Musings: Only the Mind is Real
Musings: “Your way will be different!”
“Your way will be different. … A holy relationship is a means of saving time. One instant spent together with your brother restores the universe to both of you.”
A holy relationship! This is the means A Course in Miracles has given us for returning to the home we never really left, that quiet center of rest where we need do nothing.
Have you paid close attention to Jesus’ instructions for saving time and saving the world while saving ourselves by waking up together? Here is the pearl worth any price, the keys to the kingdom, the goose that lays golden eggs, and the fountain of youth, and more.
If you have overlooked the possibilities I feel compelled to present them in a way that I hope will gain your interest, open your mind, and have you come away with a whole new appreciation for your brother and the opportunity he is giving you and you him, to awaken together. There is no sacrifice in this, although you may be thinking it.
I want to help you to understand, feel and appreciate what a relationship is honestly for so that you can recognize the holiness of all relationships, without exception. I guarantee you it has nothing to do with what the ego plans for your relationships.
Some of this may be very difficult to hear because the sense of being a separate individual is threatened. When you truly join with your brother there will be no awareness of the body. It is left behind. That is called a holy instant and that is where a holy relationship resides. It is not here, in a body, in a world, although you will still appear to be here.
The ego cannot imagine you without a body. It is specialness that has you hold on to the body as if it is you. Wanting to remain separate is what the ego wants. It is terrified of Oneness, which is of the mind, because it is the ego’s demise.
The ego, individuality, and specialness are limits that you have placed on love. You chose to do that and you will eventually choose to turn away from those limitations when you understand the cost.
Those costs will be pointed out to you here. What you don’t like or don’t want to hear will tell you who is reading, listening, and perceiving these words. The ego wants and promotes separate interests. It wants everything on its terms. It doesn’t want change. Notice when it arises. It is very useful information.
I am hopeful that I can illuminate the holy relationship so that you will find it desirable rather than something to run from. Perhaps it will be helpful to think whole when you read holy instead of conjuring up images of halos and doe-eyed faces.
Holiness (wholeness) is not something that can be possessed so the ego has a problem with it. The ego exists by possession of others to fulfill its needs and wants. Without others it can not exist. The ego is not going to like this.
You on the other hand will love it! Now I am talking to your right mind that wants something different than what the ego wants. You may not know what it is, but you know what it is not. It is not possession, bargaining, manipulation, control. It is not doubt, fear, and guilt.
You want another way and you are willing to become a learner of that way. You are the chooser, not a body with a brain. The chooser resides between the right mind and the wrong mind; the part of the mind that chooses holiness and the part of the mind that chooses the body. It’s up to you.
The Lie
We are all living a lie here. Our very existence as separate bodies with a life and will of our own is a lie, and we re-enact this lie with “others” on a daily basis. It is here in our special relationships that we will heal the cosmic lie of being separate from our Creator, Oneness, Love and Eternal Life.
Why do we stay with the lie of our separateness and the few special relationships that seem to give us some comfort? It is to protect the ego’s thought system of separation. The ego asserts separation is real, I am real, and don’t you forget it!
The purpose of our special (and not holy) relationships is to keep us mindless, fixated in the lie. There is a “me” and there is a “you” and let us take our comfort here in separation and never look for another way. It’s a strange sort of comfort, but it keeps our belief in individuality safe.
For more on what is the holy relationship: click here
Musings: What’s Valuable?
“Nothing is so easy to recognize as truth.”
Regardless of what state I am in right now there is a river of peace underneath all of it.
It goes with me wherever I go, in spite of everything going on in my ordinary life. It is not subject to any of it. It cannot be harmed or hurt. It cannot die; it was never born. It is eternal. It is what is looking through these eyes right now. It is what hears the sound of the night and it is the sounds themselves. It is what writes these words.
It is so very close to me that I am not apart from it. It is what I am.
It is arrogance, not humility, that won’t accept what I am. It is arrogance that asserts I am something else—worried, anxious, fearful—when it has tasted what can only be recognized as real. It is arrogance that thinks it can make itself some way other than the way it is.
