Lesson 35: My mind is part of God’s. I am very holy.
I went off on myself last night. One of the things I can’t stand about myself is that I’m a bit clumsy. Without mindfully moving through simple tasks, such as giving my cats a treat, I will make a mess and do what I did last night – spill most of the contents of the container on the floor.
The cats, of course, didn’t mind. It was manna from heaven.
Me? I blew up at myself and called myself everything but a child of God.
I had to laugh out loud when I read today’s lesson: “My mind is part of God’s. I am very holy.”
Yeah, right. Clumsy, self-abusing me is part of God and very holy. Tell me another one, Universe.
The first time I heard this phrase it was said by author Wayne Dyer in one of his TV programs that I watched. Dyer was my gateway drug into the metaphysical world so it was early in my learning when I heard him say this. I was immediately cynical.
“How in the world can we see peace instead of what’s obviously going on?” I thought.
Wars, rumors of wars, famine, greed, government corruption, the wealth gap, poverty, human trafficking, refugee crises, climate change. So much of the world is bereft of peace. Choosing to see peace instead of these very real dilemmas and tragedies is just so much spiritual bypass, woo-woo, head-in-the-sand spirituality.
That’s what I thought, all those years ago, and it’s what many people continue to think about metaphysical thought and practices. Deny reality and say your happy affirmations.
The Course, however, is far from advocating complacency or simple happy talk. It’s asking us, in all of these workbook lessons and throughout the text, to examine our thoughts about the world and discover what role we have played in bringing about the suffering that we see around us. It’s not an exercise in feeling guilty for the actions – or inactions – we have participated in that we believe caused the pain in the world. It’s a chance to change our mind and make it right – a chance to save the world and end the sense of separation from each other and God that all we feel in this world.
Lesson 33: There is another way to look at the world.
There are two sides to every story, conventional wisdom tells us, but in reality, there are a million or more different ways to see whatever is going on around us. That’s because everyone perceives the world differently. Perception is reality, with a little “r,” for all of us.
No place is that truer than in traffic. On the way to Jubilee! Circle Sunday I nearly hit a guy turning left in front of me at an intersection. I braked and yelled, “Dude! Watch out!” while I honked. It was a huge improvement from my usual reaction to such near misses. In years past, when road rage had a firm grip upon me, I would have yelled expletives, given him the one-finger salute or even pursued him in an effort to let him know just how IN THE WRONG he had been.
My partner admonished me for my strong reaction and came up with reasons why the man may have been distracted – a family emergency perhaps or a rush to get to an important gathering. She was quick to point out other ways to see the situation besides than some dude driving dangerously for sport or to try to intentionally piss me off.
While we live in this dream world, it’s natural to see ourselves as a victim – even if we practice telling ourselves we’re not. Today’s lesson is another approach to that idea. Whenever we feel like the world is victimizing us, disregarding us, or trampling on what we see as our rights, we have to remind ourselves that this is the world we made.
“I have invented the world I see.”
We have done this by collectively misusing our creative powers. We do this all the time with both great and small effects on the world and lives around us.
All Adolph Hitler really wanted to do with his life was paint. He was a struggling artist when he began to misuse his creative power in service to his ego’s hunger for domination when it became clear he would never be honored for his art. The pictures he painted in the world became terrible, bloody and deadly to those under his sway.
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.”
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.
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.
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.”
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.”
Lesson 26: My attack thoughts are attacking my invulnerability.
As I write today’s lesson, there is a political firestorm raging in Washington, D.C., as the US Senate considers impeachment of the president – and a common belief in a foregone conclusion. There is a deadly virus spreading around the world from China. Basketball legend Kobe Bryant and his 13-year-old daughter were killed in a helicopter crash in California. Australia is still recovering from devastating wildfires.
People are
suffering. Political turmoil has torn the country – and families and friends –
apart. Our world of separation seems to get worse by the second.
We have
several choices, of course. For those of us still in the middle class, we can
check out, ignore the news. Try to stay relatively informed while remaining
sane – or what passes for sane in this insane world. We can take to the streets
and protest and fight back and resist – which is great if we undertake such
things from a spirit of love and compassion – but most often we’re marching in
a spirit of rage and cynicism, which breeds more of both.
Or, we can
realize that the only thing causing all this suffering is us – namely the
thoughts we think – and the effects they cause in this world. The suffering is
certainly felt here in this world – the grieving families, the warring
factions, the animals and humans killed and displaced by fire. We must cope
with the events that happen in our world – but don’t have to be overcome by
them.
