I’ve often been asked to describe what happens when I “channel” Spirit. But channeling is not what I do.
Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to be able to nudge my ego mind aside and make room for Spirit to come through instead of me. But that’s a talent I don’t have.
I’m just a listener—and then afterward I report on what I hear. I would describe my role in this as being kind of like Lois Lane: Through no virtue of my own, I seem to have acquired an ongoing, daily relationship with a mysterious Friend much greater than myself.
A Friend who feeds me wonderfully accurate information to write about. A Friend who cares only for my happiness. (A Friend who also shows up to save the day, every time my foolish, impetuous ego mind gets me into a jam.)
Like Lois, my only “talent,” if indeed I have one, is that I’m a plucky, intrepid sleuth. Whenever my Friend gives me a hot tip to follow, I’ll track it all the way down to its source—and then I’ll share what I’ve learned with interested readers everywhere.
What can I say, the whole analogy makes me laugh: Carrie Triffet, Girl Reporter.
• • •
But Lois Lane makes for a useful analogy in another, more universal way.
Because really, we’re all a bit like Lois: Every single one of us has the same great Friend with us at all times. This Friend loves us all equally, and shows each of us infinite compassion and patience. It wants only our happiness, and wishes us to know its Friendship as it truly is.
But, like Lois, we never seem able to recognize the true identity of this most dear Friend.
Why? Because it’s wearing those ridiculous glasses.
Now, let’s be honest. We all willingly choose to be fooled by this laughably thin disguise. We could easily see through it if we really wanted to. But we don’t really want to. We love the fantasy that our super Friend is something entirely separate from poor old Clark Kent, and we don’t want to see they’re One and the same.
The truth is this: Every single one of us is that wonderful Friend. Just as every single one of us is also mild-mannered Clark Kent. And evil genius Lex Luthor, for that matter. Whatever flimsy disguises we may seem to be wearing on the surface, the truth is each one of us is infinitely loved and loving. Each is equally innocent of crime. We just don’t look like it at first glance.
See, our eyesight isn’t so good.
But if you squint very hard and ask for help from that wondrous Friend, you’ll begin to notice all those Clarks and Lexes and Loises are actually united in the same holy perfection. Which, not coincidentally, is all part of your holy perfection, and mine.
Working to see the holy perfection in the people around us strengthens our true vision. Maybe soon that’ll help us ditch those eyeglasses once and for all.
And then—who knows? We might develop some x-ray vision of our own, and finally see past all surface appearances to behold the shining, eternal truth of Oneness that lies beyond.
I pledge allegiance to…what, exactly?
Awhile back I wrote about pledging allegiance to Love. About making the choice to side with spiritual truth (even though spiritual truth still mostly feels like abstract theory). And against this 3-D world of illusion (even though the workings of the 3-D world still seem so real).
Well. I suppose the decision to choose is a start. But it isn’t much more than that.
Oh, it felt big at the time. But the decision itself only opened a door. And that doorway gave me my first clear view of the road ahead: It’s a hell of a vista.
• • •
Mind you, it’s been a long journey of discovery just getting this far. I would use this analogy to describe it:
It’s like it took me 20 years to realize I had feet and hands. Another year or so figuring out how they worked. Then I was given a pair of one-pound weights, so I spent a few years more teaching myself how to exercise with them.
Much self-congratulation accompanied all this progress. Who was more serious than I, about waking up to the truth of all reality? Who was moving more purposefully down their chosen path toward the constant awareness of Love’s presence?
I exercised faithfully, except when I was too busy. Or too tired. Or too distracted. Or not in the mood. When I wasn’t training, I spent my time watching daytime soaps and eating deep-fried Twinkies. And yet I genuinely wondered why the Olympic Committee never came calling…
All this newfound fitness has allowed me to climb steadily and ever higher, pausing every few steps to admire the valley below and to celebrate having made it this far. Now I’ve finally reached the top of the hill … and it turns out this is just the bunny slope.
I look up for the first time, and notice the commitment to truth that is yet to be honored. You remember…the commitment I made to choose Love instead of the world’s dark fantasies. Yep, it’s still there waiting patiently for me.
It turns out this commitment is a friggin’ mountain, and it goes straight up. My puny muscles are laughably unfit for the task.