It is what I am apart from anything I might call myself: sick, a failure, powerless. It is not affected by any of the disappointments I have endured or any of the awful things I have ever done.
It is what (not who) I am prior to any role that I have played: mother, teacher, wife, lover, liberal, woman, artist, friend, writer.
Why haven’t I noticed it as more than just a passing state before? Why haven’t I noticed that it is always there? Why haven’t we all?
Might it be that I have not paid it the slightest bit of attention and so it went unnoticed. Yet this alone is worthy of my full attention.
“Nothing is so easy to recognize as truth.” T. 137
This that I am goes on while shopping, doing the dishes, writing, sleeping, going for walks, being with friends. Sometimes I get caught up in a dream and I lose contact for a while. I start to feel out of sorts before long as a reminder that my attention has wandered from what is truly valuable because it brings me peace.
I can’t outrun it, hide from it, overcome it, rise above it, get around it, or go below it. It is with me wherever I go, whatever I do. Even when I forget it is there waiting for me to return.
This that I am has no weight and no dimension. It has no past and no future. It doesn’t have problems and it isn’t afraid. It doesn’t have moods. It doesn’t suffer. It has no need to plan. It does what needs to be done when the time comes to do it. It thinks when necessary and then it is still. It enjoys everything and resists nothing.
When A Course in Miracles came into my life many years ago it made some things very clear to me: that I was miserable; why I was miserable; and how I could leave misery behind.
The change didn’t happen overnight (in fact it continues to deepen). My misery had become very familiar. Who or what would I be without it? The emptiness was frightening each time I saw through some painful story I was telling myself and let it go. Would something come to fill the space that opened up when fear didn’t occupy every corner of my mind?
I waited impatiently, and then one day I waited patiently, with the certainty that something–I knew not what– would come to me. I didn’t care any longer how long I needed to wait. It was certain. And it did. It is never ending.
We suffer. But it doesn’t need to be that way. It is a choice. We can learn to make a different one that points us straight to what we are. It is there waiting for us to recognize, to bow down to in ourselves; in everyone.
It is possible that the only real desire I have left is help others come home to the Self they never left but only forgot for a while. It is the only thing that interests me when I meet someone or am with my family or friends and they have not yet turned to the constant source of joy within. I find myself silently saying turn, turn. It is so easy once you see it.
There is a point where you know “a happy outcome to all things is sure.”
Do you know it? Would you like to?
Musings: It Never Happened
“As long as there is a ‘you’ doing or not doing, thinking or not-thinking, meditating or not meditating, you are no closer to home than the day you were born.”
There is whole-hearted joy without an opposite and peace that is completely still. There is no other explanation other than something was removed because what is recognized is already here; it could not have been something added. It’s closer than the body. Palpable.
Feel oneness everywhere… here, now. There is no one left to worry.
I realize that this sounds like the ravings on a bottle of Dr. Bronner’s. That’s why folks don’t talk about this much. We sound like blithering idiots.
Time has stopped……….
There is only what’s happenin’ now. And what’s happenin’ now is perfect. My point of view has shifted. It is above the battleground that we call life.
From here nothing needs to be fixed or changed. The battleground is a dream. Seen from above it is clear that we can neither hurt or be hurt. That’s forgiveness. Hurt only happens in dreams of madness.
We don’t forgive. That’s not how it works. We drop our self concept of victim and victimizer and there we are above the battleground. The world is forgiven. It is so simple it is hard to believe. The whole thing is healed in an instant. Gone.
What we thought occurred has not. There is no world to be in. No one did anything to anyone. It was guilt, projected from the mind that thought it could get rid of a bad thought in the mind by projecting it.
What happened in the mind? A tiny mad idea of separation that was corrected the instant it occurred.Nothing happened. It had no effect except in the mind that thought it and then believed it. We are innocent of making a world of suffering.
We are caught in a time/space dream that is over.
Come and wake up!
Wake up!
Musings: A Little Willingness
“Salvation is easy just because it asks nothing you cannot give right now.” – A Course in Miracles, Text, page 382
It is of enormous relief to know—finally, and with certainty—what our only function is. We should be looking one another in the eye and winking the “we’ve got a secret” look of lovers in love.
