For most of my life I was living in conflict – it was all inside my own mind, and I couldn’t seem to stop projecting it on the world. I felt like a victim much of the time, but I was the one who was constantly attacking. Looking back, I wonder if I was addicted to conflict. Conflict makes the ego-identified person feel alive, and vital.
One of the major challenges we each have in our human experience is that we have conflicting goals.
We’d like to be right, and that means we’d like to make others wrong. Sometimes we’d like to be the A Course in Miracles police of our world.
We’d also like to have peace of mind. We’d also like to be loving.
These are conflicting goals. We can’t have both.
We can’t be loving and attacking at the same time.
I’ve encountered what I would call the A Course in Miracles Police – people who go around judging other students and telling them what they should and shouldn’t do and how wrong and bad they are.
Sometimes it seems like they’d rather beat you to death with the book than sit and be loving with you.
I understand that. It’s the zealot – that particular expression of the ego. That fundamentalist, dogmatic way. We’re all on this path of healing together, and we help each other – even when it seems that we don’t.
When I first started doing the Living A Course in Miracles classes, somebody wrote to me and said, “It pains me so much to see what you’re doing to A Course in Miracles.”
I thought, “what am I doing to the Course?” I wasn’t doing anything TO it. But I did know that pain is a wrong perspective. The fact that they told me it pains them – I knew the pain was in their view, not in what I was doing. Because I was getting a hundred messages of gratitude and thanksgiving for every one attack.
We wouldn’t think that A Course in Miracles students would attack each other. But we’re having a human experience, and that’s what ego-identified people do, they attack.
Cries for Love happen. I don’t know what anything is for – but I’d like to.
A Course in Miracles Lesson 25 tells us: “It is crucial to your learning to be willing to give up the goals you have established for everything.”
When we give up our conflicting goals – when we stop trying to be right AND peaceful at the same time – then we can see clearly.
Then we can discover what things are really for. Then we can bring benefit to everyone, and that makes it all so very worthwhile.
This is our spiritual responsibility – to maintain our spiritual sovereignty over our mind and our heart, our choices and our actions, so that we can actually choose to see the world correctly.
Our Change Your Mind About the World program starting Saturday, May 30 is all about learning to see these worldly events correctly – as opportunities for healing rather than reasons for despair.
Let’s roll up our spiritual sleeves together and clear our minds of the insanity!
SATURDAY: Change Your Mind About the World – Are you upset by what you see in the world – join with Alan Cohen, James Twyman, Michael Mirdad, Lisa Natoli and me – we’re bringing the darkness to the light together. Click here for more info.
NEW PODCAST EPISODE: Not Perfection with Michael Mirdad PREMIERS TODAY Most of us who love A Course in Miracles have done it: tried to work the lessons harder, study more, finally get forgiveness right. Underneath the effort, there’s often a quiet shame that we’re still not living it well enough. I felt that for years. This week I sat down with Michael Mirdad, and we kept circling something ACIM says about all that striving, something most of us read right past. What if we’ve misunderstood what’s actually being asked of us?
