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October-December, 2020

The Illusion Delusion

by Rev. Peggy Rivera, Ordained Ministerial Counselor

I received an email from one of our sisters with a message from the ACIM text.

“I am come as a light into a world that does deny itself everything. It does this simply by dissociating itself from everything. It is therefore an illusion of isolation maintained by fear of the same loneliness that is its illusion.” (T-8.lV.2:1-3) I thought, “That is the main point of this discussion. It is literally how we deny ourselves everything and accept nothingness in its place.”

Then I thought, “Okay, what is an illusion? A thing that is or is likely to be wrongly perceived or interpreted by the senses. A deceptive appearance or impression. A false idea or belief.”

And what is a delusion? The dictionary definition is, “A belief or altered reality that is persistently held despite evidence or agreement to the contrary, generally in reference to a mental disorder.”

I read in the book From the Christ Mind that “Abilities can be invented to take reality’s place; what is all powerful and forever free can seem to be a weak and pitiful thing, tied to a form destined for destruction, imprisoned by fear, and threatened by all that appears to surround it. …Reality has been lost so long ago that not even its memory remains.” We were lucky, though, because the Holy Spirit is the keeper of the memory of who we really are. And that resides deeply within our mind. Without that connection we would be totally lost in a prison that we created.

“His Presence guarantees the end of suffering and illusion, and the return Home to the Reality you left but in dreams. Yet dreams are real to the dreamer and illusions are strong in their effects. No one asleep in this world thinks what he sees is but imagination, without the power to affect him unless he wished it so. Wish makes a world and projection establishes it as you would have it be. Desire produces form and belief gives it reality through perception. Yet is illusion, illusion still. Reality is not the result of idle wishes placed outside the mind that thought them and esteemed them as true. Reality is One, all parts joined in a Unity that extends forever, created by God in His Likeness and all encompassed by His Being; It leaves not the Mind of Its Creator to appear as if outside and separate. Madness makes a world that could not be, carving separate figures out of what is One. These shadows appear to move about, and come and go, until the Light of Love returns to shine them away.”

So, illusion is our incorrect perception of the “reality” of this world and our physical experience. It causes our delusion to persistently believe this world is real, contrary to the fact that we have agreed with the Holy Spirit and Christ that this is not our true reality. Because it seems so real to us and tangible to our senses, it can be very hard to remember who we really are in truth.

That is the work of the ego. The ego is there to blind us to the truth. It is really masterful at creating more illusions. I suppose that is why I struggle so with this one. I get distracted with my stories and how I have to solve them. I think I just need to remember that the stories I have created in my egoic mind are just illusions and not really important. I can look at them as witnesses to the fact that I am still trying to heal my mind.

Instead of looking at them from ego, I can ask the meaning of them from Holy Spirit and seek His perspective on why I created that drama. I can open my mind to the fact that only Love is real and anything outside of Love is there only to distract me from the truth.

In the past, I have believed that the meaning of the Course’s description of the world not being real was only meant metaphysically, that it was only talking about the way we think being the illusion. But according to the readings in the books, From The Christ Mind and A Course in Miracles, none of this exists except in our perceived separated mind. When we so desire, we can wake up to the reality of our Spiritual life.

The Course says our true Self is spirit. I take it this dense physical form that seems so real is just a vivid dream that is hard to believe is not real. You know, the kind of dream that when you wake up from it you can be actually acting out. I have wakened crying or even screaming. One time my dream felt so real and scary I got heart palpitations. I was out of breath and sweating from it. It felt very real.

In that same way our ego self is dreaming. Our true purpose here is to help each other remember our true Self so we can all go to our real home, where there is no pain, no death, no sorrow. Who in their right mind would choose a life where they are often scared, sad, sick or waiting to get sick and die? That is the fear of the ego, annihilation, not existing at all, losing power.

In From The Christ Mind Jesus says, “You cannot know what you are as long as you are choosing to be what you are not. To choose illusion is to choose against Truth, as they are mutually exclusive, and the presence of one is the absence of the other. You would never choose wrongly if the memory of Truth had not been driven from your mind and lost to you, until you decide for It once again. Your True self is complete, it does not need help to be itself but you need help to clear your mind of all that prevents the memory of the Self from returning to your awareness. The self you made has eclipsed what God created and taken its place in your experience.”

As I think about this from the perspective of Spirit taking the body out of the equation, I feel less confused. It seems easy to figure out that if I just allow myself to see that we only have to recognize Love in the present moment, forget about the thoughts of being separate or different than someone else, all is peaceful. All is right, I just have to keep deciding that this is my Truth.

“The inevitable result of delusion is the loss of contact with Reality. …When delusion is permitted to take the place of Reality, chaos and suffering will result. When delusion replaces Truth in your mind a state of consciousness develops that does not know itself or anything else.”

As I pondered over the material I was reading, I got the feeling that this earthly existence was sort of like being on a hamster’s wheel. We keep going round and round, going nowhere. When we decide we don’t want the same old path to nowhere, we start to search beyond ourselves, keeping in mind that the body’s eyes were made only to see form, not the spiritual Self that we are.

It talks about the body’s eyes being incapable of seeing truly because they were made to see separation and differences. Wholeness and light are beyond form and are not limited by it.

I think the fact that the body’s eyes are not made to see truth is important for me to remember. It helps me understand this idea of our experience being an illusion. I realize that without the help of Holy Spirit I would never be able to see past it. Because the Holy Spirit is the keeper of our memory, It holds the truth deep within our mind. All we need is the desire to know the truth and we will never be denied. But the desire needs to be complete; we do not halfway heal. We cannot give part of our mind over to truth. One foot in the dream and one foot outside doesn’t work. We have to be committed completely to the truth.

In an article on A Course in Miracles Blog called, The Blinding Illusion of Form – the world is an illusion, there is no world, Paul West described the meaning of this blindness to the unreality of this world. He pointed out that people believe it means that the world exists only in our own personal mind. But it is much bigger than that. He says you have to see it as the collective mind, not a personal mind that you can change. We all are included in the Mind of God, not a separate mind that can change the way we think but that everything real is in God’s Mind.

The body is not outside the mind, nor is this world. They are not solid or real. They are ideas of separation. That means as mind changes, physical form must change as well. This is why the physical body can be a symbol of immortality, why all sickness must be reversed, why a broken body is proof that the mind has not been healed. Miracles, true miracles, are not restricted to the “scope” of your little mind. Nor are they limited to the scope of what you think of as mind, separate from matter.

Miracles apply to the mind’s misperception of God. Period. You can change how “you” seem to perceive the world, to see God in it, but if you are still seeing physical matter according to its illusory laws, and still think of yourself as separate, then you are still perceiving incorrectly. We seem to focus on trying to change our little mind thoughts, as if we can think it into reality. But we have to remember that we are in the Mind of God along with the whole world. God is all inclusive. As in “I am in the Father and the Father is in me.”

I close my eyes and think Loving thoughts and I am grateful that I am Love. I see us all together as whole and loving. I notice that there is nothing around me, and I feel so blessed to be a part of this. I feel the light on my face and I feel it expand larger and larger to include my entire body, I remember that my senses only block my real Self. I just bathe in a sea of Light and Love and remember who I am in God. No more distraction, no more thoughts of fear and death. Only happy thoughts, and sweet dreams. I no longer have the desire to be what I am not.

© 2020, Pathways of Light. https://www.pathwaysoflight.org
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