To begin this journey of Awakening can be very frightening. Getting out of your comfort zone by revealing and releasing your resistance and judgments takes courage. “Creating your own reality” is a notion coming from the ego. This is not about improving the personality, it is about letting it go and moving in the direction of the unknown. The gap between what is known and what is unknown can be terrifying. Old ways of relating seem to be falling apart and bringing us to our knees.
Undoing the Ego
Two Hands Kneading
Expose your thoughts and feeling on the one hand. Be used in function by the Spirit on the other.
Releasing the Ego
This discussion follows a viewing of the “Star Trek” episode, “The Thaw,” which illustrates how the ego operates and uses fear. The first question to ask on the spiritual journey is, “What aspect of the dream do you like?” The likes and dislikes are both part of a judgment system to keep the mind asleep. The dreams you think you like can hold you back just as much as the dreams in which the fear is apparent. The things you like are part of the prison without you knowing it. The mind is enmeshed and addicted to fear.
Expose the Ego
The ego needs the power of the mind’s belief. Expose your unconscious beliefs that feed the ego’s projection of the cosmos. Expose your secrets to the Holy Spirit and He will shine them away. Watch your mind, paying close attention to your upsets.
Inquiry into Consciousness
In meditation we observe our thoughts, yet self-inquiry is the pathway inwards to stillness. As I inquired into myself, I found that beneath my faulty perceptions were fear-based emotions, and beneath them were my thoughts. And what drove my thoughts was my belief system. The core belief of the ego thought system is linear time. This is the root of all conflicts. The ego made linear time to cover over the present moment. The ACIM Workbook is the beginning of self-inquiry. It leads you to an open mind and to the experience of miracles.
Undoing Duality, Undoing Time
Practical spirituality is about emptying the mind of everything you think you think and think you know. Even one scrap of dualistic thinking will turn the dream into a seeming reality that you’re a real person, that there are real people around you, and that there’s something really happening in a linear way. None of the dualistic teachings are true; the yin and the yang, the masculine and the feminine, balancing energies. It’s all dualistic.
Spiritual Self-Concept
When you get into spirituality, the ego wants to make a career out of it, to make and maintain a spiritual self-concept. When you identify with that illusion, you will defend it. This is with anything, without exception, anything in the world that you place value in; this is an identification delusion. When you are upset about anything, it is this ego belief system’s littleness-identification fearing the light, projecting the upset out onto the world, forgetting it has done so, and then blaming the projection. The root of insanity lies here.
Zero Ambition
We live in an ambition-based culture. In this culture, it might seem to that having ambition is a good thing, and that having zero ambition is a problem. Is that true? In this video, see that having zero ambition is a great way to live! David Hoffmeister laughs, saying that after ten years of attending university, he realized that he had to start unlearning! This is a point of seeing that you must move in reverse! “A Course in Miracles” is not a learning curriculum, rather an unlearning that is aimed at emptying the mind of the concepts which are integrated into this seeming reality.
The Ego Is a Perceptual Problem
You made the ego by believing in it. The ego IS the big bang! An experience (beyond the ego) will come to end your doubting. This will not be another theological concept. It will be an experience.
Exposing Everything: The Beginning of True Healing
We think that if we expose our feelings, especially the guilty, unruly, jealous ones, that they will come back to haunt us. But the truth is, this is the beginning of true healing. And at some point, one realizes that it is the only way. “How could I ever think that withholding or hiding these feelings could ever serve?” one eventually asks. It is the most difficult at the beginning, but rather than take stands for, or against, ideas of right and wrong, be honest instead and the way will become very clear. We will open to new ways of being and seeing while the old way begins to be seen as literally insane.