Author: cchellew

Lesson 15: My thoughts are images that I have made.

In 2015, a photograph of a dress posted on the internet went viral. It seems that people could not agree on what color the dress was in “reality.” The controversy went on for months with people taking sides and launching all manner of arguments about why they were right and everyone else on the internet was wrong. It became a dividing line – a point of separation – between those who perceived “correctly” and those who didn’t.

The photo underscores how our brains work, according to neuroscientist Beau Lotto, author of Deviate: The Science of Seeing Differently, who told National Geographic:  

“When you say things like, we don’t see reality, people think you’re being a post-modern relativist. That’s not the case. There is a physical world. It’s just that we don’t see it. Red doesn’t exist, the note ‘C’ doesn’t exist. These are all things inside our heads that we project out into the world.”

Which is exactly the point of today’s lesson: Our thoughts are images that we have made. We project out onto the world our ideas of what color clothing is and whether notes such as “C” exist. Because we project those images outward, we don’t understand that they came from nothing and when we stop believing in them, they return to nothing.

Continue reading “AYoMW: Jan. 15, 2020 — Open a window. It’s stuffy in here.”

Lesson 14: God did not create a meaningless world.

When A Course in Miracles teacher and author Marianne Williamson was running for president of the United States, she met controversy early on from detractors who alleged that she harmed men living with HIV and AIDS by insisting on the Course principal that the disease was not “real.”

Never mind that Williamson was an early leader in helping gay men who were afflicted by the disease and founded Project Angel Food, in part, to help feed those in need. That mission alone should have been proof enough that Williamson found the crisis to be “real” enough to take action and help those who were suffering. But, it’s a common misunderstanding of the Course which springs from today’s lesson that directs us to think about the horrors we perceive in this world and say, “God did not create that war/airplane crash/disaster, and so it is not real.”

What this lesson is getting at is that here in this ego world, perception really is reality. My stepfather succumbed to dementia before my mother did and one day, as we were preparing to take them out to dinner, my stepfather kept insisting that they needed to pick up their cars from the mechanic. They had been living in assisted housing for several years and did not own cars anymore.

Continue reading “AYoMW: Jan. 14, 2020 — I don’t think this world means what you think it means”

Lesson 7: I see only the past.

If you’ve stuck with the workbook for the past six days, and not tossed it across the room with great force as I was tempted to do during the first time I dedicated myself to getting through the entire year of lessons, today is your payoff. The first six lessons are intentionally discombobulating because the ego likes order and it really likes having an agenda and a reason to do something. That agenda, of course, is usually self-serving, so it doesn’t care much for confusion. The ego likes clarity – mainly because it makes it easier to manipulate things, make excuses or find reasons to quit when the going gets confusing.

If you’re still with me then, your ego is confused and searching madly for something to hang its hat on. Today’s lesson seems to be that hat rack, but it’s also another maddening blow to the ego’s search for easy answers and clear understanding that it can twist to its own advantage. Be vigilant, though, because the ego will, of course, try to distort the message of today’s lesson – because it only sees the past and uses it to manipulate how we experience the present and subsequently what we create in the future.

Continue reading “AYoMW: Jan. 7, 2020 — Don’t let the past steal your present”

Lesson 6: I am upset because I see something that is not there.

One of the main things the Course teaches is that “only love is real.” Which means, if we are not experiencing love – then what we feel like we’re experiencing isn’t real. That, of course, doesn’t mean events are not happening in this bodily realm. They are – something is going on and we’re upset by it.

But, in Reality – with that capital R – there’s nothing in this world that can upset us on the level of our true, divine Self. Our divinity knows nothing of slights or offenses. It doesn’t not understand being offended or giving offense. It does not traffic in shame, blame, evasion or lies.

When we become upset, we are seeing things that only exist in reality – with a little r – and that reality is ruled by the ego, which loves to be offended, to give offense, to slight others, shame others, blame others, and evade consequences or lie about things. When we become upset, then, it is a reminder to us that we are living in the ego’s world of illusions and separation.

On this level, of course, we must tend to our relationships – repair them, abandon them, learn from them – but in Reality, the slights have not occurred because nothing can disturb the peace of our divinity – especially not dreams.

Continue reading “AYoMW: Jan. 6, 2020 –Upset by the absence of the real”

Lesson 5: I am never upset for the reason I think.