• • •
It’s an uncomfortable place to be, this small spot at the top of the bunny slope. The truth is, I hate aerobic exercise, and I’m still damned fond of those Twinkies. Learning to mountain climb doesn’t sound like much fun to a flabby couch potato like me.
And yet.
Heading back down the hill – giving up the quest for awakening, and going back to treating the 3-D world as if it’s real – that would be unthinkable. Not an option.
I’m awake enough to smell what the 3-D world is made of, and it stinks.
No, I could never go back. But on the other hand, I can’t stand still in this spot on this hill forever. Hell, I don’t even want to stand here one more day.
So I guess that leaves me only one choice, and I’d better start seriously gathering my strength.
Because that mountain isn’t going to climb itself.
The quandary
You know how it is when you discover a band with a fresh, new sound – you love their catchy pop hooks, and you can’t wait for their second CD to come out. And then the CD finally arrives, and it’s filled with Chinese orphans reciting classical 12th Century poetry, all set to a backdrop of modern, atonal compositions for viola and flute.
And you think: What the hell?
It’s nice that you guys are following your muse…but couldn’t you do it while sounding the same as you did before?
• • •
If I treated writing as a career, I’d be sorely tempted to apply everything I know about product development and marketing. I’d look at what makes my first book connect with readers, and I’d give them more of that.
I’m well aware the first two thirds of Long Time No See appeals to a wide audience. That’s the part of the book that reads something like an older, wiser Eat/Pray/Love. And I could’ve stayed in that vein, and gotten mainstream success.
But in that final third of Long Time No See, instead of meeting a hunky stranger in a tropical paradise, my story dives into the single-minded search for non-dual truth of all existence.
Not really bestseller material. Yet it was by no means an accident; the story went exactly where it was guided to go.
And so Long Time No See is embraced by a much smaller (and much different) audience than it might have been. And that’s as it should be.
But now, as I prepare to release my second book – and yes, it’s chock full of Chinese orphans and atonal compositions – I’m pretty sure most of the small audience that loved all parts of Long Time No See will be disappointed by the dearth of catchy pop hooks.
Yes, it’s still funny. There’s still a healthy dose of pop-cultural snark. And I personally think it’s my best work to date. But The Enlightenment Project shines a steady, unblinking light on some areas usually left shrouded in shadows, and that’s not going to be a very comfortable sensation for many readers.
I think I might lose almost everybody who’s been with me so far.
And I do apologize for that. But here’s the thing. My writing is a chronicle of my spiritual life – and my spiritual life is a fluid, ongoing progression; it only flows in one direction. There’s no going back.
I write because I feel guided to share the things I’m experiencing right now. And if I didn’t feel that inner spiritual prompt to share these things, I’d keep them to myself. I wouldn’t be writing at all.
By the time a book comes out, I’ve already moved on. I’ve already grown and deepened my understanding beyond what’s shared in the book. This was true of Long Time No See, and it’s definitely true of The Enlightenment Project.
Who the hell knows what the book after The Enlightenment Project will be like. Just a bunch of blank pages, maybe. One atonal poem from the Chinese orphan within.
And in my mind’s eye, I semi-peacefully watch as my readership grows ever narrower, dwindling finally to one, and then none…
Or so it seems to me. But it’s in the hands of Spirit now, so I guess we’ll all find out together whether I’m wrong about that.
I pledge allegiance to Love
Funny, how you can hear something said a hundred times, and you think you get it. You think you know exactly what it means.
And then, one day you hear the same statement, and POW! It ignites a flame, a knowing, in your heart. And you realize you had no friggin’ idea, those other hundred times.
It’s an occupational hazard, especially in the spiritual arena. We hear about spiritual truth all the time: We’re all One. This 3-D world is not real. Only Love is real.
Blah, blah, blah. We get ‘truth fatigue.’ We hear it, and it sounds just like the truth we heard last week and the week before that. And so we tune it out. We’re not really hearing it at all.
Well, that’s part of the issue, anyway. The other part is that authentic spiritual truth is entirely beyond words – so the words that describe the truth don’t actually mean much of anything. They mostly exist so our ego minds can latch onto them and assure us we already know what they mean because we’ve heard them so many times before. Which is SO not true.
• • •
Anyway, I recently finished writing my next book, and the time came to ask the lovely Nouk Sanchez to write an afterword. Which she did. And it was wonderful.
