Author: cchellew

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”

Lesson 21: I am determined to see things differently.

In my 20s and 30s, I was a very angry person. My rage at the world and its unfairness began when I was 9-years-old and my Southern Baptist father, who had preached about the sin of adultery and divorce, cheated on my mother and then divorced her.

I could not square the circle in my head. I went searching for answers in the Bible, which my dad had always preached held the key to every problem you faced. What I found there was that my dad was a big, stinkin’ hypocrite who deserved not only God’s wrath, but mine. Thus, began a journey into anger and cynicism that became not just a way of life for me, but my very identity.

If you had read this lesson to me back then, it would have made me very angry. There was no way that I was willing to see things differently, especially when it concerned my father and his actions.

Continue reading “AYoMW: Jan. 21, 2020 — Catching light in a graveyard”

Lesson 20: I am determined to see.

The lessons up until today have been trying to turn our idea of the world upside down and inside out. The things in our world are not real, we’re learning. We have given them all the meaning that they have, we’re learning. None of our thoughts are neutral – they all create on some level, we’re learning. And, we’re learning that those thoughts aren’t just ours alone, but others around us experience the effect of our thoughts.

What does this all lead up to? A determination to see what IS real in this world, to see beyond the illusions and miscreations we have brought into being with our unconscious and untrained thoughts.

The salvation of the world depends on our ability to see rightly – to stop investing our thoughts and beliefs in the false projections we walk around calling “reality.”

Continue reading “AYoMW: Jan. 20, 2020 — The ruby in your purse”

Lesson 19: I am not alone in experiencing the effects of my thoughts.

We could stop reading and doing the workbook at this point if we just completely internalized and lived into this lesson alone. We, of course, don’t want to because we like the idea that we have our own mind and our thoughts and can think them anytime we want and keep them private. But, if it’s true, as the last lesson said, that “all minds are joined” then there’s not such thing as a private thought. What we think, on any level, becomes a manifested experience on some level.

Cause and effect are the same, the lesson tells us. Thoughts simultaneously result in the reality that we think we see. We like to think the two are separate – something I see in my world causes me to think something, or that I think something and then see it outside of myself. In reality, the Course says, these things happen at once.

The ego wants us to keep thinking cause and effect are separate so it can get us to play its game of competition, distrust, separation and fear. If we think we are at the effect of our own thoughts or the thoughts of others, we can justify staying separate from those who think differently than we do. If we understood the true power of our thoughts, we would awaken to the realization that changing our thoughts – changing our minds – would change the reality we lived in. We don’t have to be at the effect of our thoughts or others – we don’t have to feel fearful and vulnerable in the world. We created it – we can recreate it.

Continue reading “AYoMW: Jan. 19, 2020 — Alone, together, at last”

Lesson 18: I am not alone in experiencing the effects of my seeing.

So far, the previous lessons have focused on us as individuals and how we perceive – or misperceive – the world. Today’s lesson invites us to expand our view and know that what we experience out here in the world isn’t just for us alone – others are experiencing the world we are creating. Why? Because, as the lesson says, “all minds are joined.”

This is the big “collective consciousness” all the woo-woo purveyors speak of – except, of course, it really does exist. We humans are joined in our minds – and when one of us sees a world of fear, greed, hunger and war, we all experience it. Perhaps in different ways, but what has entered one mind has entered all minds.

The idea of “all minds are joined” is to say that there is a field of energy to which we all belong – a place of divine unity where we create on an individual level, but also at a collective level. Since we have free will, we choose what we create – a world of fear, or a world of love.

Sociologist Emilie Durkheim coined the term “collective consciousness” in the 19^th century in reference to industrial societies and explained it as: “The totality of beliefs and sentiments common to the average members of a society.” Societies displayed an “organic solidarity” he wrote, driven especially by religion and social infrastructure.

Continue reading “AYoMW: Jan. 18, 2020 — Do You See What I See?”

Lesson 17: I see no neutral things.

During Donald Trump’s presidential campaign in 2016, one of the chants at his rallies was, “Build that wall!” The candidate ran on a platform of securing the US southern border with a “big, beautiful wall” designed to stop the flow of refugees and immigrants from Mexico and other South American countries.

Even though the chant is about a literal wall, it is an example of the walls of separation that divide us as humans. While Trump’s supporters yelled for a barrier between countries, others felt that walls were unnecessary if proper immigration policies were in place, while still others questioned the value of walls at all, preferring open borders.

There were no neutral thoughts on the wall – and the wall itself, figuratively or literally, was not neutral either.

Where did these walls come from anyway? This lesson seeks to answer that by helping us realize that everything we have brought forth into this world begins with a thought. We believe that the wall caused our thoughts and subsequent division – but it’s really the opposite. We, collectively, believe in the goodness of separating by race and boundary lines and so we create them here in our collective experience.

Continue reading “AYoMW: Jan. 17, 2020: Build that wall!”

Lesson 16: I have no neutral thoughts.

In every moment, I am thinking. Right now, I’m wondering what to type next. A moment ago, I was thinking that I didn’t want to do any writing today, then I thought that I had made a commitment to do this thing, so I need to get to typing. One thought led to another, and here we are: still thinking about thoughts.

There are no neutral thoughts – all our thoughts drive us to either do, or not do, something. They may drive us to call that friend we’ve been thinking about. They may drive us to judge the person in line in front of us for using a check (“I mean, really! What century is it?”) to buy their groceries. They may drive us to make up stories about other people and how they may feel about us. They may drive us ‘pert near (as we say in the South) insane if we let them.

This is the key to this lesson, and the beginning of the mind shift the Course is seeking to make within us with these lessons: We need to be more mindful of our thoughts – because they have the power to create and destroy worlds. Just look around if you want proof. We, collectively, believe might makes right – so we build a war-like culture that protects what’s “ours” against interlopers who may “steal” it. We, collectively, believe that there is a lack of resources to produce adequate shelter for everyone or provide enough food for everyone, so homelessness and hunger enter our experience of this world. We, collectively, believe that a person’s religion, race, age, sexual orientation or gender makes them either inherently more or less valuable in the world, so prejudice enters our experience.

None of these thoughts are idle – they have created a world in their likeness. Our beliefs have manifested a world of war, famine, poverty and prejudice.

Continue reading “AYoMW: Jan. 16, 2020: Grow only seeds of Love”