When someone does something that hurts my feelings or leaves a relationship in tatters, placing blame is usually pretty easy. We all have our “somebody done us wrong” stories, and for the most part, we stick to them. We know why we’re upset – that person hurt us, betrayed us, lied to us or otherwise disregarded us in some way.

Today’s lesson is an invitation to a deeper understanding of how we allow the world to upset our peace and lead us into the ego’s favorite games of blame and shame.

Did something someone did – or didn’t do – really cause my upset, or is that my own doing all along? Questioning our thoughts around why we are really upset can bring us back into alignment with spirit – back into the peace of higher, divine self.

Continue reading “AYoMW: Jan. 5, 2020: I can be pissed or blissed”

Lesson 4: These thoughts do not mean anything. They are like the things I see in this room.

When I was a kid I fully believed that, tucked within the confines of that 8-track player (yes, I’m that many years old) was a tiny live band and the brown strip of tape contained the music they needed to reproduce the sound of any band that they were required to play.

A fantastical thought, right? I had it down to a science – imagining the tiny band members punching the clock and hanging out until someone inserted the tape and they got to work.

It’s not a weird thought for a kid – but even as adults we tend to entertain strange thoughts in the face of science and facts. Some deny climate change, others use their thoughts to imagine a flat earth or a heaven above and a hell below.

Continue reading “A Year of Miracle Writing: Jan. 4, 2020 — “Don’t believe everything you think.””

Lesson 3: I do not understand anything I see in this room.

The first year I started doing the workbook, I think it was Lesson 3 that made me question why I was even attempting this crazy thing. First, I have to wrap my mind around the idea that nothing in this room means anything and any meaning that something does have only exists because I gave it that meaning. By day three, I really was ready to simply fling the book across the room.

“What poppycock!” I thought. “Of course, I understand everything in this room! Well, maybe I don’t know exactly how my computer works, but I understand that it does and what its purpose and function is.”

Right there – I did it. I admitted that I didn’t understand something in the room. I don’t understand the minutia of computers and how they work. This, friends, is a miracle – a shift in perception. If I can admit that one thing that I see in this room is beyond my current understanding, then perhaps I could expand that thought and come to not understand everything else in the room.

Continue reading “A Year of Miracle Writing: Jan. 3, 2020 — I understand that I do not understand”

Lesson 2: I have given everything I see in this room all the meaning that it has for me.

Joseph Campbell, Mr. Follow Your Bliss guy, once remarked, “Life has no meaning. Each of us has meaning and we bring it to life. It is a waste to be asking the question when you are the answer.”

And yet, we want our lives to have meaning – we want the things around us to be meaningful. We often feel incomplete without a sense of meaning and purpose. I don’t believe A Course in Miracles is asking us to give up meaning in our lives, however. It’s asking us to give up our attachments to the meanings we’ve already made to the people and things in this world – to hold them lightly – to be willing to change how we see the world and how we react to events that happen both within and outside of ourselves.

Lesson two wants us to become more deliberate in how we see the world around us and be more in tune with how the ego automatically categorizes, compartmentalizes, judges and pigeonholes every object and sentient being we encounter. Apply the idea equally, it instructs “to a body or a button, a fly on the floor, an arm or an apple.” Not to judge one as more meaningful than another – but to see that everything in our purview is assigned a value, not by Spirit, but by ego.

It’s only when we can question the ego’s value system that we can begin to see how artificial and arbitrary it really is. That is the key to escaping the ego’s grip on us – seeing its methods and values for the capriciousness it really is. The ego values things based on them having a special meaning – a special emotion that it sparks within us. If we can be lead around by that meaning – that emotion – then we can be manipulated into the ego’s favorite games of comparison, competition and miscreation.

The Course defines its own purpose when it says, “Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all of the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.” (Chapter 16, Section IV:6)

The Muslim mystic poet Hafiz, speaking for God, agrees, writing “I would like to remove some rocks from your field so that you can plant more wheat.”

That kind of cultivation of our mind and spirit begins when we are willing to see that as long as we allow the ego to give our lives meaning, we are only constructing more barriers to love – only adding more rocks to our field that prevents our lives from flourishing into the garden of love we are supposed to be creating in this world.

“It is not necessary to seek for what is true,” the Course continues, “but it is necessary to seek for what is false.”

Whatever is false are those rocks – those samskaras – that prevent our souls from becoming the open channels of love the world needs.

“So, I would like to remove some stones from
your meadows; then an orchard you could grow,
and the world, and the world then, will come
to taste your riches.”