Nouk is an amazingly gifted teacher, both in person and in written form. She’s a treasure. But Nouk’s writing (in its raw state) is…how shall I say it…a bit wordy.
I typically polish my own books until they gleam. I edit the hell out of every page, making sure each word fulfills a beautiful purpose. And if it doesn’t, it’s outta there. I’m kind of obsessive about it.
Yet I’ve never edited another person’s work as stringently as I edit my own. When I collaborate with others on blogs or whatnot, I normally try to change their writing as little as possible. I just fix grammar, punctuation and that sort of thing, letting the original character come through almost entirely.
But this was my book we were talking about. My Spirit-inspired, year-long labor of love. No wandering sentences allowed.
Yes, I wanted a beautifully edited afterword that fit in seamlessly with the rest of the book, but I didn’t want my own bossy, obsessive ego to be in charge of the editing process. And I was having a bit of a quandary about that. How to do justice to Nouk’s piece, and my book at the same time?
I wanted to be able to find the ideal afterword within the pages she had written – carefully sculpting away the excess like Michelangelo chipping marble to reveal the masterpiece already present within the hunk of stone.
Hey, I’m good, but I ain’t no Michelangelo. So I did the only reasonable thing: After much prayer, I surrendered the entire thing to Spirit, and let an Editor far greater than me take over.
And the editing became a light, joyful process. And I ended up with a piece that was perfect for my book, while staying true to Nouk’s intention. And that’s not why I’m telling you about it.
This is what I really wanted to tell you: All of that prayer and surrender allowed me to open up to my higher Self and let the editing decisions flow from divine inspiration. But, surprisingly, the same phenomenon also happened in reverse: By being so open while I worked on Nouk’s piece, I was able to absorb what she was saying with my heart instead of my head.
I’d heard her say it many times before: We have to choose. There’s only One truth. That truth is composed of 100% divine Love, and nothing else; we say we believe this, but our actual 3-D experience shows us the opposite. When daily life is showing us disease, unhappiness, lack, or any form of conflict… what is that? It sure as hell isn’t divine Love. Yet we accept this dichotomy.
If reality is Love and only Love, what makes us think a second reality made out of Love’s opposite could ever co-exist side by side with the only reality there is? Two opposing realities absolutely cannot co-exist. It’s Love, or it’s the ego’s delusional version of reality.
SO WHICH IS IT? Put up or shut up – a choice has to be made.
And I heard it. For the first time, I heard that there’s a definitive choice to be made. Right now. By me. And I chose Love.
That means every time I’m faced with proof of Love’s opposite here in the 3-D world (no matter how convincing it seems), I stop and reaffirm my commitment to the only truth there is: I choose Love. Which has no opposite. And I pause to focus all of my intention on this choice until I feel its truth.
Has this choice caused me to permanently see the world through the lens of pure divine Love? Of course it hasn’t; not yet, anyway. I haven’t been able to choose Love consistently with all parts of my mind united. My ego mind is still very much in the picture.
But hey, it’s a start.
Love in the digital age
God bless the internet – it lets us connect in ways that were never possible before.
I’m not talking about dating sites (although they no doubt have their value). I mean the spiritual bonds we can form with anybody, anywhere in the world.
For the first time in history, we can find each other easily no matter how far away we live from one another – and once found we can make deep, heartfelt spiritual connections via digital signals. Ones and zeros.
It’s remarkable, really, when you think about it.
One of my dearest friends lives in a big green field somewhere in England. The moment we met on Twitter, we both felt a nameless spiritual connection that spanned lifetimes and needed no explanation. We recognized each other. Profoundly.
I suppose there’s a chance we might have met at some other point in history. But a pen pal relationship would never have offered the same instant depth of friendship or shared spiritual experience.
Airmail letters every other month would never have allowed the complete evaporation of cultural barriers between us. I look at him (yes, he has visited here a number of times now) and see the shining essence of my own truest Self looking back at me. How could such a connection have ever been made without the internet?
Many other friends have since come to me in this same way, and I’ve grown to cherish these relationships. I haven’t met most of these people yet (and might not meet some of them at all) but the bond of spiritual friendship between us is rich and satisfying nonetheless.
