DO WE CREATE OUR REALITY?
Ozodi Osuji
A course in miracles can be summarized this way: each of us produced the situation he finds himself in; the situation is his dream; he projected out the people and things in his world because he is the dreamer and the dreamer’s mind produced the dream he is having.
Our nightly dreams are solo dreams, but our day world is our mutual, collective dream, all of us produced the day world.
Our collective minds are in each of us, so we individually and collectively produce our world. Each of us in the world sees the world he wants to see because he is partly responsible for producing it. He is not a victim of his world and there are no victimizers for we all projected out the world we live in.
We experience what we want to experience; what other people did to us, including enslaving and treating us as second-class citizens, not hiring us for jobs are all produced by us and them, and it is what we and them want to experience.
Whatever other people are doing to one is what one is doing to oneself through seeming other people. You did to you what other people did to you. If other people killed you, you killed you; if you died from some sickness, you killed yourself by giving you that sickness; if a natural force such as tsunami, hurricane, volcano, earthquake, bacteria, virus, fungi killed you, you killed you through it.
I did to me whatever I see seeming other people do to me.
If it were possible for other people to do to me what I did not want to experience, there is no justice in the world and since God is justice then there is no justice in God. A world without justice should not exist; a God who lacks justice should not exist.
The world and God are just and, as such, only one produces what one experiences.
When other people do something to me that makes me angry, I did that thing to me to be angry at other people; I want to feel like a victim that other people, nature and God maltreated and thus I justify anger at them and guarantee that in turn they would defend themselves and justify anger at me; their anger at me is my anger at me, because I came to this world to feel angry at me.
YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR YOUR SICKNESS AND DEATH BUT NOT FOR OTHER PEOPLE’ S SICKNESS ND DEATH
You are responsible for what you experience; similarly other people are responsible for what they experience; if your wife dies from cancer that is what she wants to die from; you did not kill her. If you die from other diseases that is how you want to die.
All deaths are self-chosen. Actually, no one ever dies; death occurs in a dream state, but our spirits are eternal; the body seems to die but the spirit that hitherto lived in it continues to live, including living in other bodies until it no longer desires to live in bodies (no longer desires separation from God).
If a person is prone to bearing grievances and seeking vengeance and punishment for other people’s wrong to her (wrongs that she did to herself through them), if a person is unforgiving, she is likely to feel guilty and deny it and project her guilt to her body and make her body sick and seem to die from the disease she died from.
A forgiving mind that does not bear grudges and does not wish other people evil always has a healthy body and dies a graceful death (or not die at all but use her mind to transfigure her body to light form).
GUILT, SIN, GUILTLESSNESS, SINLESSNESS, INNOCENCE, HOLINESS
To see ourselves on earth we separated from God. We experience this separation as sinful and feel guilty and sinful (the Christian notion of original sin is rooted in our disobedience to God’s injunction not to eat a certain fruit and consequent separation from the Garden of Eden).
Feeling guilty and sinful makes one feel powerful for it means that one has the power to separate from God; one now feels more powerful than God that says that union is reality; one does not have such power and has not separated from God; one merely sleeps and dreams separation while remaining unified in God.
When one feels guilty one feels that one ought to be punished by God. God knows that his sons are not separated from him hence have not sinned so he does not punish them; knowing that God would not punish them and wanting to retain a sense of power from separation, they punish themselves by projecting guilt to their bodies and make their bodies sick and die.
If you accept that you have not separated from God, and that you remain as God created you, spirit and have not left his presence, love and love all people, you will not feel guilty and sinful; you will feel innocent, and holy.
THE HOLY SPIRIT’S INTERPRETATION OF HUMAN EVIL BEHAVIOR: IT IS DREAM EVIL, OVERLOOK IT, FORGIVE IT TO SEE IT REINVENTED IN THE WORLD OF LIGHT FORMS
There is another way of interpreting why the person who did what seems unjust to me did it. Even though that person may seem as evil as Adolf Hitler, his mind contains both the ego and the Holy Spirit; from the ego he did what he did but his right mind, in conjunction with my right mind, the Holy Spirit wants me to learn a different lesson from our combined egos apparent injustice to me.
The Holy Spirit asks me to overlook what the other person did to me and to overlook the extant world, to overlook ego injustice and seek a different type of justice, justice that loves the evil person and loves me.
Both of us, who constitute the one son of God, were operating from the ego separated self in bodies; I had seen me as an ego and body and desired what seems good for my ego, but a higher part of me, the Holy Spirit sees what my ego sees as good for me as not good for me, to him what is good for me is different.
Consider racism and rejection of Black folks for jobs. Rejection of me for jobs I was qualified for used to make me angry. But upon thinking it over, it occurred to me that I really did not like the jobs for which I was rejected. Simply put, I do not want to be part of white America and its racist institutions; I wanted to be outside the racist institutions of America and help establish Christ institutions in America, ones that did not discriminate against people.
The white institutions that discriminated against me gratified my desire not to be absorbed by the racist institutions of America; they are meant for me to help establish non-racist institutions in America.
In other words, those that rejected me for jobs did me a favor, they prevented me from becoming part of their racist world, an alcohol and drug-maintained world. They helped push me out of their insane world, a world that in this century will implode and collapse and is replaced by a saner Christ world.
The racist who rejected me for a job was helping save me from his evil world, he is my savior because he enabled me to ignore his world and find a different world, one that suits my desire for a just world.