Lesson 1: Nothing I see in this room means anything.

Everything in this room has meaning for me. From the pens I use, to the chair I sit in, to the paintings on the wall, to the cat perched on my desk looking out my window. They all have memories, emotions, thoughts and concerns attached to them.

What if I can no longer find my favorite pens?

What if this chair becomes more a nuisance than a comfort?

How could I replace some of the precious original artwork on my wall if something bad were to happen and destroy them?

And my cat, my precious cat … I don’t even want to think of the impermanence of my all of my furry babies.

How can they not mean anything, when in my bodily reality they mean everything? They give me comfort, they give me joy, they give me a reason to get my butt out of bed in the morning and do this thing called life. How can I give up their meaning to me?

Of course, everything in this room has no meaning – not above what I’ve given any of it. The things in my room mean nothing to a stranger who walks in. They don’t know the story of my love for pens, my quest for a comfy chair, the artists who created the beauty around me … and the cat – the story of how he – and all the others – came into my life.

We are meaning-making creatures. That stranger in my room has no attachment to my things, but they have plenty to their own. There is a room in their world where every thing – every being – has meaning.

So, what is the Course asking us to do in this first lesson of the year? Be aware of our meaning-making ego and its penchant for labeling, categorizing, valuing and devaluing everything around it. Be aware of how much we have allowed judgment to control us. Just by looking at the pens on my desk, I have a favorite – the one with the right balance, the right weight and the perfect smoothness of its writing. I have a favorite chair, a favorite piece of artwork, and even though I don’t tell them – there are favorites among the furry beings that roam my rooms.

The Course, of course, isn’t asking us to give up the things we love – but to put them into perspective. A miracle, of course, is simply a change in perspective and all of the lessons throughout the year are merely offering us an opportunity to see the world anew – to get our thinking right about the world and why we are here in it.

If I am holding preconceived notions about pens, chairs, paintings and even my furry family, then I am closed off to receiving miracles. I have already decided what things mean – I have already given a purpose and role to everything in my world. When I am sure what something means, I am not open to reinterpretation – a change in perspective.

This is the key then – to see the world, not through the ego’s eyes of set-in-concrete categories and meanings – but through the spirit’s eyes of infinity. We must be able to see through even the smallest thing we have given meaning to if we hope to ever see through the guilt, and evil intention, we perceive in the people that we see around us. If I can judge a pen harshly for its appearance and performance, how easy will it be for me to judge a person based on the same criteria?

Quite easy, of course. We do it all the time … in traffic, in the line at the grocery store, watching television, in our offices and homes. We are categorizing and judging machines – unconsciously giving meaning to every moment, person or thing that passes before us.

If we can train our mind to remember that nothing we see in this room or out in this world has any meaning inherent within themselves then we can begin to see those things more deeply – to question our long-held beliefs and perceptions about them.

I am also reading Daniel Ladinsky’s, A Year with Hafiz, this year and his poem for January 1 reminds us that we are “a hole in the flute that the Christ’s breath moves through – listen to this music.”

Hafiz reminds us that Christ is in, through and around it all – in “every dancer, their foot I know and lift. And every brush and hand, well, that is me too, who caresses any canvas or cheek.

“We are a hole in a flute, a moment in space, that the Christ’s body can move through and sway – all forms – in an exquisite dance – as the wind in a forest.”

This is what lesson one invites us to learn – we are not the source; we are the channel. Everything around us is the Divine – playing out the notes of its life through us, teaching us what we need to know to realize our higher divine Self in every moment.

“How did I become all these things, and beyond all things?” Hafiz asks.

“It was my destiny, as it is yours.”

Nothing in this world means anything – because it is already the meaning of everything – divine and part of the oneness of it all – which includes you and me.

Lesson 13: A meaningless world engenders fear.

I recall reading, many years ago, some advice from a Buddhist teacher on developing the skill of detachment. They recommended that whenever you were watching television to intentionally turn off the show before the ending and go do something else. This interrupted our need for a sense of closure and, he said, could help you become detached to the outcome of events in your own life.

It never worked for me. I like closure. I like to know the end of the story. Detachment may be something worth developing, but not around my TV shows.

Trying to practice detachment in this way triggered my FOMO, or my fear of missing out. I could not let go of my attachment to knowing, as Paul Harvey used to say, “the rest of the story.”

Continue reading “AYoMW: Jan. 13, 2020 — Who’s afraid of a meaningless world?”