How do we choose or end up with the life we appear to lead Q #935: How do we choose or end up with the life we appear to lead? A: A Course in Miracles does a brilliant job explaining why we ended up with the experience we seem to be having. But it really does not provide an intellectually satisfying answer as to how this happened. This is because there is no intellectually satisfying answer to that question. The Course tells us that our entire physical existence is an illusion -- a dream. So, it is helpful to think about how we would work with an upsetting nighttime dream. We would not ask how it happened. Instead, we would examine the content of the dream and ask ourselves why it would be in our mind and what we might learn from it. This is exactly the process the Course asks us to undertake with our entire life. Though we obviously do not yet believe life is merely a dream (and certainly should not pretend that we do), we must work with it as if it were. Fortunately, the Course makes doing this relatively easy by letting us know that all of us wrote the scripts of our lives to serve one simple purpose: to maintain our individuality but get rid of our guilt . Every aspect of ourselves, every experience we have, and every person, creature, or object we encounter, is a symbol we made up to validate our declaration that I am here but it is not my fault! Jesus tells us in the Course that all this began with the tiny, mad idea that we could be separate from God (T.27.VII.6:2) . Up to that point, we were one with our Creator. But this thought filled us with both glee and guilt. The ego told us we could keep the glee and lose the guilt if we would just listen to it and forget everything else. We took the ego up on its offer, which led us to fall asleep, seem to shatter into a billion fragments, and wind up in this world of form. Course students invariably ask, But how could that happen? And again, there is no intellectually satisfying answer because it did not really happen. The very fact that we think there is a me who needs to understand something is the barrier that makes understanding impossible. This is why Jesus makes statements like, This course will lead to knowledge, but knowledge itself is still beyond the scope of our curriculum. Nor is there any need for us to try to speak of what must forever lie beyond words (T.18.IX.11:1,2). So, clearly, we cannot know how we chose the scripts that make up our individual lives. From our limited perspective, we cannot understand what determined our specific choices for families, genders, and so forth. But what we can know essentially makes such concerns irrelevant. We can be sure that while the forms in our scripts differ, the content for all of us is the same -- again, to prove that we exist as individuals but that it is someone elses fault. Returning to the image of fragmenting into a billion pieces, we can think of ourselves as fragments of a mirror. Each of us is capable of reflecting either the ego or the Holy Spirit (in other words, Gods Love). We are used to reflecting the ego and letting our lives serve its goal of separation. But we could instead reflect the Holy Spirit, Who will turn our lives into classrooms for remembering that we all share the same need -- the need to know that God is not angry with us and that it is safe to awaken and be at peace at last. In every moment, we make a choice between these two options. We are always holding either the egos hand or the Holy Spirits. Within this dream, which hand we choose determines what our lives will be like. Therefore, this is the only choice we need to understand how to make now. And so Jesus tells us , The emphasis of this course always remains the same; it is at this moment that complete salvation is offered you, and it is at this moment that you can accept it. This is still your one responsibility. Atonement might be equated with total escape from the past and total lack of interest in the future. Heaven is here. There is nowhere else. Heaven is now. There is no other time (M.24.6:1,2,3,4,5,6,7). facimoutreach.org/qa/questions/questions187.htm#Q935
Posted on: Thu, 28 Aug 2014 12:29:49 +0000
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