But my ego felt angry at him for rejecting me; the Holy Spirit in me knew that he did what he is supposed to do to get me to go do what would save me from the ego (the ego is hell, a prison for the son of God); racists were helping me to understand that I am not an ego but the holy son of God, the Christ self who has total worth in God but is worthless in ego and body.
To live in ego is to live in hell, to be in prison; whoever helped me to not live in hell has helped me regain sanity; sanity is gained in love and forgiveness, in Christ. But this is not how my ego looks at the person that did it wrong; my ego is angry at that person.
A course in miracles said that the Holy Spirit sees the person who did me evil as my savior from the ego hence I need to forgive his seeming evil to me. In forgiving him I forgive my own seeming evil behavior to me and to other sons of God on earth.
RETRAINING THE MIND FROM THINKING FROM EGO TO HOLY SPIRIT PERSPECTIVE
A course in miracles says that it is retraining one’s mind, from the ego-based thinking, a thinking pattern that accommodates the egos world, to a new Holy Spirit based pattern of thinking; this new pattern rejects the ego and seeks Christ, love, and forgiveness; Christ sees no enemies, he sees those my ego sees as my enemies as my saviors.
When one allows one’s mind to be retrained so that it sees no enemies and no longer lives from the ego but from Christ, love, and forgiveness, one now lives in peace and joy.
If one continues living thus one begins to have light episodes, see oneself and the person one forgives in light forms. From that initial light experience, one sees oneself in the world of light forms.
THE EXPERIENCE OF HEAVEN’S ONENESS WHILE STILL ON EARTH
Ultimately, one experiences union with God, an experience of perfect peace and joy; here, there are no forms, no people in forms, matter or light forms, no separation, all people, and things share one formless self and one mind.
A course in miracles calls this experience Holy Instant, a return to our nature in heaven, unified state; Hinduism calls it Samadhi, Buddhism calls it Nirvana, Zen calls it Satori; Christianity calls it the mystical union of the father and the son as one self; it is experience of all things as formless one thing; in it there is no I and non I, no subject and object, no seer and seen, all are one shared self with one shared mind; in it one feels eternal, permanent and changeless because one has regained awareness of the self that God created one as, and risen above the world of separation and multiplicity we invented in our rebellion against God.
After the unified experience, one no longer lives in fear for one has accepted oneness with all people and in oneness feels total fearlessness; there is no one outside one to harm one so one feels safe and secure and no longer feels fear or anger.
ABUNDANCE FROM LIVING AS THE CHRIST SELF
If one lives from one’s real self, one is now enlightened to one’s real self, the Christ self. The Christ self has the power of God; with that power one gets whatever one asks for, whatever helps one to do the work one must do to help the world return to the awareness of love. If one asks for money, one gets it, not because one needs it but because one needs it to do the kind of work one needs to do on earth, work that requires money.
Being God realized does not mean poverty because if God is the powerful force that created us, he certainly can give one the type of abundance one needs to do his work.
DISCUSSION
It does not take much effort to realize that the thought system that A course in miracles is teaching could be seen as telling those oppressed in our world that they are responsible for their oppression and that they are experiencing what they choose to experience; this is like blaming the victim and enabling the victimizer to continue his oppressive ways.
Nevertheless, the question we must ask and try to respond to is this: is it true that we individually and collectively separated from unified spirit self, aka God and are experiencing the replacement selves and world we invented?
Heaven is unified and we supposedly choose a separated self and separated world; we chose to live as the opposite of how God created us; God created us unified with him and with each other; only the formless and spirit can unify so God created us as unified spirits; we opted to live as separated selves housed in bodies; we invented the world of space, time and matter and used matter to form our bodies and now live in bodies and walk around in the world of space, time and matter and seem separated from God and from each other.
In this world we contrive to see people and things attack our bodies, and we engage in ceaseless defense of our bodies and egos. This world is a place of constant offense and self-defense; we defend our bodies with food, medications, clothes, and shelter; if we did not defend ourselves, we would die.
But A course in miracles asks us to become defenseless and says that if we are defenseless that no one will attack us for defense says that we are attacked whereas defenseless says that we are not attacked.
We are told to be defenseless and in it regain the power of Christ and return to the safety of Christ in God, a world where no one attacks us, and we do not attack other people.
My ego intellect tells me that A course in miracles is nihilistic and is teaching a philosophy that would lead to my death and the death of the world but something in me tells me that it is teaching what the historical Jesus taught.
Jesus taught love and forgiveness and forgave those who crucified his body and ego and allegedly now lives as the Christ, in light form and in the world of light forms, and occasionally experiences formless oneness with God, heaven.
Is A course in miracles teaching the truth? I am going to leave it to the reader to make that decision for himself. In this essay my goal is to summarize what the book is teaching.
CONCLUSION
In this essay I endeavored to summarize what A course in miracles, a 1400 pages book, said in a few pages. I am not going to make a judgment as to whether it teaches the right thing or whether it is deceiving folks.
All that I can say is that the book enabled me to understand that I live an ego-based life and that that life is prone to fear, anger, depression, paranoia, and other emotional upsets. When I let go of identification with the ego and body and behave from love for me and all people I tend to feel at peace and happy.
This, of course, does not prove the existence of God. That task is addressed in other essays.
REFERENCE
Schucman, Helen (1976). A course in miracles. Mill Valley, California: Foundation for Inner Peace.
Dr Schucman was a professor of Clinical Psychology at Columbia University, New York; she claimed that she channeled what she wrote in her book from Jesus Christ.
Ozodi Osuji
June 10, 2022