September 6, 2011
We continue to experience suffering, pain, guilt. We feel like a victim of the world we live in. Or perhaps we feel helpless to control our life and the world closest to us. We have confused the concepts of cause and effect. We have misunderstood the causes of our suffering. We think the world causes our suffering or, put another way, that something outside of us causes our suffering. The truth is that our suffering is caused within us, not by any malicious act, but by our mistaken idea of what the world is and what it can do. The world we see is comprised of all we think and have ever thought about what we experience. These thoughts come from within. When we begin to understand that we create our own thoughts, we begin to understand that our suffering is caused by what we are thinking.
This idea may seem strange, or perhaps totally insane. How could I possibly be responsible for causing my own suffering? Yet we are because it is nothing more that a mistaken idea. The Course teaches us that the life and world we think we see is mostly about what we think about it, both what is happening now and all that has ever happened in our lives. The Course explains that it is like a dream we have when we are sleeping. We understand that a dream while we are sleeping is not real because it is all in our mind. The Course teaches us that we are spiritually asleep and have forgotten that we went to sleep. So, we think what we see and experience is real and happening to us because we are not waking up from the dream we call reality.
The Holy Spirit will, if we allow it, teach us in this dream state the truth that our suffering, our pain, is just a dream. Spirit, as our parents may have, gently wakes us from this dream (or nightmare), little by little, to the truth that our dreaming is the cause of our suffering, not what seems so real in the dream. Spirit reminds us that we are and always have been whole, that we are the holy Child of God. In this awakening we gradually begin to see as Spirit sees, truly. We begin to understand that our dreaming is the cause of all we thought was outside of us and doing to us.
The Course puts it this way: Into eternity, where all is one, there crept a tiny, mad idea (dream), at which we remembered (decided) not to laugh. In our forgetting (it was a dream) did the thought (dream) become a serious idea, and possible of both accomplishment and real effects. Together (with Spirit), we can laugh them both (the dream and its effects) away. T-27.VIII.6. The life we think we are in is actually in us because it is mostly comprised of our thoughts and ideas about it we believe. Letting Spirit teach us about this dream frees us from the prison of the dream we made up. Realizing that the cause is the dream and nothing more, frees us for all eternity. Let it be so.
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