One such connection was made recently through dear Nouk Sanchez. Nouk and I have spent only a little time face to face, but we feel quite close thanks to – what else – those blessed ones and zeros on our computer screens.
Anyway, through Nouk I was introduced to a woman named Eli Griffin, who, like us, writes spiritual books. Eli lives in Italy, a place I haven’t visited in at least ten years. The intro took place via email, and the connection between the three of us was such that we immediately acted on Guidance to start a project together.
We decided to collaborate on a series of long conversations about the spiritual principles underlying a practice of Oneness. All three of us share a passion to bring these spiritual principles down off their lofty intellectualized perches, and figure out how to use them as living, breathing motivators in everyday life.
So we built a blog site for this purpose. (Or rather Eli did. Nouk and I just contributed to the conversation that’s posted there.) Our dialogue – there’s only one so far, and the topic is RELATIONSHIPS – was rich and meaty, and also tons of fun to participate in! It went some unexpected places, seemingly with a mind of its own.
The response has been phenomenal and truly humbling. Me, I’m just grateful once again for all these human connections we make on the internet. Even the ones we don’t know about.
The blog, if you’re interested, is http://ourjoining.wordpress.com/ We intend to start another dialogue (Topic: COMMITMENT) in a month or so, and when that’s finished we hope to post it there as well.
In the meantime, take good care of yourself, dear friend in zeros and ones.
Love,
Carrie
HDTV Forgiveness
Ever feel like daily spiritual discipline is a whole lotta work with no immediate payoff here in the 3-D world?
All this effort to retrain my mind to see the world correctly, you think, yet I’m still reacting to the crap around me in the same old ways. That’s how it feels sometimes, at least for me.
I know all this forgiveness work is hugely powerful in terms of healing my ego mind – I can feel it happening more and more all the time – but somehow divine love never seems to be my first reaction to anything.
Well, until yesterday. That’s when I got the opportunity to see just how far I’ve really come.
My husband, like many guys, is a tech geek. I, like many women, am not. He’s been lobbying for high definition TV for about a year now. Me, I harbor no desire to see the pancake makeup actors wear to cover their pores. Especially when it’s going to cost me an extra $20 a month for the privilege.
Truth be told, I’m not so in love with TV at all, anymore. It just isn’t any fun, watching cataclysmic ego stories of good and evil. But Kurt likes it, and he really wanted that HDTV. So I relented.
And then it turned out it came with hidden fees that made the total more like $32 extra per month. Kurt took it as a personal crusade, spending hours on the phone with the DirecTV people. But they wouldn’t budge.
So he removed the DirecTV satellite dish and switched to Dish Network instead. Dish Network (compared to DirecTV) comes with a user interface straight out of the Stone Age. It’s clunky, nonsensical and needlessly complex, making even the simplest functions a difficult mess. So much so that it puts me off watching TV altogether. That’s how much I hate using that remote on that interface.
In earlier times, I would’ve been really bummed out about that. But what the hey, I’ve been looking for a reason to watch less TV. Now I’ve found it.
Yesterday as I juggled my own hectic workday, in the background I could hear Kurt on the phone with DirecTV for what seemed like hours. He emerged afterward looking flushed and upset; I thought he might burst into tears.
“It’s really terrible,” he said, flinching a little, and I realized he had something he was afraid to tell me; he was bracing himself for my reaction. “I had to sign a brand new 24 month contract when we ordered the HDTV,” he said, “and DirecTV refuses to let us out of that contract. We owe them almost $500 in cancellation fees.”
The old me, the me I’ve been all my life, would not have taken that news calmly. I’d have let him have it with both barrels for dragging me down this HDTV road in the first place, leaving me with a new TV watching experience I absolutely hate, and $500 poorer to boot. I’d have made a major drama out of it, remaining secretly resentful for months afterward every time the TV was switched on.
But it wasn’t the old me. I listened peacefully to his unhappy tale, observed the fear and frustration on his face, and immediately thought: It’s just money. You are the perfect light of heaven, and I have no desire to punish you. Because you’re not guilty of anything.
It wasn’t a forgiveness exercise – that was my honest-to-God first reaction. I then broadened the forgiveness to include all of Dish Network (who would charge the same cancellation fees if we bailed on them) and all of DirecTV. They’re taking our money, but they’re really just calling for love. It’s all perfect, exactly as it is.
