Category: A Year of Miracle Writing

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”

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?”