I. The Conditions of Learning, P 5
5 The Holy Spirit, therefore, must begin His teaching by showing you what you can never learn. His message is not indirect, but He must introduce the simple truth into a thought system which has become so twisted and so complex you cannot see that it means nothing. He merely looks at its foundation and dismisses it. But you who cannot undo what you have made, nor escape the heavy burden of its dullness that lies upon your mind, cannot see through it. It deceives you, because you chose to deceive yourself. Those who choose to be deceived will merely attack direct approaches, because they seem to encroach upon deception and strike at it.
Journal
We probably started with a simple idea, something like, “I wonder what it would be like to not be Divine?” And as that idea unfolded it became the twisted and complex thought system that Jesus is talking about. He makes it clear that we chose this and that part of choosing it was to forget we chose it. He says that we remembered not to laugh.
In other words, if we did not choose to deliberately forget that we made this up, then we would not believe in it, but would laugh at it. We wanted the experience and to have the experience we had to suspend reality and forget it wasn’t real. That was a deliberate choice. But there is a failsafe in place, the Holy Spirit, which is in our minds waiting for the signal that we are ready to wake up from this dream.
I try to remember back before I found A Course in Miracles. All the stuff that happened in my life, no matter how crazy or how painful was just “life” as I had come to know it. I prayed for help with life, but it never occurred to me that I could pray for help to extricate myself from this life. Mostly, I just tried to get better at dealing with it.
Now I understand from A Course in Miracles that this thing I think of as living is not real. This experience I am having is not life, but a twisted dream of life. This happened as the Course taught me to recognize the ego in my mind, to see the contrast between choosing to listen to the ego and choosing to listen to the Holy Spirit.
Once we learn what the ego is and how we made it, then learn to contrast it with our true nature, we make a decision as to what we want. I have decided that I am ready to wake up from this dream, and so each time I recognize that I am making decisions with the ego I turn to the Holy Spirit instead. At my request, the Holy Spirit is healing my mind and returning me to my natural state as part of God.
The question we often ask is why, if we made the ego, we need help to undo it. The ego twists that question into if life was so great with God, why did we leave it. First, we did not choose to leave God, we just chose to have an interesting and different experience. We remain in God even while we dream of these stories of being outside God.
The reason we need help waking up is because of the decision we made to forget where the ego came from. It was the decision to remember not to laugh at the whole insane idea and to take it very seriously that keeps us from the clarity we need to undo the ego.
That is why we have the Holy Spirit Who is never confused. Jesus says that He merely looks at its foundation and dismisses it. (This is what he taught me to do. I choose to ignore the story and look at the lesson it has, and when I choose to disregard appearances and know the truth instead.)His perfect clarity allows Him to see the truth about us and being in our mind, we are able to see the truth about ourselves. We cannot learn this on our own, but we can choose to know it and the Holy Spirit will teach us what we want to know. Desire is everything.
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