Astonishingly, the whole mess has never interrupted my peace for even a moment. And I’d pay a hell of a lot more than $500 for that kind of joyous serenity, any day.
So I guess the moral of the story is: Keep doing those forgiveness exercises, kids. Keep retraining your mind to see the truth of Oneness in everything, because you never know when it’ll actually start sinking in.
Enlightenment: infinite joygasm – or just release from ego?
I like Adyashanti. He comes across as a perfectly normal guy who just happens to be enlightened. And when he talks about the true nature of enlightenment, his explanations are clear and simple firsthand reports.
But for students of A Course in Miracles, those explanations can be troubling, because Adya’s descriptions of enlightenment are markedly different from those offered by the Course.
Adya says enlightenment is nothing at all – it’s merely what you have left after the ego mind is dissolved. There’s no more distorted perception of the world; you just have the clear, ever-present truth of Oneness. It’s a state of awareness that’s neither happy nor sad – it merely is. And there’s nothing else beyond it.
(It’s not just Adya who says this, of course. Jed McKenna, various Zen masters and many other self-realized teachers throughout history have all described their enlightenment in similar terms.)
The Course, on the other hand, speaks of a fully enlightened state, which it describes as limitless joy, infinite fulfillment and completion. Perfect love and safety and freedom and peace – along with the certainty of being home at last, exactly where we belong. And this is said to be a permanent, changeless state, radiating with brilliant holy light, forever and ever amen.
So whose description should we believe?
The answer, as far as I can tell is: Both. But they’re describing two different states.
Adya’s explanation seems to be a description of non-dualism, which the Course says is the 3rd step of 4 on the road to full enlightenment. Non-dualism is just what it sounds like: It’s the realization of Oneness, waking up to the reality that we’re not separate.
(The first 2 steps of 4 would be: dualism, which is where we all start out – an unquestioned belief in separate bodies and separate minds; and semi-dualism, which would be sincere-ish belief in Oneness while mostly maintaining faith in the reality of separate 3-D existence at the same time. Trying to have cake and eat it, in other words.)
Adya and the aforementioned other guys are enlightened. I’m not. (I’m assuming the same can be said of you.) So it seems ridiculous to stand up in front of a self-realized guy and say: No, excuse me, you’re wrong, because the teaching I believe in describes enlightenment differently from what you say about it.
I mean, who am I to disagree with an enlightened guy, right? He’d probably just smile and tell me all beliefs are illusion, so get over it.
Well, as it happens, I did get within spitting distance of enlightenment once. And it left a sort of residue of truth behind – a lasting ability to see the big picture.
In the Dinnertable Awakening of 2005, I was presented with an invitation to accept enlightenment. (That’s what awakenings are – you’re awakened to the truth of all existence, but whether you embrace that truth or turn away from it is up to you.)
I didn’t embrace it. At the time I found the limitless freedom of enlightenment so disturbing, so uncomfortable that I willingly threw away the opportunity. I pulled myself back into my body and my 3-D world instead, choosing to turn away from Oneness.
(Could I kick myself now for making that choice? Uh…hell yeah. But I wasn’t ready; I just couldn’t stand to stay in that infinite state of awareness.)
But when people like Adya are presented with the option of enlightenment, they choose it as their permanent operating system. So I’m not about to claim they’re mistaken or misinformed about what that enlightenment looks like. How could they be? They’re clearly just reporting on their own authentic experience.
Yet I choose to believe that there’s more, as the Course says there is. Call it a strong intuition that there’s another chapter to the story – one that those enlightened guys just haven’t experienced yet.
That would be the 4th state of 4, the full awareness of union with God. The unending joy of knowing that all of us, together, are Heaven.
And that state is called pure non-dualism, a condition that’s so far beyond plain old non-dualism that the Course says there’s no point in even trying to describe the magnificence of it.
Pure non-dualism, that’s the one I want. I’m going for the gold. Could I be wrong about its existence? Absolutely.
But it’s still where I’m headed. And if I make it in this lifetime, I will promise you one hell of a blog post.
Oneness = Identity theft?
So I had that recurring dream last night – the one where I foolishly leave my handbag unattended and moments later my wallet is gone…it happens and then I’m completely lost, set adrift. It’s not so much the money I’m worried about; it’s the driver’s license, the credit cards.