The secret is that we have the key to our happiness in our very hands. It is nowhere else.
The key to happiness is forgiveness. It is the simplest thing you will ever learn because it requires nothing of us that we cannot give right now. How do you like them apples? Do I have your attention, or did you turn away again? From the bottom of my heart I hope not, because this is the “pearl worth any price.”
The key is in your hand: guaranteed!!!! Think mind when you read hand. Hopefully you will learn here and now how to turn it: also in your mind. Learning requires that you be right-minded as opposed to wrong-minded.
Wrong-mindedness fears change. It fixates on what it thinks it knows. It thinks happiness is getting what we want. It thinks a whole lot of things are real, all of which turn out to be illusions.
Right-mindedness is willing to question what it thinks it knows, including where happiness comes from. It is willing to learn another way of seeing. It is willing to turn away from all assumptions of what reality is and walk the razor’s edge where our true education can begin.
The choice is yours. You have the willingness; it has already been given you. Don’t let fear hold you back. Give it to the One Who gave you willingness instead. Daily, a thousand times a day, you make this choice.
In order to learn from the teacher of forgiveness who knows the way to happiness, you must resign as your own teacher. This is signified by the little willingness. This is the only way that you can ever be happy.
“If you listen to the wrong voice, you have lost sight of your soul.” – A Course in Miracles
There is a silent voice in you that will show you the way. Every second that you do not plan is an instant made available to the one who can give you your function. Your function is your happiness. To learn that your function and your happiness are the same is the simplest thing you will ever do. Any effort that you make will interfere. The following prayer from The Little Willingness, shows us how small our part is.
“I who am host to God am worthy of Him.
He Who established His dwelling place in me created it as
He would have it be.
It is not needful that I make it ready for Him, but only
that I do not interfere with His plan to restore to me
my own awareness of my readiness, which is eternal.
I need add nothing to His plan.
But to receive it, I must be willing not to substitute my
Own in place of it.”
Musings: All Would Be Love
“…you believe that without the ego all would be chaos. Yet I assure you that without the ego, all would be love.”
(T. 15. V. 1: 6-7)
If we would lay aside our need to be somebody—all ideas about our self and all ideas we hold about the person before us—we would find that we are peacefully joined beyond either of those identities.
What is real is shared and what is unreal can’t be. Only the mind can be shared and it is common to all without exception. It is the personal—the body, private thoughts, the psychological self with all its needs and wants—that is unreal and therefore can’t be shared.
Awakening is from the personal. The unwillingness to enter a shared experience is the only hindrance to the realization of our Self which resides in the mind. (This is why the ego does not want us to learn that we are a mind.)
The shift from identification with the body to the awareness of the self as mind is a choice. We all will eventually make it, but usually not until we experience the pain and suffering our personal needs, wants and special interests bring upon ourselves and others. At this point we may begin to ask ourselves if there might not be a better way of relating that does not involve our specialness.
I have made it my practice to learn from Jesus that my brother and I share the same mind. It is a choice I make every morning before I begin the busy doings of the day. Remembering my goal, my part in every encounter is simply to recognize when the ego asserts its special interests and be willing to offer them to Jesus in exchange for something of greater value. I am the learner and I have a teacher.
In this process I find there is no strain to get approval, acceptance, or recognition from my brother. The listening is open and gentle when I realize the relationship is not in my hands and I do not have to make anything happen. There is no fixing, correcting, dazzling, enthralling, outsmarting, captivating, or manipulating. In allowing the presence of love beyond either body to hold the relationship I experience ease and acceptance of myself and my brother.
Jesus has never failed to show me that my brother is a much better witness to our shared reality of holiness than he is to my ego’s demands that my specialness be indulged.
The mind is truly miraculous when it is not contaminated by the ego. Spiritual practice is learning how to use the mind effectively to choose against the ego. Once we learn that we have a mind and that our only option in this world is to choose between the ego’s tyrannical rule or Jesus’ kind and gentle teaching of forgiveness we can become the happy learners of the truth of the following statement:
“…you believe that without the ego all would be chaos. Yet I assure you that without the ego, all would be love.” T. 15. V. 1: 6-7
“Looking at the resistance to forgiving ourselves without judgment…”
A video conversation with Lyn Corona, Susan Dugan and Bruce Rawles about looking at the resistance to forgiving ourselves without judgment, and a variety of metaphors and ideas that might be helpful, inspired by studies in A Course in Miracles.
