After thirty-three years of knowing something was seriously wrong, yet not knowing how things could possibly be the way they seem to be, my demand for peace of mind led me to a set of three texts called, A Course In Miracles.
The Course teaches that all which we experience is only a projection of our minds based upon our belief in our guilt due to our belief that we separated from God, which of course is impossible.
So ... none of this is happening except in our minds. Every event is just another opportunity to forgive ourselves for thinking that we abandoned God, which is a laughable concept.
I think that everything about ACIM requires faith only until the evidence becomes obvious through experience. The Course incorporates both the Big Bang and God's ‘creation’ of the universe. Actually, what ACIM says is that we (all one of us), as an extension of God, and hence God, thought of everything in an instant.
This amount of focused energy must have seemed like a ‘big bang’. All of what seems to exist – all time, all dimensions, etc. were ‘created’ as a hologram in an instant, yet it was not a true creation because all of this exists only in our minds – as a thought.
The Course tells us that ‘thoughts leave not their source’, hence, what we call ‘creation’ is in fact a ‘miscreation’.
That which evidences that it does not extend outside our minds, i.e.: that our Creator is not directly involved, is the duality of everything in our known universe – up down, light dark, male female, bad good, etc. If love is all there is – God being only a light/love energy (and not an entity with human characteristics which the ego mind continues to threaten) – then what is all encompassing can have no opposite.
Whatever we perceive which is not love (and let’s face it, this is most of what we perceive, thanks to the ego), then it can’t possibly exist except in our minds.
We made up the entire thing as a dream and our Creator is just waiting for us to wake up and ‘return home’ even though we never left, except in our thoughts, for how could we leave something that is omnipresent? Our only sin is that we believe we separated from God, when, how could we?
Think of our Creator/God as a loving parent watching her child experience a bad dream (life as we know it is often referred to as a ‘nightmare’). The parent has no idea what her child is dreaming; she knows only that it is terribly upsetting to the child. The parent can’t intervene into the dream and change it to be more pleasant because the dream exists only in the child’s mind. There is nothing to be done other than to get the child to awaken and realize that he made up the entire dream.
Only when the child awakens, will he see how he caused himself such unnecessary grief. But while he is in the dream it seems completely real. The following night, does the child go back into the dream with the intent to change the previous night’s bad dream, or does he just move on with the next night’s dream’s adventures?
The intent of the child is not only to move on but also to experience his dreams as pleasant. Wouldn’t it be particularly convenient if he remained conscious within the dream so that if a bad dream showed up, he could know that none of it was real – that it was just a dream from which he would awaken and have no fear? Thomas Szasz, in his book Myth of Mental Illness, acknowledges the dualities of life and those things which we believe to be scourges of society are really just creations in order for us to be able to see ourselves as opposites, e.g.: to assuage guilt, attorneys need criminals; to feel healthy, medics need sick patients; to feel erudite, professors need students; to feel righteous, church-goers need sinners; to feel privileged, the rich need the poor; to feel generous, philanthropists need welfare recipients, to feel powerful, the ‘authorities’ need the obedient, etc.
We each created the opposite of ‘who we think we are’ in order to believe in our own existence. We’re all just continuously attempting to define and defend our existence.
The reverse is also true in that our spirit selves – who we really are – do not require the projection of the opposite of us because there is no duality in reality. We actually do exist apart from our belief about who we think we are. Our ‘fear of death’ is not of death per se but of ceasing to exist as who we think we are.
Those in Medicine don’t know ‘health’ Those in Schooling don’t know ‘education’ Those in Media don’t know the ‘news’ (what's really going on in the world) Those in Religion don’t know ‘spirituality’ Those in Finance don’t know ‘commerce’ Those in Legal don’t know ‘law’ Those of us outside these disciplines tend to be aware of the mind-manipulation within them. Those within these disciplines cannot escape due to fear for their identity – who they ‘think’ they are.
If they ever woke up, who might they BE?
Hence, we often reveal what we most loathe about ourselves via our jobs. They represent how we want others to perceive us. I ask every nurse, “Why did you become a nurse?” “I wanted to help people.”
Anyone who has ever done any inner work knows that we can’t ‘help’ anyone. We can only assist others in their healing. We all must do our own work. Nurses tend to believe that taking care of others is more honourable than taking care of themselves and their self-loathing is revealed by their rampant addiction to substance as well as behaviour.
Most nurses are one of or any combination of: overweight, smokers, drinkers, or druggies. Those who aren’t don’t claim to identify themselves as BEing a nurse.
They are likely to know, “I am not my job.” Those who try to hide-out with their professions are doing themselves a disservice, not to mention those with whom they come into contact. Police collection agents, and all others who intend to intimidate people want the world to perceive them as ‘powerful’ – but only because they believe they are not.
Since at some visceral level we all know this the Police become bullies because their jobs fail to assuage them of their belief in their powerlessness.
The status of one’s job might seem powerful yet those behind the titles are powerless, by their own estimation, or they wouldn’t have chosen that particular vocation. As Ram Dass said, “Police are just God in drag.”
Teacher Baffour’s excerpts from His Bible of Wisdom