Everything I use to prove I really am who I say I am.
It’s a dream that occurs each time I place another big chunk of my trust in Spirit.
It’s a not-so-friendly shorthand reminder from my unconscious ego mind. A way of warning myself to back off, to quit pushing beyond my egoic comfort zone. To stop trying to see the world through the eyes of Spirit.
Because if I’m learning to trust in Spirit’s interpretation of the world, that means I’m withdrawing part of my belief from the ego mind’s version of the story.
The dream’s details change but the essence is always the same: It’s saying: Better be careful – you’re playing with fire. Get too close to Oneness and you’ll lose your identity for good.
And God knows, that’s a terrifying thought.
But is it true? Of course not.
To reconnect with Oneness is to remember our own truest state. Our real identity. And when we remember what we really are, we will also remember that we are completely safe. Infinitely peaceful. Totally free.
It’s our ego mind that’s in danger of losing the false identity it’s so carefully constructed to hide the truth of what we really are.
But knowing all this intellectually doesn’t really mean anything; when push comes to shove, I for one still thoroughly believe I’m a separate person with an individual mind, living in a 3-D world with lots of other folks in the same predicament.
Until I know and believe in my heart that we’re all One, these teachings of non-duality are all just blah blah blah. And as long as that’s true, then on the deepest unconscious level, the thought of attaining Oneness will continue to be terrifying.
Because who will I be if there’s no more me?
Actually, Spirit has taught me quite a lot on this subject. I freaked out about it in a fairly big way, back when I first realized what a return to Oneness would really entail (see page 190 of my book, in a story aptly titled ‘Freakout’).
That was back in 2006. Since then Spirit has taught me to look closely at the mask identity that the ego provides – the false ‘me’ belonging to each one of us. To really notice how all of us settle for daily unease as a fact of life; to realize that none of us are able to find truly lasting happiness or peace in this world.
We settle, in short, for an ill-fitting meat suit instead of the perfect identity that’s really ours.
There we are. It’s the human condition.
But for those of us who aspire to wake up from this dream of separation, our work is cut out for us: We know we can’t ‘give up’ this individual identity while we still believe in it and find it valuable. Trying is a waste of time – it just doesn’t work that way.
But by allowing Spirit to teach us and gently heal our perception of the world, then our perception of ourselves begins to heal as well.
Until finally, one day we realize that the mask self is nothing at all. It has no value so we willingly let it go – and just like that, it’s gone.
Oh sure, the meat suit is still here, but we’re not fooled by it anymore. We know it isn’t really us. It’s just a vehicle for walking around expressing the truth that we’ve become awakened to: That the state of Oneness is True Self, and no other identity is needed.
Yeah, I greatly look forward to knowing all this with my heart instead of my head.
But in the meantime, has anybody seen my wallet?
Forgiveness vs Denial – The Rogers & Hammerstein version
[pinit]
I was recently asked this question: ‘When A Course in Miracles talks about forgiveness, it says we should overlook the terrible thing that’s going on, and tell ourselves it isn’t really happening. But isn’t that just denial?’
Nope. And I’ll tell you why.
But first, let’s back this up for a minute and take a look at what the world means when it talks about denial.
For this, we’ll take a brief detour into the land of movie musicals. Let’s say you’re a small 19th century boy, and your ship has just landed in Siam. The badass bare-chested chief of security boards the boat and prepares to escort you to the palace of the king.
Holy crap.
Terrified, you turn to your mother who offers this sage advice:
Whenever I feel afraid
I hold my head erect
And whistle a happy tune
And no one will suspect I’m afraid.
She concludes by saying that once she’s fooled everyone else into believing she’s unafraid, she finds she’s fooled herself as well. So now she’s no longer afraid.
Or how about this:
You’re a tiny Austrian kid and you’re scared of thunderstorms. So you fly into Fraulein Maria’s bedroom and leap onto the fluffy white coverlet, hoping for reassurance. And the good Fraulein doesn’t disappoint:
When the dog bites
When the bee stings
When I’m feeling sad
I simply remember my favorite things
And then I don’t feel so bad.
The thunderstorm is still raging, but you’re so busy thinking about brown paper packages tied up with strings that you’ve forgotten all about it. At least until the next big thunderclap.