Musings: “Miracles Are Natural”
“Miracles are natural. When they do not occur something has gone wrong.”
First, let’s be clear what a miracle is not.
A miracle is not an extraordinary external phenomenon like a vision of Jesus in a cloud. It’s not having a check show up in the mail that just covers the rent when the bank account is empty. It’s not even the spontaneous remission of a terminal disease.
Miracles are corrections in the mind for our errors in perception. (Think interpretation when you read perception.) Interpretations are perceptions. When your perceptions are unloving, you are misperceiving; something has gone wrong.
That something is what’s in the way of what is natural: the miracle. The miracle is always present. We are not aware of it because we have put something in the way that keeps it from our awareness. That something goes by many names: ego, false self, dream figure, phantom, to name just a few. Perception is distorted by the personal needs, wants and desires of the false self.
The body is not our home. A Course in Miracles teaches us that the body’s eyes don’t see and its ears don’t hear.
The senses merely report to the brain. The brain then interprets the data based upon what the mind wants to see. Having decided that we are a separate self everything the brain reports is interpreted to validate the separate self. It is a closed system.
The miracle is a way of changing your mind about yourself. You cannot do this without the help of a presence other than the ego in your mind. Call it what you will: Holy Spirit, Loving Presence, this presence is kind and knows what is in your best interests. It is your Self. Don’t be afraid of it; it is there to help you remember what you are.
You must have noticed that scarcity dominates the self centered point of view. Experiencing the lack that we have inflicted upon ourselves we seek outside for approval, acceptance, recognition, and respect. Because of our imagined needs, we don’t see anyone as they are but only as a means to fulfill our needs. It is this distorted way of perceiving that the miracle corrects.
By choosing the miracle we are turning toward the love we have been seeking outside ourselves. Instead of sacrificing others to our needs our relationships provide the opportunity for miracles.
The miracle is not something we do. Miracles are natural expressions of love. Without the interference of the ego’s getting mechanisms, impersonal love flows freely. It blesses everyone indiscriminately; in other words it makes no special selections as to who is worthy and who is not. The miracle teaches us what we are, not who we are.
The miracle-minded process looks something like this:
1. You fess up! You admit that something has gone wrong. You can’t recognize a solution to a problem that you don’t know you have. You are not experiencing the miracle; you need the miracle.
2. You take responsibility. The something wrong is with you. The problem is not “out there” in someone else. The problem is in the mind along with the answer.
3. You decide to become a learner. As a learner you can be taught. You make a right-minded decision to turn your unloving perceptions over to that Loving Presence for its point of view.
4. You do nothing. The miracle is just that; a miracle. It happens. It will show you that no one did anything to you; you were not harmed or hurt in any way.
Note: If you still find yourself trying to “do” the miracle yourself, you have not fully turned the problem over to the Loving Presence. If that’s the case, go back to step 3 and investigate as to what perceptions you still want to keep. Maybe you are not willing to let it go at this time. Then “unwillingness” is what you would bring to that Loving Presence.
Perhaps your trust in the Loving Presence is very weak at this point. Then lack of trust is the perception that you would offer for correction. Always begin where you are.
Consistent willingness to be a learner places your mind in its natural state of grace. It enables you to give without any sense of loss. As long as you perceive lovelessly you remain a learner.
Musings: The Healing Purpose
The following was a letter to a friend who was in prison for a crime committed during one of his many bouts with addiction to cocaine. He wanted to wake up but was fixated on his particular dream.
I had known my friend for ten years and during this time he had been incarcerated four times. This time it was for ten years. Prior to this he had been incarcerated at least five times, all while on a cocaine rampage. He was released at the age of 50 having spent most of his life in prison.
