 — The miracle of tables”

Lesson 27: Above all else I want to see.

When I moved into my new house last year, I began walking my dogs around the neighborhood. Dogs are great if you want to meet people, because most folks can’t resist a cute puppy (although, surprisingly, some can).

I met a lot of my neighbors in very short order and they were all very kind and welcoming. Except one. As I walked my dogs one afternoon, the man who lives on the corner across the street drove up beside me and rolled down his window.

“I have noticed recently,” he said without saying hello or anything, “there has been an increase in the amount of canine fecal matter in my yard.”

That’s verbatim: “canine fecal matter.”

Continue reading “AYoMW: Jan. 27, 2020 — Suddenly I see”

Lesson 25: I do not know what anything is for.

Catholic priest and author Richard Rohr once remarked, “When we reach the end of what we know, that’s where we find God.” Which is exactly the point of today’s workbook lesson.

When we reach the end of what we know – all the knowledge the ego has gathered about the world around us and has convinced us that we live in a world of striving and lack and luck – we will understand that we don’t know what the purpose of anything is in this world.

We are purpose driven people – just ask the famous authors who write about our purpose and how to find it. I spent a good hour earlier this week listening to a very famous self-help author go on and on about life’s purpose and how to identify it and live into it. Purpose – meaning making – is the top pastime of the ego. We feel like we’ve failed this thing called life unless we have a purpose – a “special” purpose at that – to fulfill in this world.

Continue reading “AYoMW: Jan. 25, 2020 — I don’t know what I don’t know”

Lesson 24: I do not perceive my own best interests.

Over at the wiki How website they present a long, and quite tiring, article on how to make decisions. Astutely enough, it begins with identifying our fears and asking what we’re afraid of as we make a decision, which leads us into considering worse-case scenarios and whether we’ll be able to change our minds if things go sideways. It also advises us to talk to family and friends about all this before deciding what to do.

That’s Part 1.

In Part 2, we calmly do our research, consider five “whys,” think about who our decision will affect, list out all options and then … then! … make a spreadsheet for them, meditate on them and finally consider whether we’re acting intelligently or compulsively.

But, wait! There’s a Part 3.

Continue reading “AYoMW: Jan. 24, 2020 — Everything you do is wrong. And that’s good news.”

Lesson 23: I can escape from the world I see by giving up attack thoughts.

Meister Eckhart once observed: “God is not found in the soul by adding anything but by a process of subtraction.”

Today’s lesson from A Course in Miracles workbook turns on this idea that we need not add anything to ourselves to bring about an end of the separation – but subtract all the thoughts of attack – and being attacked – that have created this world in the first place.

My experience with my father is a microcosm of the macro-change we can bring into the world. Once I stopped attacking my father in my head – and no longer replayed all the stories where I believed he was attacking me – the world outside of myself changed dramatically. No longer did I find myself angered by small things, like someone cutting me off in traffic or appearing to slight me in some other way. No longer was I impatient with shortcomings of others, preferring instead to see them through the eyes of compassion and know they were acting from their pain and suffering – not their divine, higher Self. (I still don’t do all of this perfectly, by the way, but am hitting the mark more often.)

In short, my whole world changed because I saw clearly that the world around me wasn’t the cause of my pain and suffering. Instead, my mind was causing the pain and suffering – specifically my thoughts about attacking my father and feeling attacked by him. When I replaced those thoughts with loving, compassionate and kind thoughts toward my father – my heart softened and my world of anger and cynicism was destroyed. No longer did I seem to attract a tribe of other angry and cynical people. No longer was I attracted to angry and cynical remarks or TV shows or books or other depictions of such behavior. Instead I felt empathy, but also compassion for those still stuck in those thoughts of attack and being attacked.

Continue reading “AYoMW: Jan. 23, 2020 — We’re cooking now”

Lesson 22: What I see is a form of vengeance.

Living as a cynical and angry person, sparked by my father’s perceived betrayal of our family and the pain left in the wake of the divorce, left me seeing the world as a form of vengeance. I projected my pain outward onto the world and saw it as a nasty, cruel place filled with people who said they loved me, who said they would stay with me and take care of me and then betrayed me in the most painful way possible.

I brought that state of mind into every moment and every relationship after adopting this terrible view of the world as my central identity and purpose in life. Everything I did pushed people away, but it felt like it offered me some form of “protection” from ever being hurt again.

Of course, it didn’t. All I was doing was inflicting the pain I had felt from my father’s leaving on myself over and over again in an attempt to what? Get revenge? That’s what I told myself. If my hatred for him was pure enough, I believed, he’d feel it across the miles he had put between me and himself.

Continue reading “AYoMW: Jan. 22, 2020 — We can work it out”