So, in essence, these heroines of the modern musical are both offering the same dreadful advice: Don’t look down at that nightmarish hole beneath your feet. Don’t listen to the horrifying growls of the beast as it plays on your darkest fears.
Instead, grab a rusty, half-rotted plank and throw it across the gap. Stand in the middle of the plank, close your eyes, put your fingers in your ears and repeat after me at the top of your lungs:
LAH-LAH-LAH-LAH-LAH-LAH-LAH-LAH…
So yeah, that’s denial as the world employs it. Not exactly an effective coping mechanism for blotting out pain and fear. The pain and fear are only temporarily disguised, and the source of the pain and fear remains intact.
On the other hand, when A Course in Miracles talks about forgiveness and denial, it’s using denial in a completely different way.
It says: ‘Look down. See that yawning hole beneath your feet? It isn’t real, you know. You made it up. And although you’re tempted right now to be frightened or angry because you believe the monster in that hole is real, you’re completely mistaken.
There is nothing “down there” to get you. There is only one joyous, perfect Self, and you’re it. Look past the illusory image of the hole and its contents, to the loving reality of Heaven.
By choosing to see its Heavenly reality instead of the nightmare story you’ve told yourself about it, you are helping to heal your own perception of that hole. And by looking beyond the frightening image of that dark pit to the light beyond it, you help to dissolve the illusory pit itself.
Deny your dark illusions and trust in Heaven’s truth instead. This is the sure path to peace and safety.’
Ok, so it doesn’t rhyme and isn’t filmed in glorious Cinemascopic Technicolor.
But it works.
Reality checks
I woke up this morning thinking about a short story I loved when I read it back in high school:
This British WWII pilot gets shot down over Germany while on an important mission. He remembers nothing after his plane goes down, but wakes to find himself in a sunny hospital room in England, not far from where he grew up. The smiling hospital attendant informs him he’s been sent home to recover from his wounds.
The base commander will be in to debrief him as soon as he feels stronger, he’s told, but first he should just concentrate on getting well. In the meantime, they serve him just the right English food. The pretty nurses speak to him with just the right regional accent. And when he looks out the window, he sees countryside that looks just right. Just the way his corner of England is supposed to look.
But then he goes into the bathroom and turns on the water. And this water is very soft. But the water of his hometown area is hard as rocks, and everyone who lives there would know that.
So he realizes this ‘reality’ that’s been carefully constructed for him is just a trick. Despite what his senses are showing him, none of it’s real. The story ends in the debriefing session, as he answers every question with only his name, rank and serial number…
______
So in this story, the Germans are the bad guys and the English pilot the good guy. And although assigning guilt would get us nowhere, I can’t help finding some parallels to the predicament we find ourselves in when we start our search for spiritual Truth.
In Truth, of course, there are no good guys or bad guys. There’s only one of us, and we’re relying on our collective ego mind to fabricate a world for us that allows no hint of the Real world to shine through. We ask for that deception by choice, and the ego is happy to oblige us.
How does the ego mind keep out Reality? Through its crowning achievement: The body. We thoroughly believe our one eternal Self is split up into lots and lots of individual people, each of whom has a separate mind housed in a separate body.
We’re completely wrong about that, by the way.
But it’s not hard to see why we’re so thoroughly convinced of it. As Gary Renard says in The End of Reincarnation, “The body allows into its awareness only that which conforms to the reality of the ego’s cherished illusions. So now, everything we experience testifies to us of the reality of this illusion. That’s asking the illusion to explain the illusion.
So now, the illusion [of the mind] is telling us what to think and the [illusion of the] body is telling us what to feel. So it’s actually an illusion telling us everything about itself, and we buy it because it’s all that we experience.”
A closed feedback loop of fake sensory input.
Fiendishly brilliant, that ego mind. Which, of course, is really just us. (There are no bad guys here.)
But, if you’re paying attention, there are plenty of hard water/soft water-esque anomalies that prove the illusion has holes in it. In fact, (if you’re paying attention) it becomes ridiculously clear that it’s all smoke and mirrors.
It just takes a certain willingness to disbelieve what your eyes are seeing and what your ears are hearing and what your senses of touch and smell and taste are telling you, that’s all.
Name, rank and serial number, baby. That’s all I’m sayin.