Without purpose that can be applied regardless of the circumstances of his life, his situation would have been cause for desperation. My point in sharing this letter is that without purpose we are all hopelessly caught in our pitiful little dreams, be they pleasurable or painful.
Dear Friend:
This answer to your concerns about your incarceration comes from the heart. May it go to the heart, find its mark, and be helpful.
The brick and mortar prison that you find yourself in is a metaphor for the situation we all find ourselves in. The prison I am referring to is the mind that is ruled by the ego.
The ego is the thought of separation taking form. It is a prison house of our own making. Self-centered and selfish the ego sees everything in relationship to itself. The ego thinks the body is its home.
As if imprisonment were not bad enough the ego’s practice is to inflict pain or suffer pain instead of helping one another to escape. Of course I am speaking metaphorically. The escape from the prison house we have all made is accomplished only by learning that the person we think we are, that long lasting separate entity, is not what we are.
No one asleep and dreaming knows the way out of the dream he is dreaming. After all he believes it is real. He needs help.
The escape is through the mind and everyone, regardless of the circumstances of his life must come to that realization. Humans tend to make comfort, safety and security their goal and when they get them they think they have escaped the prison of separate interests. What they have attained is a pleasant form of fear.
Changing the circumstances of our life is not a change at all because it is the mind that needs to change. It is not hard to see that we take the thought system that we live by with us wherever we go. It’s all about us. To use a common analogy, changing circumstances is like shifting around the deck chairs on the Titanic. What difference will it make? The mind ruled by the ego is a sinking ship. It needs a new captain, not a change of location.
Once you have made the decision to become a happy learner from The Teacher for Truth the outcome is certain. You will escape the dream. How long the journey takes depends upon your trust in The Teacher and your willingness to bring the darkness in you to Him.
Choosing between the ego thought system of self-absorption and The Teacher’s thought system of healing is the only power the mind has. The rest of the time it’s idling, going nowhere.
Our relationships provide the opportunities for us to learn what’s in our mind. The ego’s thought system of separation goes like this:
1. The other guy is the guilty one.
2. If it weren’t for him (the other guy), my life would be peaceful and happy. (Conclusion: My anger is justified.)
3. I’m right. He’s wrong.
4. Somebody should pay, and it’s not going to be me. I’m innocent.
5. The other guy should be the one to suffer.
Behind every encounter some version of the above is always going on when the ego is ruling your mind. It only takes one person to stop playing this game. You. To do this you must have the desire to learn from a different teacher—the one that would free you and your brother together.
The Holy Spirit’s thought system, which you have chosen to learn because you are a student of A Course in Miracles, sees your brother differently. He sees
1. The other guy is innocent regardless of his behavior because he is not a body.
2. He is present in your life to help you escape from your dream of isolation.
3. There is no loss to anyone. Both parties gain.
4. Your attitude toward your brother is your attitude toward yourself.
5. You and your brother are joined in mind. Changing your mind changes all minds.
“Together or not at all” is the Holy Spirit’s mantra.
You get to choose between the ego and the Teacher of Truth. That makes you the ultimate Decision Maker. All power and glory is in your hands. It is the only freedom you have in this world.
To choose the Holy Spirit as your Teacher you must recognize when the ego is in charge, acknowledge that you no longer want it to rule your mind and ask the Holy Spirit for His Teaching instead. It’s really simple to tell which you have chosen. When you operate under the ego’s rule you don’t feel loving and happy. Simple.
Everyone you meet is your savior from isolation. By seeing our relationships in this way, every day becomes an exciting chance to remember our true undivided nature. Purpose is everything!
Everyone engaged in dreaming is trying to get rid guilt by dumping it on someone else. Refuse to blame the other guy for your misery. (The real source of your misery is your choice to be a self-centered, special, individual entity.) Ask The Teacher for help. You are not going to be able to rehabilitate yourself.
“Humility … does require that you be not content with less than greatness that comes not of you.” – A Course in Miracles, T.381.
Blessings,
Lyn
Musings: Your Way Will Be Different… Out of the comfort zone. Help is available.
“If you want to be like me, I will help you, knowing we are alike. If you want to be different I will wait until you change your mind.” – Jesus, A Course in Miracles Text, page 145